path: root/70494-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 70494 ***






                         SECOND STAGE LENSMEN

                         By E. E. Smith, Ph.D.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
          Astounding Science Fiction November, December 1941,
                        January, February 1942.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                              HISTORICAL


Law enforcement lagged behind crime because the police were limited in
their spheres of action, while criminals were not. Therefore, when
Bergenholm invented the inertialess drive and commerce throughout the
Galaxy became commonplace, crime became so rampant as to threaten the
very existence of Civilization.

Thus came into being the Galactic Patrol, an organization whose highest
members are called "Lensmen." Each is identified by wearing the Lens, a
pseudoliving telepathic jewel matched to the ego of its wearer by those
master philosophers, the Arisians. The Lens cannot be either imitated
or counterfeited, since it glows with color when worn by its owner, and
since it kills any other who attempts to wear it.

Of each million selected candidates for the Lens all except about a
hundred fail to pass the grueling tests employed to weed out the unfit.
Kimball Kinnison graduated No. 1 in his class and was put in command
of the spaceship _Brittania_--a war vessel of a new type, using
explosives, even though such weapons had been obsolete for centuries.
The "pirates"--the Boskonian Conflict was just beginning, so that no
one yet suspected that the Patrol faced anything worse than highly
organized piracy--were gaining the upper hand because of a new and
apparently almost unlimited source of power. Kinnison was instructed to
capture one of the new-type pirate ships, in order to learn the secret
of that power.

He found and defeated a Boskonian warship. Peter VanBuskirk led the
storming party of Valerians--men of human type, but of extraordinary
size, strength and agility because of the enormous gravitational force
of their home planet--in wiping out those of the pirate crew not killed
in the battle between the two ships.

The scientists of the expedition secured the information desired. It
could not be transmitted to Prime Base, however, because the pirates
blanketed all channels of communication. Boskonian warships were
gathering, and the crippled _Brittania_ could neither run nor
fight. Therefore each man was given a spool of tape bearing the data
and all the Patrolmen took to the lifeboats.

Kinnison and VanBuskirk, in one of the boats, were forced to land
upon the planet Delgon, where they joined forces with Worsel--later
to become Lensman Worsel--a winged, reptilian native of a neighboring
planet, Velantia. The three destroyed a number of the Overlords of
Delgon, a sadistic race of monsters who preyed upon the other races
of their solar system by sheer power of mind. Worsel accompanied the
Patrolmen to Velantia, where all the resources of the planet were
devoted to preparing defenses against the expected Boskonian attack.
Several others of the _Brittania's_ lifeboats reached Velantia,
called by Worsel's prodigious mind working through Kinnison's ego and
Lens.

Kinnison finally succeeded in tapping a communicator beam, thus getting
one line upon Helmuth, who "spoke for Boskone"--it was supposed
then that Helmuth actually was Boskone instead of a comparatively
unimportant Director of Operations--and upon his Grand Base.

The Boskonians attacked Velantia and six of their vessels were
captured. In these ships, manned by Velantian crews, the Tellurians set
out for Earth and the Prime Base of the Galactic Patrol. Kinnison's
Bergenholm, the generator of the force which makes inertialess--"free,"
in space parlance--flight possible, broke down, wherefore he had to
land upon the planet 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
eight hundred miles an hour. Trenco, the world upon which is produced
thionite, the deadliest and most potent of all habit-forming drugs.
Trenco, the Mecca of all the "zwilniks"--members of the Boskonian
drug ring; sometimes loosely applied to any Boskonian--of the Galaxy.
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 sight and hearing!

Lensman Tregonsee, of Rigel IV, then in command of the Patrol's
wandering base upon Trenco, furnished Kinnison a new Bergenholm and he
again set out for Tellus.

Meanwhile Helmuth, the Boskonian commander, had deduced that some
one particular Lensman was back of all his setbacks; and that the
Lens, a complete enigma to the Boskonians, was in some way connected
with Arisia. That planet had always been dreaded and shunned by
all spacemen. No one would ever say why, but no being who had ever
approached that planet uninvited could be compelled, even by threat of
death, to go near it again.

Helmuth, thinking himself secure by virtue of his thought-screens, the
secret of which he had stolen from Velantia, went alone to Arisia, to
learn how the Lens gave its wearer such power. He was stopped at the
barrier. His thought-screens were useless--the Arisians had given them
to Velantia, hence knew how to break them down. He was punished to the
verge of insanity, but was finally 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 finally reached Prime Base with the all-important data. By
building superpowerful 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, Chief of Staff
of the entire Patrol, for permission to follow it. In lieu of that,
however, Haynes informed 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 which the Galactic Patrol can bestow, for the Gray
Lensman works under no direction whatever. He is as absolutely a free
agent as it is possible to be. He is responsible to no one; to nothing
save his own conscience. He is no longer of Tellus, nor of the Solarian
System, but of the Universe as a whole. He is no longer a cog in the
immense machine of the Patrol: wherever he may go, throughout the
unbounded reaches of space, he _is_ the Patrol!

In quest of a second line upon Grand Base, Kinnison scouted a pirate
stronghold upon 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 immediately rushed ships
to his aid. In Base Hospital, Surgeon General Lacy put him together,
and, during a long and quarrelsome convalescence, Nurse Clarrissa
MacDougall held him together. 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 be permitted to take advanced training; an unheard-of
idea. 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 infinitely stronger of mind than any man had ever been before.
He also now had the sense of perception; a sense somewhat analogous to
that of sight, but of vastly greater penetration, power and scope and
not dependent upon light; a sense only vaguely forecast by ancient work
upon clairvoyance.

By the use of his new mental equipment he succeeded in entering a
Boskonian base upon Boyssia II. There he took over the mind of the
communications officer and waited. A pirate ship working out of
that base captured a hospital ship of the Patrol and brought it in.
Clarrissa, now chief nurse of the captured vessel, working under
Kinnison's instructions, stirred up trouble. Helmuth, from Grand Base,
interfered, thus enabling the Lensman to get his second, all-important
line.

The intersection of the two lines, Boskonia's Grand Base, lay in a star
cluster well outside the Galaxy. Pausing only long enough to destroy
the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I, the project in which his first attempt had
failed so dismally, he investigated Helmuth's headquarters. He found
fortifications impregnable to any massed attack of the Patrol, manned
by beings wearing thought-screens. His sense of perception was suddenly
cut off--the enemy had thrown a thought-screen around the whole planet.

He returned to Prime Base, deciding en route that boring from within
was the only possible way in which that base could be reduced. In
consultation with Haynes the zero hour was set, at which the Grand
Fleet of the Patrol would start raying Helmuth's base with every
available projector.

Pursuant to his plan, Kinnison again visited Trenco, where Tregonsee
and his Rigellians extracted for him fifty kilograms of thionite,
the noxious drug which, in microgram inhalations, makes the addict
experience all the physical and mental sensations of doing whatever it
is that he wishes most ardently to do. The larger the dose the more
intense the sensations--but the slightest overdose means a sudden and
super-ecstatic death.

Thence to Helmuth's planet; where, by controlling the muscles of a
dog whose brain was unscreened, he let himself into the central dome.
Here, just before zero time, he released his thionite into the primary
air stream, thus wiping out all the pirate personnel except Helmuth;
who, in his inner dome, could not be affected. The Patrol attacked
on schedule. Kinnison killed Helmuth in hand-to-hand combat. Grand
Base was blasted out of existence, largely by the explosion of bombs
of duodecaplyl atomate placed by the pirates themselves. These bombs
were detonated by an enigmatic, sparkling force-ball which Kinnison
had studied with care. He knew that it was operated by thought, and
he suspected--correctly--that it was in reality an intergalactic
communicator.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kinnison's search for the real Boskone lead to Lundmark's Nebula,
thenceforth called the Second Galaxy. His ship, the superpowerful
_Dauntless_, met and defeated a squadron of Boskonian warships.
The Tellurians landed upon the planet Medon, whose people were fighting
a losing war against the forces of Boskone. The Medonians, electrical
wizards who had been able to install inertia-neutralizers and a space
drive upon their planet, moved their world over to our First Galaxy.

With the cessation of military activity, however, the illicit traffic
in habit-forming drugs amongst all races of warm-blooded oxygen
breathers 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 escaped.

Ordinary disguises having proved useless against Boskone's clever
agents, Kinnison himself became Wild Bill Williams; once a gentleman
of Aldebaran II, now a space rat meteor miner. Instead of pretending
to drink he really drank; making of himself a practically bottomless
drinker of the most vicious beverages known to space. He became a drug
fiend--a bentlam eater--discovering that his Arisian-developed mind
could function at full efficiency even while his physical body was
stupefied. He became widely known as the fastest, deadliest performer
with twin ray guns that had ever struck the asteroid belts. Thus,
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 and if he could conquer his
weaknesses.

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 hyperspatial tube or vortex 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_ attacked through it; returning victorious.

Wild Bill Williams struck it rich at last. Forthwith he abandoned the
low dives in which he had been wont to carouse, and 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 drink and drug-soaked bum, took him in,
to get his quarter-million credits. Relapsing into 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 was a council. He
also learned that, while the Kalonian did not know who or where Boskone
was, Eichmil, Jalte's superior, who lived upon the planet Jarnevon in
the Second Galaxy, would probably know all about it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kinnison and Worsel, therefore, set out to investigate Jarnevon.
Kinnison was captured and tortured--there was at least one Delgonian
upon Jarnevon--but Worsel rescued him before his mind was damaged and
brought him back to the Patrol's Grand Fleet with his knowledge intact.
Jarnevon was populated by the Eich, a race of monsters as bad as the
Overlords of Delgon; the Council of Nine which ruled the noisome planet
was, in fact, the long-sought, the utterly detested Boskone!

The greatest surgeons of the age--Phillips of Posenia and Wise of the
newly acquired planet 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 would not be denied.

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. Then on to the Second Galaxy.

There the Patrol forces destroyed Jarnevon, the planet of the Eich, by
smashing it between two barren planets which had been driven there
in the "free"--inertialess--condition. These planets, having opposite
intrinsic velocities, were placed one upon each side of Jarnevon. Then
their Bergenholms were cut, restoring inertia and intrinsic velocity;
and when that frightful collision was over a minor star had come into
being.

Grand Fleet returned to our Galaxy. Galactic Civilization rejoiced.
Earth in particular made merry, and Prime Base was the center of
celebration. And in Prime Base Kinnison, supposing that the war was
over and that his problem was solved, threw off his Gray Lensman's
burden and forgot all about the Boskonian menace. Marrying his Chris,
he declared, was the most important thing in the Universe.

But how wrong he was! For, even as Lensman and Sector Chief Nurse were
walking down a hallway of Base Hospital after a conference with Lacy
and Haynes regarding that marriage--




                                  I.


"Stop, youth!" The voice of that nameless, incredibly ancient Arisian
who was Kinnison's instructor and whom he had thought of and spoken of
simply as "Mentor" thundered silently, deep within the Lensman's brain.

He stopped convulsively, almost in midstride, 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."

"Wha'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 can't!" 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, dear. Just a little longer to wait,
that's all."

Eyes, steel-gray now, stared down into eyes of tawny, gold-flecked
bronze. "QX, Chris? _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 the Brain, 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 sage of
Arisia 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
General 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--my Arisian, you
know--stopped us before we got to the elevator. Told me that I'd put
my foot in it clear up to the hip joint on that Boskonian thing. That
instead of being all buttoned up, my fool blundering has put us further
back than we were when we started."

"Mentor!"

"Your Arisian!"

"_Told_ you!"

"Put us back!"

It was an entirely unpremeditated, unconscious duet. The two old
officers were completely dumfounded. 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 Hayes, 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 loophole anywhere," he said aloud. "Where did they
figure we slipped up?"

"We didn't slip--_I_ 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 did not even occur to me. That is 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 it in that light, this intervention would seem to
be conclusive--but before that there were 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; the Lensman, 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 that you can."

"But why didn't he stop you before you fellows smashed Boskone?" Lacy
demanded, exasperated.

"I hope you're right, Chris--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 that 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
antimass--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 that 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 have been underestimating them right along," Kinnison went on. "At
first we thought that 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 would not admit that they must be as large
and as widespread as we are--galactic in scope. We know now that they
were wider-spread than we are. Intergalactic. They penetrated into our
Galaxy, riddled it, before we knew even 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 upon
Tellus; whereas, if Jarnevon was not in fact theirs, we have no idea
whatever where it is. And another point. Does that fleet of theirs, as
you look back on it, strike you as having been 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?"

"Counterattack. 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," and Haynes
and Lacy got up to go. Gone now was all thought of demerits or of
infractions of rules--each knew what a wrenching the young couple had
undergone. "See you in my office when convenient?"

"I'll be there directly, chief--as soon as I tell Chris, here, good-by."

       *       *       *       *       *

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 to 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 LaVerne 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 which-ness 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 all the stars in
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 dizzy
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 that 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, and one of 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 rightness 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 smallness 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."




                                  II.


Port Admiral Haynes, newly chosen President of the Galactic Council
and by virtue of his double office probably the most powerful being in
the First Galaxy, 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 GBT 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 kilogram, 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 inertialess until the
last strategic instant. Very well, they must be made inert prematurely,
when the Patrol wanted them that way, not the enemy. 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 shirt 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. "That's IT, as sure as
hell's a man trap!" 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 stated, baldly
and at once. "I thought from the first that I was overlooking a
bet, but I couldn't locate it. Why should they fight their way
through intergalactic 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 outweigh us in an almost impossibly high ratio, unless
they have an improbably superior armament."

"Check." The old warrior was entirely unperturbed. "Surprised that you
didn't see that long ago. We did. We do not believe that they are going
to 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 near enough to the center of this galaxy so that
they can't possibly take us by surprise. So--spill it!"

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

"Hm-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 the 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 a worse intrusion, wouldn't it, if the Boskonians sent a
planet about the size of Jupiter--or a negasphere--through one of their
extradimensional 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 equaled 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 hypertube 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, offhand," came the cautiously scientific reply. "More
than two astronomical units, 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 cannot
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 hyperplane of intersection--was
three point two six four seven, approximately, astronomical units;
the last figure being tentative and somewhat uncertain because of the
rapidly moving masses of Jupiter--

"Cover everything beyond three units out in every direction," Haynes
directed, when he got that far along the tape. He had no time to
listen to an hour of mathematical dissertation. What he wanted was
_facts_.

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 upon the Solar System. Not
close enough to affect appreciably the orbits of Sol's own children,
but close enough so that at least three or four of them could reach
any designated point in one minute or less. And 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 that 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 co-operative--or, more accurately, one of the
least non-co-operative--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 powerhouse;
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. Grand Fleet formed an enormous
hollow globe, six astronomical units in diameter. Outside that globe
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.

And as nearly as possible at the center of that globe, circling the
Sun well inside the orbit of Venus, 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 outside that thin globe of Patrol ships, 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 supermaulers were big and powerful, of
course, but they very definitely were not planets; and the big, new
idea was mighty hard to jell. He did not 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 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
inglobe 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 multicolored
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. Unattached Lensmen all; 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, subfleets flashed smoothly toward their newly assigned
positions. Supermaulers 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 powerhouses 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, nonexistent 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 these 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 hit. 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 were wrecked, riddled, blown apart or blasted
completely out of space in the paralyzingly cataclysmic violence of
that first, seconds-long, mind-shaking, space-racking 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 automatic; 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 Unattached
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 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 vice admirals and rear 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 rear and vice admirals, knew nothing, could know
nothing whatever 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 synchronizing, could and repeatedly did rush upon one unit of the
foe; inglobing 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 any
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 supermaulers moved ponderously up and
went to work. This was their dish; for this they had been designed.
Tubes, lances, stilettos 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. Then they loosed forces of their own. Forces of such
appalling magnitude as to burn out in the 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 supermaulers 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. The war vessels of the enemy disappeared, each puffing
out into a tiny, but brilliant, sparkle of light.

Then, before the beam could affect 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 again--and, in a heart-stoppingly
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, brusquely. "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.




                                 III.


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 hookup in multiple series-parallel,
instead of in the straight 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. Gerrond and the other 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 upon Tellus. As a matter
of cold fact, he could not find a single person who had ever seen
him or who knew anything definite about him except a number. 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 settled 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 Spaceport. 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
he 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 informant 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 were 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 ape 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 "oof" 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 can 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 94," 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 94, 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 the whole of the
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--and planets.

