SECOND STAGE LENSMAN

      First serialized in "ASTOUNDING," Nov '41 - Feb '42;

            Fist book, Fantasy Press hardbound, 1953

BY E. E. "DOC" SMITH

FOREWORD

     A couple of billion years ago, when the first and Second Galaxies were passing

through each other and when myriads of planets were coming into being where only a

handful had existed before, two races of beings were already ancient. Each had

become independent of the chance formation of planets upon which to live. Each had

won a large measure of power over its environment; the Arisians by force of mind alone,

the Eddorians by employing both mind and mechanism.

     The Arisians were native to this, our normal space-time continuum. They had

lived in it since the unthinkably remote time of their origin. The original Arisia was very

much like Earth. Thus all our normal space was permeated by Arisian life-spores, and

thus upon all Earth-like planets there came into being races more or less like what the

Arisians had been in the days of their racial youth.

     The Eddorians, on the other hand, were interlopers. They came to our space-

time continuum from some horribly different plenum. For eons they had been exploring

the Macrocosmic All; moving their planets from plenum to plenum; seeking that which at

last they found—one in which there were enough planets, soon to be inhabited by

intelligent life, to sate even the Eddorian lust for dominance. Here, in our own universe,

they would stay; and here supreme they would rule.

     The Elders of Arisia, however, the ablest thinkers of the race, had known of and

had studied the Eddorians for many cycles of time. Their integrated Visualization of the

Cosmic All showed what was to happen. No more than the Arisians themselves could

the Eddorians be slain by any physical means; nor could the Arisians, unaided, kill all

the invaders by mental force. Eddore's All-Highest and his Innermost Circle, in their

ultrashielded citadel, could be destroyed only by a mental bolt of such nature and

magnitude that its generator, which was to become known as the Galactic Patrol, would

require several long Arisian lifetimes for its building.

     Nor would that building be easy. The Eddorians must be kept in ignorance, both

of Arisia and of the proposed generator, until too late to take effective counter-

measures. Also, no entity below the third level of intelligence could ever be allowed to

learn the truth, for that knowledge would set up an inferiority complex that would rob the

generator of its ability to do the work.

     On the four most promising planets of the First Galaxy —our Earth or Sol Three,

Velantia, Rigel Four, and Palain Seven—breeding programs, to develop the highest

mentality of which each race was capable, were begun as soon as intelligent life

appeared.

     On our Earth there were only two blood lines, since humanity has only two sexes.

One was a straight male line of descent, and was always named Kinnison or its

equivalent. Civilizations rose and fell; Arisia surreptitiously lifting them up, Eddore

callously knocking them down. Pestilences raged, and wars, and famines, and

holocausts and disasters that decimated entire populations again and again; but the

direct male line of descent of the Kinnisons was never broken.

     The other line, sometimes male and sometimes female, which was to culminate

in the female penultimate of the Arisian program, was equally persistent and was

characterized throughout its prodigious length by a peculiarly spectacular shade of red-

bronze-auburn hair and equally striking gold-flecked, tawny eyes. Atlantis fell, but the

red-headed, yellow-eyed child of red-haired Captain Phryges had been sent to North

Maya, and lived. Patroclus, the red-headed gladiator, begot a red-haired daughter

before he was cut down. And so it went.

     World Wars One, Two, and Three, occupying as they did only a few moments of

Arisian-Eddorian time, formed merely one incident in the eons-long game. Immediately

after that incident, Gharlane of Eddore made what proved to be an error. Knowing

nothing of the Arisians, he assumed that the then completely ruined Tellus would not

require his personal attention again for many hundreds of Tellurian years, and went

elsewhere; to Rigel Four, to Palain Seven, and to Velantia Two, or Delgon, where he

found that his creatures, the Overlords, were not progressing satisfactorily. He spent

quite a little time there; during which the men of Earth, aided by the Arisians, made a

rapid recovery from the ravages of atomic warfare and very rapid advances in both

sociology and technology.

     Virgil Samms, the auburn-haired, tawny-eyed Crusader who was to become the

first wearer of Arisia's Lens, took advantage of the demoralization to institute an

effective planetary police force. Then, with the advent of interplanetary flight, he was

instrumental in forming the Interplanetary League. As head of the Triplanetary Service

he took a leading part in the brief war with the Nevians, a race of highly intelligent

amphibians who used allotropic iron as a source of atomic power.

     Gharlane of Eddore came back to the Solarian System as Gray Roger, the

enigmatic and practically immortal scourge of space, only to find his every move so

completely blocked that he could not kill two ordinary human beings, Conway Costigan

and Clio Marsden. Nor were these two, in spite of some belief to the contrary, anything

but what they seemed. Neither of them ever knew that they were being protected.

Gharlane's blocker was in fact an Arisian fusion; the four-ply mentality which was to

become known to every Lensman of the Patrol as Mentor of Arisia.

     The inertialess drive, which made an interstellar trip a matter of minutes instead

of lifetimes, brought with it such an increase in crime, and made detection of criminals

so difficult, that law enforcement broke down almost completely. As Samms himself

expressed it:

     "How can legal processes work efficiently—work at all, for that matter—when a

man can commit a murder or a pirate can loot a space-ship and be a hundred parsecs

away before the crime is even discovered? How can a Tellurian John Law find a

criminal on a strange world that knows nothing of our Patrol, with a completely alien

language— maybe no language at all—when it takes months even to find out who and

where—if any—the native police officers are?"

     Also there was the apparently insuperable difficulty of identification of authorized

personnel. Triplanetary's best scientists had done their best in the way of a non-

counterfeitable badge—the historic Golden Meteor, which upon touch impressed upon

the toucher's consciousness an unpronounceable,—unspellable syllable—but that best

was not enough. What physical science could devise and synthesize, physical science

could analyze and duplicate; and that analysis and duplication had caused trouble

indeed.

     Triplanetary needed something vastly better than its meteor. In fact, without a

better, its expansion into an inter-systemic organization would probably be impossible. It

needed something to identify a Patrolman, anytime and anywhere. This something must

be impossible of duplication or imitation—ideally, it should kill, painfully, any entity

attempting imposture. It should operate as a telepath or endow its wearer with telepathic

power—how else could a Tellurian converse with peoples such as the Rigellians, who

could not talk, see, or hear?

     Both Solarian Councillor Virgil Samms and his friend of old, Commissioner of

Public Safety Roderick Kinnison, knew these things; but they also knew how utterly

preposterous their thoughts were; how utterly and self-evidently impossible such a

device was.

     But Arisia again came to the rescue. The scientist working on the meteor

problem, one Dr. Nels Bergenholm—who, all unknown to even his closest associates,

was a form of flesh energized at various times by various Arisians—reported to Virgil

Samms that:

     (1) Physical science could not then produce what was needed, and probably

could never do so. (2) Although it could not be explained by any symbology known to

man, there was—there must be—a science of die mind; a science whose tangible

products physical science could neither analyze nor imitate. (3) Virgil Samms, by going

to Arisia, could obtain exactly what was needed.

     "Arisia! Of all the hells in space, why Arisia?" Kinnison demanded. "How? Don't

you know that nobody can get anywhere near that damn planet?"

     "I know that the Arisians are very well versed in that science. I know that if Virgil

Samms goes to Arisia he will obtain the symbol he needs. I know that he will never

obtain it otherwise. As to how I know these things—I can't—I just —I know them, I tell

you!"

     And since Bergenholm was already as well known for uncannily accurate

"hunches" as for a height of genius bordering on insanity, the two leaders of Civilization

did not press him farther, but went immediately to the hitherto forbidden planet. They

were—apparently—received hospitably enough, and were given Lenses by Mentor of

Arisia; Lenses which, it developed, were all that Bergenholm had indicated, and more.

     The Lens is a lenticular structure of hundreds of thousands of tiny crystalloids,

built and tuned to match the individual life force—the ego, the personality—of one

individual entity. While not, strictly speaking, alive, it is endowed with a sort of pseudo-

life by virtue of which it gives off a strong, characteristically-changing, polychromatic

light as long as it is in circuit with the living mentality with which it is in synchronization.

Conversely, when worn by anyone except its owner, it not only remains dark, but it kills;

so strongly does its pseudo-life interfere with any life to which it is not attuned. It is also

a telepathic communicator of astounding power and range—and other things.

     Back on Earth, Samms set out to find people of Lensman caliber to send to

Arisia. Kinnison's son, Jack, Jack's friend Mason Northrop, Conway Costigan, and

Samms' daughter Virgilia—who had inherited her father's hair and eyes and who was

the most accomplished muscle-reader of her time— went first. The boys got Lenses, but

Jill did not. Mentor, who was to her senses a woman seven feet tall—it should be

mentioned here that no two entities who ever saw Mentor ever saw the same

thing—told her that she did not then and never would need a Lens.

     Frederick Rodebush, Lyman Cleveland, young Bergenholm and a couple of

commodores of the Patrol—Clayton of North America and Schweikert of Europe—just

about exhausted Earth's resources. Nor were the other Solarian planets very helpful,

yielding only three Lensmen—Knobos of Mars, Del Nalten of Venus, and Rularion of

Jove. Lensman material was very scarce stuff.

     Knowing that his proposed Galactic Council would have to be made up

exclusively of Lensmen, and that it should represent as many solar systems as

possible, Samms visited the various systems which had been colonized by humanity,

then went on: to Rigel Four, where he found Dronvire the Explorer, who was of

Lensman grade; and next to Pluto, where he found Pilinixi the Dexitroboper, who very

definitely was not; and finally to Palain Seven, an ultra-frigid world where he found

Tallick, who might—or might not—go to Arisia some day. And Virgil Samms, being

physically tough and mentally a real crusader, survived these various ordeals.

     For some time the existence of the newly-formed Galactic Patrol was precarious

indeed. Archibald Isaacson, head of Interstellar Spaceways, wanting a monopoly of

interstellar trade, first tried bribery; then, joining forces with the machine of Senator

Morgan and Boss Towne, assassination. The other Lensmen and Jill saved Samms' life;

after which Kinnison took him to the safest place on Earth—deep underground beneath

the Hill; the tremendously fortified, superlatively armed fortress which had been built to

be the headquarters of the Triplanetary Service.

     But even there the First Lensman was attacked, this time by a fleet of space-

ships in full battle array. By that time, however, the Galactic Patrol had a fleet of its own,

and again the Lensmen won.

     Knowing that the final and decisive struggle would of necessity be a political one,

the Patrol took over the Cosmocrat party and set out to gather detailed and

documentary evidence of corrupt and criminal activities of the Nationalists, the party

then in power. Roderick ("Rod the Rock") Kinnison ran for President of North America

against the incumbent Witherspoon; and after a knock-down-and-drag-out political

battle with Senator Morgan, the voice of the Morgan-Towne-Isaacson machine, he was

elected.

     And Morgan was murdered—supposedly by disgruntled gangsters; actually by

his Kalonian boss, who was in turn a minion of Eddore—simply because he had failed.

     North America was the most powerful continent of Earth; Earth was the mother

planet, the leader and the boss. Hence, under the sponsorship of the Cosmocratic

government of North America, the Galactic Council and its arm, the Galactic Patrol,

came into their own. At the end of R. K. Kinnison's term of office, at which time he

resumed his interrupted duties as Port Admiral of the Patrol, there were a hundred

planets adherent to Civilization. In ten years there were a thousand; in a hundred years

a million; and it is sufficient characterization of the government of the Galactic Council to

say that in the long history of Civilization no planet has ever withdrawn from it.

     Time went on. The prodigiously long blood-lines, so carefully manipulated by

Mentor of Arisia, neared culmination. Lensman Kimball Kinnison was graduated Number

One of his class—as a matter of fact, although he did not know it, he was Number One

of his time. And his female counterpart and complement, Clarrissa MacDougall of the

red-bronze-auburn hair and the gold-flecked tawny eyes, was a nurse in the Patrol's

Hospital at Prime Base.

     Shortly after graduation Kinnison was called in by Port Admiral Haynes. Space

piracy had become an organized force; and, under the leadership of someone or

something known as "Boskone", had risen to such heights of power as to threaten

seriously the Patrol itself. In one respect Boskonia was ahead of the Patrol; its scientists

having developed a source of power vastly greater than any known to Civilization. Pirate

ships, faster than the Patrol's fastest cruisers and yet more heavily armed than its most

powerful battleships, had been doing as they pleased throughout all space.

     For one particular purpose the engineers of the Patrol had designed and built

one ship—the Brittania. She was the fastest thing in space, but for offense she had only

one weapon, the "Q-gun". Kinnison was put in command of this vessel, with orders to:

(1) Capture a late-model pirate vessel; (2) Learn her secrets of power; and (3) Transmit

the information to Prime Base.

     He found and took such a ship. Sergeant Peter vanBuskirk led the storming party

of Valerians—men of human ancestry, but of extraordinary size, strength, and agility

because of the enormous gravitation of the planet Valeria—in wiping out those of the

pirate crew not killed in the battle between the two vessels.

     The Brittania's scientists secured the desired data. It could not be transmitted to

Prime Base, however, as the pirates were blanketing all channels of communication.

Boskonian warships were gathering for the kill, and the crippled Patrol ship could neither

run nor fight. Therefore each man was given a spool of tape bearing a complete record

of everything that had occurred; and, after setting up a director-by-chance to make the

empty ship pursue an unpredictable course in space, and after rigging bombs to destroy

her at the first touch of a ray, the Patrolmen paired off by lot and took to the lifeboats.

     The erratic course of the cruiser brought her near the lifeboat manned by

Kinnison and vanBuskirk, and there the pirates tried to stop her. The ensuing explosion

was so violent that flying wreckage disabled practically the entire personnel of one of

the attacking ships, which did not have time to go free before the crash. The two

Patrolmen boarded the pirate vessel and drove her toward Earth, reaching the solar

system of Velantia before the Boskonians headed them off. Again taking to their

lifeboat, they landed on the planet Delgon, where they were rescued from a horde of

Catlats by one Worsel—later to become Lensman Worsel of Velantia—a highly

intelligent winged reptile.

     By means of improvements upon Velantian thought-screens the three destroyed

a group of the Overlords of Delgon, a sadistic race of monsters who had been preying

upon the other peoples of the system by sheer power of mind. Worsel then

accompanied the two Patrolmen to Velantia, where all the resources of the planet were

devoted to the preparation of defenses against the expected attack of the Boskonians.

Several other lifeboats reached Velantia, guided by Worsel's mind working through

Kinnison's ego and Lens.

     Kinnison intercepted a message from Helmuth, who "spoke for Boskone", and

traced his communicator beam, thus getting his first line on Boskone's Grand Base. The

pirates attacked Velantia, and six of their warships were captured. In these six ships,

manned by Velantian crews, the Patrolmen again set out for Earth and Prime Base.

