Christopher Kinnison drove toward Arisia, seething. Why couldn't those sisters of his have sense to match their brains—or why couldn't he have had some brothers? Especially—right now—Kay. If she had the sense of a Zabriskan fontema, she'd know that this job was important and would snap into it, instead of wild-goose-chasing all over space. If he were Mentor, he'd straighten her out. He had decided to straighten her out once himself, and he grinned wryly to himself at the memory of what had happened. What Mentor had done to him, before he even got started, was really rugged. What he would like to do, next time he got within reach of her, was to shake her until her teeth rattled.
Or would he? Uh-uh. By no stretch of the imagination could he picture himself hurting any one of them. They were swell kids—in fact, the finest people he had ever known. He had rough-housed and wrestled with them plenty of times, of course—he liked it, and so did they. He could handle any one of them—he surveyed without his usual complacence his two-hundred-plus pounds of meat, bone, and gristle—he ought to be able to, since he outweighed them by fifty or sixty pounds; but it wasn't easy. Worse than Valerians—just like taking on a combination of boa constrictor and cateagle—and when Kat and Con ganged up on him that time they mauled him to a pulp in nothing flat.
But jet back! Weight wasn't it, except maybe among themselves. He had never met a Valerian yet whose shoulders he couldn't pin flat to the mat in a hundred seconds, and the very smallest of them outweighed him two to one. Conversely, although he had never thought of it before, what his sisters had taken from him, without even a bruise, would have broken any ordinary woman up into a mess of compound fractures. They were—they must be—made of different stuff.
His thoughts took a new tack. The kids were special in another way, too, he had noticed lately, without paying it any particular attention. It might tie in. They didn't feel like other girls. After dancing with one of them, other girls felt like robots made out of putty. Their flesh was different. It was firmer, finer, infinitely more responsive. Each individual cell seemed to be endowed with a flashing, sparkling life; a life which, interlinking with that of one of his own cells, made their bodies as intimately one as were their perfectly synchronized minds.
But what did all this have to do with their lack of sense? QX, they were nice people. QX, he couldn't beat their brains out, either physically or mentally. But there ought to be some way of driving some ordinary common sense through their fine-grained, thick, hard, tough skulls!
Thus it was that Kit approached Arisia in a decidedly mixed frame of mind. He shot through the barrier without slowing down and without notification. Inerting his ship, he fought her into an orbit around the planet. The shape of the orbit was immaterial, as long as its every inch was well inside Arisia's innermost screen. For young Kinnison knew precisely what those screens were and exactly what they were for. He knew that distance of itself meant nothing—Mentor could give anyone either basic or advanced treatments just as well from a distance of a thousand million parsecs as at hand to hand. The reason for the screens and for the personal visits was the existence of the Eddorians, who had minds probably as capable as the Arisians' own. And throughout all the infinite reaches of the macrocosmic Universe, only within these highly special screens was there certainty of privacy from the spying senses of the ultimate foe.
"The time has come, Christopher, for the last treatment I am able to give you," Mentor announced without preamble, as soon as Kit had checked his orbit.
"Oh—so soon? I thought you were pulling me in to pin my ears back for fighting with Kay—the dim-wit!"
"That, while a minor matter, is worthy of passing mention, since it is illustrative of the difficulties inherent in the project of developing, without over-controlling, such minds as yours. En route here, you made a masterly summation of the situation, with one outstanding omission."