"I was just going to call you, First Lensman." Winfield waved a hand in the general direction of a chair near his own. "Take the Lieutenant-Captain's station, please." Then, after a few minutes: "Go inert, Mr. White."
"Attention, all personnel," Lieutenant-Captain White spoke conversationally into a microphone. "Prepare for inert maneuvering, Class Three. Off."
A bank of tiny red lights upon a panel turned green practically as one. White cut the Bergenholm, whereupon Virgil Samms' mass changed instantly from a weight of zero to one of five hundred and twenty five pounds—ships of war then had no space to waste upon such non-essentials as artificial gravity. Although he was braced for the change and cushioned against it, the Lensman's breath whooshed! out sharply; but, being intensely interested in what was going on, he swallowed convulsively a couple of times, gasped a few deep breaths, and fought his way back up to normalcy.
The Chief Pilot was now at work, with all the virtuoso's skill of his rank and grade; one of the hall-marks of which is to make difficult tasks look easy. He played trills and runs and arpeggios—at times veritable glissades—upon keyboards and pedals, directing with micrometric precision the tremendous forces of the superdreadnaught to the task of matching the intrinsic velocity of New York Spaceport at the time of his departure to the I. V. of the surface of the planet so far below.
Samms stared into his plate; first at the incredibly tiny apparent size of that incredibly hot sun, and then at the barren-looking world toward which they were dropping at such terrific speed.
"It doesn't seem possible ..." he remarked, half to Winfield, half to himself, "that a sun could be that big and that hot. Rigel Four is almost two hundred times as far away from it as Earth is from Sol—something like eighteen billion miles—it doesn't look much, if any, bigger than Venus does from Luna—yet this world is hotter than the Sahara Desert."
"Well, blue giants are both big and hot," the captain replied, matter-of-factly, "and their radiation, being mostly invisible, is deadly stuff. And Rigel is about the biggest in this region. There are others a lot worse, though. Doradus S, for instance, would make Rigel, here, look like a tallow candle. I'm going out there, some of these days, just to take a look at it. But that's enough of astronomical chit-chat—we're down to twenty miles of altitude and we've got your city just about stopped."
The Chicago slowed gently to a halt; perched motionless upon softly hissing jets. Samms directed his visibeam downward and sent along it an exploring, questing thought. Since he had never met a Rigellian in person, he could not form the mental image or pattern necessary to become en rapport with any one individual of the race. He did know, however, the type of mind which must be possessed by the entity with whom he wished to talk, and he combed the Rigellian city until he found one. The rapport was so incomplete and imperfect as to amount almost to no contact at all, but he could, perhaps, make himself understood.
"If you will excuse this possibly unpleasant and certainly unwarranted intrusion," he thought, carefully and slowly, "I would like very much to discuss with you a matter which should become of paramount importance to all the intelligent peoples of all the planets in space."
"I welcome you, Tellurian." Mind fused with mind at every one of uncountable millions of points and paths. This Rigellian professor of sociology, standing at his desk, was physically a monster ... the oil-drum of a body, the four blocky legs, the multi-branchiate tentacular arms, that immobile dome of a head, the complete lack of eyes and of ears ... nevertheless Samms' mind fused with the monstrosity's as smoothly, as effortlessly, and almost as completely as it had with his own daughter's!