     Then Kinnison's Bergenholm, the generator of the force which makes inertialess

flight possible, broke down, so that he had to land upon Trenco for repairs. Trenco, the

tempestuous, billiard-ball-smooth planet where it rains forty seven feet and five inches

every night and where the wind blows at over eight hundred miles per hour—Trenco,

the source of thionite, the deadliest of all deadly drugs—Trenco, whose weirdly-charged

ether and atmosphere so distort beams and vision that it can be policed only by such

beings as the Rigellians, who possess the sense of perception instead of those of sight

and hearing!

     Lensman Tregonsee, of Rigel Four, then in command of the Patrol's wandering

base on Trenco, supplied Kinnison with a new Bergenholm and he again set out for

Tellus.

     Meanwhile Helmuth had decided that some one particular Lensman must be the

cause of all his set-backs; and that the Lens, a complete enigma to all Boskonians, was

in some way connected with Arisia. That planet had always been dreaded and shunned

by all spacemen. No Boskonian who had even approached that planet could be

compelled, even by the certainty of death, to go near it again.

     Thinking himself secure by virtue of thought-screens "given him by a being from

a higher-echelon planet named Floor, Helmuth went alone to Arisia, determined to learn

all about the Lens. There he was punished to the verge of insanity, but was permitted to

return to his Grand Base alive and sane: "Not for your own good, but for the good of

that struggling young Civilization which you oppose."

     Kinnison reached Prime Base with the all-important data. By building super-

powerful battleships, called "maulers", the Patrol gained a temporary advantage over

Boskonia, but a stalemate soon ensued. Kinnison developed a plan of action whereby

he hoped to locate Helmuth's Grand Base, and asked Port Admiral Haynes for

permission to follow it. In lieu of that, however, Haynes told him that he had been given

his Release; that he was an Unattached Lensman—a "Gray" Lensman, popularly so-

called, from the color of the plain leather uniforms they wear. Thus he earned the

highest honor possible for the Galactic Patrol to give, for the Gray Lensman works

under no supervision or direction whatever. He is responsible to no one; to nothing save

his own conscience. He is no longer a cog in the immense machine of the Galactic

Patrol: wherever he may go he is the Patrol!

     In quest of a second line to Grand Base, Kinnison scouted a pirate stronghold on

Aldebaran I. Its personnel, however, were not even near-human, but were Wheelmen,

possessed of the sense of perception; hence Kinnison was discovered before he could

accomplish anything and was very seriously wounded. He managed to get back to his

speedster and to send a thought to Port Admiral Haynes, who rushed ships to his aid. In

Base Hospital Surgeon-Marshal Lacy put him back together; and, during a long and

quarrelsome convalescence, Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall held him together. And Lacy

and Haynes connived to promote a romance between nurse and Lensman.

     As soon as he could leave the hospital he went to Arisia in the hope that he

might he given advanced training; something which had never before been attempted.

Much to his surprise he learned that he had been expected to return for exactly such

training. Getting it almost killed him, but he emerged from the ordeal vastly stronger of

mind than any human being had ever been before; and possessed of a new sense as

well—the sense of perception, a sense somewhat analogous to sight, but of much

greater power, depth, and scope, and not dependent on light.

     After trying out his new mental equipment by solving a murder mystery on

Radelix, he went to Boyssia II, where he succeeded in entering an enemy base. He took

over the mind of a communications officer and waited for a chance to get his second,

all-important line to Grand Base. An enemy ship captured a hospital ship of the Patrol

and brought it in to Boyssia. Nurse MacDougall, head nurse of the ship, working under

Kinnison's instructions, stirred up trouble which soon became mutiny. Helmuth took a

hand from Grand Base, thus enabling the Lensman to get his second line.

     The hospital ship, undetectable by virtue of Kinnison's nullifier, escaped from

Boyssia II and headed for Earth at full blast. Kinnison, convinced that Helmuth was

really Boskone himself, found that the intersection of the two lines, and therefore the

pirates' Grand Base, lay in Star Cluster AC 257-4736, well outside the galaxy. Pausing

only long enough to destroy the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I, he set out to investigate

Helmuth's headquarters. He found a stronghold impregnable to any attack the Patrol

could throw against it; manned by thought-screened personnel. His sense of perception

was suddenly cut off—the pirates had erected a thought-screen around their whole

planet. He then returned to Prime Base, deciding en route that boring from within was

the only possible way to take that stupendous fortress.

     In consultation with the Port Admiral the zero hour was set, at which time the

massed Grand Fleet of the Patrol was to attack Grand Base with every projector it could

bring to bear.

     Pursuant to his plan, Kinnison again visited Trenco, where the Patrol forces

extracted for him some fifty kilograms of thionite; the noxious drug which, in microgram

inhalations, makes the addict experience all the sensations of doing whatever it is that

he wishes most ardently to do. The larger the dose, the more intense and exquisite the

sensations—resulting, sooner or later, in a super-ecstatic death.

     Thence to Helmuth's planet; where, working through the unshielded brain of a

dog, he let himself into the central dome. Here, just before the zero minute, he released

his thionite into the air-stream, thus wiping out all the pirates except Helmuth himself,

who, in his ultra-shielded inner bombproof, could not be affected.

     The Patrol attacked precisely on schedule, but Helmuth would not leave his

retreat, even to try to save his base. Therefore Kinnison had to go in after him. Poised in

the air of the inner dome there was an enigmatic, sparkling ball of force which the

Lensman could not understand, and of which he was therefore very suspicious.

     But the storming of that quadruply-defended inner stronghold was exactly the

task for which Kinnison's new and ultra-cumbersome armor had been designed; so in

he went. He killed Helmuth in armor-to-armor combat.

     Kinnison was pretty sure that that force-ball was keyed to some particular

pattern, and suspected—correctly—that it was in part an inter-galactic communicator.

Hence he did not think into it until he was in the flagship with Port Admiral Haynes; until

all kinds of recorders and analyzers had been set up. Then he did so—and Grand Base

was blasted out of existence by duodec bombs placed by the pirates themselves and

triggered by the force-ball. The detectors showed a hard, tight communications line

running straight out toward the Second Galaxy. Helmuth was not Boskone.

     Scouting the Second Galaxy in his super-powerful battleship Dauntless, Kinnison

met and defeated a squadron of Boskonian war-vessels. He landed upon the planet

Medon, whose people had been fighting a losing war against Boskone. The Medonians,

electrical wizards who had already installed inertia-neutralizers and a space-drive,

moved their world across inter-galactic space to our First Galaxy.

     With the cessation of military activity, however, the illicit traffic in habit-forming

drugs had increased tremendously, and Kinnison, deducing that Boskone was back of

the drug syndicate, decided that the best way to find the real leader of the enemy was to

work upward through the drug ring.

     Disguised as a dock walloper, he frequented the saloon of a drug baron, and

helped to raid it; but, although he secured much information, his disguise was

penetrated.

     He called a Conference of Scientists to devise means of building a gigantic bomb

of negative matter. Then, impersonating a Tellurian secret-service agent who lent

himself to the deception, he tried to investigate the stronghold of Prellin of Bronseca,

one of Boskone's regional directors. This disguise also failed and he barely managed to

escape.

     Ordinary disguises having proved useless, Kinnison became Wild Bill Williams;

once a gentleman of Aldebaran II, now a space-rat meteor miner. He made of himself

an almost bottomless drinker of the hardest beverages known to space. He became a

drug fiend—a bentlam eater—discovering that his Arisian-trained mind could function at

full efficiency even while his physical body was completely stupefied. He became widely

known as the fastest, deadliest performer with twin DeLameters ever to strike the

asteroid belts.

     Through solar system after solar system he built up an unimpeachable identity as

a hard-drinking, wildly-carousing, bentlam-eating, fast-shooting space-hellion; a lucky or

a very skillful meteor miner; a derelict who had been an Aldebaranian gentleman once

and who would be again if he should ever strike it rich.

     Physically helpless in a bentlam stupor, he listened in on a zwilnik conference

and learned that Edmund Crowninshield, of Tressilia III, was also a regional director of

the enemy.

     Boskone formed an alliance with the Overlords of Delgon, and through a hyper-

spatial tube the combined forces again attacked humanity. Not simple slaughter this

time, for the Overlords tortured their captives and consumed their life forces in sadistic

orgies. The Conference of Scientists solved the mystery of the tube and the Dauntless

counter-attacked through it, returning victorious.

     Wild Bill Williams struck it rich at last. Abandoning the low dives in which he had

been wont to carouse, he made an obvious effort to become again an Aldebaranian

gentleman. He secured an invitation to visit Crowninshield's resort—the Boskonian,

believing that Williams was basically a booze- and drug-soaked bum, wanted to get his

quarter-million credits.

     In a characteristically wild debauch, Kinnison-Williams did squander a large part

of his new fortune; but he learned from Crowninshield's mind that one Jalte, a Kalonian

by birth, was Boskone's galactic director; and that Jalte had his headquarters in a star

cluster just outside the First Galaxy. Pretending bitter humiliation and declaring that he

would change his name and disappear, the Gray Lensman left the planet—to

investigate Jalte's base.

     He learned that Boskone was not a single entity, but a council. Jalte did not know

very much about it, but his superior, one Eichmil, who lived on the planet Jarnevon, in

the Second Galaxy, would know who and what Boskone really was.

     Therefore Kinnison and Worsel went to Jarnevon. Kinnison was captured and

tortured—there was at least one Overlord there—but Worsel rescued him before his

mind was damaged and brought him back with his knowledge intact. Jarnevon was

peopled by the Eich, a race almost as monstrous as the Overlords. The Council of Nine

which ruled the planet was in fact the long-sought Boskone.

     The greatest surgeons of the age—Phillips of Posenia and Wise of

Medon—demonstrated that they could grow new nervous tissue; even new limbs and

organs if necessary. Again Clarrissa MacDougall nursed Kinnison back to health, and

this time the love between them could not be concealed.

     The Grand Fleet of the Patrol was assembled, and with Kinnison in charge of

Operations, swept outward from the First Galaxy. Jalte's planet was destroyed by

means of the negasphere—the negative-matter bomb—4hen on to the Second Galaxy.

     Jarnevon, the planet of the Eich, was destroyed by smashing it between two

barren planets which had been driven there in the "free" (inertialess) condition. These

planets, having exactly opposite intrinsic velocities, were inerted, one upon each side of

the doomed world; and when that frightful collision was over a minor star had come into

being.

     Grand Fleet returned to our galaxy. Galactic Civilization rejoiced. Prime Base

was a center of celebration. Kinnison, supposing that the war was over and that his

problem was solved, threw off Lensman's Load. Marrying his Cris, he declared, was the

most important thing in the universe.

     But how wrong he was! For even as Lensman and nurse were walking down a

corridor of Base Hospital after a conference with Haynes and Lacy regarding that

marriage—

CHAPTER 1

Recalled

     Stop, youth!" the voice of Mentor the Arisian thundered silently, deep within the

Lensman's brain.

     He stopped convulsively, almost in mid-stride, and at the rigid, absent awareness

in his eyes Nurse MacDougall's face went white.

     "This is not merely the loose and muddy thinking of which you have all too

frequently been guilty in the past," the deeply resonant, soundless voice went on, "it is

simply not thinking at all. At times, Kinnison of Tellus, we almost despair of you. Think,

youth, think! For know, Lensman, that upon the clarity of your thought and upon the

trueness of your perception depends the whole future of your Patrol and of your

Civilization; more so now by far than at any time in the past."

     "What'dy'mean, 'think'?" Kinnison snapped back thoughtlessly. His mind was a

seething turmoil, his emotions an indescribable blend of surprise, puzzlement, and

incredulity.

     For moments, as Mentor did not reply, the Gray Lensman's mind raced.

Incredulity . . . becoming tinged with apprehension . . . turning rapidly into rebellion.

     "Oh, Kim!" Clarrissa choked. A queer enough tableau they made, these two, had

any been there to see; the two uniformed figures standing there so strainedly, the

nurse's two hands gripping those of the Lensman. She, completely en rapport with him,

had understood his every fleeting thought. "Oh, Kim! They can't do that to us . . ."

     "I'll say they cant!" Kinnison flared. "By Klono's tungsten teeth, I won't do it! We

have a right to happiness, you and I, and we'll. . ."

     "We'll what?" she asked, quietly. She knew what they had to face; and, strong-

souled woman that she was, she was quicker to face it squarely than was he. "You were

just blasting off, Kim, and so was I."

     "I suppose so," glumly. "Why in all the nine hells of Valeria did I have to be a

Lensman? Why couldn't I have stayed a . . . ?"

     "Because you are you," the girl interrupted, gently. "Kimball Kinnison, the man I

love. You couldn't do anything else." Chin up, she was fighting gamely. "And if I rate

Lensman's Mate I can't be a sissy, either. It won't last forever, Kim. Just a little longer to

wait, that's all."

     Eyes, steel-gray now, stared down into eyes of tawny, gold-flecked bronze. "QX,

Cris? Really QX?" What a world of meaning there was in that cryptic question!

     "Really, Kim." She met his stare unfalteringly. If not entirely unafraid, at least with

whole-hearted determination. "On the beam and on the green, Gray Lensman, all the

way. Every long, last millimeter. There, wherever it is—to the very end of whatever road

it has to be—and back again. Until it's over. I'll be here. Or somewhere, Kim. Waiting."

     The man shook himself and breathed deep. Hands dropped apart—both knew

consciously as well as subconsciously that the less of physical demonstration the better

for two such natures as theirs—and Kimball Kinnison, Unattached Lensman, came to

grips with his problem.

     He began really to think; to think with the full power of his prodigious mind; and

as he did so he began to see what the Arisian could have—what he must have—meant.

He, Kinnison, had gummed up the works. He had made a colossal blunder in the

Boskonian campaign. He knew that Mentor, although silent, was still en rapport with

him; and as he coldly, grimly, thought the thing through to its logical conclusion he

knew, with a dull, sick certainty, what was coming next. It came:

     "Ah, you perceive at last some portion of the truth. You see that your confused,

superficial thinking has brought about almost irreparable harm. I grant that, in

specimens so young of such a youthful race, emotion has its place and its function; but I

tell you now in all solemnity that for you the time of emotional relaxation has not yet

come. Think, youth— THINK!" and the ancient Arisian snapped the telepathic line.

     As one, without a word, nurse and Lensman retraced their way to the room they

had left so shortly before. Port Admiral Haynes and Surgeon-Marshal Lacy still sat upon

the nurse's davenport, scheming roseate schemes having to do with the wedding they

had so subtly engineered.

     "Back so soon? Forget something, MacDougall?" Lacy asked, amiably. Then, as

both men noticed the couple's utterly untranslatable expression:

     "What happened? Break it out, Kim!" Haynes commanded.

     "Plenty, chief," Kinnison answered, quietly. "Mentor .stopped us before we got to

the elevator. Told me I'd put my foot in it up to my neck on that Boskonian thing. That

instead of being all buttoned up, my fool blundering has put us farther back than we

were when we started."

     "Mentor!"

     "Told you!"

     "Put us back!"

     It was an entirely unpremeditated, unconscious duet. The two old officers were

completely dumbfounded. Arisians never had come out of their shells, they never would.

