"Our experimental animals aged and died normally," he explained graciously, "but I was beginning to wonder if we had rejuvenated you two, or perhaps endowed you with eternal life. Glad to see that the new parts have the same physical age as the rest of you—It would be mildly embarrassing to have to kill two Gray Lensmen to get rid of them."
"You're about as funny as a rubber crutch," Haynes grunted. "When are you going to give Kinnison the works? Don't you realize we need him?"
"Pretty quick now. Just as soon as we give you and Von your psychological examinations."
"Bah! That isn't necessary—my brain's QX!"
"That's what you think, but what do you know about brains? Worse! will tell us what shape your mind—if any—Is in."
The Velantian put both Haynes and von Hohendorff through a gruelling examination, finding that their minds had not been affected in any way by the stimulants applied to their pineal glands.
Then and only then did Phillips operate upon Kinnison; and in his case, too, the operation was a complete success. Arms and legs and eyes replaced themselves flawlessly. The scars of his terrible wounds disappeared, leaving no sign of ever having been.
He was a little slower, however, somewhat clumsy, and woefully weak. Therefore, instead of discharging him from the hospital as cured, which procedure would have restored to him automatically all the rights and privileges of an Unattached Lensman, the Council decided to transfer him to a physical–culture camp. A few weeks there would restore to him entirely the strength, speed, and agility which had formerly been his, and he would then be allowed to resume active duty.
Just before he left the hospital, Kinnison strolled with Clarrissa out to a bench in the grounds.
"…and you're making a perfect recovery," the girl was saying. "You'll be exactly as you were. But things between us aren't just as they were, and they never can be again. You know that, Kim. We've got unfinished business to transact—let's take it down off the shelf before you go."
"Better let it lay, Mac." All the new–found joy of existence went out of the man's eyes. "I'm whole, yes, but that angle was really the least important of all. You never yet have faced squarely the fact that my job isn't done and that my chance of living through it is just about one in ten. Even Phillips can't do anything about a corpse."
"I won't face it, either, unless and until I must." Her reply was tranquility itself. "Most of the troubles people worry about in advance never do materialize. And even if it did, you ought to know that I…that any woman would rather…well, that half a loaf is better than no bread."
"QX. I haven't mentioned the worst thing. I didn't want to—but if you've got to have it, here it is," the man wrenched out. "Look at what I am. A bar–room brawler. A rum–dum. A hardboiled egg. A cold–blooded, ruthless murderer; even of my own men…"
"Not that, Kirn, ever, and you know it," she rebuked him.
"What else can you call it?" he grated. "A killer besides—a red– handed butcher if there ever was one; then, now, and forever. I've got to be. I can't get away from it. Do you think that you, or any other decent woman, could stand it to live with me? That you could feel my arms around you, feel my gory paws touching you, without going sick at the stomach?"
"Oh, so that's what's been really griping you all this time?" Clarrissa was surprised, but entirely unshaken. "I don't have to think about that, Kim—I know. If you were a murderer or had the killer instinct, that would be different, but you aren't and you haven't. You are hard, of course. You have to be…but do you think I'd be running a temperature over a softy? You brawl, yes—like the world's champion you are. Anybody you ever killed needed killing, there's no question of that. You don't do these things for fun; and the fact that you can drive yourself to do the things that have to be done shows your real size.
"Nor have you even thought of the obverse; that you lean over backwards in wielding that terrific power of yours. The Desplaines woman, the countess— lots of other instances. I respect and honor you more than any other man I have ever known. Any woman who really knew you would —she must!
"Listen, Kim. Read my mind, all of it. You'll really know me then, and understand me better than I can ever explain myself."
"Have you got a picture of me doing that?" he asked, flatly.
"No, you big, unreasonable clunker, I haven't!" she flared, "and that's just what's driving me mad!"
Then, voice dropping to a whisper, almost sobbing;
"Cancel that, Kim—I didn't mean it. You wouldn't—you couldn't, I suppose, and still be you, the man I love. But isn't there something—anything—that will make you understand what I really am?"
"I know what you are." Kinnison's voice was uninflected, weary.
"As I told you before—the universe's best It's what I am that's clogging the jets— what I have been and what I've got to keep on being. I simply don't rate up, and you'd better lay off me, Mac, while you can. There's a poem by one of the ancients—Kipling—the 'Ballad of Boh Da Thone'—that describes it exactly. You wouldn't know it…"
"You just think I wouldn't," nodding brightly. "The only trouble is, you always think of the wrong verses. Part of it really is descriptive of you. You know, where all the soldiers of the Black Tyrone thought so much of their captain?"
She recited: "'And worshipped with fluency, fervor, and zeal " The mud on the boot–heels of "Crook" O'Neil.' "That describes you to a 'T.'"
"You're crazy for the lack of sense," he demurred. "I don't rate like that."
"Sure you do," she assured him. "All the men think of you that way. And not only men.
Women, too, darn 'em—and the next time I catch one of them at it I'm going to kick her cursed teeth out, one by one!" Kinnison laughed, albeit a trifle sourly. "You're raving, Mac. Imagining things. But to get back to that poem, what I was referring to went like this…"
"I know how it goes. Listen:
But the captain had quitted the long–drawn strife
And in far Simoorie had taken a wife;
And she was a damsel of delicate mold,
With hair like the sunshine and heart of gold.
And little she knew the arms that embraced
Had cloven a man from the brow to the waist:
And little she knew that the loving lips
Had ordered a quivering life's eclipse,
And the eyes that lit at her lightest breath
Had glared unawed in the Gates of Death.
(For these be matters a man would hide,
As a general thing, from an innocent bride.)
"That's what you mean, isn't it?" she asked, quietly.
"Mac, you know a lot of things you've got no business knowing." Instead of answering her question, he stared at her speculatively. "My sprees and brawls, Dessa Desplaines and the Countess Avondrin, and now this. Would you mind telling me how you get the stuff?"
"I'm closer to you than you suspect, Kirn—I've always been. Worsel calls it being 'en rapport.' You don't need to think at me—in fact, you have to put up a conscious block to keep me out. So I know a lot that I shouldn't, but Lensmen aren't the only ones who don't talk. You'd been thinking about that poem a lot—it worried you—so I checked with Archeology on it. I memorized most of it."
"Well, to get the true picture of me you'll have to multiply that by a thousand. Also, don't forget that loose heads might be rolling, out onto your breakfast table almost any morning instead of only once."
"So what?" she countered evenly. "Do you think I could sit for Kipling's portrait of Mrs. O'Neil? Nobody ever called my mold delicate, and Kipling, if he had been describing me, would have said: