"Let them go on; I'll be of more use working on my own, I think. I did the boys over there a favor a while back—they would co-operate anyway, of course, but it's a little nicer to have them sort of owe it to me. We'll all be able to play together very nicely if the opportunity arises."
"I'm mighty glad you're taking this on. The Radeligians are stuck, and we had no real reason for thinking that our men could do any better. With this new angle of approach, however, and with you working behind the scenes, the picture looks entirely different."
"I'm afraid that's unjustifiably high—"
"Not a bit of it, lad. Just a minute—I'll break out a couple of beakers of fayalin—Luck!"
"Thanks, chief!"
"Down the hatch!" and again the Gray Lensman was gone. To the spaceport, into his speedster, and away—hurtling through the void at the maximum blast of the fastest space-flier then boasted by the Galactic Patrol.
During the long trip, Kinnison exercised, thought, and studied spool after spool of tape—the Radeligian language. Thoughts of the red-headed nurse obtruded themselves strongly at times, but he put them aside resolutely. He was, he assured himself, off women forever—all women. He cultivated his new beard; trimming it, with the aid of a triplex mirror and four stereoscopic photographs, into something which, although neat and spruce enough, was too full and bushy by half to be a Vandyke. Also, he moved his Lens bracelet up his arm and rayed the white skin thus exposed until his whole wrist was the same even shade of tan.
He did not drive his speedster to Radelix, for that racy little fabrication would have been recognized anywhere for what she was; and private citizens simply did not drive ships of that type. Therefore, with every possible precaution of secrecy, he landed her in a Patrol base four solar systems away. In that base Kimball Kinnison disappeared; but the tall, shock-haired, bushy-bearded Chester Q. Fordyce—cosmopolite, man of leisure, and dilettante in science—who took the next space liner for Radelix was not precisely the same individual who had come to that planet a few days before with that name and those unmistakable characteristics.
Mr. Chester Q. Fordyce, then, and not Gray Lensman Kimball Kinnison, disembarked at Ardith, the world-capital of Radelix. He took up his abode at the Hotel Ardith-Splendide and proceeded, with neither too much nor too little fanfare, to be his cosmopolitan self in those circles of society in which, wherever he might find himself, he was wont to move.
As a matter of course, he entertained, and was entertained by, the Tellurian Ambassador. Equally as a matter of course, he attended divers and sundry functions, at which he made the acquaintance of hundreds of persons, many of them personages. That one of these should have been Vice-Admiral Gerrond, Lensman in charge of the Patrol's Radeligian base, was inevitable.