As has been said, Kinnison-ex-Cartiff was en route for Lyrane II while the foregoing conference was taking place. Throughout the trip he kept in touch with Mac. At first he tried, with his every artifice of diplomacy, cajolery, and downright threats, to make her lay off; he finally invoked all his Unattached Lensman's transcendental authority and ordered her summarily to lay off.
No soap. How did he get that way, she wanted furiously to know, to be ordering her around as though she were an uncapped probe? She was a Lensman, too, by Klono's curly whiskers! She had a job to do and she was going to do it. She was on a definite assignment—his own assignment, too, remember—and she wasn't going to be called off of it just because he had found out all of a sudden that it might not be quite as safe as dunking doughnuts at a down-river picnic. What kind of a sun-baked, space-tempered crust did he have to pull a crack like that on her? Would he have the barefaced, unmitigated gall to spring a thing like that on any other Lensman in the whole cockeyed universe?
That stopped him—cold. Lensmen always went in; that was their code. For any Tellurian Lensman, anywhere, to duck or to dodge because of any possible personal danger was sheerly, starkly unthinkable. The fact that she was, to him, the sum total of all the femininity of the Galaxy could not be allowed any weight whatever; any more than the converse aspect had ever been permitted to sway him. Fair enough. Bitter, but inescapable. This was one—just one—of the consequences which Mentor had foreseen. He had foreseen it, too, in a dimly unreal sort of way, and now that it was here he'd simply have to take it. QX.
"But be careful, Chris, anyway," he surrendered. "Awfully careful—as careful as I would myself."
"I could be ever so much more careful than that and still be pretty reckless." Her low, entrancing chuckle came through as though she were present in person. "And by the way, Kim, did I ever tell you that I am fast getting to be a gray Lensman?"
"You always were, ace—you couldn't very well be anything else."
"No—I mean actually gray. Did you ever stop to consider what the laundry problem would be upon this heathenish planet?"
"Chris, I'm surprised at you—what do you need of a laundry?" he derided her, affectionately. "Here you've been blasting me to a cinder about not taking your Lensmanship seriously enough, and yet you are violating one of the prime tenets—that of conformation to planetary customs. Shame on you!"
He felt her hot blush across all those parsecs of empty space. "I tried it at first, Kim, but it was just simply terrible!"