"Can do. Free it is. Pilot room! Prepare for inertialess contact with vessel approaching. Magnets. Messenger coming aboard—free."
The two speeding vessels flashed together, at all their unimaginable velocities, without a thump or jar. Magnetic clamps locked and held. Air-lock doors opened, shut, opened; and at the inner port Kinnison met Raoul la Forge, his classmate through the four years at Wentworth Hall. Brief but hearty greetings were exchanged, but the visitor could not stop. Lensmen are busy men.
"Fine seeing you, Kim—be sure and inert the thing—clear ether!"
"Same to you, ace. Sure, I will—think I want to tear a guy's arm off?"
Indeed, inerting the package was the Lensman's first care, for in the free condition it was a frightfully dangerous thing. Its intrinsic velocity was that of Arisia, while the ship's was that of Lyrane II. They might be forty or fifty miles per second apart; and if the Dauntless should go inert that harmless-looking package would instantly become a meteorite inside the ship. At the thought of that velocity he paused. The cocoon would stand it—but would the Lens? Oh, sure, the Arisian knew that this was coming; the Lens would be packed to stand it.
Kinnison wrapped the package in heavy gauze, then in roll after roll of spring steel mesh. He jammed heavy steel springs into the ends, then clamped the whole thing into a form with tool-steel bolts an inch in diameter. He poured in two hundred pounds of metallic mercury, filling the form to the top. Then a cover, also bolted on. This whole assembly went into the "cocoon," a cushioned, heavily padded affair suspended from all four walls, ceiling, and floor by every shock-absorbing device known to the engineers of the Patrol.
The Dauntless inerted briefly at Kinnison's word and it seemed as though a troop of elephants were running silently amuck in the cocoon room. The package to be inerted weighed no more than eight ounces—but eight ounces of mass, at a relative velocity of fifty miles per second, possesses a kinetic energy by no means to be despised.
The frantic lurchings and bouncings subsided, the cruiser resumed her free flight, and the man undid all that he had done. The Arisian package looked exactly as before, but it was harmless now; it had the same intrinsic velocity as did everything else aboard the vessel.
Then the Lensman pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves and opened the package; finding, as he had expected, that the packing material was a dense, viscous liquid. He poured it out and there was the Lens—Chris' Lens! He cleaned it carefully, then wrapped it in heavy insulation. For of all the billions of unnumbered billions of living entities in existence, Clarrissa MacDougall was the only one whose flesh could touch that apparently innocuous jewel with impunity. Others could safely touch it while she wore it, while it glowed with its marvelously polychromatic cold flame; but until she wore it, and unless she wore it, its touch meant death to any life to which it was not attuned.