Infinitely less disturbing would have been the authentic tidings that a brick house had

fallen upstairs. They had nursed this romance along so carefully, had timed it so

exactly, and now it had gone p-f-f-f-t—it had been taken out of their hands entirely. That

thought flashed through their minds first. Then, as catastrophe follows lightning's flash,

the real knowledge exploded within their consciousnesses that, in some unguessable

fashion or other, the whole Boskonian campaign had gone p-f-f-f-t, too.

     Port Admiral Haynes, master tactician, reviewed in his keen strategist's mind

every phase of the recent struggle, without being able to find a flaw in it.

     "There wasn't a loop-hole anywhere," he said aloud. "Where do they figure we

slipped up?"

     "We didn't slip—7 slipped," Kinnison stated, flatly. "When we took Bominger—the

fat Chief Zwilnik of Radelix, you know—I took a bop on the head to learn that Boskone

had more than one string per bow. Observers, independent, for every station at all

important. I learned that fact thoroughly then, I thought. At least, we figured on

Boskone's having lines of communication past, not through, his Regional Directors,

such as Prellin of Bronseca. Since I changed my line of attack at that point, I did not

need to consider whether or not Crowninshield of Tressilia III was by-passed in the

same way; and when I had worked my way up through Jalte in his star-cluster to

Boskone itself, on Jarnevon, I had forgotten the concept completely. Its possibility didn't

even occur to me. That's where I fell down."

     "I still don't see it!" Haynes protested. "Boskone was the top!"

     "Yeah?" Kinnison asked, pointedly. "That's what I thought —but prove it."

     "Oh." The Port Admiral hesitated. "We had no reason to think otherwise . . .

looked at in that light, this intervention would seem to be conclusive . . . but before that

there was no . . ."

     "There were so," Kinnison contradicted, "but I didn't see them then. That's where

my brain went sour; I should have seen them. Little things, mostly, but significant. Not

so much positive as negative indices. Above all, there was nothing whatever to indicate

that Boskone actually was the top. That idea was the product of my own-wishful and

very low-grade thinking, with no basis or foundation in fact or in theory. And now," he

concluded bitterly, "because my skull is so thick that it takes an idea a hundred years to

filter through it—because a sheer, bare fact has to be driven into my brain with a

Valerian maul before I can grasp it—we're sunk without a trace."

     "Wait a minute, Kim, we aren't sunk yet," the girl advised, shrewdly. "The fact

that, for the first time in history, an Arisian has taken the initiative in communicating with

a human being, means something big—really big. Mentor does not indulge in what he

calls 'loose and muddy' thinking. Every part of every thought he sent carries meaning—

plenty of meaning."

     "What do you mean?" As one, the three men asked substantially the same

question; Kinnison, by virtue of his faster reactions, being perhaps half a syllable in the

lead.

     "I don't know, exactly," Clarrissa admitted. "I've got only an ordinary mind, and it's

firing on half its jets or less right now. But I do know that his thought was 'almost'

irreparable, and that he meant precisely that—nothing else. If it had been wholly

irreparable he not only would have expressed his thought that way, but he would have

stopped you before you destroyed Jarnevon. I know that. Apparently it would have

become wholly irreparable if we had got . . ." she faltered, blushing, then went on, ". . . if

we had kept on about our own personal affairs. That's why he stopped us. We can win

out, he meant, if you keep on working. It's your oyster, Kim . . . it's up to you to open it.

You can do it, too—I just know you can."

     "But why didn't he stop you before you fellows smashed Boskone?" Lacy

demanded, exasperated.

     "I hope you're right, Cris—it sounds reasonable," Kinnison said, thoughtfully.

Then, to Lacy:

     "That's an easy one to answer, doctor. Because knowledge that comes the hard

way is knowledge that really sticks with you. If he had drawn me a diagram before, it

wouldn't have helped, the next time I get into a jam. This way it will. I've got to learn how

to think, if it cracks my skull.

     "Really think," he went on, more to himself than to the other three. "To think so it

counts."

     "Well, what are we going to do about it?" Haynes was— he had to be, to get

where he was and to stay where he was—quick on the uptake. "Or, more specifically,

what are you going to do and what am I going to do?"

     "What I am going to do will take a bit of mulling over," Kinnison replied, slowly.

"Find some more leads and trace them up, is the best that occurs to me right now. Your

job and procedure are rather clearer. You remarked out in space that Boskone knew

that Tellus was very strongly held. That statement, of course, is no longer true."

     "Huh?" Haynes half-pulled himself up from the davenport, then sank back.

"Why?" he demanded.

     "Because we used the negasphere—a negative-matter bomb of planetary anti-

mass—to wipe out Jalte's planet, and because we smashed Jarnevon between two

colliding planets," the Lensman explained, concisely. "Can the present defenses of

Tellus cope with either one of those offensives?"

     "I'm afraid not . . . no," the Port Admiral admitted. "But . . ."

     "We can admit no 'buts', admiral," Kinnison declared, with grim finality. "Having

used those weapons, we must assume that the Boskonian scientists—we'll have to

keep on calling them 'Boskonians', I suppose, until we find a truer name—had recorders

on them and have now duplicated them. Tellus must be made safe against anything we

have ever used; against, as well, everything that, by the wildest stretch of the

imagination, we can conceive of the enemy using."

     "You're right. . . I can see that," Haynes nodded.

     "We've been underestimating them right along," Kinnison went on. "At first we

thought they were merely organized outlaws and pirates. Then, when it was forced upon

us that they could match us—overmatch us in some things—we still wouldn't admit that

they must be as large and as wide-spread as we are—galactic in scope. We know now

that they were wider-spread than we are. Inter-galactic. They penetrated into our

galaxy, riddled it, before we knew that theirs was inhabited or inhabitable. Right?"

     "To a hair, although I never thought of it in exactly that way before."

     "None of us have—mental cowardice. And they have the advantage," Kinnison

continued, inexorably, "in knowing that our Prime Base is on Tellus; whereas, if

Jarnevon was not in fact theirs, we have no idea whatever where it is. And another

point. Was that fleet of theirs a planetary outfit?"

     "Well, Jarnevon was a big planet, and the Eich were a mighty warlike race."

     "Quibbling a bit, aren't you, chief?"

     "Uh-huh," Haynes admitted, somewhat sheepishly. "The probability is very great

that no one planet either built or maintained that fleet."

     "And that leads us to expect what?"

     "Counter-attack. In force. Everything they can shove this way. However, they've

got to rebuild their fleet, besides designing and building the new stuff. We'll have time

enough, probably, if we get started right now."

     "But, after all, Jarnevon may have been their vital spot," Lacy submitted.

     "Even if that were true, which it probably isn't," the now thoroughly convinced

Port Admiral sided in with Kinnison, "it doesn't mean a thing, Sawbones. If they should

blow Tellus out of space it wouldn't kill the Galactic Patrol. It would hurt it, of course, but

it wouldn't cripple it seriously. The other planets of Civilization could, and certainly

would, go ahead with it."

     "My thought exactly," from Kinnison. "I check you to the proverbial nineteen

decimals."

     "Well, there's a lot to do and I'd better be getting at it." Haynes and Lacy got up to

go. "See you in my office when convenient?"

     "I'll be there as soon as I tell Clarrissa goodbye."

     At about the same time that Haynes and Lacy went to Nurse MacDougall's room,

Worsel the Velantian arrowed downward through the atmosphere toward a certain flat

roof. Leather wings shot out with a snap and in a blast of wind— Velantians can stand

eleven Tellurian gravities—he came in his customary appalling landing and dived

unconcernedly down a nearby shaft. Into a corridor, along which he wriggled blithely to

the office of his old friend, Master Technician La-Verne Thorndyke.

     "Verne, I have been thinking," he announced, as he coiled all but about six feet of

his sinuous length into a tight spiral upon the rug and thrust out half a dozen weirdly

stalked eyes.

     "That's nothing new," Thorndyke countered. No human mind can sympathize with

or even remotely understand the Velantian passion for solid weeks of intense,

uninterrupted concentration upon a single thought. "What about this time? The

whichness of the why?"

     "That is the trouble with you Tellurians," Worsel grumbled. "Not only do you not

know how to think, but you . . ."

     "Hold on!" Thorndyke interrupted, unimpressed. "If you've got anything to say, old

snake, why not say it? Why circumnavigate total space before you get to the point?"

     "I have been thinking about thought. . ."

     "So what?" the technician derided. "That's even worse. That's a logarithmic spiral

if there ever was one."

     "Thought—and Kinnison," Worsel declared, with finality.

     "Kinnison? Oh—that's different. I'm interested—very much so. Go ahead."

     "And his weapons. His DeLameters, you know.".

     "No, I don't know, and you know I don't know. What about them?"

     "They are so . . . so . . . so obvious." The Velantian finally found the exact

thought he wanted. "So big, and so clumsy, and so obtrusive. So inefficient, so wasteful

of power. No subtlety—no finesse."

     "But that's far and away the best hand-weapon that has ever been developed!"

Thorndyke protested.

     "True. Nevertheless, a millionth of that power, properly applied, could be at least

a million times as deadly."

     "How?" The Tellurian, although shocked, was dubious.

     "I have reasoned it out that thought, in any organic being, is and must be

connected with one definite organic compound —this one," the Velantian explained

didactically, the while there appeared within the technician's mind the space formula of

an incredibly complex molecule; a formula which seemed to fill not only his mind, but

the entire room as well. "You will note that it is a large molecule, one of very high

molecular weight. Thus it is comparatively unstable. A vibration at the resonant

frequency of any one of its component groups would break it down, and thought would

therefore cease."

     It took perhaps a minute for the full import of the ghastly thing to sink into

Thorndyke's mind. Then, every fiber of him flinching from the idea, he began to protest.

     "But he doesn't need it, Worsel. He's got a mind already that can . . ."

     "It takes much mental force to kill," Worsel broke in equably. "By that method one

can slay only a few at a time, and it is exhausting work. My proposed method would

require only a minute fraction of a watt of power and scarcely any mental force at all."

     "And it would kill—it would have to. That reaction could not be made reversible."

     "Certainly," Worsel concurred. "I never could understand why you soft-headed,

soft-hearted, soft-bodied human beings are so reluctant to kill your enemies. What good

does it do merely to stun them?"

     "QX—skip it" Thorndyke knew that it was hopeless to attempt to convince the

utterly unhuman Worsel of the fundamental lightness of human ethics. "But nothing has

ever been designed small enough to project such a wave."

     "I realize that. Its design and construction will challenge your inventive ability. Its

small ness is its great advantage. He could wear it in a ring, in the bracelet of his Lens;

or, since it will be actuated, controlled, and directed by thought, even imbedded

surgically beneath his skin."

     "How about backfires?" Thorndyke actually shuddered. "Projection . . . shielding .

. ."

     "Details—mere details," Worsel assured him, with an airy flip of his scimitared

tail.

     "That's nothing to be running around loose," the man argued. "Nobody could tell

what killed them, could they?"

     "Probably not." Worsel pondered briefly. "No. Certainly not. The substance must

decompose in the instant of death, from any cause. And it would not be 'loose', as you

think; it should not become known, even. You would make only the one, of course."

     "Oh. You don't want one, then?"

     "Certainly not. What do I need of such a thing? Kinnison only—and only for his

protection."

     "Kim can handle it . . . but he's the only being this side of Arisia that I'd trust with

one . . . QX, give me the dope on the frequency, wave-form, and so on, and I'll see what

I can do."

CHAPTER 2

Invasion Via Tube

     Port Admiral Haynes, newly chosen president of the Galactic Council and by

virtue of his double office the most powerful entity of Civilization, set instantly into

motion the vast machinery which would make Tellus safe against any possible attack.

He first called together his Board of Strategy; the same keen-minded tacticians who had

helped him plan the invasion of the Second Galaxy and the eminently successful attack

upon Jarnevon. Should Grand Fleet, many of whose component fleets had not yet

reached their home planets, be recalled? Not yet—lots of time for that. Let them go

home for a while first. The enemy would have to rebuild before they could attack, and

there were many more pressing matters.

     Scouting was most important. The planets near the galactic rim could take care

of that. In fact, they should concentrate upon it, to the exclusion of everything else of

warfare's activities. Every approach to the galaxy—yes, the space between the two

galaxies and as far into the Second Galaxy as it was safe to penetrate—should be

covered as with a blanket. That way, they could not be surprised.

     Kinnison, when he heard that, became vaguely uneasy. He did not really have a

thought; it was as though he should have had one, but didn't. Deep down, far off, just

barely above the threshold of perception an indefinite, formless something obtruded

itself upon his consciousness. Tug and haul at it as he would, he could not get the drift.

There was something he ought to be thinking of, but what in all the iridescent hells from

Vandemar to Alsakan was it? So, instead of flitting about upon his declared business,

he stuck around; helping the General Staff—and thinking.

     And Defense Plan BBT went from the idea men to the draftsmen, then to the

engineers. This was to be, primarily, a war of planets. Ships could battle ships, fleets

fleets; but, postulating good tactics upon the other side, no fleet, however armed and

powered, could stop a planet. That had been proved. A planet had a mass of the order

of magnitude of one times ten to the twenty fifth kilograms, and an intrinsic velocity of

somewhere around forty kilometers per second. A hundred probably, relative to Tellus,

if the planet came from the Second Galaxy. Kinetic energy, roughly, about five times ten

to the forty first ergs. No, that was nothing for any possible fleet to cope with.

     Also, the attacking planets would of course be inertia-less until the last strategic

instant. Very well, they must be made inert prematurely, when the Patrol wanted them

that way, not the enemy. How? HOW? The Bergenholms upon those planets would be

guarded with everything the Boskonians had.

     The answer to that question, as worked out by the engineers, was something

they called a "super-mauler". It was gigantic, cumbersome, and slow; but little faster,

indeed, than a free planet. It was like Helmuth's fortresses of space, only larger. It was

like the special defense cruisers of the Patrol, except that its screens were vastly

heavier. It was like a regular mauler, except that it had only one weapon. All of its

incomprehensible mass was devoted to one thing—power! It could defend itself; and, if

it could get close enough to its objective, it could do plenty of damage—its dreadful

primary was the first weapon ever developed capable of cutting a Q-type helix squarely

in two.

     And in various solar systems, uninhabitable and worthless planets were

converted into projectiles. Dozens of them, possessing widely varying masses and

intrinsic velocities. One by one they flitted away from their parent suns and took up

positions—not too far away from our Solar System, but not too near.

     And finally Kinnison, worrying at his tantalizing thought as a dog worries a bone,

crystallized it. Prosaically enough, it was an extremely short and flamboyantly waggling

pink skirt which catalyzed the reaction; which acted as the seed of the crystallization.

Pink—a Chickladorian—Xylpic the Navigator—Overlords of Delgon. Thus flashed the

train of thought, culminating in:

     "Oh, so that's it!" he exclaimed, aloud. "A TUBE—just as sure as hell's a

mantrap!" He whistled raucously at a taxi, took the wheel himself, and broke—or at least

bent—most of the city's traffic ordinances in getting to Haynes' office.

