Children of the Lens by E.E. Smith

Christopher Kinnison drove toward Arisia, seething. Why couldn't those sisters of his have sense to match their brains -- or why couldn't he have had some brothers? Especially -- right now -- Kay. If she had the sense of a Zabriskan fontema, she'd know that this job was _important_ and would snap into it, instead of wild-goose-chasing all over space. If he were Mentor, he'd straighten her out. He had decided to straighten her out once himself, and he grinned wryly to himself at the memory of what had happened. What Mentor had done to him, before he even got started, was really rugged. What he would like to do, next time he got within reach of her, was to shake her until her teeth rattled.

Or would he? Uh-uh. By no stretch of the imagination could he picture himself hurting any one of them. They were swell kids -- in fact, the finest people he had ever known. He had rough-housed and wrestled with them plenty of times, of course -- he liked it, and so did they. He could handle any one of them -- he surveyed without his usual complacence his two-hundred-plus pounds of meat, bone, and gristle -- he ought to be able to, since he outweighed them by fifty or sixty pounds; but it wasn't easy. Worse than Valerians -- just like taking on a combination of boa constrictor and cateagle -- and when Kat and Con ganged up on him that time they mauled him to a pulp in nothing flat.