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. You haven't got a speedster under you now."

"So what? I can certainly handle this scrap heap a damn sight better
than that ground-gripper is handling that speedster." Henry Henderson,
Master Pilot No. 1 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 weight 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 9. Four G's on the tail. Tail
over to belly landing. Hipe!"

The Bergenholms were cut and as the tremendously massive
superdreadnought, inert, shot off at an angle under its Tellurian
intrinsic velocity, Master Pilot No. 1 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 spacehounds 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.

Four G's, Kinnison reflected, while this was going on. Not bad--he had
thought that it would take five; possibly six. He could sit up and take
notice at four, 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 upon Tellus. 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 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 a pair of sandals and his
DeLameters.

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
automobilelike 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 you 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 the '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 air lock 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 spaceship 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, spiderlike 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 decorations
of any sort or kind. No paint, no powder, no touch of perfume. Her
heavy, bushy eyebrows had never been either 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 do we care to know them," 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. No mentality in existence, not even
that of Mentor the Arisian, could lie to Gray Lensman Kinnison against
his will.

"Damnation!" he snorted to himself. "Fighting against _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
thoughts 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 be a 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 that they can do it. I have been wondering how I could force you to
go there," she explained, naïvely.

"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 speedster
with a fine-tooth comb, and when you get everything we want, blast it.
It and the _Dauntless_ are the only space cans on the planet, and
I haven't got a picture of them taking the cruiser away from you. But
keep your thought-screens up. Don't let them down for a fraction of a
second, because these janes here carry 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 was not 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 that 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-without-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 a
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 bushmaster, 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-five 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 co-operation--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 cockeyed--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 hairdo.

"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 more precise
and truthful. 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 hookup 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 fully co-operant
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 co-operation 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.




                                  IV.


"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 am 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. 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 call-out, 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, were of Manarkan
glamorette, blazing 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. Earrings, 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. Its battery was
mighty low now, 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 mental
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' 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, far 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 Chris' 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 would be a primary beam on any
man's planet. She had this zwilnik 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 is 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
foolhardiness.

"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' 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 outthrust 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 nonexistent 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 midleap 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 three-second needle down through the floor here; close
enough to make her jump, but far enough away so that you won't blister
her. Say about fifteen feet or so back--Fire!"

       *       *       *       *       *

At Kinnison's 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--halfway 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 anyone 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, Scarlet-top, what's the percentage in playing so dirty?" the
Lensman complained then. "I'm doing my damnedest 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 again 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, yes--perfectly!" she fairly squealed in schoolgirlish delight. The
Lensman's tirade, instead of infuriating her further, 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 that 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
that 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 upon Tellus, 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 quite 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 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 that
you kidded me into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it
won't take, really. I have never broken yet, and I don't believe that
I will break now. And if I do, I'm dead certain that 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 the 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, but from my
standpoint plenty bad enough. What can I expect from the 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 cabin.

"That door," he explained carefully, "is solid tool steel. The lock
is on the inside, and it cannot be picked. There are only two keys
to it in the Universe, and here they are. There is a bolt, too, that
cannot be forced by anything short of a hydraulic jack. Here is a
full-coverage screen, and here's 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 star wagon,
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.




                                  V.


Some 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--'"

"Hold everything--we'll call you Illona Potter." 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-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 complete invisibility 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
sunsuit, 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 multicolored,
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." Kinnison applauded briefly. "Hard for me to evaluate such
talent as that. However, upon 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. You didn't
hurt me, or anything. You couldn't have operated--changed me--because
I have all my memories--or seem to. I'm not an idiot, I mean any more
than usual--"

"You've been taught a good many sheer lies, and quite a few
half-truths," he informed her, evenly. "For instance, what did they
tell you that hollow tooth would do to you when you broke the seal?"

"Make my mind a blank. But one of their doctors would get hold of me
very soon and give me the antidote that would restore me exactly as I
was before."

"That is one of the half-truths. It would certainly have made your mind
a blank, but only by blasting nine-tenths of your memory files out of
existence. Their therapists would 'restore' you by substituting other
memories for your own--whatever other ones they pleased."

"How horrible! How perfectly ghastly! That was why you treated it so,
then; as though it were a snake. I wondered at your savagery toward it.
But how, really, do I know that you are telling the truth?"

"You don't," he admitted. "You will have to make your own decisions
after acquiring full information."

"You are a therapist," she remarked, shrewdly. "But if you operated
upon my mind you didn't 'save' me, because I still think exactly
the same as I always did about the Patrol and everything pertaining
to it--or do I? Or is this--" Her eyes widened with a startling
possibility.

"No, I didn't operate," he assured her. "No such operation can possibly
be done without leaving scars--breaks in the memory chains--that you
can find in a minute if you look for them. There are no breaks or
blanks in any chain in your mind."

"No--at least, I can't find any," she reported after a few minutes'
thought. "But why didn't you? You can't turn me loose this way, you
know--a z ... an enemy of your society."

"You don't need saving," he grinned. "You believe in absolute good and
absolute evil, don't you?"

"Why, of course--certainly! _Everybody_ must!"

"Not necessarily. Some of the greatest thinkers in the Universe do
not." His voice grew somber, then lightened again. "Such being the
case, however, all that you need to 'save' yourself is experience,
observation and knowledge of both sides of the question. You're a
colossal little fraud, you know."

"How do you mean?" She blushed vividly, her eyes wavered.

"Pretending to be such a hard-boiled egg. 'Never broke yet.' Why should
you have broken, when you have never been under pressure?"

"I have so!" she flared. "What do you suppose I'm carrying this knife
for?"

"Oh, that." He mentally shrugged the wicked little dagger aside as
he pondered. "You little lamb in wolf's clothing--but at that, your
memories may, I think, be altogether too valuable to monkey with.
There's something funny about this whole matrix--_damned_ funny.
Come clean, angel face--why?"

       *       *       *       *       *

"They told me," Illona admitted, wriggling slightly, "to act
tough--really tough. As though I were an adventuress who had been
everywhere and had done ... done everything. That the worse I acted the
better I would get along in your Civilization."

"I suspected something of the sort. And what did you zwil ... excuse
me, you folks ... go to Lyrane for, in the first place?"

"I don't know. From chance remarks I gathered that we were to land upon
one of the planets--any one, I supposed--and wait for somebody."

"What were you, personally, going to do?"

"I don't know that, either--not exactly, that is. Whoever it was that
we were going to meet was going to give us instructions."

"How come those women killed your men? Didn't they have
thought-screens, too?"

"No. They were not agents, just soldiers. They killed about a dozen of
the Lyranians when we first landed--to demonstrate their power--then
they dropped dead."

"Um. Poor technique, but typically Boskonian. Your trip to Tellus was
more or less accidental, then?"

"Yes. I wanted her to take me back to Lonabar, but she wouldn't. She
learned about Tellus and the Patrol from our minds--none of them could
believe at first that there were any inhabited worlds except their
own--and wanted to study them at first hand. So she took our ship and
used me as ... as a sort of blind, I think."

"I see. I'm not surprised. I thought that there was something
remarkably screwy about those activities--they seemed so aimless and so
barren of results--but I couldn't put my finger on it. And we crowded
her so close that she decided to flit for home. You drove the ship
and picked her up. You could see her, but nobody else could--that she
didn't want to."

"That was it. She said that she was being hampered by a mind of power.
That was you, of course?"

"And others. Well, that's that, for a while."

He called the tailor in. No, he didn't have a thing to make a girl's
dress out of, especially not a girl like that. She should wear
glamorette, and sheer--very sheer. He didn't know a thing about ladies'
tailoring, either; he hadn't made a gown since he was knee-high to a
duck. All he had in the shop was coat linings. Perhaps nylon would do,
after a fashion. He remembered now, he did have a bolt of gray nylon
that wasn't any good for linings--not stiff enough. Far too heavy, of
course, but it would drape well.

It did. She came swaggering back, an hour or so later, the hem of her
skirt swishing against the tops of her high-laced boots.

"Do you like it?" she asked, pirouetting gayly.

"Fine!" he applauded, and it was. The tailor had understated
tremendously both his ability and the resources of his shop.

"Now what? I don't have to stay in my room all the time now, please?"

"I'll say not. The ship is yours. I want you to get acquainted with
every man on board. Go anywhere you like--except the private quarters,
of course--even to the control room. The boys all know that you're at
large."

"The language--but I'm talking English now!"

"Sure. I've been giving it to you right along. You know it as well now
as I do."

She stared at him in awe. Then, her natural buoyancy asserting itself,
she flitted out of the room with a wave of her hand.

       *       *       *       *       *

And Kinnison sat down to think. A girl--a kid who wasn't dry behind the
ears yet--wearing beads worth a full-grown fortune, sent somewhere--to
do what? Lyrane II, a perfect matriarchy. Lonabar, a planet of zwilniks
that knew all about Tellus, but that Tellus had never even heard of,
sending expeditions to Lyrane. To the System, perhaps not specifically
to Lyrane II. Why? For what? To do what? Strange, new jewels of
fabulous value. What was the hookup? It didn't make any kind of sense
yet--not enough data.

And faintly, waveringly, barely impinging upon the outermost, most
tenuous fringes of his mind he felt something: the groping, questing
summons of an incredibly distant thought.

"Male of Civilization ... Person of Tellus ... Kinnison of
Tellus ... Lensman Kinnison of Sol III.... Any Lens-bearing officer
of the Galactic Patrol--" Endlessly the desperately urgent, almost
imperceptible thought implored.

Kinnison stiffened. He reached out with the full power of his mind,
seized the thought, tuned to it, and hurled a reply--and when
_that_ mind really pushed a thought, it traveled.

"Kinnison of Tellus acknowledging!" His answer fairly crackled on its
way.

"You do not know my name," the stranger's thought came clearly now.
"I am the 'Toots,' the 'Queen of Sheba,' the 'Cleopatra,' the 'Elder
Person' of Lyrane II. Do you know me, O Kinnison of Sol III?"

"I know you," he shot back. What a brain--what a _terrific_
brain--that sexless woman had!

"We are invaded by manlike beings in ships of space, who wear screens
against our thoughts and who slay without cause. Will you help us with
your ship of might and your mind of power?"

"Just a sec, Toots--_Henderson!_" Orders snapped. The
_Dauntless_ spun end-for-end.

"QX, Helen of Troy," he reported then. "We're on our way back there
at maximum blast. Say, that name 'Helen of Troy' fits you better than
anything else I have called you. You don't know it, of course, but that
other Helen launched a thousand ships. You're launching only one; but,
believe me, Babe, the old _Dauntless_ is SOME ship!"

"I hope so." The Person of Lyrane II, ignoring the byplay, went
directly to the heart of the matter in her usual pragmatic fashion.
"We have no right to ask; you have every reason to refuse--"

"Don't worry about that, Helen. We're all good little boy scouts at
heart. We're supposed to do a good deed every day, and we have missed a
lot of days lately."

"You are what you call 'kidding,' I think." A matriarch could not be
expected to possess a sense of humor. "But I do not lie to you or
pretend. We did not, do not now, and never will like you or yours. With
us now, however, it is that you are much the lesser of two terrible
evils. If you will aid us now, we will tolerate your Patrol."

"And that's big of you, Helen, no fooling." The Lensman was really
impressed. The plight of the Lyranians must be desperate indeed. "Just
keep a stiff upper lip, all of you. We're coming loaded for bear, and
we are not exactly creeping."

Nor were they. The big cruiser had plenty of legs and she was using
them all; the engineers were giving her all the oof that her drivers
would take. She was literally blasting a hole through space; she was
traveling so fast that the atoms of substance in the interstellar
vacuum, merely wave forms though they were, simply could not get out of
the flier's way. They were being blasted into nothingness against the
_Dauntless'_ wall shields.

And throughout her interior the Patrol ship, always in complete
readiness for strife, was being gone over again with microscopic
thoroughness, to be put into more readiness, if possible, even than
that.

       *       *       *       *       *

After a few hours Illona danced back to Kinnison's "con" room,
fairly bubbling over.

"They're marvelous, Lensman!" she cried, "simply _marvelous_!"

"What are marvelous?"

"The boys," she enthused. "All of them. They're here because they
_want_ to be--why, the officers don't even have whips! They
_like_ them, actually! The officers who push the little buttons
and things and those who walk around and look through the little
glass things and even the gray-haired old man with the four stripes,
why they like them all! And the boys were all putting on guns when I
left--why, I never _heard_ of such a thing!--and they're just
simply _crazy_ about you. I thought it was awfully funny that you
took off your guns as soon as the ship left Lyrane and that you don't
have guards around you all the time because I thought sure somebody
would stab you in the back or something, but they don't even want to
and that's what's so marvelous and Hank Henderson told me--"

"Save it!" he ordered. "Jet back, angel face, before you blow a fuse."
He had been right in not operating--this girl was going to be a mine
of information concerning Boskonian methods and operations, and all
without knowing it. "That's what I have been trying to tell you
about our Civilization; that it is founded upon the freedom of the
individual to do pretty much as he pleases, as long as it is not to the
public harm. And, as far as possible, equality of all the entities of
Civilization."

"Uh-huh, I know you did," she nodded brightly, then sobered quickly,
"but I couldn't understand it. I can't understand it yet; I can
scarcely believe that you all are so--You know, don't you, what would
happen if this were a Lonabarian ship and I would go running around
talking to officers as though I were their equal?"

"No--what?"

"It's inconceivable, of course; it simply couldn't happen. But if it
did, I would be punished terribly--perhaps, though, at a first offense,
I might be given only a twenty-scar whipping." At his lifted eyebrow
she explained, "One that leaves twenty scars that show for life.

"That's why I'm acting so intoxicated, I think. You see," she hesitated
shyly, "I am not used to being treated as anybody's equal, except
of course other girls like me. Nobody is, on Lonabar. Everybody is
higher or lower than you are. I'm going to simply love this when I get
accustomed to it." She spread both arms in a sweeping gesture. "I'd
like to _squeeze_ this whole ship and everybody in it--I just
can't wait to get to Tellus and really _live_ there!"

"That's a thing that has been bothering me," Kinnison confessed, and
the girl stared wonderingly at his serious face. "We are going into
battle, and we can't take time to land you anywhere before the battle
starts."

"Of course not. Why should you?" she paused, thinking deeply. "You're
not worrying about _me_, surely? Why, you're a high officer!
Officers don't care whether a girl is shot or not, do they?" The
thought was obviously, utterly new.

"We do. It's extremely poor hospitality to invite a guest aboard and
then have her killed. All I can say, though, is that if our number goes
up, I hope that you can forgive me for getting you into it!"

"Oh--thanks, Gray Lensman. Nobody ever spoke to me like that before.
But I wouldn't land if I could. I like Civilization. If you ... if you
don't win, I couldn't go to Tellus, anyway, so I'd much rather take
my chances here than not, sir, really. I'll _never_ go back to
Lonabar, in any case."

"'At a girl, Toots!" He extended his hand. She looked at it dubiously,
then hesitantly stretched out her own. But she learned fast; she put as
much pressure into the brief hand-clasp as Kinnison did. "You'd better
blast off now, I've got work to do.

"Go anywhere you like until I call you. Before the trouble starts
I'm going to put you down in the center, where you'll be as safe as
possible."

       *       *       *       *       *

The girl hurried away and the Lensman got into communication with
Helen of Lyrane, who gave him then a resumé of everything that had
happened. Two ships--big ships, immense space cruisers--appeared near
the airport. Nobody saw them coming, they came so fast. They stopped,
and without warning or parley destroyed all the buildings and all the
people nearby with beams like Kinnison's needle beam, except much
larger. Then the ships landed and men disembarked. The Lyranians killed
ten of them by direct mental impact or by monsters of the mind, but
after that everyone who came out of the vessel wore a thought-screen
and the persons were quite helpless. The enemy had burned down and
melted a part of the city, and as a further warning were then making
formal plans to execute publicly a hundred leading Lyranians--ten for
each man they had killed.

