The distance was long and the pace was slow. The woman was driving automatically, the while her every sense was concentrated upon finding some weak point, some chink in his barrier, through which to thrust at him. Kinnison was amazed—stumped—at her fixity of purpose; at her grimly single–minded determination to make an end of him. She was out to get him, and she wasn't fooling.
"Listen, sister," he thought at her, after a few minutes of it; almost plaintively, for him. "Let's be reasonable about this thing. I told you I didn't want to kill you; why in all the iridescent hells of space are you so dead set on killing me? If you don't behave yourself, I'll give you a treatment that will make your head ache for the next six months. Why don't you snap out of it, you dumb little lug, and be friends?"
This thought jarred her so that she stopped the car, the better to stare directly and viciously into his eyes.
"Be friends! With a male!" The thought literally seared its way into the man's brain.
"Listen, half–wit!" Kinnison stormed, exasperated. "Forget your narrow– minded, one–planet prejudices and think for a minute, if you can think—use that pint of bean soup inside your skull for something besides hating me all over the place. Get this—I am no more a male than you are the kind of a female that you think, by analogy, such a creature would have to be if she could exist in a sane and logical world."
"Oh." The Lyranian was taken aback at such cavalier instruction. "But the others, those in your so–immense vessel, they are of a certainty males," she stated with conviction. "I understood what you told them via your telephone– with–out–conductors. You have mechanical shields against the thought which kills. Yet you do not have to use it, while the others—males indubitably—do. You yourself are not entirely male; your brain is almost as good as a person's."
"Better, you mean," he corrected her. "You're wrong. All of us of the ship are men—all alike. But a man on a job can't concentrate all the time on defending his brain against attack, hence the use of thought–screens. I can't use a screen out here, because I've got to talk to you people. See?"
"You fear us, then, so little?" she flared, all of her old animosity blazing out anew. "You consider our power, then, so small a thing?"
"Right. Right to a hair," he declared, with tightening jaw. But he did not believe it—quite. This girl was just about as safe to play around with as five– feet–eleven of coiled bush–master, and twice as deadly.
She could not kill him mentally. Nor could the elder sister—whoever she might be—and her crew; he was pretty sure of that. But if they couldn't do him in by dint of brain it was a foregone conclusion that they would try brawn. And brawn they certainly had. This jade beside him weighed a hundred sixty Jive or seventy, and she was trained down fine. Hard, limber, and fast. He might be able to lick three or four of them—maybe half a dozen—in a rough–and–tumble brawl; but more than that would mean either killing or being killed. Damn it all! He'd never killed a woman yet, but it looked as though he might have to start in pretty quick now.
"Well, let's get going again," he suggested, "and while we're en route let's see if we can't work out some basis of cooperation—a sort of live–and–let–live arrangement. Since you understood the orders I gave the crew, you realize that our ship carries weapons capable of razing this entire city in a space of minutes." It was a statement, not a question.
"I realize that." The thought was muffled in helpless fury. "Weapons, weapons—always weapons! The eternal male! If it were not for your huge vessel and the peculiar airplane hovering over us I would claw your eyes out and strangle you with my bare hands!"
"That would be a good trick if you could do it," he countered, equably enough. "But listen, you frustrated young murderess. You have already shown yourself to be, basically, a realist in facing physical facts. Why not face mental, intellectual facts in the same spirit?"
"Why, I do, of course. I always do!"
"You do not," he contradicted, sharply. "Males, according to your lights, have two—and only two—attributes. One, they breed. Two, they fight. They fight each other, and everything else, to the death and at the drop of a hat. Right?"
"Right, but…"
"But nothing—let me talk. Why didn't you breed the combativeness out of your males, hundreds of generations ago?"
"They tried it once, but the race began to deteriorate," she admitted.
"Exactly. Your whole set–up is cock–eyed—unbalanced. You can think of me only as a male—one to be destroyed on sight, since I am not like one of yours. Yet, when I could kill you and had every reason to do so, I didn't. We can destroy you all, but we won't unless we must. What's the answer?"
"I don't know," she confessed, frankly. Her frenzied desire for killing abated, although her ingrained antipathy and revulsion did not. "In some ways, you do seem to have some of the instincts and qualities of a…almost of a person."
"I am a person…"
"You are not! Do you think that I am to be misled by the silly coverings you wear?"
"Just a minute. I am a person of a race having two equal sexes. Equal in every way. Numbers, too—one man and one woman…" and he went on to explain to her, as well as he could, the sociology of Civilization.
"Incredible!" she gasped the thought.
"But true," he assured her. "And now are you going to lay off me and behave yourself, like a good little girl, or am I going to have to do a bit of massaging on your brain? Or wind that beautiful body of yours a couple of times around a tree? I'm asking this for your own good, kid, believe me."
"Yes, I do believe you," she marveled. "I am becoming convinced that…that perhaps you are a person—at least of a sort—after all." "Sure I am— that's what I've been trying to tell you for an hour. And cancel that 'of a sort', too…" "But tell me," she interrupted, "a thought you used— 'beautiful". I do not understand it. What does it mean, 'beautiful body'?"
"Holy Klono's whiskers!" If Kinnison had never been stumped before, he was now. How could he explain beauty, or music, or art, to this…this matriarchal savage? How explain cerise to a man born blind? And above all, who had ever heard of having to explain to a woman—to any woman, anywhere in the whole macrocosmic universe—that she in particular was beautiful?
But he tried. In her mind he spread a portrait of her as he had seen her first. He pointed out to her the graceful curves and lovely contours, the lithely flowing lines, the perfection of proportion and modeling and symmetry, the flawlessly smooth, firmtextured skin, the supple, hard–trained fineness of her whole physique. No soap. She tried, in brow–furrowing concentration, to get it, but in vain. It simply did not register.
"But that is merely efficiency, everything you have shown," she declared. "Nothing else. I must be so, for my own good and for the good of those to come. But I think that I have seen some of your beauty," and in turn she sent into his mind a weirdly distorted picture of a human woman. The zwilnik he was following, Kinnison decided instantly.
She would be jeweled, 'of course, but not that heavily—a horse couldn't carry that load. And no woman ever born put paint on that thick, or reeked so of violent perfume, or plucked her eyebrows to such a thread, or indulged in such a hair–do.
"If that is beauty, I want none of it," the Lyranian declared.
Kinnison tried again. He showed her a waterfall, this time, in a stupendous gorge, with appropriate cloud formations and scenery. That, the girl declared, was simply erosion. Geological formations and meteorological phenomena. Beauty still did not appear. Painting, it appeared to her, was a waste of pigment and oil. Useless and inefficient—for any purpose of record the camera was much faster and much more accurate. Music—vibrations in the atmosphere—would of necessity be simply a noise; and noise—any kind of noise —was not efficient.