     The Port Admiral was always busy, but he was never too busy to see Gray

Lensman Kinnison; especially when the latter demanded the right of way in such terms

as he used then.

     "The whole defense set-up is screwy," Kinnison declared. "I thought I was

overlooking a bet, but I couldn't locate it. Why should they fight their way through inter-

galactic space and through sixty thousand parsecs of planet-infested galaxy when they

don't have to?" he demanded. "Think of the length of the supply line, with our bases

placed to cut it in a hundred places, no matter how they route it. It doesn't make sense.

They'd have to out-weigh us in an almost impossibly high ratio, unless they have an

improbably superior armament."

     "Check." The old warrior was entirely unperturbed. "Surprised you didn't see that

long ago. We did. I'll be very much surprised if they attack at all."

     "But you're going ahead with all this just as though . . ."

     "Certainly. Something may happen, and we can't be caught off guard. Besides,

it's good training for the boys. Helps morale, no end." Haynes' nonchalant air

disappeared and he studied the younger man keenly for moments. "But Mentor's

warning certainly meant something, and you said 'when they don't have to'. But even if

they go clear around the galaxy to the other side—an impossibly long haul—we're

covered. Tellus is far enough in so they can't possibly take us by surprise. So—spill it!"

     "How about a hyperspatial tube? They know exactly where we are, you know."

     "Urn . . . m . . . m." Haynes was taken aback. "Never thought of it . . . possible,

distinctly a possibility. A duodec bomb, say, just far enough underground . . ."

     "Nobody else thought of it, either, until just now," Kinnison broke in. "However,

I'm not afraid of duodec—don't see how they could control it accurately enough at this

three-dimensional distance. Too deep, it wouldn't explode at all. What I don't like to

think of, though, is a negasphere. Or a planet, perhaps."

     "Ideas? Suggestions?" the admiral snapped.

     "No—I don't know anything about that stuff. How about putting our Lenses on

Cardynge?"

     "That's a thought!" and in seconds they were in communication with Sir Austin

Cardynge, Earth's mightiest mathematical brain.

     "Kinnison, how many times must I tell you that I am not to be interrupted?" the

aged scientist's thought was a crackle of fury. "How can I concentrate upon vital

problems if every young whippersnapper in the System is to perpetrate such

abominable, such outrageous intrusions . . ."

     "Hold it, Sir Austin—hold everything!" Kinnison soothed. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't

have intruded if it hadn't been a matter of life or death. But it would be. worse intrusion,

wouldn't it, if the Boskonians sent a planet about the size of Jupiter—or a

negasphere—through one of their extra-dimensional vortices into your study? That's

exactly what they're figuring on doing."

     "What-what-what?" Cardynge snapped, like a string of firecrackers. He quieted

down, then, and thought. And Sir Austin Cardynge could think, upon occasion and when

he felt so inclined; could think in the abstruse symbology of pure mathematics with a

cogency equalled by few minds in the universe. Both Lensmen perceived those

thoughts, but neither could understand or follow them. No mind not a member of the

Conference of Scientists could have done so.

     "They can't!" of a sudden the mathematician cackled, gleefully disdainful.

"Impossible—quite definitely impossible. There are laws governing such things,

Kinnison, my impetuous and ignorant young friend. The terminus of the necessary

hyper-tube could not be established within such proximity to the mass of the sun. This is

shown by . . ."

     "Never mind the proof—the fact is enough," Kinnison interposed, hastily. "How

close to the sun could it be established?"

     "I couldn't say, off-hand," came the cautiously scientific reply. "More than one

astronomical unit, certainly, but the computation of the exact distance would require

some little time. It would, however, be an interesting, if minor, problem. I will solve it for

you, if you like, and advise you of the exact minimum distance."

     "Please do so—thanks a million," and the Lensmen disconnected.

     "The conceited old goat!" Haynes snorted. "I'd like to smack him down!"

     "I've felt like it more than once, but it wouldn't do any good. You've got to handle

him with gloves—besides, you can afford to make concessions to a man with a brain

like that."

     "I suppose so. But how about that infernal tube? Knowing that it can not be set

up within or very near Tellus helps some, but not enough. We've got to know where it

is—if it is. Can you detect it?"

     "Yes. That is, I can't, but the specialists can, I think. Wise of Medon would know

more about that than anyone else. Why wouldn't it be a thought to call him over here?"

     "It would that", and it was done.

     Wise of Medon and his staff came, conferred, and departed.

     Sir Austin Cardynge solved his minor problem, reporting that the minimum

distance from the sun's center to the postulated center of the terminus of the

vortex—actually, the geometrical origin of the three-dimensional figure which was the

hyper-plane of intersection—was one point two six four seven, approximately,

astronomical units; the last figure being tentative and somewhat uncertain because of

the rapidly-moving masses of Jupiter . . .

     Haynes cut the tape—he had no time for an hour of mathematical

dissertation—and called in his execs.

     "Full-globe detection of hyper-spatial tubes," he directed, crisply. "Kinnison will

tell you exactly what he wants. Hipe!"

     Shortly thereafter, five-man speedsters, plentifully equipped with new

instruments, flashed at full drive along courses carefully calculated to give the greatest

possible coverage in the shortest possible time.

     Unobtrusively the loose planets closed in; close enough so that at least three or

four of them could reach any designated point in one minute or less. The outlying units

of Grand Fleet, too, were pulled in. That fleet was not actually mobilized—yet—but

every vessel in it was kept in readiness for instant action.

     "No trace," came the report from the Medonian surveyors, and Haynes looked at

Kinnison, quizzically.

     "QX, chief—glad of it," the Gray Lensman answered the unspoken query. "If it

was up, that would mean they were on the way. Hope they don't get a trace for two

months yet. But I'm next-to-positive that that's the way they're coming and the longer

they put it off the better—there's a possible new projector that will take a bit of doping

out. I've got to do a flit—can I have the Dauntless?"

     "Sure—anything you want—she's yours anyway."

     Kinnison went. And, wonder of wonders, he took Sir Austin Cardynge with him.

From solar system to solar system, from planet to planet, the mighty Dauntless hurtled

at the incomprehensible velocity of her full maximum blast; and every planet so visited

was the home world of one of the most cooperative—or, more accurately, one of the

least non-cooperative—members of the Conference of Scientists. For days brilliant but

more or less unstable minds struggled with new and obdurate problems; struggled

heatedly and with friction, as was their wont. Few if any of those mighty intellects would

have really enjoyed a quietly studious session, even had such a thing been possible.

     Then Kinnison returned his guests to their respective homes and shot his flying

warship-laboratory back to Prime Base. And, even before the Dauntless landed, the first

few hundreds of a fleet which was soon to be numbered in the millions of meteor-

miners' boats began working like beavers to build a new and exactly-designed system

of asteroid belts of iron meteors.

     And soon, as such things go, new structures began to appear here and there in

the void. Comparatively small, these things were; tiny, in fact, compared to the Patrol's

maulers. Unarmed, too; carrying nothing except defensive screen. Each was,

apparently, simply a power-house; stuffed skin full of atomic motors, exciters, intakes,

and generators of highly peculiar design and pattern. Unnoticed except by gauntly

haggard Thorndyke and his experts, who kept dashing from one of the strange craft to

another, each took its place in a succession of precisely-determined relationships to the

sun.

     Between the orbits of Mars and of Jupiter, the new, sharply-defined rings of

asteroids moved smoothly. Most of Grand Fleet formed an enormous hollow

hemisphere. Throughout all nearby space the surveying speedsters and flitters rushed

madly hither and yon. Uselessly, apparently, for not one needle of the vortex-detectors

stirred from its zero-pin.

     As nearly as possible at the Fleet's center there floated the flagship. Technically

the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, ordinarily simply GFHQ, that ship had been built

specifically to control the operations of a million separate flotillas. At her million-plug

board stood—they had no need, ever, to sit— two hundred blocky, tentacle-armed

Rigellians. They were waiting, stolidly motionless.

     Intergalactic space remained empty. Interstellar ditto, ditto. The flitters flitted,

fruitlessly.

     But if everything out there in the threatened volume of space seemed quiet and

serene, things in the Z9M9Z were distinctly otherwise. Haynes and Kinnison, upon

whom the heaviest responsibilities rested, were tensely ill at ease.

     The admiral had his formation made, but he did not like it at all. It was too big, too

loose, too cumbersome. The Boskonian fleet might appear anywhere, and it would take

him far, far too long to get any kind of a fighting formation made, anywhere. So he

worried. Minutes dragged—he wished that the pirates would hurry up and start

something!

     Kinnison was even less easy in his mind. He was not afraid of negaspheres,

even if Boskonia should have them; but he was afraid of fortified, mobile planets. The

super-maulers were big and powerful, of course, but they very definitely were not

planets; and the big, new idea was mighty hard to jell. He didn't like to bother Thorndyke

by calling him—the master technician had troubles of his own—but the reports that were

coming in were none too cheery. The excitation was wrong or the grid action was too

unstable or the screen potentials were too high or too low or too something. Sometimes

they got a concentration, but it was just as apt as not to be a spread flood instead of a

tight beam. To Kinnison, therefore, the minutes fled like seconds—but every minute that

space remained clear was one more precious minute gained.

     Then, suddenly, it happened. A needle leaped into significant figures. Relays

clicked, a bright red light flared into being, a gong clanged out its raucous warning. A

fractional instant later ten thousand other gongs in ten thousand other ships came

brazenly to life as the discovering speedster automatically sent out its number and

position; and those other ships—surveyors all—flashed toward that position and dashed

frantically about. Theirs the task to determine, in the least number of seconds possible,

the approximate location of the center of emergence.

     For Port Admiral Haynes, canny old tactician that he was, had planned his

campaign long since. It was standing plain in his tactical tank—to englobe the entire

space of emergence of the foe and to blast them out of existence before they could

maneuver. If he could get into formation before the Boskonians appeared it would be a

simple slaughter—if not, it might be otherwise. Hence seconds counted; and hence he

had had high-speed computers working steadily for weeks at the computation of

courses for every possible center of emergence.

     "Get me that center—fast!" Haynes barked at the surveyors, already blasting at

maximum.

     It came in. The chief computer yelped a string of numbers. Selected loose-leaf

binders were pulled down, yanked apart, and distributed on the double, leaf by leaf.

And:

     "Get it over there! Especially the shock-globe!" the Port Admiral yelled.

     For he himself could direct the engagement only in broad; details must be left to

others. To be big enough to hold in any significant relationship the millions of lights

representing vessels, fleets, planets, structures, and objectives, the Operations tank of

the Directrix had to be seven hundred feet in diameter; and it was a sheer physical

impossibility for any ordinary mind either to perceive that seventeen million cubic feet of

space as a whole or to make any sense at all out of the stupendously bewildering maze

of multi-colored lights crawling and flashing therein.

     Kinnison and Worsel had handled Grand Fleet Operations during the battle of

Jarnevon, but they had discovered that they could have used some help. Four Rigellian

Lensmen had been training for months for that all-important job, but they were not yet

ready. Therefore the two old masters and one new one now labored at GFO: three

tremendous minds, each supplying something that the others lacked. Kinnison of Tellus,

with his hard, flat driving urge, his unconquerable, unstoppable will to do. Worsel of

Velantia, with the prodigious reach and grasp which had enabled him, even without the

Lens, to scan mentally a solar system eleven light-years distant. Tregonsee of Rigel IV,

with the vast, calm certainty, the imperturbable poise peculiar to his long-lived, solemn

race. Second Stage Lensmen all, graduates of Arisian advanced training; minds linked,

basically, together into one mind by a wide-open three-way; superficially free, each to

do his assigned third of the gigantic task.

     Smoothly, effortlessly, those three linked minds went to work at the admiral's

signal. Orders shot out along tight beams of thought to the stolid hundreds of Rigellian

switchboard operators, and thence along communicator beams to the pilot rooms,

wherever stationed. Flotillas, squadrons, sub-fleets flashed smoothly toward their newly-

assigned positions. Super-maulers moved ponderously toward theirs. The survey ships,

their work done, vanished. They had no business anywhere near what was coming

next. Small they were, and defenseless; a speedster's screens were as efficacious as

so much vacuum against the forces about to be unleashed. The power houses also

moved. Maintaining rigidly their cryptic mathematical relationships to each other and the

sun, they went as a whole into a new one with respect to the circling rings of tightly-

packed meteors and the invisible, non-existent mouth of the Boskonian vortex.

     Then, before Haynes' formation was nearly complete, the Boskonian fleet

materialized. Just that—one instant space was empty; the next it was full of warships. A

vast globe of battle-wagons, in perfect fighting formation. They were not free, but inert

and deadly.

     Haynes swore viciously under his breath, the Lensmen pulled themselves

together more tensely; but no additional orders were given. Everything that could

possibly be done was already being done.

     Whether the Boskonians expected to meet a perfectly-placed fleet or whether

they expected to emerge into empty space, to descend upon a defenseless Tellus, is

not known or knowable. It is certain, however, that they emerged in the best possible

formation to meet anything that could be brought to bear. It is also certain that, had the

enemy had a Z9M9Z and a Kinnison-Worsel-Tregonsee combination scanning its

Operations tank, the outcome might well have been otherwise than it was.

     For that ordinarily insignificant delay, that few minutes of time necessary for the

Boskonians' orientation, was exactly that required for those two hundred smoothly-

working Rigellians to get Civilization's shock-globe into position.

     A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian

conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of

every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck

and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged, and searingly bit Rods and

cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore, and ground

in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its

horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall-shields, in such numbers and with such

violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary

density.

     Screen after screen, wall-shield after wall-shield, in their hundreds and their

thousands, went down. A full eighth of the Patrol's entire count of battleships was

wrecked, riddled, blown apart, or blasted completely out of space in the paralyzingly

cataclysmic violence of the first, seconds-long, mind-shaking, space-wracking

encounter. Nor could it have been otherwise; for this encounter had not been at battle

range. Not even at point-blank range; the warring monsters of the void were packed

practically screen to screen.

     But not a man died—upon Civilization's side at least— even though practically all

of the myriad of ships composing the inner sphere, the shock-globe, was lost. For they

were automatics, manned by robots; what little superintendence was necessary had

been furnished by remote control. Indeed it is possible, although perhaps not entirely

probable, that the shock-globe of the foe was similarly manned.

     That first frightful meeting gave time for the reserves of the Patrol to get there,

and it was then that the superior Operations control of the Z9M9Z made itself tellingly

felt. Ship for ship, beam for beam, screen for screen, the Boskonians were, perhaps

equal to the Patrol; but they did not have the perfection of control necessary for unified

action. The field was too immense, the number of contending units too enormously vast.