Because of the screens no communication was possible, but the invaders
had made it clear that if there were one more sign of resistance, or
even of non-co-operation, the entire city would be rayed and every
living thing in it blasted out of existence. She herself had escaped
so far. She was hidden in a crypt in the deepest subcellar of the
city. She was, of course, one of the ones they wanted to execute, but
finding any of Lyrane's leaders would be extremely difficult, if not
impossible. They were still searching, with many persons as highly
unwilling guides. They had indicated that they would stay there until
the leaders were found; that they would make the Lyranians tear down
their city, stone by stone, until they _were_ found.

"But how could they know who your leaders are?" Kinnison wanted to know.

"Perhaps one of our persons weakened under their torture," Helen
replied equably. "Perhaps they have among them a mind of power. Perhaps
in some other fashion. What matters it? The thing of importance is that
they do know."

"Another thing of importance is that it'll hold them there until we get
there," Kinnison thought. "Typical Boskonian technique, I gather. It
won't be many hours now. Hold them off if you can."

"I think that I can," came tranquil reply. "Through mental contact each
person acting as guide knows where each of us hidden ones is, and is
avoiding all our hiding places."

"Good. Tell me all you can about those ships, their size, shape and
armament."

She could not, it developed, give him any reliable information as to
size. She thought that the present invaders were smaller than the
_Dauntless_, but she could not be sure. Compared to the little
airships which were the only flying structures with which she was
familiar, both Kinnison's ships and those now upon Lyrane were so
immensely huge that trying to tell which was larger was very much like
attempting to visualize the difference between infinity squared and
infinity cubed. On shape, however, she was much better; she spread
in the Lensman's mind an accurately detailed picture of the two space
ships which the Patrolmen intended to engage.

In shape they were ultrafast, very much like the _Dauntless_
herself. Hence they certainly were not maulers. Nor, probably, were
they first-line battleships, such as had composed the fleet which had
met Civilization's Grand Fleet off the edge of the Second Galaxy. Of
course, the Patrol had had in that battle ultrafast ships which were
ultrapowerful as well--such as this same _Dauntless_--and it was a
fact that while Civilization was designing and building, Boskonia could
very well have been doing the same thing. On the other hand, since
the enemy could not logically be expecting real trouble in Dunstan's
Region, these cans might very well be second-line or out-of-date stuff--

"Are those ships lying on the same field we landed on?" he asked at
that point in his cogitations.

"Yes."

"You can give me pretty close to an actual measurement of the
difference, then," he told her. "We left a hole in that field
practically our whole length. How does it compare with theirs?"

"I can find that out, I think," and in due time she did so; reporting
that the _Dauntless_ was the longer, by some twelve times a
person's height.

"Thanks, Helen." Then, and only then, did Kinnison leave his private
conning room and call his officers into consultation in the control
room.

He told them everything he had learned and deduced about the two
Boskonian vessels which they were about to attack. Then, heads bent
over a visitank, the Patrolmen began to discuss strategy and tactics.




                                  VI.


As the _Dauntless_ approached Lyrane II so nearly that the
planet showed a perceptible disk upon the plates, the observers began
to study their detectors carefully. Nothing registered, and a brief
interchange of thoughts with the Chief Person of Lyrane informed the
Lensman that the two Boskonian warships were still upon the ground.
Indeed, they were going to stay upon the ground until after the hundred
Lyranian leaders, most of whom were still safely hidden, had been found
and executed, exactly as per announcement. The strangers had killed
many persons by torture and were killing more in attempts to make
them reveal the hiding places of the leaders, but little if any real
information was being obtained.

"Good technique, perhaps, from a bullheaded, dictatorial standpoint,
but it strikes me as being damned poor tactics," grunted Malcolm Craig,
the _Dauntless'_ grizzled captain, when Kinnison had relayed the
information.

"I'll say it's poor tactics," the Lensman agreed. "If Helmuth or one of
the living military hot shots of his caliber were down there, one of
those cans would be out on guard, flitting all over space."

"But how could they be expecting trouble 'way out here, nine thousand
parsecs from anywhere?" argued Chatway, the chief firing officer.

"They ought to be--that's the point." This from Henderson. "Where do we
land, Kim? Did you find out?"

"Not exactly; they're on the other side of the planet from here, now.
Good thing we don't have to get rid of a Tellurian intrinsic this
time--it'll be a near thing as it is." And it was. Scarcely was the
intrinsic velocity matched to that of the planet when the observers
reported that the airport upon which the enemy lay was upon the
horizon. Inertialess, the _Dauntless_ flashed away, going inert
and into action simultaneously when within range of the zwilnik ships.
Within range of one of them, that is; for, short as the time had been,
the crew of one of the Boskonian vessels had been sufficiently alert to
get her away. The other one did not move; then or ever.

The Patrolmen acted with the flawless smoothness of long practice and
perfect teamwork. At the first sign of zwilnik activity as revealed
by his spy-rays, Nelson, the chief communications officer, loosed a
barrage of ethereal and sub-ethereal static interference through which
no communications beam or signal could be driven. Captain Craig barked
a word into his microphone and every dreadful primary that could be
brought to bear erupted as one weapon. Chief Pilot Henderson, after a
casual glance below, cut in the Bergenholms, tramped in his blasts, and
set the cruiser's narrow nose into his tracer's line. One glance was
enough. He needed no orders as to what to do next. It would have been
apparent to almost anyone, even to one of the persons of Lyrane, that
that riddled, slashed, three-quarters fused mass of junk never again
would be or could contain aught of menace. The Patrol ship had not
stopped: had scarcely even paused. Now, having destroyed half of the
opposition _en passant_, she legged it after the remaining half.

"Now what, Kim?" asked Captain Craig. "We can't inglobe him and he no
doubt mounts tractor shears. We'll have to use the new tractor zone,
won't we?"

Ordinarily the gray-haired four-striper would have made his own
decisions, since he and he alone fought his ship; but these
circumstances were far from ordinary. First, any Unattached Lensman,
wherever he was, was the boss. Second, the tractor zone was new; so
brand-new that even the _Dauntless_ had not as yet used it. Third,
the ship was on detached duty, assigned directly to Kinnison to do with
as he willed. Fourth, said Kinnison was high in the confidence of the
Galactic Council and would know whether or not the present situation
justified the use of the new mechanism.

"If he can cut a tractor, yes," the Lensman agreed. "Only one ship. He
can't get away and he can't communicate--safe enough. Go to it."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Tellurian ship was faster than the Boskonian; and, since she
had been only seconds behind at the start, she came within striking
distance of her quarry in short order. Tractor beams reached out and
seized; but only momentarily did they hold. At the first pull they were
cut cleanly away. No one was surprised; it had been taken for granted
that all Boskonian ships would by this time have been equipped with
tractor shears.

These shears had been developed originally by the scientists of the
Patrol. Immediately following that invention, looking forward to the
time when Boskone would have acquired it, those same scientists set
themselves to the task of working out something which would be just
as good as a tractor beam for combat purposes, but which could not be
cut. They got it finally--a globular shell of force, very much like a
meteorite screen except double in phase. That is, it was completely
impervious to matter moving in either direction, instead of only to
that moving inwardly. Even if exact data as to generation, gauging,
distance, and control of this weapon were available--which they very
definitely are not--it would serve no good end to detail them here.
Suffice it to say that the _Dauntless_ mounted tractor zones, and
had ample power to hold them.

Closer up the Patrol ship blasted. The zone snapped on, well beyond the
Boskonian, and tightened. Henderson cut the Bergenholms. Captain Craig
snapped out orders and Chief Firing Officer Chatway and his boys did
their stuff.

Defensive screens full out, the pirate stayed free and tried to run. No
soap. She merely slid around upon the frictionless inner surface of the
zone. She rolled and she spun. Then she went inert and rammed. Still
no soap. She struck the zone and bounced; bounced with all of her mass
and against all the power of her driving thrust. The impact jarred the
_Dauntless_ to her very skin; but the zone's anchorage had been
computed and installed by top-flight engineers and they held. And the
zone itself held. It yielded a bit, but it did not fail and the shear
planes of the pirates could not cut it.

Then, no other course being possible, the Boskonians fought. Of course,
theoretically, surrender was possible, but it simply was not done. No
pirate ship ever had surrendered to a Patrol force, however large; none
ever would. No Patrol ship had ever surrendered to Boskone--or would.
That was the unwritten but grimly understood code of this internecine
conflict between two galaxy-wide and diametrically opposed cultures;
it was and had to be a war of utter and complete extermination.
Individuals or small groups might be captured bodily; but no ship, no
individual, even, ever, under any conditions, surrendered. The fight
was--always and everywhere--to the death.

So this one was. The enemy was well armed of her type, but her type
simply did not carry projectors of sufficient power to break down
the _Dauntless'_ hard-held defensive screens. Nor did she mount
screens heavy enough to withstand for long the furious assault of the
Patrol ship's terrific primaries.

As soon as the pirate's screens went down the firing stopped; that
order had been given long since. Kinnison wanted information, he wanted
charts, he wanted a few living Boskonians. He got nothing. Not a man
remained alive aboard the riddled hulk; the chart room contained only
heaps of fused ash. Everything which might have been of use to the
Patrol had been destroyed, either by the Patrol's own beams or by the
pirates themselves after they saw they must lose.

"Beam it out," Craig ordered, and the remains of the Boskonian warship
disappeared.

       *       *       *       *       *

Back toward Lyrane II, then, the _Dauntless_ went, and Kinnison
again made contact with Helen, the Elder Sister. She had emerged from
her crypt and was directing affairs from her--"office" is perhaps the
word--upon the top floor of the city's largest building. The search for
the Lyranian leaders, the torture and murder of the citizens, and the
destruction of the city had stopped, all at once, when the grounded
Boskonian cruiser had been blasted out of commission. The directing
intelligences of the raiders had remained, it developed, within
the "safe" confines of their vessel's walls; and when they ceased
directing, their minions in the actual theater of operations ceased
operating. They had been grouped uncertainly in an open square, but at
the first glimpse of the returning _Dauntless_ they had dashed
into the nearest large building, each man seizing one or sometimes
two persons as he went. They were now inside, erecting defenses and
very evidently intending to use the Lyranians both as hostages and as
shields.

Motionless now, directly over the city, Kinnison and his officers
studied through their spy-rays the number, armament, and disposition
of the enemy force. There were one hundred and thirty of them, human
to about six places. They were armed with the usual portable weapons
carried by such parties.

Originally they had had several semiportable projectors, but since all
heavy stuff must be powered from the mother ship, it had been abandoned
long since. Surprisingly, though, they wore full armor. Kinnison had
expected only thought-screens, since the Lyranians had no offensive
weapons save those of the mind; but apparently either the pirates did
not know that or else were guarding against surprise.

Armor was--and is--heavy, cumbersome, a handicap to fast action, and a
nuisance generally; hence for the Boskonians to have dispensed with it
would not have been poor tactics. True, the Patrol _did_ attack,
but that could not have been what was expected. In fact, had such an
attack been in the cards, that Boskonian punitive party would not
have been on the ground at all. It was equally true that canny old
Helmuth, who took nothing whatever for granted, would have had his men
in armor. However, he would have guarded much more completely against
surprise--but few commanders indeed went to such lengths of precaution
as Helmuth did. Thus Kinnison pondered.

"This ought to be as easy as shooting fish down a well--but you'd
better put out space scouts just the same," he decided, as he punched a
call for Lieutenant Peter Van Buskirk. "Bus? Do you see what we see?"

"Uh-huh, we've been peeking a bit," the huge Dutch-Valerian responded,
happily.

"QX. Get your gang wrapped up in their tinware. I'll see you at the
main lower stabbard lock in ten minutes." He switched off and turned to
an orderly. "Break out my G-P cage for me, will you, Spike? And I'll
want the 'copters--tell them to get hot."

"But listen, Kim!" and:

"You can't do that, Kinnison!" came simultaneously from chief pilot and
captain, neither of whom could leave the ship in such circumstances as
these. They, the vessel's two top officers, were bound to her; while
the Lensman, although ranking both of them, even aboard ship, was not
and could not be bound by anything.

"Sure, I can--you fellows are just jealous, that's all," Kinnison
retorted, cheerfully. "I not only can, I've _got_ to go with the
Valerians. I need a lot of information, and I can't read a dead man's
brain--yet."

       *       *       *       *       *

While the storming party was assembling, the _Dauntless_ settled
downward, coming to rest in the already devastated section of the town,
as close as possible to the building in which the Boskonians had taken
refuge.

One hundred and two men disembarked: Kinnison, Van Buskirk, and the
full company of one hundred Valerians. Each of those space-fighting
wild cats measured seventy-eight inches or more from sole to crown;
each was composed of four hundred or more pounds of the fantastically
powerful, rigid, and reactive brawn, bone, and sinew necessary for
survival upon a planet having a surface gravity almost three times that
of small, feeble Terra.

Because of the women held captive by the pirates, the Valerians carried
no machine rifles, no semiportables, no heavy stuff at all; only
their DeLameters and, of course, their space axes. A Valerian trooper
without his space ax? Unthinkable! A dire weapon indeed, the space
ax. A combination and sublimation of battle-ax, mace, bludgeon, and
lumberman's picaroon; thirty pounds of hard, tough, space-tempered
alloy; a weapon of potentialities limited only by the physical strength
and bodily agility of its wielder. And Van Buskirk's Valerians had
both--plenty of both. One-handed, with simple flicks of his incredible
wrist, the smallest Valerian of the _Dauntless_ boarding party
could manipulate his atrocious weapon as effortlessly as, and almost
unbelievably faster than, a fencing master handles his rapier or an
orchestra conductor waves his baton.

With machinelike precision the Valerians fell in and strode away;
Van Buskirk in the lead, the helicopters hovering overhead, the Gray
Lensman bringing up the rear. Tall and heavy, strong and agile as he
was--for a Tellurian--he had no business in that front line, and no one
knew that fact better than he did. The puniest Valerian of the company
could do in full armor a standing high jump of over fourteen feet; and
could dodge, feint, parry, and swing with a blinding speed starkly
impossible to any member of any of the physically lesser breeds of man.

Approaching the building they spread out, surrounded it; and at a
signal from a helicopter that the ring was complete, the assault began.
Doors and windows were locked, barred, and barricaded, of course; but
what of that? A few taps of the axes and a few blasts of the DeLameters
took care of things very nicely; and through the openings thus made
there leaped, dove, rolled, or strode the space black-and-silver
warriors of the Galactic Patrol. Valerians, than whom no fiercer race
of hand-to-hand fighters has ever been known--no bifurcate race, and
but very few others, however built or shaped, have ever willingly come
to grips with the armored axmen of Valeria!

Not by choice, then, but of necessity and in sheer desperation the
pirates fought. In the vicious beams of their portables the stone walls
of the room glared a baleful red; in spots even were pierced through.
Old-fashioned pistols barked, spitting steel-jacketed lead. But the
G-P suits were screened against lethal beams by generators capable of
withstanding anything of lesser power than a semiportable projector;
G-P armor was proof against any projectile possessing less energy than
that hurled by the high caliber machine rifle. Thus the Boskonian beams
splashed off the Valerian's screens in torrents of man-made lightning
and in pyrotechnic displays of multicolored splendor, their bullets
ricocheted harmlessly as spent, misshapen blobs of metal.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Patrolmen did not even draw their DeLameters during their
inexorable advance. They knew that the pirates' armor was as capable as
theirs, and the women were not to die if death for them could possibly
be avoided. As they advanced the enemy fell back toward the center of
the great room; holding there with the Lyranians forming the outer ring
of their roughly circular formation; firing over the women's heads and
between their naked bodies.

Kinnison did not want those women to die. It seemed, however, that die
they must, from the sheer, tremendous reflection from the Valerians'
fiercely radiant screens, if the Patrolmen persisted in their advance.
He studied the enemy formation briefly, then flashed an order.

There ensued a startling and entirely unorthodox maneuver, one possible
only to the troopers there at work, as at Kinnison's command every
Valerian left the floor in a prodigious leap. Over the women's heads,
over the heads of the enemy; but in midleap, as he passed over, each
Patrolman swung his ax at a Boskonian helmet with all the speed and
all the power he could muster. Most of the enemy died then and there,
for the helmet has never been forged which is able to fend the diamond
beak of a space ax driven as each of those was driven. The fact that
the Valerians were nine or ten feet off the floor at the time made
no difference whatever. They were space fighters, trained to handle
themselves and their weapons in any position or situation; with or
without gravity, with or without even inertia.

