She did so, but not to sleep. Instead, she went into a trance; and so, almost, did Kinnison. For over an hour he lay intensely asprawl in an easy-chair, the while he engraved, day by day, a memory of missing years into that bare storehouse of knowledge. And finally the task was done.
"Sleep, Dessa," he told her then. "Sleep. Waken in eight hours; whole."
"Lensman, you're a man!" Gerrond realized vaguely what had been done. "You didn't give her the truth, of course?"
"Far from it. Only that she was married and is a widow. The rest of it is highly fictitious—just enough like the real thing so that she can square herself with herself, if she meets old acquaintances. Plenty of lapses, of course, but they're covered by shock."
"But the husband?" queried the curious Radeligian.
"That's her business," Kinnison countered, callously. "She'll tell you, if she ever feels like it. One thing I did do, though—they'll never use her again. The next man that tries to hypnotize her will be lucky if he gets away alive."
The advent of Dessa Desplaines, however, and his curious adventure with her, had altered markedly the Lensman's situation. No one else in the throng had worn a screen, but there might have been agents—anyway, the observed facts would enable the higher-ups to link Fordyce up with what had happened—they would know, of course, that the real Fordyce hadn't done it—he could be Fordyce no longer.
Wherefore the real Chester Q. Fordyce took over and a strange Unattached Lensman appeared. A Posenian, supposedly, since against the air of Radelix he wore that planet's unmistakable armor. No other race of even approximately human shape could "see" through a helmet of solid, opaque metal.
And in this guise Kinnison continued his investigations. That place and that man must be on this planet somewhere; the sending outfit worn by the Desplaines woman could not possibly reach any other. He had a good picture of the room and a fair picture—several pictures, in fact—of the man. The room was an actuality; all he had had to do was to fill in the details which definitely, by unmistakable internal evidence, belonged there. The man was different. How much of the original picture was real, and how much of it was the girl's impression?