But the mind of each of the three Second-Stage Lensmen read aright the flashing lights

of his particular volume of the gigantic tank and spread their meaning truly in the

infinitely smaller space-model beside which Port Admiral Haynes, Master Tactician,

stood. Scanning the entire space of battle as a whole, he rapped out general orders

—orders applying, perhaps, to a hundred or to five hundred planetary fleets. Kinnison

and his fellows broke these orders down for the operators, who in turn told the admirals

and vice-admirals of the fleets what to do. They gave detailed orders to the units of their

commands, and the line officers, knowing exactly what to do and precisely how to do it,

did it with neatness and dispatch.

     There was no doubt, no uncertainty, no indecision or wavering. The line officers,

even the admirals, knew nothing, could know nothing of the progress of the

engagement as a whole. But they had worked under the Z9M9Z before. They knew that

the maestro Haynes did know the battle as a whole. They knew that he was handling

them as carefully and as skillfully as a master at chess plays his pieces upon the

square-filled board. They knew that Kinnison or Worsel or Tregonsee was assigning no

task too difficult of accomplishment.

     They knew that they could not be taken by surprise, attacked from some,

unexpected and unprotected direction; knew that, although in those hundreds of

thousands of cubic miles of space there were hundreds of thousands of highly inimical

and exceedingly powerful ships of war, none of them were or shortly could be in position

to do them serious harm. If there had been, they would have been pulled out of there,

beaucoup fast. They were as safe as anyone in a warship in such a war could expect,

or even hope, to be. Therefore they acted instantly; directly, whole-heartedly and

efficiently; and it was the Boskonians who were taken, repeatedly and by the thousands,

by surprise.

     For the enemy, as has been said, did not have the Patrol's smooth perfection of

control. Thus several of Civilization's fleets, acting in full synchronization, could and

repeatedly did rush upon one unit of the foe; englobing it, blasting it out of existence,

and dashing back to stations; all before the nearest by fleets of Boskone knew even that

a threat was being made. Thus ended the second phase of the battle, the engagement

of the two Grand Fleets, with the few remaining thousands of Boskone's battleships

taking refuge upon or near the phalanx of planets which had made up their center.

     Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and

powered; with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon a lesser mobile base,

with fixed-mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or

feed. Galactic Civilization's war-vessels fell back. Attacking a full-armed planet was no

part of their job. And as they fell back the super-maulers moved ponderously up and

went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed. Tubes, lances,

stillettoes of unthinkable energies raved against their mighty screens; bouncing off,

glancing away, dissipating themselves in space-torturing discharges as they hurled

themselves upon the nearest ground. In and in the monsters bored, inexorably taking up

their positions directly over the ultra-protected domes which, their commanders knew,

sheltered the vitally important Bergenholms and controls. They then loosed forces of

their own. Forces of such appalling magnitude as to burn out in a twinkling of an eye

projector-shells of a refractoriness to withstand for ten full seconds the maximum output

of a first-class battleship's primary batteries!

     The resultant beam was of very short duration, but of utterly intolerable

poignancy. No material substance could endure it even momentarily. It pierced instantly

the hardest, tightest wall-shield known to the scientists of the Patrol. It was the only

known thing which could cut or rupture the ultimately stubborn fabric of a Q-type helix.

Hence it is not to be wondered at that as those incredible needles of ravening energy

stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again at Boskonian domes every man of the Patrol,

even Kimball Kinnison, fully expected those domes to go down.

     But those domes held. And those fixed-mount projectors hurled back against the

super-maulers forces at the impact of which course after course of fierce-driven

defensive screen flamed through the spectrum and went down.

     "Back! Get them back!" Kinnison whispered, white-lipped, and the attacking

structures sullenly, stubbornly gave way.

     "Why?" gritted Haynes. "They're all we've got."

     "You forget the new one, chief—give us a chance."

     "What makes you think it'll work?" the old admiral flashed the searing thought. "It

probably won't—and if it doesn't. . ."

     "If it doesn't," the younger man shot back, "we're no worse off than now to use

the maulers. But we've got to use the sunbeam now while those planets are together

and before they start toward Tellus."

     "QX," the admiral assented; and, as soon as the Patrol's maulers were out of the

way:

     "Verne?" Kinnison flashed a thought. "We can't crack 'em. Looks like it's up to

you—what do you say?"

     "Jury-rigged—don't know whether she'll light a cigarette or not—but here she

comes!"

     The sun, shining so brightly, darkened almost to the point of invisibility. War-

vessels of the enemy disappeared, each puffing out into a tiny but brilliant sparkle of

light.

     Then, before the beam could effect the enormous masses of the planets, the

engineers lost it. The sun flashed up— dulled—brightened—darkened—wavered. The

beam waxed and waned irregularly; the planets began to move away under the urgings

of their now thoroughly scared commanders.

     Again, while millions upon millions of tensely straining Patrol officers stared into

their plates, haggard Thorndyke and his sweating crews got the sunbeam under

control— and, in a heart-stopping wavering fashion, held it together. It

flared—sputtered—ballooned out—but very shortly, before they could get out of its way,

the planets began to glow. Ice-caps melted, then boiled. Oceans boiled, their surfaces

almost exploding into steam. Mountain ranges melted and flowed sluggishly down into

valleys. The Boskonian domes of force went down and stayed down.

     "QX, Kim—let be," Haynes ordered. "No use overdoing it. Not bad-looking

planets; maybe we can use them for something."

     The sun brightened to its wonted splendor, the planets began visibly to

cool—even the Titanic forces then at work had heated those planetary masses only

superficially.

     The battle was over.

     "What in all the purple hells of Palain did you do, Haynes, and how?" demanded

the Z9M9Z's captain.

     "He used the whole damned solar system as a vacuum tube!" Haynes explained,

gleefully. "Those power stations out there, with all their motors and intake screens, are

simply the power leads. The asteroid belts, and maybe some of the planets, are the

grids and plates. The sun is . . ."

     "Hold on, chief!" Kinnison broke in. "That isn't quite it. You see, the directive field

set up by the . . ."

     "Hold on yourself!" Haynes ordered, briskly. "You're too damned scientific, just

like Sawbones Lacy. What do Rex and I care about technical details that we can't

understand anyway? The net result is what counts—and that was to concentrate upon

those planets practically the whole energy output of the sun. Wasn't it?"

     "Well, that's the main idea," Kinnison conceded. "The energy equivalent, roughly,

of four million one hundred and fifty thousand tons per second of disintegrating matter."

     "Whew!" the captain whistled. "No wonder it frizzled 'em up."

     "I can say now, I think, with no fear of successful contradiction, that Tellus is

strongly held," Haynes stated, with conviction. "What now, Kim old son?"

     "I think they're done, for a while," the Gray Lensman pondered. "Cardynge can't

communicate through the tube, so probably they can't; but if they managed to slip an

observer through they may know how almighty close they came to licking us. On the

other hand, Verne says that he can get the bugs out of the sunbeam in a couple of

weeks—and when he does, the next zwilnik he cuts loose at is going to get a surprise."

     "I'll say so," Haynes agreed. "We'll keep the surveyors on the prowl, and some of

the Fleet will always be close by. Not all of it, of course—we'll adopt a schedule of

reliefs— but enough of it to be useful. That ought to be enough, don't you think?"

     "I think so—yes," Kinnison answered, thoughtfully. "I'm just about positive that

they won't be in shape to start anything here again for a long time. And I had better get

busy, sir, on my own job—I've got to put out a few jets."

     "I suppose so," Haynes admitted.

     For Tellus was strongly held, now—so strongly held that Kinnison felt free to

begin again the search upon whose successful conclusion depended, perhaps, the

outcome of the struggle between Boskonia and Galactic Civilization.

CHAPTER 3

Lyrane the Matriarchy

     When the forces of the Galactic Patrol blasted Helmuth's Grand Base out of

existence and hunted down and destroyed his secondary bases throughout this galaxy,

Boskone's military grasp upon Civilization was definitely broken. Some minor bases

may have escaped destruction, of course. Indeed, it is practically certain that some of

them did so, for there are comparatively large volumes of our Island Universe which

have not been mapped, even yet, by the planetographers of the Patrol. It is equally

certain, however, that they were relatively few and of no real importance. For warships,

being large, cannot be carried around or concealed in a vest pocket —a war-fleet must

of necessity be based upon a celestial object not smaller than a very large asteroid.

Such a base, lying close enough to any one of Civilization's planets to be of any use,

could not be hidden successfully from the detectors of the Patrol.

     Reasoning from analogy, Kinnison quite justifiably concluded that the back of the

drug syndicate had been broken in similar fashion when he had worked upward through

Bominger and Strongheart and Crowninshield and Jalte to the dread council of Boskone

itself. He was, however, wrong.

     For, unlike the battleship, thionite is a vest-pocket commodity. Unlike the space-

fleet base, a drug-baron's headquarters can be and frequently is small, compact, and

highly mobile. Also, the galaxy is huge, the number of planets in it immense, the total

count of drug addicts utterly incomprehensible. Therefore it had been found more

efficient to arrange the drug hook-up in multiple series-parallel, instead of in the straight

en-cascade sequence which Kinnison thought that he had followed up.

     He thought so at first, that is, but he did not think so long. He had thought, and he

had told Haynes, as well as Gerrond of Radelix, that the situation was entirely under

control; that with the zwilnik headquarters blasted out of existence and with all of the

regional heads and many of the planetary chiefs dead or under arrest, all that the

Enforcement men would have to cope with would be the normal bootleg trickle. In that,

too, he was wrong. The lawmen of Narcotics had had a brief respite, it is true; but in a

few days or weeks, upon almost as many planets as before, the illicit traffic was again in

full swing.

     After the Battle of Tellus, then, it did not take the Gray Lensman long to discover

the above facts. Indeed, they were pressed upon him. He was, however, more relieved

than disappointed at the tidings, for he knew that he would have material upon which to

work. If his original opinion had been right, if all lines of communication with the now

completely unknown ultimate authorities of the zwilniks had been destroyed, his task

would have been an almost hopeless one.

     It would serve no good purpose here to go into details covering his early efforts,

since they embodied, in principle, the same tactics as those which he had previously

employed. He studied, he analyzed, he investigated. He snooped and he spied. He

fought; upon occasion he killed. And in due course —and not too long a course—he cut

into the sign of what he thought must be a key zwilnik. Not upon Bronseca or Radelix or

Chickladoria, or any other distant planet, but right upon Tellus!

     But he could not locate him. He never saw him on Tellus. As a matter of cold

fact, he could not find a single person who had ever seen him or knew anything definite

about him. These facts, of course, only whetted Kinnison's keenness to come to grips

with the fellow. He might not be a very big shot, but the fact that he was covering

himself up so thoroughly and so successfully made it abundantly evident that he was a

fish well worth landing.

     This wight, however, proved to be as elusive as the proverbial flea. He was never

there when Kinnison pounced. In London he was a few minutes late. In Berlin he was a

minute or so too early, and the ape didn't show up at all. He missed him in Paris and in

San Francisco and in Shanghai. The guy sat down finally in New York, but still the Gray

Lensman could not connect—it was always the wrong street, or the wrong house, or the

wrong time, or something.

     Then Kinnison set a snare which should have caught a microbe—and almost

caught his zwilnik. He missed him by one mere second when he blasted off from New

York Space-Port. He was so close that he saw his flare, so close that he could slap onto

the fleeing vessel the beam of the CRX tracer which he always carried with him.

     Unfortunately, however, the Lensman was in mufti at the time, and was driving a

rented flitter. His speedster—altogether too spectacular and obvious a conveyance to

be using in a hush-hush investigation—was at Prime Base. He didn't want the

speedster, anyway, except inside the Dauntless. He'd go organized this time to chase

the lug clear out of space, if he had to. He shot in a call for the big cruiser, and while it

was coming he made luridly sulphurous inquiry.

     Fruitless. His orders had been carried out to the letter, except in the one detail of

not allowing any vessel to take off. This take-off absolutely could not be helped—it was

just one of those things. The ship was a Patrol speedster from Deneb V, registry

number so-and-so. Said he was coming in for servicing. Came in on the north beam,

identified himself properly—Lieutenant Quirkenfal, of Deneb V, he said it was, and it

checked. . . .

     It would check, of course. The zwilnik that Kinnison had been chasing so long

certainly would not be guilty of any such raw, crude work as a faulty identification. In

fact, right then he probably looked just as much like Quirkenfal as the lieutenant himself

did.

     "He wasn't in any hurry at all," the information went on. "He waited around for his

landing clearance, then slanted in on his assigned slide to the service pits. In the last

hundred yards, though, he shot off to one side and sat down, plop, broadside on, clear

over there in the far corner of the field. But he wasn't down but a second, sir. Long

before anybody could get to him—before the cruisers could put a beam on him,

even—he blasted off as though the devil was on his tail. Then you came along, sir, but

we did put a CRX tracer on him. . . ."

     "I did that much, myself," Kinnison stated, morosely. "He stopped just long

enough to pick up a passenger—my zwilnik, of course—then flitted . . . and you fellows

let him get away with it."

     "But we couldn't help it, sir," the official protested. "And anyway, he couldn't

possibly have . . ."

     "He sure could. You'd be surprised no end at what that bimbo can do."

     Then the Dauntless flashed in; not asking but demanding instant right of way.

     "Look around, fellows, if you like, but you won't find a damned thing," Kinnison's

uncheering conclusion came back as he sprinted toward the dock into which his

battleship had settled. "The lug hasn't left a loose end dangling yet."

     By the time the great Patrol ship had cleared the stratosphere Kinnison's CRX,

powerful and tenacious as it was, was just barely registering a line. But that was

enough. Henry Henderson, Master Pilot, stuck the Dauntless' needle nose into that line

and shoved into the driving projectors every watt of that those Brobdingnagian creations

would take.

     They had been following the zwilnik for three days now, Kinnison reflected, and

his CRX's were none too strong yet. They were overhauling him mighty slowly; and the

Dauntless was supposed to be the fastest thing in space. That bucket up ahead had

plenty of legs—must have been souped up to the limit. This was apt to be a long chase,

but he'd get that bozo if he had to chase him on a geodesic line along the hyper-

dimensional curvature of space clear back to Tellus where he started from!

     They did not have to circumnavigate total space, of course, but they did almost

leave the galaxy before they could get the fugitive upon their plates. The stars were

thinning out fast; but still, hazily before them in a vastness of distance, there stretched a

milky band of opalescence.

     "What's coming up, Hen— a rift?" Kinnison asked.

     "Uh-huh, Rift Ninety Four," the pilot replied. "And if I remember right, that arm up

ahead is Dunstan's region and it has never been explored. I'll have the chart-room

check up on it."

     "Never mind; I'll go check it myself—I'm curious about this whole thing."

     Unlike any smaller vessel, the Dauntless was large enough so that she

could—and hence as a matter of course did—carry every space-chart issued by all the

various Boards and Offices and Bureaus concerned with space, astronomy, astrogation,

and planetography. She had to, for there were usually minds aboard which were apt at

any time to become intensely and unpredictably interested in anything, anywhere.

Hence it did not take Kinnison long to obtain what little information there was.

     The vacancy they were approaching was Rift Ninety Four, a vast space,

practically empty of stars, lying between the main body of the galaxy and a minor

branch of one of its prodigious spiral arms. The opalescence ahead was the branch

—Dunstan's Region. Henderson was right; it had never been explored.

