Free Second Stage Lensman by E. E. (Doc) Smith

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. "Damnation!" he snorted to himself. "Fighting women again!"
    "Who was she, then—it, I mean," he hastily corrected the thought.
    "It was our elder sister…"
    The thought so translated by the man was not really "sister". That term, having distinctly sexual connotations and implications, would never have entered the mind of any "person" of Lyrane II. "Elder child of the same heritage" was more like it.
    "…and another person from what it claimed was another world," the thought flowed smoothly on. "An entity, rather, not really a person, but you would not be interested in that, of course."
    "Of course I would," Kinnison assured her. "In fact, it is this other person, and not your elderly relative, in whom I am interested. But you say that it is an entity, not a person. How come? Tell me all about it."
    "Well, it looked like a person, but it wasn't. Its intelligence was low, its brain power was small. And its mind was upon things… its thought were so…"
    Kinnison grinned at the Lyranian's efforts to express clearly thoughts so utterly foreign to her mind as to be totally incomprehensible.
    "You don't know what that entity was, but I do," he broke in upon her floundering. "It was a person who was also, and quite definitely, a female. Right?"
    "But a person couldn't—couldn't possibly—be a female!" she protested. "Why, even biologically, it doesn't make sense. There are no such things as females—there can't be!" and Kinnison saw her viewpoint clearly enough. According to her sociology and conditioning there could not be.
    "We'll go into that later," he told her. "What I want now is this female zwilnik. Is she—or it—with your elder