"You persons--run! Get out of here! SCRAM!" Kinnison fairly shouted
the thought as the Valerians left the floor, and the matriarchs
obeyed--frantically. Through doors and windows they fled, in all
directions and at the highest possible speed.

But in their enthusiasm to strike down the foe, not one of the
Valerians had paid any attention to the exact spot upon which he was to
land; or, if he did, someone else got there either first or just barely
second. Besides, there was not room for them all in the center of the
ring. For seconds, therefore, confusion reigned and a boiler-works
clangor resounded for a mile around as a hundred and one extra-big and
extra-heavy men, a writhing, kicking, pulling tangle of armor, axes,
and equipment, jammed into a space which half their number would have
filled overfull. Sulphurous Valerian profanity and sizzling deep-space
oaths blistered the very air as each warrior struggled madly to right
himself, to get one more crack at a pirate before somebody else beat
him to it.

During this terrible melee some of the pirates released their screens
and committed suicide. A few got out of the room, but not many. Nor
far; the men in the helicopters saw to that. They had needle beams,
powered from the _Dauntless_, which went through the screens of
personal armor as a knife goes through ripe cheese.

"Save it, guys--hold everything!" Kinnison yelled as the tangled mass
of Valerians resolved itself into erect and warlike units. "No more ax
work--don't let them kill themselves--catch them ALIVE!"

They did so, quickly and easily. With the women out of the way,
there was nothing to prevent the Valerians from darting right up to
the muzzles of the foes' DeLameters. Nor could the enemy dodge, or
run, half fast enough to get away. Armored, shielded hands batted
the weapons away--if an arm or leg broke in the process, what the
hell?--and the victim was held motionless until his turn came to face
the mind-reading Kinnison.

Nothing. Nothing, flat. A string of zeros. And, bitterly silent,
Kinnison led the way back to the _Dauntless_. The men he wanted,
the ones who knew anything, were the ones who killed themselves,
of course. Well, why not? In like case, officers of the Patrol had
undoubtedly done the same. The live ones didn't know where their planet
was, could give no picture even of where it lay in the Galaxy, did not
know where they were going, nor why. Well, so what? Wasn't ignorance
the prime characteristic of the bottom layers of dictatorships
everywhere? If they had known anything, they would have been under
orders to kill themselves, too, and would have done it.

In his con room in the _Dauntless_ his black mood lightened
somewhat and he called the Elder Person.

"Helen of Troy? I suppose that the best thing we can do now, for your
peace of mind, prosperity, well-being, et cetera, is to drill out of
here as fast as Klono and Noshabkeming will let us. Right?"

"Why, I ... you ... um ... that is." The matriarch was badly flustered
at the Lensman's bald summation of her attitude. She did not want to
agree, but she certainly did not want these males around a second
longer than was necessary.

"Just as well say it, because it goes double for me--you can play it
clear across the board, toots, that if I ever see you again it will be
because I can't get out of it." Then, to his chief pilot:

"QX, Hen, give her the oof--back to Tellus."




                                 VII.


Through the ether the mighty _Dauntless_ bored her serene way
homeward, at the easy touring blast--for her--of some eighty parsecs
an hour. The engineers inspected and checked their equipment, from
instrument needles to blast nozzles; re-lining, repairing, replacing
anything and everything which showed any sign of wear or strain because
of what the big vessel had just gone through. Then they relaxed into
their customary routine of killing time--the games of a dozen planets
and the vying with each other in the telling of outrageously untruthful
stories.

The officers on watch lolled at ease in their cushioned seats, making
much ado of each tiny thing as it happened, even the changes of watch.
The Valerians, as usual, remained invisible in their own special
quarters. There the gravity was set at twenty-seven hundred instead of
at the Tellurian normal of nine hundred eighty, there the atmospheric
pressure was forty pounds to the square inch, there the temperature was
ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, and there Van Buskirk and his fighters
lived and moved and had their daily drills of fantastic violence and
stress. They were irked less than any of the others by monotony; being,
as has been intimated previously, neither mental nor intellectual
giants.

And Kinnison, mirror-polished gray boots stacked in all their majestic
size upon a corner of his desk, leaned his chair precariously backward
and thought in black concentration. It _still_ didn't make any
kind of sense. He had just enough clues--fragments of clues--to drive
a man nuts. Menjo Bleeko was the man he wanted. On Lonabar. To find
one was to find the other, but how in the steaming hells of Venus
was he going to find either of them? It might seem funny not to be
able to find a thing as big as a planet--but since nobody knew where
it was, by fifty thousand parsecs, and since there were millions and
skillions and whillions of planets in the Galaxy, a random search was
quite definitely out. Bleeko was a zwilnik, or tied in with zwilniks,
of course; but he could read a million zwilnik minds without finding,
except by merest chance, one having any contact with or knowledge of
the Lonabarian.

The Patrol had already scoured--fruitlessly--Aldebaran II for any
sign, however slight, pointing toward Lonabar. The planetographers had
searched the files, the charts, the libraries thoroughly. No Lonabar.
Of course, they had suggested--what a help!--they might know it under
some other name. Personally, he didn't think so, since no jeweler
throughout the far-flung bounds of civilization had as yet been found
who could recognize or identify any of the items he had described.

Whatever avenue or alley of thought Kinnison started along, he always
ended up at the jewels and the girl. Illona, the squirrel-brained,
romping, joyous little imp who by now owned in fee simple half of the
ship and nine-tenths of the crew. Why in Palain's purple hells couldn't
she have had a brain back of that beautiful pan? But at that, he had to
admit, she was smarter than most--you couldn't expect any other woman
in the Galaxy to have a mind like Mac's.

For minutes, then, he abandoned his problem and reveled in visions
of the mental and physical perfections of his fiancée. But this was
getting him nowhere, fast. The girl or the jewels--which? They were the
only real angles he had.

He sent out a call for her, and in a few minutes she came swirling
in. How different she was from what she had been! Gone were the
somberness, the dread, the terror which had oppressed her; gone were
the class-conscious inhibitions against which she had been rebelling,
however subconsciously, since childhood. Here she was _free_!
The boys were free, _everybody_ was free! She had expanded
tremendously--unfolded. She was living as she had never dreamed it
possible to live. Each new minute was an adventure in itself. Her black
eyes, once so dull, sparkled with animation; radiated her sheer joy in
living. Even her jet-black hair seemed to have taken on a new luster
and gloss, in its every precisely arranged wavelet.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Hi, Lensman!" Illona burst out, before Kinnison could say a word or
think a thought in greeting. "I'm _so_ glad you sent for me,
because there's something I've been wanting to ask you for days. The
boys are going to throw a blowout, with all kinds of stunts, and they
want me to do a dance. QX, do you think?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Clothes," she explained. "I told them I couldn't dance in a dress, and
they said that I wasn't supposed to, that acrobats didn't wear dresses
when they performed on Tellus. I said they lied like thieves and they
swore they didn't--said to ask the Old Man--" She broke off, two
knuckles jammed into her mouth, expressive eyes wide in sudden fright.
"Oh, excuse me, sir," she gasped. "I didn't--"

"'Smatter? What bit you?" Kinnison asked, then got it. "Oh ... the 'Old
Man,' huh? QX, angel face, that is standard nomenclature in the Patrol.
Not with you folks, though, I take it?"

"I'll say not," she breathed. She acted as though a catastrophe had
been averted by the narrowest possible margin. "Why, if anybody got
caught even _thinking_ such a thing, the whole crew would go into
the steamer that very minute. And if I would dare to say 'Hi' to Menjo
Bleeko--" She shuddered.

"Nice people," Kinnison commented.

"But are you sure that the ... that I'm not getting any of the boys
into trouble?" she pleaded. "For, after all, none of them ever dare
call you that to your face, you know."

"You haven't been around enough yet," he assured her. "On duty, no;
that's discipline--necessary for efficiency. And I haven't hung around
the wardrooms much of late--been too busy. But at the party you'll be
surprised at some of the things they call me--if you happen to hear
them. You've been practicing--keeping in shape?"

"Uh-huh," she confessed. "In my room, with the spy-ray block on."

"Good. No need to hide, though, and no need to wear dresses any
time you're practicing--the boys were right on that. What do you
think of this pseudoinertia as compared to the real thing?" He did
not, actually, care what she thought of it; he was merely making
conversation to cover up the fact that he was probing the deepest
recesses of her mind.

"I like it, even better in some ways. Your legs and arms feel as though
they were following through perfectly, but if you kick something, or
come down too hard in a forward flip--back flips are easy--it doesn't
hurt. It's nice."

"Must be," he agreed, absently. "Got to watch out for yourself, though,
when you get back onto a planet. Now I want you to help me. Will you?"

"Yes, sir. In anything I can--_anything_, sir," she answered,
instantly.

"I want you to give me every scrap of information you possibly
can about Lonabar; its customs and habits, its work and its
play--everything, even its money and its jewelry." This last apparently
an afterthought. "To do so, you'll have to let me into your mind of
your own free will--you'll have to co-operate to the limit of your
capability. QX?"

"That will be quite all right, Lensman," she agreed, shyly. "I know now
that you are not going to hurt me."

Illona did not like it at first, there was no question of that. And
small wonder. It is an intensely disturbing thing to have your mind
invaded, knowingly, by another; particularly when that other is the
appallingly powerful mind of Gray Lensman Kimball Kinnison. There were
lots of things she did not want exposed, and the very effort not to
think of them brought them ever and ever more vividly to the fore.
She squirmed, mentally and physically: her mind was for minutes a
practically illegible turmoil. But she soon steadied down and, as she
got used to the new sensations, she went to work with a will. She could
not increase materially the knowledge of the planet which Kinnison had
already obtained from her, but she was a mine of information concerning
the peculiar gems. She knew all about every one of them, with the
completely detailed knowledge one is all too apt to have of a thing
long and intensely desired, but supposedly forever out of reach.

"Thanks, Illona." It was over; the Lensman knew as much as she did
about everything which had any bearing upon his quest. "You have helped
a lot--now you can flit."

"I'm glad to help, sir, really--any time. I'll see you at the party,
then, if not before." Illona left the room in a far more subdued
fashion than she had entered it. She had always been more than half
afraid of Kinnison; just being near him did things to her which she did
not quite like. And this last thing, this mind-searching interview, did
not operate to quiet her fears. It gave her the screaming meamies, no
less!

       *       *       *       *       *

And Kinnison, alone in his room, called for a tight beam to Prime Base.
He wanted something, he explained, when the visage of Port Admiral
Haynes appeared upon his plate. Something big, something that had never
been tried before. Namely, a wide-open, Lens-to-Lens conference with
all the Lensmen--particularly all the Unattached Lensmen--of the whole
Galaxy, at the same time. Could it be arranged?

"_Whew!_" the admiral whistled. "I was in on a wide-open ten-way,
once, but that's as high as I ever tried it. What's your thought as to
technique?"

"Set a definite time, far enough ahead to give everybody notice. At
that time, have everybody tune to your frequency. Since everybody will
be _en rapport_ with you, we will all be _en rapport_ with
each other, automatically."

"Seems reasonable--can do, I think. It will take at least a day to
arrange the hookup. Day and a half, maybe. Say hour twenty tomorrow."

"QX. Hour twenty, on the line."

The next day dragged, even for the always-busy Kinnison. He prowled
about, aimlessly. He saw the beautiful Aldebaranian several times,
noticing as he did so something which he had not hitherto really
observed, but which tied in nicely with a fact he had half seen in the
girl's own mind, before he could dodge it--that whenever she made a
twosome with any man, the man was Chief Pilot Henderson.

"Blasted, Hen?" he asked, casually, as he came upon the pilot in a
corner of a wardroom, staring fixedly at nothing.

"Out of the ether," Henderson admitted. "I want to talk to you."

"G. A., we're alone--or, better yet, on the Lens. About Illona, the
Aldebaranian zwilnik, I suppose."

"Don't Kim," Henderson flinched. "She isn't a zwilnik, really--I'd bet
my last millo on that?"

"Are you telling me, or asking me?" the Lensman asked.

"I don't know," Henderson hesitated. "I wanted to ask you ... you know,
you've got a lot of stuff that the rest of us haven't. I'm punctured
plenty, and it's getting worse. Is there any reason, chief, why I
shouldn't, well ... er ... get married?"

"Every reason in the book why you should, Hen. Why, when I get to be as
old as you are, I hope to be retired, married, and the father of two or
three kids."

"Damnation, Kim! That isn't what I meant, and you know it!"

"Think clearly, then; for your own sake and Illona's; not mine,"
Kinnison ordered. "Yes, I know what you mean, but you've got to bring
it out into the open, yourself, to do any good."

"QX. Have I the permission of Kimball Kinnison, Unattached Lensman of
the Galactic Patrol, to marry Illona Potter, if I've got jets enough to
swing it?"

Mighty clever, the Lensman thought. Since all the men of the
Patrol were notoriously averse to going sloppy or maudlin
about it, he wondered just how the pilot was going to phrase
his question. Hen had done it very neatly, by tossing the buck
right back at him. But he wouldn't get sloppy, either. The
"untarnished-meteors-upon-the-collars-of-the-Patrol" stuff was QX for
Earthly spellbinders, but it didn't fit in anywhere else. So:

"That's better," Kinnison approved. "As far as I know--and in this case
I bashfully admit that I know it all--everything is on the green. All
you've got to worry about is the opposition of twelve hundred or so
other guys in this can, and the fact that Illona will probably blast
you to a cinder."

"Huh? Those apes? That? Watch my jets!" Henderson strode away, doubts
all resolved; and Kinnison, seeing that hour twenty was very near, went
to his own room.

       *       *       *       *       *

Precisely upon the hour the Lensman tuned his--not his Lens, really,
since he no longer needed that, but in all probability his very ego
to that of Port Admiral Haynes. He had wondered frequently what it
was going to feel like; but, having experienced it, he could never
afterward describe it even in part.

It is difficult for any ordinary mind to conceive of its being in
complete accord with any other, however closely akin. Consider, then,
how utterly impossible it is to envision that merging of a hundred
thousand, or five hundred thousand, or a million--nobody ever did
know how many Lensmen tuned in that day--minds so utterly different
that no one human being can live long enough even to see each of the
races there represented! Probably less than half of them were even
approximately human. Many were not mammals, many were not warm-blooded.
Not all, by far, were even oxygen breathers--oxygen, to many of those
races, was sheerest poison. Nevertheless, they had much in common. All
were intelligent; most of them very highly so; and all were imbued with
the principles of freedom and equality for which Galactic Civilization
stood and upon which it was fundamentally based.

That meeting was staggering, even to Kinnison's mind. It was
appalling--yet it was ultimately thrilling, too. It was one of the
greatest, one of the most terrific thrills of the Lensman's long life.

"Thanks, fellows, for coming in," he began, simply. "I will make my
message very short. As Haynes may have told you, I am Kinnison of
Tellus. It will help greatly in locating the head of the Boskonian
culture if I can find a certain planet, known to me only by the name of
Lonabar. Its people are human beings to the last decimal; its rarest
jewels are these," and he spread in the collective mind a perfect,
exactly detailed and pictured description of the gems. "Does any one of
you know of such a planet? Has any one of you ever seen a stone like
any of these?"

A pause--a heartbreakingly long pause. Then a faint, soft, diffident
thought appeared; appeared as though seeping slowly from a single cell
of that incredibly linked, million-fold-composite Lensmen's BRAIN.

"I waited to be sure that no one else would speak, as my information is
very meager, and unsatisfactory, and old," the thought apologized.

"Whatever its nature, any information at all is very welcome," Kinnison
replied. "Who is speaking, please?"

"Nadreck of Palain VII, Unattached. Many cycles ago I secured, and
still have in my possession, a crystal--or rather, fragment of a
supercooled liquid--like one of the red gems you showed us; the
one having practically all its transmittance in a very narrow band
centering at point seven, oh, oh."

"But you do not know what planet it came from--is that it?"

"Not exactly," the soft thought went on. "I saw it upon its native
planet, but unfortunately I do not now know just what or where that
planet was. We were exploring at the time, and had visited many
planets. Not being interested in any world having an atmosphere of
oxygen, we paused but briefly, nor did we map it. I was interested in
the fusion because of its peculiar filtering effect, hence bought it
from its owner. A scientific curiosity merely."

"Do you believe that you could find the planet again?"