     The Galactic Survey, which has not even yet mapped at all completely the whole

of the First Galaxy proper, had of course done no systematic work upon such outlying

sections as the spiral arms. Some such regions were well known and well mapped, it is

true; either because its own population, independently developing means of space-

flight, had come into contact with our Civilization upon its own initiative or because

private exploration and investigation had opened up profitable lines of commerce. But

Dunstan's Region was bare. No people resident in it had ever made themselves known;

no private prospecting, if there had ever been any such, had revealed anything worthy

of exploitation or development. And, with so many perfectly good uninhabited planets so

much nearer to Galactic Center, it was of course much too far out for colonization.

     Through the rift, then, and into Dunstan's Region the Dauntless bored at the

unimaginable pace of her terrific full-blast drive. The tracers' beams grew harder and

more taut with every passing hour; the fleeing speedster itself grew large and clear

upon the plates. The opalescence of the spiral arm became a firmament of stars. A sun

detached itself from that firmament; a dwarf of Type G. Planets appeared.

     One of these in particular, the second out, looked so much like Earth that it made

some of the observers homesick. There were the familiar polar ice-caps, the

atmosphere and stratosphere, the high-piled, billowy masses of clouds. There were vast

blue oceans, there were huge, unfamiliar continents glowing with chlorophyllic green.

     At the spectroscopes, at the bolometers, at the many other instruments men

went rapidly and skillfully to work.

     "Hope the ape's heading for Two, and I think he is," Kinnison remarked, as he

studied the results. "People living on that planet would be human to ten places, for all

the tea in China. No wonder he was so much at home on Tellus . . . Yup, it's

Two—there, he's gone inert."

     "Whoever is piloting that can went to school just one day in his life and that day it

rained and the teacher didn't come," Henderson snorted. "And he's trying to balance her

down on her tail—look at her bounce and flop around! He's just begging for a crack-up."

     "If he makes it it'll be bad—plenty bad," Kinnison mused. "He'll gain a lot of time

on us while we're rounding the globe on our landing spiral."

     "Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than

his—it's the same one, in fact."

     "Get conscious, Hen. This is a superbattlewagon—just in case you didn't know it

before."

     "So what? I can certainly handle this super a damn sight better than that ground-

gripper is handling that scrap-heap down there." Henry Henderson, Master Pilot

Number One of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was

the simple and obvious truth.

     "Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never

stunted this much mass before, did you?"

     "No, but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth." He was then a

grand old man of twenty-eight or thereabouts. "I can line up the main rear center pipe

onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she

slags it down."

     "If you think you can spell 'able', hop to it!"

     "QX, this is going to be fun." Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then

clicked on his general-alarm microphone. "Strap down, everybody, for inert

maneuvering, Class Three, on the tail. Tail over to belly landing. Hipe!"

     The Bergenholms were cut and as the tremendously massive super-

dreadnought, inert, shot off at an angle under its Tellurian intrinsic velocity, Master Pilot

Number One proved his rating. As much a virtuoso of the banks and tiers of blast keys

and levers before him as a concert organist is of his instrument, his hands and feet

flashed hither and yon. Not music?—the bellowing, crescendo thunders of those jets

were music to the hard-boiled space-hounds who heard them. And in response to the

exact placement and the precisely-measured power of those blasts the great sky-rover

spun, twisted, and bucked as her prodigious mass was forced into motionlessness

relative to the terrain beneath her.

     Three G's, Kinnison reflected, while this was going on. Not bad—he'd guessed it

at four or better. He could sit up and take notice at three, and he did so.

     This world wasn't very densely populated, apparently. Quite a few cities, but all

just about on the equator. Nothing in the temperate zones at all; even the highest power

revealed no handiwork of man. Virgin forest, untouched prairie. Lots of roads and things

in the torrid zone, but nothing anywhere else. The speedster was making a rough and

unskillful, but not catastrophic landing.

     The field which was their destination lay just outside a large city. Funny—it wasn't

a space-field at all. No docks, no pits, no ships. Low, flat buildings—hangars. An air-

field, then, although not like any air-field he knew. Too small. Gyros? 'Copters? Didn't

see any—all little ships. Crates— biplanes and tripes. Made of wire and fabric. Wotta

woil, wotta woil!

     The Dauntless landed, fairly close to the now deserted speedster.

     "Hold everything, men," Kinnison cautioned. "Something funny here. I'll do a bit of

looking around before we open up."

     He was not surprised that the people in and around the airport were human to at

least ten places of classification; he had expected that from the planetary data. Nor was

he surprised at the fact that they wore no clothing. He had learned long since that, while

most human or near-human races—particularly the women—wore at least a few

ornaments, the wearing of clothing as such, except when it was actually needed for

protection, was far more the exception than the rule. And, just as a Martian, out of

deference to conventions, wears a light robe upon Tellus, Kinnison as a matter of

course stripped to his evenly-tanned hide when visiting planets upon which nakedness

was de rigueur. He had attended more than one state function, without a quibble or a

qualm, tastefully attired in his Lens.

     No, the startling fact was that there was not a man in sight anywhere around the

place; there was nothing male perceptible as far as his sense of perception could reach.

Women were laboring, women were supervising, women were running the machines.

Women were operating the airplanes and servicing them. Women were in the offices.

Women and girls and little girls and girl babies filled the waiting rooms and the

automobile-like conveyances parked near the airport and running along the streets.

     And, even before Kinnison had finished uttering his warning, while his hand was

in the air reaching for a spy-ray switch, he felt an alien force attempting to insinuate

itself into his mind.

     Fat chance! With any ordinary mind it would have succeeded, but in the case of

the Gray Lensman it was just like trying to stick a pin unobtrusively into a panther. He

put up a solid block automatically, instantaneously; then, a fraction of a second later, a

thought-tight screen enveloped the whole vessel.

     "Did any of you1 fellows . . ." he began, then broke off. They wouldn't have felt it,

of course; their brains could have been read completely with them none the wiser. He

was the only Lensman aboard, and even most Lensmen couldn't . . . this was his oyster.

But that kind of stuff, on such an apparently backward planet as this? It didn't make

sense, unless that zwilnik . . . ah, this was his oyster, absolutely!

     "Something funnier even than I thought—thought-waves," he calmly continued

his original remark. "Thought I'd better undress to go out there, but I'm not going to. I'd

wear full armor, except that I may need my hands or have to move fast. If they get

insulted at my clothes I'll apologize later."

     "But listen, Kim, you can't go out there alone—especially without armor!"

     "Sure I can. I'm not taking any chances. You fellows couldn't do me much good

out there, but you can here. Break out a 'copter and keep a spy-ray on me. If I give you

the signal, go to work with a couple of narrow needle-beams. Pretty sure that I won't

need any help, but you can't always tell."

     The airlock opened and Kinnison stepped out. He had a high-powered thought-

screen, but he did not need it—yet. He had his DeLameters. He had also a weapon

deadlier by far even than those mighty portables; a weapon so utterly deadly that he

had not used it. He did not need to test it— since Worsel had said that it would work, it

would. The trouble with it was that it could not merely disable: if used at all it killed, with

complete and grim finality. And behind him he had the full awful power of the Dauntless.

He had nothing to worry about.

     Only when the space-ship had settled down upon and into the hard-packed soil

of the airport could those at work there realize just how big and how heavy the visitor

was. Practically everyone stopped work and stared, and they continued to stare as

Kinnison strode toward the office. The Lensman had landed upon many strange

planets, he had been met in divers fashions and with various emotions; but never before

had his presence stirred up anything even remotely resembling the sentiments written

so plainly upon these women's faces and expressed even more plainly in their seething

thoughts.

     Loathing, hatred, detestation—not precisely any one of the three, yet containing

something of each. As though he were a monstrosity, a revolting abnormality that

should be destroyed on sight. Beings such as the fantastically ugly, spider-like denizens

of Dekanore VI had shuddered at the sight of him, but their thoughts were mild

compared to these. Besides, that was natural enough. Any human being would appear

a monstrosity to such as those. But these women were human; as human as he was.

He didn't get it, at all.

     Kinnison opened the door and faced the manager, who was standing at that

other-worldly equivalent of a desk. His first glance at her brought to the surface of his

mind one of the peculiarities which he had already unconsciously observed. Here, for

the first time in his life, he saw a woman without any touch whatever of personal

adornment. She was tall and beautifully proportioned, strong and fine; her smooth skin

was tanned to a rich and even brown. She was clean, almost blatantly so.

     But she wore no jewelry, no bracelets, no ribbons; no decoration of any sort or

kind. No paint, no powder, no touch of perfume. Her heavy, bushy eyebrows had never

been plucked or clipped. Some of her teeth had been expertly filled, and she had a two-

tooth bridge that would have done credit to any Tellurian dentist—but her hair! It, too,

was painfully clean, as was the white scalp beneath it, but aesthetically it was a mess.

Some of it reached almost to her shoulders, but it was very evident that whenever a lock

grew long enough to be a bother she was wont to grab it and hew it off, as close to the

skull as possible, with whatever knife, shears, or other implement came readiest to

hand.

     These thoughts and the general inspection did not take any appreciable length of

time, of course. Before Kinnison had taken two steps toward the manager's desk, he

directed a thought:

     "Kinnison of Sol III—Lensman, Unattached. It is possible, however, that neither

Tellus nor the Lens are known upon this planet?"

     "Neither is known, nor does anyone of Lyrane care to know anything of either,"

she replied coldly. 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 relative now?"

     "Yes. They will be having dinner in the hall very shortly."

     "Sorry to bother, but you'll have to take me to them—right now."

     "Oh, may I? Since I could not kill you myself, I must take you to them so they can

do it. I have been wondering how I could force you to go there," she explained, naively.

     "Henderson?" The Lensman spoke into his microphone— thought-screens, of

course, being no barrier to radio waves.

     "I'm going after the zwilnik. This woman here is taking me. Have the 'copter stay

over me, ready to needle anything I tell them to. While I'm gone go over that speeder

with a fine-tooth comb, and when you get everything we want, blast it. It and the

Dauntless are the only spacecraft on the planet. These janes are man-haters and

mental killers, so keep your thought-screens up. Don't let them down for a fraction of a

second, because they've got plenty of jets and they're just as sweet and reasonable as

a cageful of cateagles. Got it?"

     "On the tape, chief," came instant answer. "But don't take any chances, Kim.

Sure you can swing it alone?"

     "Jets enough and to spare," Kinnison assured him, curtly. Then, as the Tellurians'

helicopter shot into the air, he again turned his thought to the manager.

     "Let's go," he directed, and she led him across the way to a row of parked

ground-cars. She manipulated a couple of levers and smoothly, if slowly, the little

vehicle rolled away.

     The distance was long and the pace was slow. The woman was driving

automatically, the while her every sense was concentrated upon finding some weak

point, some chink in his barrier, through which to thrust at him. Kinnison was

amazed—stumped—at her fixity of purpose; at her grimly single-minded determination

to make an end of him. She was out to get him, and she wasn't fooling.

     "Listen, sister," he thought at her, after a few minutes of it; almost plaintively, for

him. "Let's be reasonable about this thing. I told you I didn't want to kill you; why in all

the iridescent hells of space are you so dead set on killing me? If you don't behave

yourself, I'll give you a treatment that will make your head ache for the next six months.

Why don't you snap out of it, you dumb little lug, and be friends?"

     This thought jarred her so that she stopped the car, the better to stare directly

and viciously into his eyes.

     "Be friends! With a male!" The thought literally seared its way into the man's

brain.

     "Listen, half-wit!" Kinnison stormed, exasperated. "Forget your narrow-minded,

one-planet prejudices and think for a minute, if you can think—use that pint of bean

soup inside your skull for something besides hating me all over the place. Get this—I

am no more a male than you are the kind of a female that you think, by analogy, such a

creature would have to be if she could exist in a sane and logical world."

     "Oh." The Lyranian was taken aback at such cavalier instruction. "But the others,

those in your so-immense vessel, they are of a certainty males," she stated with

conviction. "I understood what you told them via your telephone-with-out-conductors.

You have mechanical shields against the thought which kills. Yet you do not have to use

it, while the others—males indubitably—do. You yourself are not entirely male; your

brain is almost as good as a person's."

     "Better, you mean," he corrected her. "You're wrong. All of us of the ship are

men—all alike. But a man on a job can't concentrate all the time on defending his brain

against attack, hence the use of thought-screens. I can't use a screen out here,

because I've got to talk to you people. See?"

     "You fear us, then, so little?" she flared, all of her old animosity blazing out anew.

"You consider our power, then, so small a thing?"

     "Right. Right to a hair," he declared, with tightening jaw. But he did not believe

it—quite. This girl was just about as safe to play around with as five-feet-eleven of

coiled bush-master, and twice as deadly.

     She could not kill him mentally. Nor could the elder sister —whoever she might

be—and her crew; he was pretty sure of that. But if they couldn't do him in by dint of

brain it was a foregone conclusion that they would try brawn. And brawn they certainly

had. This jade beside him weighed a hundred sixty Jive or seventy, and she was trained

down fine. Hard, limber, and fast. He might be able to lick three or four of them—maybe

half a dozen—in a rough-and-tumble brawl; but more than that would mean either killing

or being killed. Damn it all! He'd never killed a woman yet, but it looked as though he

might have to start in pretty quick now.

     "Well, let's get going again," he suggested, "and while we're en route let's see if

we can't work out some basis of cooperation—a sort of live-and-let-live arrangement.

Since you understood the orders I gave the crew, you realize that our ship carries

weapons capable of razing this entire city in a space of minutes." It was a statement, not

a question.

     "I realize that." The thought was muffled in helpless fury. "Weapons,

weapons—always weapons! The eternal male! If it were not for your huge vessel and

the peculiar airplane hovering over us I would claw your eyes out and strangle you with

my bare hands!"

     "That would be a good trick if you could do it," he countered, equably enough.

"But listen, you frustrated young murderess. You have already shown yourself to be,

basically, a realist in facing physical facts. Why not face mental, intellectual facts in the

same spirit?"

     "Why, I do, of course. I always do!"

     "You do not," he contradicted, sharply. "Males, according to your lights, have

two—and only two—attributes. One, they breed. Two, they fight. They fight each other,

and everything else, to the death and at the drop of a hat. Right?"

     "Right, but . . ."

     "But nothing—let me talk. Why didn't you breed the combativeness out of your

males, hundreds of generations ago?"

     "They tried it once, but the race began to deteriorate," she admitted.

     "Exactly. Your whole set-up is cock-eyed—unbalanced. You can think of me only

as a male—one to be destroyed on sight, since I am not like one of yours. Yet, when I

could kill you and had every reason to do so, I didn't. We can destroy you all, but we

won't unless we must. What's the answer?"

     "I don't know," she confessed, frankly. Her frenzied desire for killing abated,

although her ingrained antipathy and revulsion did not. "In some ways, you do seem to

have some of the instincts and qualities of a . . . almost of a person."

