"Neither is known, nor do we care to know them," she replied, coldly. Her brain was keen and clear; her personality vigorous, striking, forceful. But, compared with Kinnison's doubly Arisian-trained mind, hers was woefully slow. He watched her assemble the mental bolt which was intended to slay him then and there. He let her send it, then struck back. Not lethally, not even paralyzingly, but solidly enough so that she slumped down, almost unconscious, into a nearby chair.
"It's good technique to size a man up before you tackle him, sister," he advised her when she had recovered. "Couldn't you tell from the feel of my mind-block that you couldn't crack it?"
"I was afraid so," she admitted, hopelessly, "but I had to kill you if I possibly could. Since you are the stronger you will, of course, kill me." Whatever else these peculiar women were, they were stark realists. "Go ahead—get it over with. But it can't be!" Her thought was a wail of protest. "I do not grasp your thought of 'a man,' but you are certainly a male; and no mere male can be—can possibly be, ever—as strong as a person."
Kinnison got that thought perfectly, and it rocked him. She did not think of herself as a woman, a female, at all. She was simply a person. She could not understand even dimly Kinnison's reference to himself as a man. To her, "man" and "male" were synonymous terms. Both meant sex, and nothing whatever except sex.
"I have no intention of killing you, or anyone else upon this planet," he informed her levelly, "unless I absolutely have to. But I have chased that speedster over there all the way from Tellus, and I intend to get the man that drove it here, if I have to wipe out half of your population to do it. Is that perfectly clear?"
"That is perfectly clear, male." Her mind was fuzzy with a melange of immiscible emotions. Surprise and relief that she was not to be slain out of hand; disgust and repugnance at the very idea of such a horrible, monstrous male creature having the audacity to exist; stunned, disbelieving wonder at his unprecedented power of mind; a dawning comprehension that there were perhaps some things which she did not know: these and numerous other conflicting thoughts surged through her mind. "But there was no male within the space-traversing vessel which you think of as a 'speedster,'" she concluded, surprisingly.
And he knew that she was not lying. No mentality in existence, not even that of Mentor the Arisian, could lie to Gray Lensman Kinnison against his will.
"Damnation!" he snorted to himself. "Fighting against women again!"
"Who was she, then—it, I mean?" he hastily corrected the thought.