"By checking back upon the planets we did map, and by retracing our
route, I should be able to ... yes, I am certain that I can do so."

"And when Nadreck of Palain VII says that he is certain of anything,"
another thought appeared, "nothing in the macrocosmic universe is more
certain."

"I thank you, Twenty-four of Six, for the expression of confidence."

"And I thank both of you particularly, as well as all of you
collectively," Kinnison broadcast. Then, as intelligences by the tens
of thousands began to break away from the linkage, he continued to
Nadreck:

"You will map this planet for me, then, and send the data in to Prime
Base?"

"I will map the planet and will myself bring the data to you at Prime
Base. Do you want some of the gems, also?"

"I don't think so," Kinnison thought swiftly. "No, better not. They'll
be harder to get now, and it might tip our hand too much. I'll get them
myself, later. Will you inform me, through Haynes, when to expect you
upon Tellus?"

"I will so inform you. I will proceed at once, with speed."

"Thanks a million, Nadreck--clear ether!" and everyone cut loose.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ship sped on, and as it sped, Kinnison continued to think. He
attended the "blowout." Ordinarily he would have been right in the
thick of it; but this time, young though he was and enthusiastic, he
simply could not tune in. Nothing fitted, and until he could see a
picture that made some kind of sense he could not let go. He listened
to the music with half an ear, he watched the stunts with only half an
eye.

He forgot his problem for a while when, at the end, Illona Potter
danced. For Lonabarian acrobatic dancing is not like the Tellurian art
of the same name. Or rather, it is like it, except more so--much more
so. An earthly expert would be scarcely a novice on Lonabar, and Illona
was a Lonabarian expert. She had been training, intensively, all her
life, and even in Lonabar's chill social and psychological environment
she had loved her work. Now, reveling as she was in the first
realization of liberty of thought and of person, and inspired by the
heartfelt applause of the spacehounds so closely packed into the hall,
she put on something more than an exhibition of coldly impersonal
skill and limberness. And the feelings, both of performer and of
spectators, were intensified by the fact that, of all the repertoire
of the _Dauntless'_ superb orchestra, Illona liked best to dance
to the stirring strains of "Our Patrol." "Our Patrol," which any man
who has ever worn the space black-and-silver will say is the greatest,
grandest, most glorious, most terrific piece of music that ever was or
ever will be written, played, or sung! Small wonder, then, that the
dancer really "gave," or that the mighty cruiser's walls almost bulged
under the applause of Illona's "boys" at the end of her first number.

They kept her at it until Captain Craig stopped it, to keep the girl
from killing herself. "She's worn down to a nub," he declared, and she
was. She was trembling. She was panting; her almost lacquered-down hair
stood out in wild disorder. Her eyes were starry with tears--happy
tears. Then the ranking officers made short speeches of appreciation
and the spectators carried the actors--actual carrying, in Illona's
case, upon an improvised throne--off for refreshments.

Back in his quarters, Kinnison tackled his problem again. He could
work out something on Lonabar now, but what about Lyrane? It tied in,
too--there was an angle there, somewhere. To get it, though, somebody
would have to get close to--really friendly with--the Lyranians.
Just looking on from the outside wouldn't do. Somebody they could
trust and would confide in--and they were so damnably, so fanatically
non-co-operative! A man couldn't get a millo's worth of real
information--he could read any one mind by force, but he'd never get
the right one. Neither could Worsel or Tregonsee or any other nonhuman
Lensman; the Lyranians just simply didn't have the galactic viewpoint.
No, what he wanted was a human woman Lensman, and there weren't any--

At the thought he gasped; the pit of his stomach felt cold. Chris! She
was more than half Lensman already--she was the only un-Lensed human
being who had ever been able to read his thoughts. But he didn't have
the gall, the sheer, brazen crust, to shove a load like that onto
_her_--or did he? Didn't the job come first? Wouldn't Chris be big
enough to see it that way? Sure, she would! As to what Haynes and the
rest of the Lensmen would think--let them think! In this, he had to
make his own decisions.

He couldn't. He sat there for an hour; teeth locked until his jaws
ached, fists clenched.

"I can't make that decision alone," he breathed, finally. "Not jets
enough by half," and he shot a thought to distant Arisia and Mentor the
Sage.

"This intrusion is necessary," he thought coldly, precisely. "It seems
to me to be wise to do this thing which has never before been done. I
have no data, however, upon which to base a decision and the matter is
grave. I ask, therefore--is it wise?"

"You do not ask as to repercussions--consequences--either to yourself
or to the woman?"

"I ask what I asked."

"Ah, Kinnison of Tellus, you truly grow. You at last learn to think. It
is wise," and the telepathic link snapped.

Kinnison slumped down in relief. He had not known what to expect. He
would not have been surprised if the Arisian had pinned his ears back;
he certainly did not expect either the compliment or the clear-cut
answer. He knew that Mentor would give him no help whatever in any
problem which he could possibly solve alone; he was just beginning to
realize that the Arisian _would_ aid him in matters which were
absolutely, intrinsically, beyond his reach.

Recovering, he flashed a call to Surgeon General Lacy.

"Lacy? Kinnison. I would like to have Sector Chief Nurse Clarrissa
MacDougall detached at once. Please have her report to me here aboard
the _Dauntless_, en route, at the earliest possible moment of
rendezvous."

"Huh? What? You can't ... you wouldn't--" the old Lensman gurgled.

"No, I wouldn't. The whole corps will know it soon enough, so I might
as well tell you now that I'm going to make a Lensman out of her."

Lacy exploded then, but Kinnison had expected that.

"Seal it!" he counseled, sharply. "I am not doing it entirely on my
own--Mentor of Arisia made the final decision. Prefer charges against
me if you like, but in the meantime please do as I request."

And that was that.




                                 VIII.


A few hours before the time of rendezvous with the cruiser which was
bringing Chris out to him, the detectors picked up a vessel whose
course, it proved, was set to intersect their own. A minute or so later
a sharp, clear thought came through Kinnison's Lens.

"Kim? Raoul. Been flitting around out Arisia way, and they called me in
and asked me to bring you a package. Said you'd be expecting it. QX?"

"Hi, Spacehound! QX." Kinnison had very decidedly not been expecting
it--he had thought that he would have to do the best he could without
it--but he realized instantly, with a thrill of gladness, what it was.
"Inert? Or can't you stay?"

"Free. Got to make a rendezvous. Can't take time to inert--that is, if
you'll inert the thing in your cocoon. Don't want it to hole out on
you, though."

"Can do. Free it is. Pilot room! Prepare for inertialess contact with
vessel approaching. Magnets. Messenger coming aboard--free."

The two speeding vessels flashed together, at all their unimaginable
velocities, without a thump or jar. Magnetic clamps locked and held.
Air-lock doors opened, shut, opened; and at the inner port Kinnison met
Raoul la Forge, his classmate through the four years at Wentworth Hall.
Brief but hearty greetings were exchanged, but the visitor could not
stop. Lensmen are busy men.

"Fine seeing you, Kim--be sure and inert the thing--clear ether!"

"Same to you, ace. Sure, I will--think I want to tear a guy's arm off?"

Indeed, inerting the package was the Lensman's first care, for in the
free condition it was a frightfully dangerous thing. Its intrinsic
velocity was that of Arisia, while the ship's was that of Lyrane
II. They might be forty or fifty miles per second apart; and if the
_Dauntless_ should go inert that harmless-looking package would
instantly become a meteorite inside the ship. At the thought of that
velocity he paused. The cocoon would stand it--but would the Lens? Oh,
sure, the Arisian knew that this was coming; the Lens would be packed
to stand it.

Kinnison wrapped the package in heavy gauze, then in roll after roll of
spring steel mesh. He jammed heavy steel springs into the ends, then
clamped the whole thing into a form with tool-steel bolts an inch in
diameter. He poured in two hundred pounds of metallic mercury, filling
the form to the top. Then a cover, also bolted on. This whole assembly
went into the "cocoon," a cushioned, heavily padded affair suspended
from all four walls, ceiling, and floor by every shock-absorbing device
known to the engineers of the Patrol.

The _Dauntless_ inerted briefly at Kinnison's word and it seemed
as though a troop of elephants were running silently amuck in the
cocoon room. The package to be inerted weighed no more than eight
ounces--but eight ounces of mass, at a relative velocity of fifty miles
per second, possesses a kinetic energy by no means to be despised.

The frantic lurchings and bouncings subsided, the cruiser resumed
her free flight, and the man undid all that he had done. The Arisian
package looked exactly as before, but it was harmless now; it had the
same intrinsic velocity as did everything else aboard the vessel.

Then the Lensman pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves and opened the
package; finding, as he had expected, that the packing material was a
dense, viscous liquid. He poured it out and there was the Lens--Chris'
Lens! He cleaned it carefully, then wrapped it in heavy insulation.
For of all the billions of unnumbered billions of living entities in
existence, Clarrissa MacDougall was the only one whose flesh could
touch that apparently innocuous jewel with impunity. Others could
safely touch it while she wore it, while it glowed with its marvelously
polychromatic cold flame; but until she wore it, and unless she wore
it, its touch meant death to any life to which it was not attuned.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shortly thereafter another Patrol cruiser hove in sight. This meeting,
however, was to be no casual one, for the nurse could not be inerted
from the free state in the _Dauntless'_ cocoon. No such device
ever built could stand it--and those structures are stronger far than
is the human frame. Any adjustment which even the hardest, toughest
spacehound can take in a cocoon is measured in feet per second, not in
miles.

Hundreds of miles apart, the ships inerted and their pilots fought with
supreme skill to make the two intrinsics match. And even so the vessels
did not touch, even nearly. A space line was thrown; the nurse and her
space roll were quite unceremoniously hauled aboard.

Kinnison did not meet her at the air lock, but waited for her in his
con room; and the details of that meeting will remain unchronicled.
They were young, they had not seen each other for a long time, and they
were very much in love. It is evident, therefore, that Patrol affairs
were not the first matters to be touched upon. Nor, if the historian
has succeeded even partially in portraying truly the characters of the
two persons involved, is it either necessary or desirable to go at any
length into the argument they had as to whether or not she should be
inducted so cavalierly into a service from which her sex had always,
automatically, been barred. He did not want to make her carry that
load, but he had to; she did not--although for entirely different
reasons--want to take it.

He shook out the Lens and, holding it in a thick-folded corner of the
insulating blanket, flicked one of the girl's fingertips across the
bracelet. Satisfied by the fleeting flash of color which swept across
the jewel, he snapped the platinum-iridium band around her left wrist,
which it fitted exactly.

Chris stared for a minute at the smoothly, rhythmically flowing colors
of the thing so magically sprung to life upon her wrist; awe and
humility in her glorious eyes. Then:

"I can't, Kim. I simply can't. I'm not worthy of it," she choked.

"None of us is, Chris. We can't be--but we've got to do it, just the
same."

"I suppose that's true--it would be so, of course. I'll do my best--but
you know perfectly well, Kim, that I'm not--can't ever be--a real
Lensman."

"Sure, you can. Do we have to go over all that again? You won't have
some of the technical stuff that we got, of course, but you carry jets
that no other Lensman ever has had. You're a real Lensman; don't worry
about that--if you weren't, do you think that they would have made that
Lens for you?"

"In a way I see that that must be true, even though I can't understand
it. But I'm simply scared to death of the rest of it, Kim."

"You needn't be. It'll hurt, but not more than you can stand. Don't
think we'd better start that stuff for a few days yet, though; not
until you get used to using your Lens. Coming at you, Lensman!" and he
went into Lens-to-Lens communication, broadening it gradually into a
wide-open two-way.

She was appalled at first, but entranced some thirty minutes later,
when he called the lesson to a halt.

"Enough for now," he decided. "It doesn't take much of that stuff to be
a great plenty, at first."

"I'll say it doesn't," she agreed. "Put this away for me until next
time, will you, Kim? I don't want to wear it all the time until I know
more about it."

"Fair enough. In the meantime I want you to get acquainted with a new
girl friend of mine," and he sent out a call for Illona Potter.

"_Girl_ friend!"

"Uh-huh. Study her. Educational no end, and she may be important. Want
to compare notes with you on her later, is why I'm not giving you any
advance dope on her--here she comes."

"Mac, this is Illona," he introduced them informally. "I told them to
give you the cabin next to hers," he added, to the nurse. "I'll go with
you to be sure that everything's on the green."

It was, and the Lensman left the two together.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I'm awfully glad you're here," Illona said, shyly. "I've heard
_so_ much about you, Miss--"

"Mac to you, my dear--all of my friends call me that," the nurse broke
in. "And you don't want to believe everything you hear, especially
aboard this space can." Her lips smiled, but her eyes were faintly
troubled.

"Oh, it was nice," Illona assured her. "About what a grand person you
are, and what a wonderful couple you and Lensman Kinnison make ... why,
you really _are_ in love with him, aren't you?" This in surprise,
as she studied the nurse's face.

"Yes," unequivocally. "And you love him, too, and that makes it--"

"Good heavens, no!" the Aldebaranian exclaimed, so positively that
Clarrissa jumped.

"What? You don't? _Really?_" Gold-flecked, tawny eyes stared
intensely into engagingly candid eyes of black. Mac wished then that
she had left her Lens on, so that she could tell whether this bejeweled
brunet hussy was telling the truth or not.

"Certainly not. That's what I meant--I'm simply scared to death of him.
He's so--well--so over-powering. He's so much more--tremendous--than I
am. I didn't see how any girl could possibly love him--but I understand
now how you could, perhaps. You're sort of--terrific--yourself, you
know. I feel as though I ought to call you 'Your Magnificence' instead
of just plain Mac."

"Why, I'm no such thing!" Clarrissa exclaimed; but she softened
noticeably, none the less. "And I think that I'm going to like you a
lot."

"Oh-h-h--honestly?" Illona squealed. "It sounds too good to be true,
you're so marvelous. But if you do, I think that Civilization will be
everything that I've been afraid--_so_ afraid--that it couldn't
possibly be!"

No longer was it a feminine Lensman investigating a female zwilnik; it
was two girls--two young, intensely alive, human girls--who chattered
on and on.

Days passed. Mac learned the use of her Lens as well as any first stage
Lensman had ever known it. Then Kinnison, one of the few then existent
second stage Lensmen, began really to bear down. Since the acquirement
of the second stage of Lensmanship has been described in detail
elsewhere, it need be said here only that Clarrissa MacDougall had
mental capacity enough to take it without becoming insane. He suffered
as much as she did; after every mental bout he was as spent as she was;
but both of them stuck relentlessly to it.

As is now well known, the prime requisite of all such advanced
treatment is to know with the utmost precision exactly what knowledge
or ability is required. Mac had no idea as to what she wanted or
needed; but Kinnison did.

He could not give her everything that the Arisian had given him, of
course. Much of it was too hazy yet; more of it did not apply. He gave
her everything, however, which she could handle and which would be
of any use to her in the work she was to do; including the sense of
perception. He did it, that is, with a modicum of help; for, once or
twice, when he faltered or weakened, not knowing exactly what to do
or not being quite able to do it, a stronger mind than his was always
there.

       *       *       *       *       *

At length, approaching Tellus fast, Mac and Kim had a final conference;
the consultation of two Lensmen settling the last details of procedure
in a long-planned and highly important campaign.

"I agree with you that Lyrane II is a key planet," the nurse was
saying, thoughtfully. "It must be, to have those expeditions from
Lonabar and the as yet unknown planet 'X' centering there."

"'X' certainly, and don't forget the possibility of 'Y' and 'Z' and
maybe others," he reminded her. "The Lyrane-Lonabar linkage is the only
one we are sure of. With you on one end of that and me on the other,
it'll be funny if we can't trace out some more. While I'm building up
an authentic identity to tackle Bleeko, you'll be getting chummy with
Helen of Lyrane. That's about as far ahead as we can plan definitely
right now, since this ground-work can't be hurried too much."

"And I report to you often--frequently, in fact." Mac widened her
expressive eyes at her man.

"At least," he agreed. "And I'll report to you between times."

"Oh, Kim, it's nice, being a Lensman!" She snuggled closer. Some way
or other, the conference had become somewhat personal. "Being _en
rapport_ will be almost as good as being together--we can stand it,
that way, at least."

"It'll help a lot, ace, no fooling. That was why I was afraid to go
ahead with it on my own hook. I couldn't be sure that my feelings were
not in control, instead of my judgment--if any."

