Then one evening a girl--young, pretty, vivacious--approached him, a pinch of purple powder between her fingers. As the Gray Lensman he knew that the stuff was not thionite, but as William Williams he did not. "_Do_ have a tiny smell of thionite, Mr. Williams!" she urged, coquettishly, and made as though to blow it into his face. Williams reacted strangely, but instantaneously. He ducked with startling speed and the flat of his palm smacked ringingly against the girl's cheek. He did not slap her hard--it looked and sounded much worse than it really was--the only actual force was in the follow-up push that sent her flying across the room. "Whatja mean, you? You can't slap girls around like that here!" and the chief bouncer came at him with a rush. This time the Lensman did not pull his punch. He struck with everything he had, from heels to fingertips. Such was the sheer brute power of the blow that the bouncer literally somersaulted the length of the room, bringing up with a crash against the distant wall; so accurate was its placement that the victim, while not killed outright, would be unconscious for many hours to come. Others turned then, and paused; for Williams was not running away; he was not even giving ground. Instead, he stood lightly poised upon the balls of his feet, knees bent the veriest trifle, arms hanging at ready, eyes as hard and as cold as the iron meteorites of the space he knew so well. "Any others of you damn zwilniks want to make a pass at me?" he demanded, and a concerted gasp arose: the word "zwilnik" was in those circles far worse than a mere fighting word. It was absolutely taboo: it was _never_, under any circumstance, uttered. Nevertheless, no action was taken. At first the cold arrogance, the sheer effrontery of the man's pose held them in check; then they noticed one thing and remembered another, the combination of which gave them most emphatically to pause. No garment, even by the most deliberate intent, could possibly have been designed as a better hiding place for DeLameters than the barrel-topped full-dress jacket of Aldebaran II; and-- Mr. William Williams, poised there in steel-spring readiness for action; so coldly self-confident; so inexplicably, so scornfully derisive of that whole roomful of men not a few of whom he knew must be armed; was also the Wild Bill Williams, meteor miner, who was widely known as the fastest and deadliest performer with twin DeLameters who had ever infested space! XVIII.