     "I am a person . . ."

     "You are not! Do you think that I am to be misled by the silly coverings you

wear?"

     "Just a minute. I am a person of a race having two equal sexes. Equal in every

way. Numbers, too—one man and one woman . . ." and he went on to explain to her, as

well as he could, the sociology of Civilization.

     "Incredible!" she gasped the thought.

     "But true," he assured her. "And now are you going to lay off me and behave

yourself, like a good little girl, or am I going to have to do a bit of massaging on your

brain? Or wind that beautiful body of yours a couple of times around a tree? I'm asking

this for your own good, kid, believe me."

     "Yes, I do believe you," she marveled. "I am becoming convinced that . . . that

perhaps you are a person—at least of a sort—after all."

     "Sure I am—that's what I've been trying to tell you for an hour. And cancel that 'of

a sort', too . . ."

     "But tell me," she interrupted, "a thought you used—'beautiful". I do not

understand it. What does it mean, 'beautiful body'?"

     "Holy Klono's whiskers!" If Kinnison had never been stumped before, he was

now. How could he explain beauty, or music, or art, to this . . . this matriarchal savage?

How explain cerise to a man born blind? And above all, who had ever heard of having to

explain to a woman—to any woman, anywhere in the whole macrocosmic

universe—that she in particular was beautiful?

     But he tried. In her mind he spread a portrait of her as he had seen her first. He

pointed out to her the graceful curves and lovely contours, the lithely flowing lines, the

perfection of proportion and modeling and symmetry, the flawlessly smooth, firm-

textured skin, the supple, hard-trained fineness of her whole physique. No soap. She

tried, in brow-furrowing concentration, to get it, but in vain. It simply did not register.

     "But that is merely efficiency, everything you have shown," she declared.

"Nothing else. I must be so, for my own good and for the good of those to come. But I

think that I have seen some of your beauty," and in turn she sent into his mind a weirdly

distorted picture of a human woman. The zwilnik he was following, Kinnison decided

instantly.

     She would be jeweled, 'of course, but not that heavily—a horse couldn't carry

that load. And no woman ever born put paint on that thick, or reeked so of violent

perfume, or plucked her eyebrows to such a thread, or indulged in such a hair-do.

     "If that is beauty, I want none of it," the Lyranian declared.

     Kinnison tried again. He showed her a waterfall, this time, in a stupendous gorge,

with appropriate cloud formations and scenery. That, the girl declared, was simply

erosion. Geological formations and meteorological phenomena. Beauty still did not

appear. Painting, it appeared to her, was a waste of pigment and oil. Useless and

inefficient—for any purpose of record the camera was much faster and much more

accurate. Music—vibrations in the atmosphere—would of necessity be simply a noise;

and noise—any kind of noise —was not efficient.

     "You poor little devil." The Lensman gave up. "You poor, ignorant, soul-starved

little devil. And the worst of it is that you don't even realize—and never can

realize—what you are missing."

     "Don't be silly." For the first time, the woman actually laughed. "You are utterly

foolish to make such a fuss about such trivial things."

     Kinnison quit, appalled. He knew, now, that he and this apparently human

creature beside him were as far apart as the Galactic Poles in every essential phase of

life. He had heard of matriarchies, but he had never considered what a real matriarchy,

carried to its logical conclusion, would be like.

     This was it. For ages there had been, to all intents and purposes, only one sex;

the masculine element never having been allowed to rise above the fundamental

necessity of reproducing the completely dominant female. And that dominant female

had become, in every respect save the purely and necessitously physical one,

absolutely and utterly sexless. Men, upon Lyrane II, were dwarfs about thirty inches tall.

They had the temper and the disposition of a mad Radeligian cateagle, the intellectual

capacity of a Zabriskan fontema. They were not regarded as people, either at birth or at

any subsequent time. To maintain a static population, each person gave birth to one

person, on the grand average. The occasional male baby—about one in a hundred—did

not count. He was not even kept at home, but was taken immediately to the

"maletorium", in which he lived until attaining maturity.

     One man to a hundred or so women for a year, then death. The hundred persons

had their babies at twenty-one or twenty-two years of age—they lived to an average age

of a hundred years—then calmly blasted their male's mind and disposed of his carcass.

The male was not exactly an outcast; not precisely a pariah. He was tolerated as a

necessary adjunct to the society of persons, but in no sense whatever was he a

member of it.

     The more Kinnison pondered this hook-up the more appalled he became.

Physically, these people were practically indistinguishable from human, Tellurian,

Caucasian women. But mentally, intellectually, in every other way, how utterly different!

Shockingly, astoundingly so to any really human being, whose entire outlook and

existence is fundamentally, however unconsciously or subconsciously, based upon and

conditioned by the prime division of life into two cooperant sexes. It didn't seem, at first

glance, that such a cause could have such terrific effects; but here they were. In cold

reality, these women were no more human than were the . . . the Eich. Take the

Posenians, or the Rigellians, or even the Velantians. Any normal, stay-at-home

Tellurian woman would pass out cold if she happened to stumble onto Worsel in a dark

alley at night. Yet the members of his repulsively reptilian-appearing race, merely

because of having a heredity of equality and cooperation between the sexes, were in

essence more nearly human than were these tall, splendidly-built, actually and

intrinsically beautiful creatures of Lyrane II!

     "This is the hall," the person informed him, as the car came to a halt in front of a

large structure of plain gray stone. "Come with me."

     "Gladly," and they walked across the peculiarly bare grounds. They were side by

side, but a couple of feet apart. She had been altogether too close to him in the little car.

She did not want this male—or any male—to touch her or to be near her. And,

considerably to her surprise, if the truth were to be known, the feeling was entirely

mutual. Kinnison would have preferred to touch a Borovan slime-lizard.

     They mounted the granite steps. They passed through the dull, weather-beaten

portal. They were still side by side—but they were now a full yard apart.

CHAPTER 4

Kinnison Captures . . .

     Listen, my beautiful but dumb guide," Kinnison counseled the Lyranian girl as

they neared their objective. "I see that you're forgetting all your good girl-scout

resolutions and are getting all hot and bothered again. I'm telling you now for the last

time to watch your step. If that zwilnik person has even a split second's warning that I'm

on her tail all hell will be out for noon, and I don't mean perchance."

     "But I must notify the Elder One that I am bringing you in," she told him. "One

simply does not intrude unannounced. It is not permitted."

     "QX. Stick to the announcement, though, and don't put out any funny ideas or I'll

lay you out cold. I'll send a thought along, just to make sure."

     But he did more than that, for even as he spoke his sense of perception was

already in the room to which they were going. It was a large room, and bare; filled with

tables except for a clear central space upon which at the moment a lithe and supple

person was doing what seemed to be a routine of acrobatic dancing, interspersed with

suddenly motionless posings and posturings of extreme technical difficulty. At the tables

were seated a hundred or so Lyranians, eating.

     Kinnison was not interested in the floor show, whatever it was, nor in the massed

Lyranians. The zwilnik was what he was after. Ah, there she was, at a ringside table—a

small, square table seating four—near the door. Her back was to it—good. At her left,

commanding the central view of the floor, was a redhead, sitting in a revolving, reclining

chair, the only such seat in the room. Probably the Big Noise herself— the Elder One.

No matter, he wasn't interested in her, either—yet. His attention flashed back to his

proposed quarry and he almost gasped.

     For she, like Dessa Desplaines, was an Aldebaranian, and she was everything

that the Desplaines woman had been—more so, if possible. She was a seven-sector

callout, a thionite dream if there ever was one. And jewelry! This Lyranian tiger hadn't

exaggerated that angle very much, at that. Her breast-shields were of gold and platinum

filigree, thickly studded with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, in intricate designs. Her

shorts, or rather trunks, made of something that looked like glamorete, blazed with

gems. A cleverly concealed dagger, with a jeweled haft and a vicious little fang of a

blade. Rings, even a thumb-ring. A necklace which was practically a collar flashed all

the colors of the rainbow. Bracelets, armlets, anklets and knee-bands. High-laced dress

boots, jeweled from stem to gudgeon. Ear-rings, and a meticulous, micrometrically

precise coiffure held in place by at least a dozen glittering buckles, combs and

barrettes.

     "Holy Klono's brazen tendons!" the Lensman whistled to himself, for every last,

least one of those stones was the clear quill. "Half a million credits if it's a millo's worth!"

     But he was not particularly interested in this jeweler's vision of what the well-

dressed lady zwilnik will wear. There were other, far more important things. Yes, she

had a thought-screen. It was off, and its battery was mighty low, but it would still work;

good thing he had blocked the warning. And she had a hollow tooth, too, but he'd see to

it that she didn't get a chance to swallow its contents. She knew plenty, and he hadn't

chased her this far to let her knowledge be obliterated by that hellish Boskonian drug.

     They were at the door now. Disregarding the fiercely-driven metal protests of his

companion, Kinnison flung it open, stiffening up his mental guard as he did so.

Simultaneously he invaded the zwilnik's mind with a flood of force, clamping down so

hard that she could not move a single voluntary muscle. Then, paying no attention

whatever to the shocked surprise of the assembled Lyranians, he strode directly up to

the Aldebaranian and bent her head back into the crook of his elbow. Forcibly but gently

he opened her mouth. With thumb and forefinger he deftly removed the false tooth.

Releasing her then, mentally and physically, he dropped his spoil to the cement floor

and ground it savagely to bits under his hard and heavy heel.

     The zwilnik screamed wildly, piercingly at first. However, finding that she was

getting no results, from Lensman or Lyranian, she subsided quickly into alertly watchful

waiting.

     Still unsatisfied, Kinnison flipped out one of his DeLameters and flamed the

remains of the capsule of worse than paralyzing fluid, caring not a whit that his vicious

portable, even in that brief instant, seared a hole a foot deep into the floor. Then and

only then did he turn his attention to the redhead in the boss's chair.

     He had to hand it to Elder Sister—through all this sudden and to her entirely

unprecedented violence of action she hadn't turned a hair. She had swung her chair

around so that she was facing him. Her back was to the athletic dancer who, now

holding a flawlessly perfect pose, was going on with the act as though nothing out of the

ordinary were transpiring. She was leaning backward in the armless swivel chair, her

right foot resting upon its pedestal. Her left ankle was crossed over her right knee, her

left knee rested lightly against the table's top. Her hands were clasped together at the

nape of her neck, supporting her red-thatched head; her elbows spread abroad in easy,

indolent grace. Her eyes, so deeply, darkly green as to be almost black stared up

unwinkingly into the Lensman's—"insolently" was the descriptive word that came first to

his mind.

     If the Elder Sister was supposed to be old, Kinnison reflected as he studied

appreciatively the startlingly beautiful picture which the artless Chief Person of this tribe

so unconsciously made, she certainly belied her looks. As far as looks went, she really

qualified—whatever it took, she in abundant measure had. Her hair was not really red,

either. It was a flamboyant, gorgeous auburn, about the same color as Clarrissa's own,

and just as thick. And it wasn't all haggled up. Accidentally, of course, and no doubt

because on her particular job her hair didn't get in the way very often, it happened to be

a fairly even, shoulder-length bob. What a mop! And damned if it wasn't wavy! Just as

she was, with no dolling up at all, she'd be a primary beam on any man's planet. She

had this zwilnik houri here, knockout that she was and with all her war-paint and

feathers, blasted clear out of the ether. But this queen bee had a sting; she was still

boring away at his shield. He'd better let her know that she didn't even begin to have

enough jets to swing that load.

     "QX, ace, cut the gun!" he directed, crisply. "Ace", from him, was a

complimentary term indeed. "Pipe down— that's all of that kind of stuff from you. I stood

for this much of it, just to show you that you can't get to the first check-station with that

kind of fuel, but enough is a great plenty." At the sheer cutting power of the thought,

rebroadcast no doubt by the airport manager, Lyranian activity throughout the room

came to a halt. This was decidedly out of the ordinary. For a male mind—any male

mind—to be able even momentarily to resist that of the meanest person of Lyrane was

starkly unthinkable. The Elder's graceful body tensed, into her eyes there crept a

dawning doubt, a peculiar, wondering uncertainty. Of fear there was none; all these

sexless Lyranian women were brave to the point of fool-hardiness.

     "You tell her, draggle-pate," he ordered his erstwhile guide. "It took me hell's own

time to make you understand that I mean business, but you talk her language—see how

fast you can get the thing through Her Royal Nibs's skull."

     It did not take long. The lovely, dark-green eyes held conviction, now; but also a

greater uncertainty.

     "It will be best, I think, to kill you now, instead of allowing you to leave . . ." she

began.

     Allow me to leave!" Kinnison exploded. "Where do you get such funny ideas as

that killing stuff? Just who, Toots, is going to keep me from leaving?"

     "This." At the thought a weirdly conglomerate monstrosity which certainly had not

been in the dining hall an instant before leaped at Kinnison's throat. It was a frightful

thing indeed, combining the worst features of the reptile and the feline, a serpent's head

upon a panther's body. Through the air it hurtled, terrible claws unsheathed to rend and

venomous fangs out-thrust to stab.

     Kinnison had never before met that particular form of attack, but he knew

instantly what it was—knew that neither leather nor armor of proof nor screen of force

could stop it. He knew that the thing was real only to the woman and himself, that it was

not only invisible, but non-existent to everyone else. He also knew how ultimately deadly

the creature was, knew that if claw or fang should strike him he would die then and

there.

     Ordinarily very efficient, to the Lensman this method of slaughter was crude and

amateurish. No such figment of any other mind could harm him unless he knew that it

was coming; unless his mind was given ample time in which to appreciate—in reality, to

manufacture—the danger he was in. And in that time his mind could negate it. He had

two defenses. He could deny the monster's existence, in which case it would simply

disappear. Or, a much more difficult, but technically a much nicer course, would be to

take over control and toss it back at her.

     Unhesitatingly he did the latter. In mid-leap the apparition swerved, in a full right-

angle turn, directly toward the quietly-poised body of the Lyranian. She acted just barely

in time; the madly-reaching claws were within scant inches of her skin when they

vanished. Her eyes widened in frightened startlement; she was quite evidently shaken

to the core by the Lensman's viciously skillful riposte. With an obvious effort she pulled

herself together.

     "Or these, then, if I must," and with a sweeping gesture of thought she indicated

the roomful of her Lyranian sisters.

     "How?" Kinnison asked, pointedly.

     "By force of numbers; by sheer weight and strength. You can kill many of them

with your weapons, of course, but not enough or quickly enough."

     "You yourself would be the first to die," he cautioned her; and, since she was en

rapport with his very mind, she knew that it was not a threat, but the stern finality of fact.

     "What of that?" He in turn knew that she, too, meant precisely that and nothing

else.

     He had another weapon, but she would not believe it without a demonstration,

and he simply could not prove that weapon upon an unarmed, defenseless woman,

even though she was a Lyranian.

     Stalemate.

     No, the 'copter. "Listen, Queen of Sheba, to what I tell my boys," he ordered, and

spoke into his microphone.