"I'd have been certain that it was your soft heart instead of your hard
head if it hadn't been for Mentor," she sighed, happily. "As it is,
though, I know that everything is on the green."

"All done with Illona?"

"Yes, the darling. She's the _sweetest_ thing, Kim--and a
storehouse of information if there ever was one. You and I know more of
Boskonian life than anyone of Civilization ever knew before, I am sure.
And it's so ghastly! We _must_ win, Kim--we simply _must_,
for the good of all creation!"

"We will." Kinnison spoke with grim finality.

"But back to Illona. She can't go with me, and she can't stay here with
Hank aboard the _Dauntless_ taking me back to Lyrane, and you
can't watch her. I'd hate to think of anything happening to her, Kim."

"It won't," he replied, comfortably. "Ilyowicz won't sleep nights until
he has her as the top-flight solo dancer in his show--even though she
doesn't have to work for a living any more."

"She will, though, I think. Don't you?"

"Probably. Anyway, a couple of Haynes' smart girls are going to be her
best friends, wherever she goes. Sort of keep an eye on her until she
learns the ropes--it won't take long. We owe her that much, I figure."

"That much, at least. You're seeing to the selling of her jewelry
yourself, aren't you?"

"No, I had a new thought on that. I'm going to buy it myself--or
rather, Cartiff is. They're making up a set of paste imitations.
Cartiff has to buy a stock somewhere; why not hers?"

"That's a thought--there's certainly enough of them to stock a
wholesaler. 'Cartiff'--I can see that sign," she snickered. "Almost
microscopic letters, severely plain, in the lower right-hand corner
of an immense plate-glass window. One gem in the middle of an acre
of black velvet. Cartiff, the most peculiar, if not quite the most
exclusive, jeweler in the Galaxy. And nobody except you and me knows
anything about him. Isn't that something?"

"Everybody will know about Cartiff pretty soon," he told her. "Found
any flaws in the scheme yet?"

"Nary a flaw." She shook her head. "That is, if none of the boys overdo
it, and I'm sure they won't. I've got a picture of it," and she
giggled merrily. "Think of a whole gang of sleuths from the homicide
division chasing poor Cartiff, and never quite catching him!"

"Uh-huh--a touching picture indeed. But there goes the signal, and
there's Tellus. We're about to land."

"Oh, I want to see!" and she started to get up.

"Look, then," pulling her down into her original place at his side.
"You've got the sense of perception now, remember; you don't need
visiplates."

And side by side, arms around each other, the two Lensmen watched the
docking of their great vessel.

       *       *       *       *       *

It landed. Jewelers came aboard with their carefully made wares.
Assured that the metal would not discolor her skin, Illona made the
exchange willingly enough. Beads were beads, to her. She could scarcely
believe that she was now independently wealthy--in fact, she forgot all
about her money after Ilyowicz had seen her dance.

"You see," she explained to Mac and Kinnison, "there were two things I
wanted to do until Hank gets back--travel around a lot and learn all
I can about your Civilization. I wanted to dance, too, but I didn't
see how I could. Now I can do all three, and get paid for doing them
besides--isn't that _marvelous_? And Mr. Ilyowicz said that you
said that it was QX. Is it, really?"

"Right," and Illona was off.

The _Dauntless_ was serviced and Mac was off, to far Lyrane.

Lensman Kinnison was supposedly off somewhere, also, when Cartiff
appeared. Cartiff, the ultra-ultra; the, oh, so exclusive! Cartiff did
not advertise. He catered, word spread fast, to only the very upper
flakes of the upper crust. Simple dignity was Cartiff's keynote, his
insidiously spread claim; the dignified simplicity of immense wealth
and impeccable social position.

What he actually achieved, however, was something subtly different. His
simplicity was just a hair off beam; his dignity was an affected, not
a natural, quality. Nobody with less than a million credits ever got
past his door, it is true. However, instead of being the real _crème
de la crème_ of Earth, Cartiff's clients were those who pretended to
belong to, or who were trying to force an entrance into, that select
stratum. Cartiff was a snob of snobs; he built up a clientele of snobs;
and, even more than in his admittedly fine and flawless gems, he dealt
in equally high-proof snobbery.

Betimes came Nadreck, the Unattached Lensman of Palain VII, and
Kinnison met him secretly at Prime Base. Soft-voiced as ever,
apologetic, diffident; even though Kim had learned that the Palainian
had a record of accomplishment as long as any one of his arms. But it
was not an act, not affectation. It was simply a racial trait, for the
intelligent and civilized race of that planet is in no sense human.
Nadreck was utterly, startlingly unhuman. In his atmosphere there was
no oxygen, in his body there flowed no aqueous blood. At his normal
body temperature neither liquid water nor gaseous oxygen could exist.

The seventh planet out from any sun would, of course, be cold, but
Kinnison had not thought particularly about the point until he felt
the bitter radiation from the heavily insulated suit of his guest;
perceived how fiercely its refrigerators were laboring to keep its
internal temperature down.

"If you will permit it, please, I will depart at once," Nadreck
pleaded, as soon as he had delivered his spool and his message. "My
heat dissipators, powerful though they are, cannot cope much longer
with this frightfully high temperature."

"QX, Nadreck--thanks a million," and the weird little monstrosity
scuttled out. "Remember, Lensman's Seal on all this stuff until Prime
Base releases it."

"Of course, Kinnison. You will understand, however, I am sure, that
none of our races of Civilization are even remotely interested in
Lonabar--it is as hot, as poisonous, as hellish generally as is Tellus
itself!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kinnison went back to Cartiff's; and very soon thereafter it became
noised abroad that Cartiff was a crook. He was a cheat, a liar, a
robber. His stones were synthetic; he made them himself. The stories
grew. He was a smuggler; he didn't have an honest gem in his shop. He
was a zwilnik, an out-and-out pirate; a red-handed murderer who, if he
wasn't there already, certainly ought to be in the big black book of
the Galactic Patrol. This wasn't just gossip, either; everybody saw and
spoke to men who had seen unspeakable things with their own eyes.

Thus Cartiff was arrested. He blasted his way out, however, before he
could be brought to trial, and the newscasters blazed with that highly
spectacular, murderous jail break. Nobody actually saw Cartiff escape,
nobody actually saw any lifeless bodies. Everybody, however, saw the
telenews broadcasts of the shattered walls and the sheeted forms; and,
since such pictures are and always have been just as convincing as
the real thing, everybody knew that there had been plenty of mangled
corpses in those ruins and that Cartiff was a fugitive murderer. Also,
everybody knew that the Patrol never gives up on a murderer.

Hence it was natural enough that the search for Cartiff, the
jeweler-murderer, should spread from planet to planet and from region
to region. Not exactly obtrusively, but inexorably, it did so spread;
until finally anyone interested in the subject could find upon any one
of a hundred million planets unmistakable evidence that the Patrol
wanted one Cartiff, description so-and-so, for murder in the first
degree.

And the Patrol was thorough. Wherever Cartiff went or how, they managed
to follow him. At first he disguised himself, changed his name, and
stayed in the legitimate jewelry business; apparently the only business
he knew. But he never could get even a start. Scarcely would his shop
open than he would be discovered and forced again to flee.

Deeper and deeper he went, then, into the noisome society of crime. A
fence now--still and always he clung to jewelry. But always and ever
the bloodhounds of the law were baying at his heels. Whatever name
he used was nosed aside and "Cartiff" they howled; so loudly that a
thousand million worlds came to know that despised and hated name.

Perforce he became a traveling fence, always on the go. He flew a
dead-black ship, ultrafast, armed and armored like a superdreadnought,
crewed--according to the newscasts--by the hardest-boiled gang of
cutthroats in the known universe. He traded in, and boasted of
trading in, the most bloodstained, the most ghost-ridden gems of a
thousand worlds. And, so trading, hurling defiance the while into
the teeth of the Patrol, establishing himself ever more firmly as
one of Civilization's cleverest and most implacable foes, he worked
zigzagwise and not at all obviously toward the unexplored spiral
arm in which the planet Lonabar lay. And as he moved farther and
farther away from the Solarian System his stock of jewels began to
change. He had always favored pearls--the lovely, glorious things so
characteristically Tellurian--and those he kept. The diamonds, however,
he traded away; likewise the emeralds, the rubies, the sapphires, and
some others. He kept and accumulated Borovan firestones, Manarkan
star drops, and a hundred other gorgeous gems, none of which would be
"beads" upon the planet which was his goal.

He visited planets only fleetingly now; the Patrol was hopelessly
out-distanced. Nevertheless, he took no chances. His villainous crew
guarded his ship; his bullies guarded him wherever he went--surrounding
him when he walked, standing behind him while he ate, sitting at either
side of the bed in which he slept. He was a king snipe now.

As such he was accosted one evening as he was about to dine in a garish
restaurant. A tall, somewhat fish-faced man in faultless evening dress
approached. His arms were at his sides, fingertips bent into the "I'm
not shooting" sign.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Captain Cartiff, I believe. May I seat myself at your table, please?"
the stranger asked, politely, in the _lingua franca_ of deep space.

Kinnison's sense of perception frisked him rapidly for concealed
weapons. He was clean. "I would be very happy, sir, to have you as my
guest," he replied, courteously.

The stranger sat down, unfolded his napkin, and delicately allowed
it to fall into his lap, all without letting either of his hands
disappear from sight, even for an instant, beneath the table's top.
He was an old and skillful hand. And during the excellent meal the two
men conversed brilliantly upon many topics, none of which were of the
least importance. After it Kinnison paid the check, despite the polite
protestations of his vis-à-vis. Then:

"I am simply a messenger, you will understand, nothing else," the guest
observed. "No. 1 has been checking up on you, and has decided to let
you come in. He will receive you tonight. The usual safeguards on both
sides, of course--I am to be your guide and guarantee."

"Very kind of him, I'm sure." Kinnison's mind raced. Who could this No.
1 be? The ape had a thought-screen on, so he was flying blind. Couldn't
be a real big shot, though, so soon--no use monkeying with him at all.
"Please convey my thanks, but also my regrets."

"What?" the other demanded. His veneer of politeness had sloughed
off; his eyes were narrow, keen, and cold. "You know what happens to
independent operators around here, don't you? Do you think that you can
fight _us_?"

"Not fight you, no." The Lensman elaborately stifled a yawn. He now had
a clue. "Simply ignore you--if you act up, smash you like bugs, that's
all. Please tell your No. 1 that I do not split my takes with anybody.
Tell him also that I am looking for a choicer location to settle down
upon than any I have found as yet. If I do not find such a place near
here, I shall move on. If I do find it I shall take it, in spite of man
or the devil."

The stranger stood up, glaring in quiet fury, but with both hands still
above the table. "You want to make it a war, then, Captain Cartiff!" he
gritted.

"Not 'Captain' Cartiff, please," Kinnison begged, dipping one paw
delicately into his finger bowl. "'Cartiff' merely, my dear fellow,
if you don't mind. Simplicity, sir, and dignity; those two are my key
words."

"Not for long," prophesied the other. "No. 1 will blast you out of the
ether before you can swap another necklace."

"The Patrol has been trying to do that for some time now, and I'm still
here," Kinnison reminded him, gently. "Caution him, please, in order to
avoid bloodshed, not to come after me in only one ship, but a fleet;
and suggest that he have something hotter than Patrol primaries before
he tackles me at all."

Surrounded by his bodyguards, Kinnison left the restaurant, and as he
walked along he reflected. Nice going, this. It would get around fast.
This No. 1 couldn't be Bleeko; but the king snipe of Lonabar and its
environs would hear the news in short order. He was now ready to go. He
would flit around a few more days--give this bunch of zwilniks a chance
to make a pass at him if they felt like calling his bluff--then on to
Lonabar.




                                  IX.


Kinnison did not walk far, nor reflect much, before he changed his mind
and retraced his steps; finding the messenger still in the restaurant.

"So you got wise to yourself and decided to crawl while the crawling's
good, eh?" he sneered, before the Lensman could say a word. "I don't
know whether the offer is still good or not."

"No--and I advise you to muffle your exhaust before somebody rams a ray
gun down your throat." Kinnison's voice was coldly level. "I came back
to tell you to tell your No. 1 that I'm calling his bluff. You know
Checuster?"

"Of course." The zwilnik was plainly discomfited.

"Come along, then, and listen, so you'll know that I'm not running a
blazer."

They sought a booth, wherein the native himself got Checuster on the
visiplate.

"Checuster, this is Cartiff." The start of surprise and the expression
of pleased interest revealed how well that name was known. "I'll be
down at your old warehouse day after tomorrow night about this time.
Pass the word around that if any of the boys have any stuff too hot
for them to handle conveniently, I'll buy it; paying for it in either
Patrol credits or bar platinum, whichever they like."

He then turned to the messenger. "Did you get that straight, Lizard
Puss?"

The man nodded.

"Relay it to No. 1," Kinnison ordered and strode off. This time he got
to his ship, which took off at once.

Cartiff had never made a habit of wearing visible arms, and his guards,
while undoubtedly fast gunmen, were apparently only that. Therefore
there was no reason for No. 1 to suppose that his mob would have any
noteworthy difficulty in cutting this upstart, Cartiff, down. He was,
however, surprised; for Cartiff did not come afoot or unarmed.

Instead, it was an armored car that brought the intruding fence through
the truck entrance into the old warehouse. Not a car, either; it was
more like a twenty-ton tank except for the fact that it ran upon
wheels, not treads. It was screened like a cruiser; it mounted a
battery of projectors whose energies, it was clear to any discerning
eye, nothing short of battle screen could handle. The thing rolled
quietly to a stop, a door swung open, and Kinnison emerged. He was
neither unarmed nor unarmored now. Instead, he wore a full suit of G-P
armor or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and carried a semiportable
projector.

"You will excuse the seeming discourtesy, men," he announced, "when I
tell you that a certain No. 1 has informed me that he will blast me
out of the ether before I swap a necklace on this planet. Stand clear,
please, until we see whether he meant business or was just warming up
his jets. Now, No. 1, if you're around, come and get it!"

Apparently the challenged party was not present, for no overt move was
made. Neither could Kinnison's sense of perception discover any sign of
unfriendly activity within its range. Of mind reading there was none,
for every man upon the floor was, as usual, both masked and screened.

Business was slack at first, for those present were not bold souls and
the Lensman's overwhelmingly superior armament gave them very seriously
to doubt his intentions. Many of them, in fact, had fled precipitately
at the first sight of the armored truck, and of these more than a
few--No. 1's thugs, no doubt--did not return. The others, however, came
filtering back as they perceived that there was to be no warfare and as
cupidity overcame their timorousness. And as it became evident to all
that the stranger's armament was for defense only, that he was there to
buy or to barter and not to kill and thus to steal, Cartiff trafficked
ever more and more briskly, as the evening wore on, in the hottest gems
of the planet.

Nor did he step out of character for a second. He was Cartiff the
fence, all the time. He drove hard bargains, but not too hard. He knew
jewels thoroughly by this time, he knew the code, and he followed it
rigorously. He would give a thousand Patrol credits, in currency good
upon any planet of Civilization or in bar platinum good anywhere, for
an article worth five thousand, but which was so badly wanted by the
law that its then possessor could not dispose of it at all. Or, in
barter, he would swap for that article another item, worth fifteen
hundred or so, but which was not hot--at least, not upon that planet.
Fair enough--so fair that it was almost morning before the silently
running truck slid into its storage inside the dead-black spaceship.

Then, in so far as No. 1, the Patrol, and Civilization were concerned,
Cartiff and his outfit simply vanished. The zwilnik subchief hunted him
viciously for a space, then bragged of how he had run him out of the
region. The Patrol, as usual, bided its time, watching alertly. The
general public forgot him completely in the next sensation to arise.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fairly close although he then was to the rim of the Galaxy, Kinnison
did not take any chances at all of detection in a line toward that rim.
The spiral arm beyond Rift 85 was unexplored. It had been of so little
interest to Civilization that even its various regions were nameless
upon the charts, and the Lensman wanted it to remain that way, at
least for the time being. Therefore he left the Galaxy in as nearly
a straight nadir line as he could without coming within detection
distance of any trade route. Then, making a prodigious loop, so as to
enter the spiral arm from the nadir direction, he threw Nadreck's map
into the pilot tank and began the computations which would enable him
to place correctly in that three-dimensional chart the brilliant point
of light which represented his ship.

