"Keep it on until we get to the ship, sister," he spoke aloud in the girl's native tongue. "Your battery's low, I know, but it'll last long enough. These hens seem to be strictly on the peck."
"I'll say they are—you don't know the half of it." Her voice was low, rich, vibrant. "Thanks, Kinnison."
"Listen, Red–Top, what's the percentage in playing so dirty?" the Lensman complained then. "I'm doing my damndest to let you off easy, but I'm all done dickering. Do we go out of here peaceably, or do we fry you and your crew to cinders in your own lard, and walk out over the grease spots? It's strictly up to you, but you'll decide right here and right now."
The Elder One's face was hard, her eyes flinty. Her fingers were curled into balltight fists. "I suppose, since we cannot stop you, we must let you go free," she hissed, in helpless but controlled fury. "If by giving my life and the lives of all these others we could kill you, here and now would you two die…but as it is, you may go."
"But why all the rage?" the puzzled Lensman asked. "You strike me as being, on the whole, reasoning creatures. You in particular went to Tellus with this zwilnik here, so you should know…"
"I do know," the Lyranian broke in. "That is why I would go to any length, pay any price whatever, to keep you from returning to your own world, to prevent the inrush of your barbarous hordes here…"
"Oh! So that's it!" Kinnison exclaimed. "You think that some of our people might want to settle down here, or to have traffic with you?"
"Yes." She went into a eulogy concerning Lyrane II, concluding, "I have seen the planets and the races of your so–called Civilization, and I detest them and it. Never again shall any of us leave Lyrane; nor, if I can help it, shall any stranger ever come here."
"Listen, angel–face!" the man commanded. "You're as mad as a Radeligian cateagle—you're as cockeyed as Trenco's ether. Get this, and get it straight. To any really intelligent being of any one of forty million planets, your whole Lyranian race would be a total loss with no insurance. You're a God–forsaken, spiritually and emotionally starved, barren, mentally ossified, and completely monstrous mess. If I, personally, never see either you or your planet again, that will be exactly twenty seven minutes too soon. This girl here thinks the same of you as I do. If anybody else ever hears of Lyrane and thinks he wants to visit it, I'll take him out of—I'll knock a hip down on him if I have to, to keep him away from here. Do I make myself clear?"
"Oh, yet—perfectly!" she fairly squealed in school–girlish delight. The Lensman's tirade, instead of infuriating her farther, had been sweet music to her peculiarly insular mind. "Go, then, at once—hurry! Oh, please, hurry! Can you drive the car back to your vessel, or will one of us have to go with you?"
"Thanks. I could drive your car, but it won't be necessary. The "copter will pick us up."
He spoke to the watchful Ralph, then he and the Aldebaranian left the hall, followed at a careful distance by the throng. The helicopter was on the ground, waiting. The man and the woman climbed aboard.
"Clear ether, persons!" The Lensman waved a salute to the crowd and the Tellurian craft shot into the air.
Thence to the Dauntless, which immediately did likewise, leaving behind her, upon the little airport, a fused blob of metal that had once been the zwilnik's speedster. Kinnison studied the white face of his captive, then handed her a tiny canister.
"Fresh battery for your thought–screen generator; yours is about shot." Since she made no motion to accept it, he made the exchange himself and tested the result. It worked. "What's the matter with you, kid, anyway? I'd say you were starved, if I hadn't caught you at a full table."
"I am starved," the girl said, simply. "I couldn't eat there. I knew they were going to kill me, and it…it sort of took away my appetite."
"Well, what are we waiting for? I'm hungry, too—let's go eat."
"Not with you, either, any more than with them. I thanked you, Lensman, for saving my life there, and I meant it. I thought then and still think that I would rather have you kill me than those horrible, monstrous women, but I simply can't eat."
"But I'm not even thinking of killing you—can't you get that through your skull? I don't make war on women; you ought to know that by this time."
"You will have to." The girl's voice was low and level. "You didn't kill any of those Lyranians, no, but you didn't chase them a million parsecs, either. We have been taught ever since we were born that you Patrolmen always torture people to death. I don't quite believe that of you personally, since I have had a couple of glimpses into your mind, but you'll kill me before I'll talk. At least, I hope and I believe that I can hold out."
"Listen, girl." Kinnison was in deadly earnest. "You are in no danger whatever. You are just as safe as though you were in Klono's hip pocket. You have some information that I want, yes, and I will get it, but in the process I will neither hurt you nor do you mental or physical harm. The only torture you will undergo will be that which, as now, you give yourself."
"But you called me a…a zwilnik, and they always kill them," she protested.
"Not always. In battles and in raids, yes. Captured ones are tried in court. If found guilty, they used to go into the lethal chambers. Sometimes they do yet, but not usually. We have mental therapists now who can operate on a mind if there's anything there worth saving."
"And you think that I will wait to stand trial, in the entirely negligible hope that your bewhiskered, fossilized therapists will find something in me worth saving?"
"You won't have to," Kinnison laughed. "Your case has already been decided—in your favor. I am neither a policeman nor a Narcotics man; but I happen to be qualified as judge, jury, and executioner. I am a therapist to boot. I once saved a worse zwilnik than you are—even though she wasn't such a knockout. Now do we eat?"
"Really? You aren't just…just giving me the needle?"
The Lensman flipped off her screen and gave her unmistakable evidence. The girl, hitherto so unmovedly self–reliant, broke down. She recovered quickly, however, and in Kinnison's cabin she ate ravenously.
"Have you a cigarette?" She sighed with repletion when she could hold no more food.
"Sure. Alsakanite, Venerian, Tellurian, most anything—we carry a couple of hundred different brands. What would you like?"
"Tellurian, by all means. I had a package of Camerfields once—they were gorgeous. Would you have those, by any chance?"
"Uh–huh," he assured her. "Quartermaster! Carton of Camerfields, please." It popped out of the pneumatic tube in seconds. "Here you are sister."
The glittery girl drew the fragrant smoke deep, down into her lungs.
"Ah, that tastes good! Thanks, Kinnison—for everything. I'm glad you kidded me into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it won't take, really. I've never broken yet, and I won't break now. If I do, I won't be worth a damn, to myself or to anybody else, from then on." She crushed out the butt. "So let's get on with the third degree. Bring on your rubber hose and your lights and your drip–can."
"You're still on the wrong foot, Toots," Kinnison said, pityingly. What a frightful contrast there was between her slimly rounded body, in its fantastically gorgeous costume, and the stark somberness of her eyes! "There'll be no third degree, no hose, no lights, nothing like that. In fact, I'm not even going to talk to you until you've had a good long sleep. You don't look hungry any more, but you're still not in tune, by seven thousand kilocycles. How long has it been since you really slept?"
"A couple of weeks, at a guess. Maybe a month."
"Thought so. Come on; you're going to sleep now."
The girl did not move. "With whom?" she asked, quietly. Her voice did not quiver, but stark terror lay in her mind and her hand crept unconsciously toward the hilt of her dagger.
"Holy Klono's claws!" Kinnison snorted, staring at her in wide–eyed wonder. "Just what kind of a bunch of hyenas do you think you've got into, anyway?"