"Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. "No, the professors are right. We can't understand the figures, but we don't have to—all we have to do is to work with 'em. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are Gladys Forrester, it's quite clear that you and I are in the same boat."
"Me? How?" she exclaimed.
"The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear tide to a million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that really produces results—the hard way of actual experience. You lost a lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take it away from you. The fact that your brain can't envisage a million credits hasn't interferred with your manipulation of that amount, has it?"
"No, but that's entirely different!" she protested.
"Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best, perhaps, by analogy. You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North America, either, yet that fact doesn't bother you in the least while you're driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?"
"A DeKhotinsky sporter."
"Um–m–m. Top speed a hundred and forty miles an hour, and I suppose you cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere on Tellus…"
"I can get tight–beam short–wave programs from the moon," the girl broke in.
"I've heard them lots of times."
"Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen to be any interference."
"Static is pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed.
"Well, change 'miles' to 'parsecs' and you've got the picture of deep–space speeds and operations," Kinnison informed her. "Our speed varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the average—say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters of space—we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about ninety. And our ultra–wave communicators, working below the level of the ether, in the sub–ether…"
"Whatever that is," she interrupted.
"That's as good a definition of it as any," he grinned at her. "We don't know what even the ether is, or whether or not it exists as an objective reality; to say nothing of what we so nonchalantly call the sub–ether. We can't understand gravity, even though we make it to order. Nobody yet has been able to say how it is propagated, or even whether or not it is propagated—no one has been able to devise any kind of an apparatus or meter or method by which its nature, period, or velocity can be determined. Neither do we know anything about time or space. In fact, fundamentally, we don't really know much of anything at all," he concluded.
"Says you…but that makes me feel better, anyway," she confided, snuggling a little closer. "Go on about the communicators."
"Ultra–waves are faster than ordinary radio waves, which of course travel through the ether with the velocity of light, in just about the same ratio as that of the speed of our ships to the speed of slow automobiles—that is, the ratio of a parsec to a mile. Roughly nineteen billion to one. Range, of course, is proportional to the square of the speed."
"Nineteen billion!" she exclaimed. "And you just said that nobody could understand even a million!"
"That's the point exactly," he went on, undisturbed. "You don't have to understand or visualize it All you have to know is that deep–space vessels and communicators cover distances in parsecs at practically the same rate that Tellurian automobiles and radios cover miles. So, when some space–flea talks to you about parsecs, just think of miles in terms of an automobile and a teleset and you'll know as much as he does—maybe more."
"I never heard it explained that way before—it does make it ever so much simpler. Will you sign this, please?"
"Just one more point." The music had ceased and he was signing her card, preparatory to escorting her back to her place. "Like your supposedly tight– beam Luna–Tellus hookups, our long–range, equally tight–beam communicators are very sensitive to interference, either natural or artificial. So, while under perfect conditions we can communicate clear across the galaxy, there are times—particularly when the pirates are scrambling the channels—that we can't drive a beam from here to Alpha Centauri…Thanks a lot for the dance."
The other girls did not quite come to blows as to which of them was to get him next; and shortly—he never did know exactly how it came about—he found himself dancing with a luscious, cuddly little brunette, clad—partially clad, at least—in a high–slitted, flame–colored sheath of some new fabric which the Lensman had never seen before. It looked like solidified, tightly–woven electricity!
"Oh, Mr. Kinnison!" his new partner cooed, ecstatically, "I think all spacemen, and you Lensmen particularly, are just too perfectly darn heroic for anything! Why, I think space is just terrible! I simply can't cope with it at all!"
"Ever been out, Miss?" he grinned. He had never known many social butterflies, and temporarily he had forgotten that such girls as this one really existed.
"Why, of course!" The young woman kept on being exclamatory.
"Clear out to the moon, perhaps?" he hazarded.
"Don't be ridic—ever so much farther than that—why, I went clear to Mars! And it gave me the screaming meamies, no less—I thought I would collapse!"
That dance ended ultimately, and other dances with other girls followed; but Kinnison could not throw himself into the gayety surrounding him. During his cadet days he had enjoyed such revels to the full, but now the whole thing left him cold. His mind insisted upon reverting to its problem. Finally, in the throng of young people on the floor, he saw a girl with a mass of redbronze hair and a supple, superbly molded figure. He did not need to await her turning to recognize his erstwhile nurse and later assistant, whom he had last seen just this side of fardistant Boyssia II.
"Mac!" To her mind alone he sent out a thought. "For the love of Klono, lend a hand—rescue me! How many dances have you got ahead?"
"None at all—I'm not dating ahead." She jumped as though someone had jabbed her with a needle, then paused in panic; eyes wide, breath coming fast, heart pounding. She had felt Lensed thoughts before, but this was something else, something entirely different Every cell of his brain was open to her—and what was she seeing! She could read his mind as fully and as easily as…as…as Lensmen were supposed to be able to read anybody's! She blanketed her thoughts desperately, tried with all her might not to think at all!
"QX, Mac," the thought went quietly on within her mind, quite as though nothing unusual were occurring. "No intrusion meant—you didn't think it; I already knew that if you started dating ahead you'd be tied up until day after tomorrow. Can I have the next one?"
"Surely, Kim."
"Thanks—the Lens is off for the rest of the evening." She sighed in relief as he snapped the telepathic line as though he were hanging up the receiver of a telephone.
"I'd like to dance with you all, kids," he addressed at large the group of buds surrounding him and eyeing him hungrily, "but I've got this next one. See you later, perhaps," and he was gone.
"Sorry, fellows," he remarked casually, as he made his way through the circle of men around the gorgeous red–head. "Sorry, but this dance is mine, isn't it, Miss MacDougall?"