In this work he was ably assisted by his chief pilot. He did not have
Henderson now, but he did have Watson, who rated No. 2 only by the
hair-splitting of the supreme Board of Examiners. Such hair-splitting
was, of course, necessary: otherwise no difference at all could have
been found within the ranks of the first fifty of the Patrol's master
pilots, to say nothing of the first three or four. And the rest of the
crew did whatever they could.

For it was only in the newscasts that Cartiff's crew was one of
murderous and villainous pirates. They were, in fact, volunteers; and,
since everyone is familiar with what that means in the Patrol, that
statement is as efficient as a book would be.

The chart was sketchy and incomplete, of course; around the flying ship
were hundreds, yes, thousands, of stars which were not in the chart
at all; but Nadreck had furnished enough reference points so that the
pilots could compute their orientation. No need to fear detectors now,
in these wild, waste spaces; they set a right-line course for Lonabar
and followed it.

As soon as Kinnison could make out the continental outlines of the
planet upon the plates he took over control, as he alone of the crew
was upon familiar ground. He knew everything about Lonabar that Illona
had ever learned; and, although the girl was a total loss as an
astronaut, she did know her geography.

Kinnison docked his ship boldly at the spaceport of Lonia, the planet's
largest city and its capital. With equal boldness he registered as
"Cartiff," filling in some of the blank spaces in the spaceport's
routine registry form--not quite truthfully, perhaps--and blandly
ignoring others. The armored truck was hoisted out of the hold and made
its way to Lonia's largest bank, into which it disgorged a staggering
total of bar platinum, as well as sundry coffers of hard, gray steel.
These last items went directly into a private vault, under the watchful
eyes and ready weapons of Kinnison's own guards.

The truck rolled swiftly back to the spaceport and Cartiff's ship took
off--it did not need servicing at the time--ostensibly for another
planet unknown to the Patrol, actually to go, inert, into a closed
orbit around Lonabar and near enough to it to respond to a call in
seconds.

Immense wealth can command speed of construction and service. Hence, in
a matter of days, Cartiff was again in business. His salon was, upon a
larger and grander scale, a repetition of his Tellurian shop. It was
simple, and dignified, and blatantly expensive. Costly rugs covered the
floor, impeccable works of art adorned the walls, and three precisely
correct, flawlessly groomed clerks displayed, with the exactly right
air of condescending humility, Cartiff's wares before those who
wished to view them. Cartiff himself was visible, ensconced within a
magnificent plate-glass-and-gold office in the rear, but he did not
ordinarily have anything to do with customers. He waited; nor did he
wait long before there happened that which he expected.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the superperfect clerks coughed slightly into a microphone.

"A gentleman insists upon seeing you personally, sir," he announced.

"Very well, I will see him now. Show him in, please," and the visitor
was ceremoniously ushered into the Presence.

"This is a very nice place you have here, Mr. Cartiff, but did it ever
occur to you that--"

"It never did and it never will," Kinnison snapped. He still lolled at
ease in his chair, but his eyes were frosty and his voice carried an
icy sting. "I quit paying protection to little shots a good many years
ago. Or are you from Menjo Bleeko?"

The visitor's eyes widened. He gasped, as though even to utter that
dread name were sheer sacrilege. "No, but No.--"

"Save it, slob!" The cold venom of that crisp but quiet order set the
fellow back onto his heels. "I am thoroughly sick of this thing of
every half-baked tinhorn zwilnik in space calling himself No. 1 as
soon as he can steal enough small change to hire an ape to walk around
behind him packing a couple of ray guns. If that louse of a boss of
yours has a name, use it. If he hasn't, call him 'The Louse.' But
cancel that No. 1 stuff. In my book there is no No. 1 in the whole
damned Universe. Doesn't your mob know yet who and what Cartiff is?"

"What do we care?" The visitor gathered courage visibly. "A good big
bomb--"

"Clam it, you squint-eyed slime-lizard!" The Lensman's voice was still
low and level, but his tone bit deep and his words drilled in. "That
stuff?" he waved inclusively at the magnificent hall. "Sucker bait,
nothing more. The whole works cost only a hundred thousand. Chicken
feed. It wouldn't even nick the edge of the roll if you blew up ten
of them. Bomb it any time you feel the urge. But take notice that it
would make me sore--plenty sore--and that I would do things about it;
because I'm in a big game, not this petty-larceny racketeering and
chiseling that your mob is doing, and when a toad gets in my way I step
on it. So go back and tell that No. 1 of yours to case a job a lot more
thoroughly than he did this one before he starts throwing his weight
around. Now scram, before I feed your carcass to the other rats around
here!"

Kinnison grinned inwardly as the completely deflated gangster slunk
out. Good going. It wouldn't take long for _that_ blast to get
action. This little-shot No. 1 wouldn't dare to lift a hand, but Bleeko
would have to. That was axiomatic, from the very nature of things. It
was very definitely Bleeko's move next. The only moot point was as to
which his nibs would do first--talk or act. He would talk, the Lensman
thought. The prime reward of being a hot shot was to have people know
it and bend the knee. Therefore, although Cartiff's salon was at all
times in complete readiness for any form of violence, Kinnison was
practically certain that Menjo Bleeko would send an emissary before he
started the rough stuff.

He did, and shortly. A big, massive man was the messenger; a man
wearing consciously an aura of superiority, of boundless power and
force. He did not simply come into the shop--he made an entrance. All
three of the clerks literally cringed before him, and at his casually
matter-of-fact order they hazed the already uncomfortable customers
out of the shop and locked the doors. Then one of them escorted the
visitor, with a sickening servility he had never thought of showing
toward his employer and with no thought of consulting Cartiff's wishes
in the matter, into Cartiff's private sanctum. Kinnison knew at first
glance that this was Ghundrith Khars, Bleeko's right-hand man. Khars,
the notorious, who kneeled only to his supremacy, Menjo Bleeko himself;
and to whom everyone else upon Lonabar and its subsidiary planets
kneeled. The big shot waved a hand and the clerk fled in disorder.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Stand up, worm, and give me that--" Khars began, loftily.

"Silence, fool! Attention!" Kinnison rasped, in such a drivingly
domineering tone that the stupefied messenger obeyed involuntarily.
The Lensman, psychologist par excellence that he was, knew that this
man, with a background of twenty years of blind, dumb obedience to his
every order, simply could not cope with a positive and self-confident
opposition. "You will not be here long enough to sit down, even if I
permitted it in my presence, which I very definitely do not. You came
here to give me certain instructions and orders. Instead, you are going
to listen merely; I will do all the talking.

"First. The only reason you did not die as you entered this place is
that neither you nor Menjo Bleeko knows any better. The next one of you
to approach me in this fashion dies in his tracks.

"Second. Knowing as I do the workings of that which your bloated leech
of a Menjo Bleeko calls his brain, I know that he has a spy-ray on us
now. I am not blocking it out, as I want him to receive ungarbled--and
I know that you would not have the courage to transmit it accurately to
his foulness--everything I have to say.

"Third. I have been searching for a long time for a planet that I like.
This is it. I fully intend to stay here as long as I please. There is
plenty of room here for both of us without crowding.

"Fourth. Being essentially a peaceable man, I came in peace and
I prefer a peaceable arrangement. However, let it be distinctly
understood that I truckle to no man or entity, dead, living, or yet to
be born.

"Fifth. Tell Bleeko from me to consider very carefully and very
thoroughly an iceberg; its every phase and aspect. That is all--you may
go."

"Bub-bub-but," the big man stammered. "An _iceberg_?"

"An iceberg, yes--just that," Kinnison assured him. "Don't bother to
try to think about it yourself, since you've got nothing to think
with. But his putrescence, Bleeko, even though he is a mental, moral,
and intellectual slime-lizard, can think--at least in a narrow, mean,
small-souled sort of way--and I advise him in all seriousness to do so.
Now get out of here, before I burn the seat of your pants off."

Khars got, gathering together visibly the shreds of his self-esteem as
he did so, the clerks staring the while in dumfounded amazement. Then
they huddled together, eying the owner of the establishment with a
brand-new respect--a subservient respect, heavily laced with awe.

"Business as usual, boys," he counseled them, cheerfully enough. "They
won't blow up the place until after dark."

The clerks resumed their places then and trade did go on, after a
fashion; but Cartiff's force had not recovered its wonted blasé aplomb
even at closing time.

"Just a moment." The proprietor called his employees together and,
reaching into his pocket, distributed among them a sheaf of currency.
"In case you don't find the shop here in the morning, you may consider
yourselves on vacation at full pay until I call you."

They departed, and Kinnison went back to his office. His first care
was to set up a spy-ray block--a block which had been purchased upon
Lonabar and which was, therefore, certainly pervious to Bleeko's
instruments. Then he prowled about, apparently in deep and anxious
thought. But as he prowled, the eavesdroppers did not, could not know
that his weight set into operation certain devices of his own highly
secret installation, or that when he finally left the shop no really
serious harm could be done to it except by an explosion sufficiently
violent to demolish the neighborhood for blocks around. The front wall
would go, of course. He wanted it to go; otherwise there would be
neither reason nor excuse for doing that which for days he had been
ready to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

Since Cartiff lived rigorously to schedule and did not have a spy-ray
block in his room, Bleeko's methodical and efficient observers always
turned off their beams when the observee went to sleep. This night,
however, Kinnison was not really asleep, and as soon as the ray went
off he acted. He threw on his clothes and sought the street, where he
took a taxi to a certain airport. There he climbed into a rocketplane
which was already warmed up and waiting for him.

Hanging from her screaming props the fantastically powerful little
plane bulleted upward in a vertical climb, and as she began to slow
down from lack of air her projectors took over. A tractor reached
out, seizing her gently. Her wings retracted and she was drawn into
Cartiff's great spaceship; which, a few minutes later, hung poised
above one of the largest, richest jewel mines of Lonabar.

This mine was, among others, Menjo Bleeko's personal property. Since
overproduction would glut the market, it was being worked by only one
shift of men--the day shift. It was now black night; the usual guards
were the only men upon the premises. The big black ship hung there and
waited.

"But suppose they don't, Kim?" Watson asked.

"Then we'll wait here every night until they do," Kinnison replied,
grimly. "But they'll do it tonight, for all the tea in China. They'll
have to, to save Bleeko's face."

And they did. In a couple of hours the observer at a high-powered plate
reported that Cartiff's salon had just been blown to bits. Then the
Patrolmen went into action.

Bleeko's mobsmen hadn't killed anybody at Cartiff's, therefore the
Tellurians wouldn't kill anyone here. Hence, while ten immense
beam-dirigible torpedoes were being piloted carefully down shafts and
along tunnels into the deepest bowels of the workings, the guards were
given warning that, if they got into their fliers fast enough, they
could be fifty miles away and probably safe by zero time. They hurried.

At zero time the torpedoes let go as one. The entire planet quivered
under the trip-hammer shock of detonating duodec. For those frightful,
those appalling charges had been placed, by computations checked and
rechecked, precisely where they would wreak the most havoc, the utmost
possible measure of sheer destruction. Much of the rock, however hard,
around each one of those incredible centers of demolition was simply
blasted out of existence. That is the way duodec, in massive charges,
works. Matter simply cannot get out of its way in the first instants of
its detonation; matter's own inherent inertia forbids.

Most of the rock between the bombs was pulverized the merest fraction
of a second later. Then, the distortedly spherical explosion fronts
merging, the total incomprehensible pressure was exerted as almost pure
lift. The field above the mine works lifted, then; practically as a
mass at first. But it could not remain as such. It could not move fast
enough as a whole; nor did it possess even a minute fraction of the
tensile strength necessary to withstand the stresses being applied.
Those stresses, the forces of the explosions, were to all intents and
purposes irresistible. The crust disintegrated violently and almost
instantaneously. Rock crushed grindingly against rock, practically the
whole mass reducing in the twinkling of an eye to an impalpable powder.

Upward and outward, then, the ragingly compressed gases of detonation
drove, hurling everything before them. Chunks blew out sidewise, flying
for miles; the mind-staggeringly enormous volume of dust was hurled
upward clear into the stratosphere.

Finally that awful dust cloud was wafted aside, revealing through
its thinning haze a strangely and hideously altered terrain. No sign
remained of the buildings or the mechanisms of Bleeko's richest mine.
No vestige was left to show that anything built by or pertaining to man
had ever existed there. Where those works had been, there now yawned
an absolutely featureless crater; a crater whose sheer geometrical
perfection of figure revealed with shocking clarity the magnitude of
the cataclysmic forces which had wrought there.

Kinnison, looking blackly down at that crater, did not feel the glow of
satisfaction which comes of a good deed well done. He detested it--it
made him sick at the stomach. But, since he had had it to do, he had
done it. Why in all the nine hells of Valeria did he have to be a
Lensman, anyway?

Back to Lonia, then, the Lensman made his resentful way, and back to
bed.

And in the morning, early, workmen began the reconstruction of
Cartiff's place of business.




                                  X.


Since Kinnison's impenetrable shields of force had confined the damage
to the store's front, it was not long before Cartiff's reopened.
Business was and remained brisk; not only because of what had happened,
but also because Cartiff's top-lofty and arrogant snobbishness had
an irresistible appeal to the upper layers of Lonabar's peculiarly
stratified humanity. The Lensman, however, paid little enough attention
to business. Outwardly, seated at his ornate desk in haughty grandeur,
he was calmness itself, but inwardly he was far from serene.

If he had figured things right, and he was pretty sure that he had,
it was up to Bleeko to make the next move, and it would pretty nearly
have to be a peaceable one. There was enough doubt about it, however,
to make the Lensman a bit jittery inside. Also, from the fact that
everybody having any weight at all wore thought-screens, it was almost
a foregone conclusion that they had been warned against, and were on
the lookout for, THE Lensman--that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned
Tellurian Lensman who had already done so much hurt to the Boskonian
cause. That they now thought that one to be a well-hidden, unknown
director of Lensmen, and not an actual operative, was little
protection. If he made one slip, they'd have him, cold.

He hadn't slipped yet, they didn't suspect him yet; he was sure
of those points. With these people to suspect was to act, and his
world-circling ship, equipped with every scanning, spying, and
eavesdropping device known to science, would have informed him
instantly of any untoward development anywhere upon or near the planet.
And his fight with Bleeko was, after all, natural enough and very much
in character. It was of the very essence of Boskonian culture that
king snipes should do each other to death with whatever weapons came
readiest to hand. The underdog was always trying to kill the upper, and
if the latter was not strong enough to protect his loot, he deserved
everything he got. A callous philosophy, it is true, but one truly
characteristic of Civilization's inveterate foes.

The higher-ups never interfered. Their own skins were the only ones in
which they were interested. They would, Kinnison reflected, probably
check back on him, just to insure their own safety, but they would
not take sides in this brawl if they were convinced that he was, as
he appeared to be, a struggling young racketeer making his way up the
ladder of fame and fortune as best he could. Let them check--Cartiff's
past had been fabricated especially to stand up under precisely that
investigation, no matter how rigid it were to be!

Hence Kinnison waited, as calmly as might be, for Bleeko to move. There
was no particular hurry, especially since Chris was finding heavy
going and thick ether at her end of the line, too. They had been in
communication at least once every day, usually oftener; and Clarrissa
had reported seethingly, in near-masculine, almost deep-space verbiage,
that that damned red-headed hussy of a Helen was a hard nut to crack.

Kinnison grinned sourly every time he thought of Lyrane II. Those
matriarchs certainly were a rum lot. They were a pigheaded,
self-centered, mulishly stubborn bunch of cockeyed knotheads, he
decided. Non-galaxy minded; as shortsightedly antisocial as a flock
of mad Radeligian cateagles. He'd better--no, he hadn't better,
either--he'd have to lay off. If Chris, with all her potency and
charm, with all her drive and force of will, with all her sheer power
of mind and of Lens, couldn't pierce their armor, what chance did any
other entity of Civilization have of doing it? Particularly any male
creature? He'd like to half wring their beautiful necks, all of them;
but that wouldn't get him to the first check station, either. He'd just
have to wait until Chris broke through the matriarchs' crust--she'd do
it, too, by Klono's prehensile tail!--and then they'd really ride the
beam.

