First Lensman by E. E. Smith (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📕

the steel plates together, the busy airport outside, and even deep into the ground. He could see and study in detail the deepest-buried, most heavily shielded parts of the atomic engines of the Chicago.

But he was wasting time. He could also plainly see a deeply-cushioned chair, designed to fit a human body, welded to a stanchion and equipped with half a dozen padded restraining straps. He sat down quickly; strapped himself in.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

The door banged shut with a clangor which burst through spacesuit and earplugs with all the violence of a nearby thunderclap. And that was merely the beginning. The engine started⁠—an internal-combustion engine of well over a thousand horsepower, designed for maximum efficiency by engineers in whose lexicon there were no counterparts of any English words relating to noise, or even to sound. The car took off; with an acceleration which drove the Tellurian backward, deep into the cushions. The scream of tortured tires and the crescendo bellowing of the engine combined to form an uproar which, amplified by and reverberating within the resonant shell of metal, threatened to addle the very brain inside the Lensman’s skull.

“You suffer!” the driver exclaimed, in high concern. “They cautioned me to start and stop gently, to drive slowly and carefully, to bump softly. They told me you are frail and fragile, a fact which I perceived for myself and which has caused me to drive with the utmost possible care and restraint. Is the fault mine? Have I been too rough?”

“Not at all. It isn’t that. It’s the ungodly noise.” Then, realizing that the Rigellian could have no conception of his meaning, he continued quickly:

“The vibrations in the atmosphere, from sixteen cycles per second up to about nine or ten thousand.” He explained what a second was. “My nervous system is very sensitive to those vibrations. But I expected them and shielded myself against them as adequately as I could. Nothing can be done about them. Go ahead.”

“Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations?” The driver marveled, and concentrated upon this entirely new concept while he⁠—

1. Swung around a steel-sheathed concrete pillar at a speed of at least sixty miles per hour, grazing it so closely that he removed one layer of protective coating from the metal.

2. Braked so savagely to miss a wildly careening truck that the restraining straps almost cut Samms’ body, spacesuit and all, into slices.

3. Darted into a hole in the traffic so narrow that only tiny fractions of inches separated his hurtling Juggernaut from an enormous steel column on one side and another speeding vehicle on the other.

4. Executed a double-right-angle reverse curve, thus missing by hair’s breadths two vehicles traveling in the opposite direction and one in his own.

5. As a grand climax to this spectacular exhibition of insane driving, he plunged at full speed into a traffic artery which seemed so full already that it could not hold even one more car. But it could⁠—just barely could. However, instead of near misses or grazing hits, this time there were bumps, dents⁠—little ones, nothing at all, really, only an inch or so deep⁠—and an utterly hellish concatenation and concentration of noise.

“I fail completely to understand what effect such vibrations could have,” the Rigellian announced finally, sublimely unconscious that anything at all out of the ordinary had occurred. For him, nothing had. “But surely they cannot be of any use?”

“On this world, I am afraid not. No,” Samms admitted, wearily. “Here, too, apparently, as everywhere, the big cities are choking themselves to death with their own traffic.”

“Yes. We build and build, but never have roads enough.”

“What are those mounds along the streets?” For some time Samms had been conscious of those long, low, apparently opaque structures; attracted to them because they were the only non-transparent objects within range of the Rigellian’s mind. “Or is it something I should not mention?”

“What? Oh, those? By no means.”

One of the nearby mounds lost its opacity. It was filled with swirling, gyrating bands and streamers of energy so vivid and so solid as to resemble fabric; with wildly hurtling objects of indescribable shapes and contours; with brilliantly flashing symbols which Samms found, greatly to his surprise, made sense⁠—not through the Rigellian’s mind, but through his own Lens:

“Eat Teegmee’s Food!”

“Advertising!” Samms’ thought was a snort.

“Advertising. You do not perceive yours, either, as you drive?” This was the first bond to be established between two of the most highly advanced races of the First Galaxy!

The frightful drive continued; the noise grew worse and worse. Imagine, if you can, a city of fifteen millions of people, throughout whose entire length, breadth, height, and depth no attempt whatever had ever been made to abate any noise, however violent or piercing! If your imagination has been sufficiently vivid and if you have worked understandingly enough, the product may approximate what First Lensman Samms was forced to listen to that day.

Through ever-thickening traffic, climbing to higher and ever higher roadways between towering windowless walls of steel, the massive Rigellian automobile barged and banged its way. Finally it stopped, a thousand feet or so above the ground, beside a building which was still under construction. The heavy door clanged open. They got out.

And then⁠—it chanced to be daylight at the time⁠—Samms saw a tangle of fighting, screaming colors whose like no entity possessing the sense of sight had ever before imagined. Reds, yellows, blues, greens, purples, and every variation and intermixture possible; laid on or splashed on or occurring naturally at perfect random, smote his eyes as violently as the all-pervading noise had been assailing his ears.

He realized then that through his guide’s sense of perception he had been “seeing” only in shades of gray, that to these people “visible” light differed only in wavelength from any other band of the complete electromagnetic spectrum of vibration.

Strained and tense, the Lensman followed his escort along a narrow catwalk, through a wall upon which riveters and welders were busily at work, into a room practically without walls and ceiled only by