     "Ralph? Stick a one-second needle down through the floor here; close enough to

make her jump, but far enough away so as not to blister her fanny."

     At his word a narrow, but ragingly incandescent pencil of destruction raved

downward through ceiling and floor. So inconceivably hot was it that if it had been a

fraction larger, it would have ignited the Elder Sister's very chair. Effortlessly, insatiably

it consumed everything in its immediate path, radiating the while the entire spectrum of

vibrations. It was unbearable, and the auburn-haired creature did indeed jump, in spite

of herself—half-way to the door. The rest of the hitherto imperturbable persons

clustered together in panic-stricken knots.

     "You see, Cleopatra," Kinnison explained, as the dreadful needle-beam expired,

"I've got plenty of stuff if I want to —or have to—use it. The boys up there will stick a

needle like that through the brain of any one or everyone in this room if I give the word. I

don't want to kill any of you unless it's necessary, as I explained to your misbarbered

friend here, but I am leaving here alive and all in one piece, and I'm taking this

Aldebaranian along with me, in the same condition. If I must, I'll lay down a barrage like

that sample you just saw, and only the zwilnik and I will get out alive. How about it?"

     "What are you going to do with the stranger?" the Lyranian asked, avoiding the

issue.

     "I'm going to take some information away from her, that's all. Why? What were

you going to do with her yourselves?"

     "We were—and are going to kill it," came flashing reply. The lethal bolt came

even before the reply; but, fast as the Elder One was, the Gray Lensman was faster. He

blanked out the thought, reached over and flipped on the Aldebaranian's thought-

screen.

     "Keep it on until we get to the ship, sister," he spoke aloud in the girl's native

tongue. "Your battery's low, I know, but it'll last long enough. These hens seem to be

strictly on the peck."

     "I'll say they are—you don't know the half of it." Her voice was low, rich, vibrant.

"Thanks, Kinnison."

     "Listen, Red-Top, what's the percentage in playing so dirty?" the Lensman

complained then. "I'm doing my damndest to let you off easy, but I'm all done dickering.

Do we go out of here peaceably, or do we fry you and your crew to cinders in your own

lard, and walk out over the grease spots? It's strictly up to you, but you'll decide right

here and right now."

     The Elder One's face was hard, her eyes flinty. Her fingers were curled into ball-

tight fists. "I suppose, since we cannot stop you, we must let you go free," she hissed, in

helpless but controlled fury. "If by giving my life and the lives of all these others we

could kill you, here and now would you two die . . . but as it is, you may go."

     "But why all the rage?" the puzzled Lensman asked. "You strike me as being, on

the whole, reasoning creatures. You in particular went to Tellus with this zwilnik here, so

you should know . . ."

     "I do know," the Lyranian broke in. "That is why I would go to any length, pay any

price whatever, to keep you from returning to your own world, to prevent the inrush of

your barbarous hordes here . . ."

     "Oh! So that's it!" Kinnison exclaimed. "You think that some of our people might

want to settle down here, or to have traffic with you?"

     "Yes." She went into a eulogy concerning Lyrane II, concluding, "I have seen the

planets and the races of your so-called Civilization, and I detest them and it. Never

again shall any of us leave Lyrane; nor, if I can help it, shall any stranger ever come

here."

     "Listen, angel-face!" the man commanded. "You're as mad as a Radeligian

cateagle—you're as cockeyed as Trenco's ether. Get this, and get it straight. To any

really intelligent being of any one of forty million planets, your whole Lyranian race

would be a total loss with no insurance. You're a God-forsaken, spiritually and

emotionally starved, barren, mentally ossified, and completely monstrous mess. If I,

personally, never see either you or your planet again, that will be exactly twenty seven

minutes too soon. This girl here thinks the same of you as I do. If anybody else ever

hears of Lyrane and thinks he wants to visit it, I'll take him out of— I'll knock a hip down

on him if I have to, to keep him away from here. Do I make myself clear?"

     "Oh, yet—perfectly!" she fairly squealed in school-girlish delight. The Lensman's

tirade, instead of infuriating her farther, had been sweet music to her peculiarly insular

mind. "Go, then, at once—hurry! Oh, please, hurry! Can you drive the car back to your

vessel, or will one of us have to go with you?"

     "Thanks. I could drive your car, but it won't be necessary. The "copter will pick us

up."

     He spoke to the watchful Ralph, then he and the Aldebaranian left the hall,

followed at a careful distance by the throng. The helicopter was on the ground, waiting.

The man and the woman climbed aboard.

     "Clear ether, persons!" The Lensman waved a salute to the crowd and the

Tellurian craft shot into the air.

     Thence to the Dauntless, which immediately did likewise, leaving behind her,

upon the little airport, a fused blob of metal that had once been the zwilnik's speedster.

Kinnison studied the white face of his captive, then handed her a tiny canister.

     "Fresh battery for your thought-screen generator; yours is about shot." Since she

made no motion to accept it, he made the exchange himself and tested the result. It

worked. "What's the matter with you, kid, anyway? I'd say you were starved, if I hadn't

caught you at a full table."

     "I am starved," the girl said, simply. "I couldn't eat there. I knew they were going

to kill me, and it . . . it sort of took away my appetite."

     "Well, what are we waiting for? I'm hungry, too—let's go eat."

     "Not with you, either, any more than with them. I thanked you, Lensman, for

saving my life there, and I meant it. I thought then and still think that I would rather have

you kill me than those horrible, monstrous women, but I simply can't eat."

     "But I'm not even thinking of killing you—can't you get that through your skull? I

don't make war on women; you ought to know that by this time."

     "You will have to." The girl's voice was low and level. "You didn't kill any of those

Lyranians, no, but you didn't chase them a million parsecs, either. We have been taught

ever since we were born that you Patrolmen always torture people to death. I don't quite

believe that of you personally, since I have had a couple of glimpses into your mind, but

you'll kill me before I'll talk. At least, I hope and I believe that I can hold out."

     "Listen, girl." Kinnison was in deadly earnest. "You are in no danger whatever.

You are just as safe as though you were in Klono's hip pocket. You have some

information that I want, yes, and I will get it, but in the process I will neither hurt you nor

do you mental or physical harm. The only torture you will undergo will be that which, as

now, you give yourself."

     "But you called me a . . . a zwilnik, and they always kill them," she protested.

     "Not always. In battles and in raids, yes. Captured ones are tried in court. If found

guilty, they used to go into the lethal chambers. Sometimes they do yet, but not usually.

We have mental therapists now who can operate on a mind if there's anything there

worth saving."

     "And you think that I will wait to stand trial, in the entirely negligible hope that

your bewhiskered, fossilized therapists will find something in me worth saving?"

     "You won't have to," Kinnison laughed. "Your case has already been decided—in

your favor. I am neither a policeman nor a Narcotics man; but I happen to be qualified

as judge, jury, and executioner. I am a therapist to boot. I once saved a worse zwilnik

than you are,- even though she wasn't such a knockout. Now do we eat?"

     "Really? You aren't just. . . just giving me the needle?"

     The Lensman flipped off her screen and gave her unmistakable evidence. The

girl, hitherto so unmovedly self-reliant, broke down. She recovered quickly, however,

and in Kinnison's cabin she ate ravenously.

     "Have you a cigarette?" She sighed with repletion when she could hold no more

food.

     "Sure. Alsakanite, Venerian, Tellurian, most anything— we carry a couple of

hundred different brands. What would you like?"

     "Tellurian, by all means. I had a package of Camerfields once—they were

gorgeous. Would you have those, by any chance?"

     "Uh-huh," he assured her. "Quartermaster! Carton of Camerfields, please." It

popped out of the pneumatic tube in seconds. "Here you are sister."

     The glittery girl drew the fragrant smoke deep, down into her lungs.

     "Ah, that tastes good! Thanks, Kinnison—for everything. I'm glad you kidded me

into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it won't take, really. I've never broken

yet, and I won't break now. If I do, I won't be worth a damn, to myself or to anybody

else, from then on." She crushed out the butt. "So let's get on with the third degree.

Bring on your rubber hose and your lights and your drip-can."

     "You're still on the wrong foot, Toots," Kinnison said, pityingly. What a frightful

contrast there was between her slimly rounded body, in its fantastically gorgeous

costume, and the stark somberness of her eyes! "There'll be no third degree, no hose,

no lights, nothing like that. In fact, I'm not even going to talk to you until you've had a

good long sleep. You don't look hungry any more, but you're still not in tune, by seven

thousand kilocycles. How long has it been since you really slept?"

     "A couple of weeks, at a guess. Maybe a month."

     "Thought so. Come on; you're going to sleep now."

     The girl did not move. "With whom?" she asked, quietly. Her voice did not quiver,

but stark terror lay in her mind and her hand crept unconsciously toward the hilt of her

dagger.

     "Holy Klono's claws!" Kinnison snorted, staring at her in wide-eyed wonder. "Just

what kind of a bunch of hyenas do you think you've got into, anyway?"

     "Bad," the girl replied, gravely. "Not the worst possible, perhaps, but from my

standpoint plenty bad enough. What can I expect from me Patrol except what I do

expect?'You don't need to kid me along, Kinnison. I can take it, and I'd a lot rather take

it standing up, facing it, than have you sneak up on me with it after giving me your shots

in the arm."

     "What somebody has done to you is a sin and a shrieking shame," Kinnison

declared, feelingly. "Come on, you poor little devil." He picked up sundry pieces of

apparatus, then, taking her arm, he escorted her to another, almost luxuriously

furnished cabin.

     "That door," he explained carefully, "is solid chrome-tungsten-molybdenum steel.

The lock can't be picked. There are only two keys to it in existence, and here they are.

There's a bolt, too, that's proof against anything short of a five-hundred-ton hydraulic

jack, or an atomic-hydrogen cutting torch. Here's a full-coverage screen, and a twenty-

foot spy-ray block. There is your stuff out of the speedster. If you want help, or anything

to eat or drink, or anything else that can be expected aboard a ship like this, there's the

communicator. QX?

     "Then you really mean it? That I . . . that you . . . I mean . . ."

     "Absolutely," he assured her. "Just that You are completely the master of your

destiny, the captain of your soul. Good-night."

     "Good-night, Kinnison. Good-night, and th . . . thanks." The girl threw herself face

downward upon the bed in a storm of sobs.

     Nevertheless, as Kinnison started back toward his own cabin, he heard the

massive bolt click into its socket and felt the blocking screens go on.

CHAPTER 5

. . Illona of Lonabar

     Twelve or fourteen hours later, after the Aldebaranian girl had had her breakfast,

Kinnison went to her cabin.

     "Hi, Cutie, you look better. By the way, what's your name, so we'll know what to

call you?"

     "Illona,"

     "Illona what?"

     "No what—just Illona, that's all."

     "How do they tell you from other Illonas, then?"

     "Oh, you mean my registry number. In the Aldebaranian language there are not

the symbols—it would have to be The Illona who is the daughter of Porlakent the potter

who lives in the house of the wheel upon the road of. . .'"

     "Hold everything—well call you Illona Porter." He eyed her keenly. "I thought your

Aldebaranian wasn't so hot— didn't seem possible that I could have got that rusty. You

haven't been on Aldebaran II for a long time, have you?"

     "No, we moved to Lonabar when I was about six."

     "Lonabar? Never heard of it—I'll check up on it later. Your stuff was all here,

wasn't it? Did any of the red-headed person's things get mixed in?"

     "Things?" She giggled sunnily, then sobered in quick embarrassment "She didn't

carry any. They're horrid, I think —positively indecent—to run around that way."

     "Hm . . . m. Glad you brought the point up. You've got to put on some clothes

aboard this ship, you know."

     "Me?" she demanded. "Why, I'm fully dressed . . ." She paused, then shrank

together visibly. "Oh! Tellurians—I remember, all those coverings! You mean, then . . .

you think I'm shameless and indecent too?"

     "No. Not at all—yet." At his obvious sincerity Illona unfolded again. "Most of

us—especially the officers—have been on so many different planets, had dealings with

so many different types and kinds of entities, that we're used to anything. When we visit

a planet that goes naked, we do also, as a matter of course; when we hit one that

muffles up to the smothering point we do that, too. 'When in Rome, be a Roman candle',

you know. The point is that we're at home here, you're the visitor. It's all a matter of

convention, of course; but a rather important one. Don't you think so?"

     "Covering up, certainly. Uncovering is different. They told me to be sure to, but I

simply can't. I tried it back there, but I felt naked!"

     "QX—we'll have the tailor make you a dress or two. Some of the boys haven't

been around very much, and you'd look pretty bare to them. Everything you've got on,

jewelry and all, wouldn't make a Tellurian sun-suit, you know."

     "Then have them hurry up the dress, please. But this isn't jewelry, it is . . ."

     "Jet back, beautiful. I know gold, and platinum, and . . ."

     "The metal is expensive, yes," Illona conceded. "These alone," she tapped one of

the delicate shields, "cost five days of work. But base metal stains the skin blue and

green and black, so what can one do? As for the beads, they are synthetics—junk. Poor

girls, if they buy it themselves, do not wear jewelry, but beads, like these. Half a day's

work buys the lot."

     "What!" Kinnison demanded.

     "Certainly. Rich girls only, or poor girls who do not work, wear real jewelry, such

as . . . the Aldebaranian has not the words. Let me think at you, please?"

     "Sorry, nothing there that I recognize at all," Kinnison answered, after studying a

succession of thought-images of multi-colored, spectacular gems. "That's one to file

away in the book, too, believe me. But as to that 'junk' you've got draped all over

yourself—half a day's pay—what do you work at for a living, when you work?"

     "I'm a dancer—like this." She leaped lightly to her feet and her left boot whizzed

past her ear in a flashingly fast high kick. Then followed a series of gyrations and

contortions, for which the Lensman knew no names, during which the girl seemed a

practically boneless embodiment of suppleness and grace. She sat down; meticulous

hairdress scarcely rumpled, not a buckle or bracelet awry, breathing hardly one count

faster.

     "Nice." He applauded briefly. "Hard for me to evaluate such talent as that—I

thought you were a pilot. However, on Tellus or any one of a thousand other planets I

could point out to you, you can sell that 'junk' you're wearing for —at a rough

guess—about fifty thousand days' work."

     "Impossible!"

     "True, nevertheless. So, before we land, you'd better give them to me, so that I

can send them to a bank for you, under guard."

     "If I land." As Kinnison spoke Illona's manner changed; darkened as though an

inner light had been extinguished. "You have been so friendly and nice, I was forgetting

where I am and the business ahead. Putting it off won't make it any easier. Better be

getting on with it, don't you think?"

     "Oh, that? That's all done, long ago."

     "What?" she almost screamed. "It isn't! It couldn't be!"

     "Sure. I got most of the stuff I wanted last night, while I was changing your

thought-screen battery. Menjo Bleeko, your big-shot boss, and so on."

     "You didn't! But . . . you must have, at that, to know it . . . but you didn't hurt me,

or anything . . . you couldn't have operated—changed me, because I have all my