       *       *       *       *       *

So Kinnison waited--and waited--and waited. When he got tired of
waiting he gave a few more lessons in snobbishness and in the
gentle art of self-preservation to the promising young Lonabarian
thug whom he had selected to inherit the business, lock, stock, and
barrel--including good will, if any--if, as, and when he was done
with it. Then he waited some more; waited, in fact, until Bleeko was
forced, by his silent pressure, to act.

It was not an overt act, nor an unfriendly--he simply called him up on
the visiphone.

"What do you think you're trying to do?" Bleeko demanded, his darkly
handsome face darker than ever with wrath.

"You." Kinnison made succinct answer. "You should have taken my advice
about pondering the various aspects of an iceberg."

"Bah!" the other snorted. "That silliness?"

"Not as silly as you think. It was a warning, Bleeko, that that which
appears above the surface is but a very small portion of my total
resources. But you could not or would not learn by precept; you had
to have it the hard way. Apparently, however, you have learned. That
you have not been able to locate my forces I am certain. I am almost
as sure that you do not want to try me again, at least until you have
found out what you do not know. But I can give you no more time--you
must decide now, Bleeko, whether it is to be peace or war between us. I
still prefer a peaceful settlement, with an equitable division of the
spoils; but if you want war, so be it."

"I have decided upon peace," the big shot said, and the effort of it
almost choked him. "I, Menjo Bleeko the Supreme, will give you a place
beside me. Come to me here, at once, so that we may discuss the terms
of peace."

"We will discuss them now," Kinnison insisted.

"Impossible! Barred and shielded as this room is--"

"It would be," Kinnison interrupted with a nod, "for you to make such
an admission as you have just made."

"--I do not trust unreservedly this communication line. If you join me
now, you may do so in peace. If you do not come to me, here and now, it
is war to the death."

"Fair enough, at that," the Lensman admitted. "After all, you've got to
save your face, and I haven't--yet. And if I team up with you I can't
very well stay out of your palace forever. But before I come there I
want to give you three things--a reminder, a caution, and a warning.
I remind you that our first exchange of amenities cost you a thousand
times as much as it did me. I caution you to consider again, and more
carefully this time, the iceberg. I warn you that if we again come into
conflict you will lose not merely a mine, but everything you have,
including your life. So see to it that you lay no traps for me. I come."

He went out into the shop. "Take over, Sport," he told his gangster
protégé. "I'm going up to the palace to see Menjo Bleeko. If I'm not
back in two hours, and if your grapevine reports that Bleeko is out of
the picture, what I've left in the store here is yours until I come
back and take it away from you."

"I'll take care of it, boss--thanks," and the Lensman knew that in true
Lonabarian gratitude the youth was already, mentally, slipping a long,
keen knife between his ribs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Without a qualm, but with every sense stretched to the limit and in
instant readiness for any eventuality, Kinnison took a cab to the
palace and entered its heavily guarded portals. He was sure that they
would not cut him down before he got to Bleeko's room--that room would
surely be the one chosen for the execution. Nevertheless, he took
no chances. He was supremely ready to slay instantly every guard
within range of his sense of perception at the first sign of inimical
activity. Long before he came to them, he made sure that the beams
which were set to search him for concealed weapons were really search
beams and not lethal vibrations.

And as he passed those beams each one of them reported him clean.
Rings, of course; a stickpin, and various other items of adornment. But
Cartiff, the great jeweler, would be expected to wear very large and
exceedingly expensive gems. And the beam has never been projected which
could penetrate those Worsel-designed, Thorndyke-built walls of force
to show that any one of those flamboyant gems was not precisely what it
appeared to be.

Searched, combed minutely, millimeter by cubic millimeter, Kinnison was
escorted by a heavily armed quartet of Bleeko's personal guards into
his supremacy's private study. All four bowed as he entered--but they
strode in behind him, then shut and locked the door.

"You fool!" Bleeko gloated from behind his massive desk. His face
flamed with sadistic joy and anticipation. "You trusting, greedy fool!
I have you exactly where I want you now. How easy! How simple! This
entire building is screened and shielded--by _my_ screens and
shields. Your friends and accomplices, whoever or wherever they are,
can neither see you nor know what is to happen to you. If your ship
attempts your rescue, it will be blasted out of the ether. I will,
personally, gouge out your eyes, tear off your nails, strip your
hide from your quivering carcass--" Bleeko was now, in his raging
exaltation, fairly frothing at the mouth.

"That would be a good trick if you could do it," Kinnison remarked,
coldly. "But the real fact is that you haven't even tried to use that
pint of blue mush that you call a brain. Do you think that I am an
utter idiot? I put on an act and you fell for it--"

"Seize him, guards! Silence his yammering--tear out his tongue!" His
supremacy shrieked, leaping out of his chair as though possessed.

The guards tried manfully, but before they could touch him--before
any one of them could take one full step--they dropped. Without being
touched by material object or visible beam, without their proposed
victim having moved a muscle, they died and fell. Died instantly, in
their tracks; died completely, effortlessly, painlessly, with every
molecule of the all-important compound without which life cannot even
momentarily exist shattered instantaneously into its degradation
products; died not knowing even that they died.

Bleeko was shaken, but he was not beaten. Needle-ray men,
sharp-shooters all, were stationed behind those walls. Gone now the
dictator's intent to torture his victim to death. Slaying him out
of hand would have to suffice. He flashed a signal to the concealed
marksmen, but that order, too, went unobeyed. For Kinnison had
perceived the hidden gunmen long since, and before any of them could
align his sights or press his firing stud each one of them ceased to
live. The zwilnik then flipped on his communicator and gobbled orders.
Uselessly; for death sped ahead. Before any mind at any switchboard
could grasp the meaning of the signal, it could no longer think.

"You fiend!" Bleeko screamed, in mad panic now, and wrenched open a
drawer in order to seize a weapon of his own. Too late. The Lensman
had already leaped, and as he landed he struck--not gently. Lonabar's
tyrant collapsed upon the thick-piled rug in a writhing, gasping heap;
but he was not unconscious. To suit Kinnison's purpose he could not be
unconscious; he had to be in full possession of his mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Lensman crooked one brawny arm around the zwilnik's neck in an
unbreakable strangle hold and flipped off his thought-screen. Physical
struggles were of no avail: the attacker knew exactly what to do to
certain nerves and ganglia to paralyze all such activity. Mental
resistance was equally futile against the overwhelmingly superior power
of the Tellurian's mind. Then, his subject quietly passive, Kinnison
tuned in and began his search for information. Began it--and swore
soulfully. This _couldn't_ be so--it didn't make any kind of
sense--but there it was.

The ape simply didn't know a thing about any ramification whatever
of the vast culture to which Civilization was opposed. He knew all
about Lonabar and the rest of the domain which he had ruled with such
an iron hand. He knew much--altogether too much--about humanity and
Civilization, and plainly to be read in his mind were the methods by
which he had obtained those knowledges and the brutally efficient
precautions he had taken to make sure that Civilization would not, in
turn, learn of him.

Kinnison scowled blackly. His deductions simply _couldn't_ be that
far off--and besides, it wasn't reasonable that this guy was the top or
that he had done all that work on his own account. He pondered deeply,
staring unseeing at Bleeko's placid face; and as he pondered, some of
the jig-saw blocks of the puzzle began to click into a pattern.

Then, ultracarefully, with the utmost nicety of which he was capable,
he again fitted his mind to that of the dictator and began to trace,
one at a time, the lines of memory. Searching, probing, coursing
backward and forward along those deeply buried time tracks, until at
last he found the breaks and the scars for which he was hunting. For,
as he had told Illona, a radical mind operation cannot be performed
without leaving scars. It is true that upon cold, unfriendly Jarnevon,
after Worsel had so operated upon Kinnison's mind, Kinnison himself
could not perceive that any work had been done. But that, be it
remembered, was before any actual change had occurred; before the
compulsion had been applied. The false memories supplied by Worsel were
still latent, nonexistent; the true memory chains, complete and intact,
were still in place.

This lug's brain had been operated upon, Kinnison now knew, and by an
expert. What the compulsion was, what combination of thought stimuli it
was that would restore those now nonexistent knowledges, Kinnison had
utterly no means of finding out. Bleeko himself, even subconsciously,
did not know. It was, it had to be, something external, a thought
pattern impressed upon Bleeko's mind by the Boskonian higher-up
whenever he wanted to use him; and to waste time in trying to solve
_that_ problem would be the sheerest folly. Nor could he discover
how that compulsion had been or could be applied. If he got his orders
from the Boskonian high command direct, there would have to be an
intergalactic communicator; and it would in all probability be right
here, in Bleeko's private rooms. No force-ball, or anything else that
could take its place, was to be found. Therefore Bleeko was, probably,
merely another Regional Director, and took orders from someone here in
the First Galaxy.

Lyrane? The possibility jarred Kinnison. No real probability pointed
that way yet, however; it was simply a possibility, born of his own
anxiety. He couldn't worry about it--yet.

His study of the zwilnik's mind, unproductive although it was of the
desired details of things Boskonian, had yielded one highly important
fact. His supremacy of Lonabar had sent at least one expedition to
Lyrane II; yet there was no present memory in his mind that he had ever
done so. Kinnison had scanned those files with surpassing care, and
knew positively that Bleeko did not now know even that such a planet as
Lyrane II existed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Could he, Kinnison, be wrong? Could somebody other than Menjo Bleeko
have sent that ship? Or those ships, since it was not only possible,
but highly probable, that that voyage was not an isolated instance?
No, he decided instantly. Illona's knowledge was far too detailed and
exact. Nothing of such importance would be or could be done without the
knowledge and consent of Lonabar's dictator. And the fact that he did
not now remember it was highly significant. It meant--it _must_
mean--that the new Boskone or whoever was back of Boskone considered
the solar system of Lyrane of such vital importance that knowledge
of it must never, under any circumstances, get to Star A Star, the
detested, hated, and feared Director of Lensmen of the Galactic Patrol!
And Mac was on Lyrane II--ALONE! She had been safe enough so far, but--

"Chris!" he sent her an insistent thought.

"Yes, Kim?" came flashing answer.

"Thank Klono and Noshabkeming! You're QX, then?"

"Why, of course. Why shouldn't I be, the same as I was this morning?"

"Things have changed since then," he assured her, grimly. "I've finally
cracked things open here, and I find that Lonabar is simply a dead
end. It's a feeder for Lyrane, nothing else. It's not a certainty, of
course, but there's a very distinct possibility that Lyrane is IT. If
it is, I don't need to tell you that you're on a mighty hot spot. So
I want you to quit whatever you're doing and run. Hide. Crawl into a
hole and pull it in after you. Get into one of Helen's deepest crypts
and have somebody sit on the lid. And do it right now--five minutes ago
would have been better."

"Why, Kim!" she giggled. "Everything here is exactly as it has always
been. And surely, you wouldn't have a Lensman hide, would you? Would
you, yourself?"

That question was, they both knew, unanswerable. "That's different,"
he, of course, protested, but he knew that it was not. "Well, anyway,
be careful," he insisted. "More careful than you ever were before in
your life. Use everything you've got, every second, and if you notice
anything, however small, the least bit out of the way, let me know,
right then."

"I'll do that. You're coming, of course." It was a statement, not a
question.

"I'll say I am--in force! 'By, Chris--BE CAREFUL!" and he snapped the
line. He had a lot to do. He had to act fast, and had to be right--and
he couldn't take all day in deciding, either.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kinnison's mind flashed back over what he had done. Could he cover up?
Should he cover up, even if he could? Yes and no. Better not even try
to cover Cartiff up, he decided. Leave that trail just as it was; wide
and plain--up to a certain point. This point, right here. Cartiff would
disappear here, in Bleeko's palace.

He was done with Cartiff, anyway. They would smell a rat, of course--it
stunk to high heaven. They might not--they probably would not--believe
that he had died in the ruins of the palace, but they wouldn't
_know_ that he hadn't. And they would think that he hadn't found
out a thing, and he would keep them thinking so as long as he could.
The young thug in Cartiff's would help, too, all unconsciously. He
would assume the name and station, of course, and fight with everything
Kinnison had taught him. That _would_ help--Kinnison grinned as he
realized just how much it would help.

The real Cartiff would have to vanish as completely, as absolutely
without a trace as was humanly possible. They would, of course, figure
out in time that Cartiff had done whatever was done in the palace, but
it was up to him to see to it that they could never find out how it was
done. Wherefore he took from Menjo's mind every iota of knowledge which
might conceivably be of use to him thereafter. Then Menjo Bleeko died.
His corpse fell into a heap upon the floor and the Lensman strode along
corridors and down stairways. And wherever he went, there Death went
also.

This killing griped Kinnison to the core of his being, but it had
to be. The fate of all Civilization might very well depend upon the
completeness of his butchery this day; upon the sheer mercilessness
of his extermination of every foe who might be able to cast any light,
however dim, upon what he had just done.

Straight to the palace arsenal he went, where he labored briefly at
the filling of a bin with bombs. A minute more to set a timer and he
was done. Out of the building he ran. No one stayed him; nor did any,
later, say that they had seen him go. He dumped a dead man out of a
car and drove it away at reckless speed. Even at that, however, he was
almost too slow--hurtling stones from the dynamited palace showered
down scarcely a hundred feet behind his screeching wheels.

He headed for the spaceport; then, changing his mind, braked savagely
as he sent Lensed instructions to Watson. He felt no compunction about
fracturing the rules and regulations made and provided for the landing
of spaceships at spaceports everywhere by having his vessel make a hot
blast, unauthorized, and quite possibly highly destructive landing
to pick him up. Nor did he fear pursuit. The big shots were, for the
most part, dead; the survivors and the middle-sized shots were too
busy by far to waste time over an irregular incident at a spaceport.
Hence nobody would give anybody any orders, and without explicit orders
no Lonabarian officer would act. No, there would be no pursuit. But
They--the Ones Kinnison was after--would interpret truly every such
irregular incident; wherefore there must not be any.

Thus it came about that when the speeding ground car was upon an empty
stretch of highway, with nothing in sight in any direction, a spaceship
eased down upon muffled under jets directly above it. A tractor beam
reached down; car and man were drawn upward and into the vessel's
hold. Kinnison did not want the car, but he could not leave it there.
Since many cars had been blown out of existence with Bleeko's palace,
for this one to disappear would be natural enough; but for it to be
found abandoned out in the open country would be a highly irregular and
an all-too-revealing occurrence.

Upward through atmosphere and stratosphere the black cruiser climbed;
out into interstellar space she flashed. Then, while Watson coaxed the
sleek flier to do even better than her prodigious best, Kinnison seated
himself at the ultrabeam communicator and drilled a beam to Prime Base
and Port Admiral Haynes.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Lens-to-Lens, chief, please," Kinnison cautioned, when the handsome
old face, surmounted now by a shock of bushy gray hair, appeared upon
his plate. "Didn't want to interrupt anything important, is why I
called you through the office instead of direct."

"You always have the right of way, Kim, you know that--you're the most
important thing in the Galaxy right now," Haynes said, soberly.

"Well, a minute or so wouldn't make any difference--not _that_
much difference, anyway," Kinnison replied, uncomfortably. "I don't
like to Lens you unless I have to," and he began his report.

Scarcely had he started, however, when he felt a call impinge upon his
own Lens. Clarrissa was calling him from Lyrane II.

"Just a sec, admiral!" he thought, rapidly. "Come in, Chris--make it a
three-way with Admiral Haynes!"

"You told me to report anything unusual, no matter what," the girl
began. "Well, I finally managed to get almost chummy with Helen, and
absolutely the only unusual thing I can find out about the whole planet
or race is that the death rate from airplane crashes began to go up
awhile ago and is still rising. I don't see how that fact can have any
bearing, but am reporting it as per instructions."

"Hm-m-m. What kind of crashes?" Kinnison asked.

"That's the unusual feature of it. Nobody knows--they just disappear."

"WHAT?" Kinnison yelled the thought, so forcibly that both Clarrissa
and Haynes winced under its impact.

"Why, yes," she replied, innocently. "But I don't see yet that it
means--"

"It means that you _do_, right now, crawl into the deepest,
most heavily thought-screened hole in Lyrane and stay there until I,
personally, come and dig you out," he replied, grimly. "It means,
admiral, that I want Worsel and Tregonsee as fast as I can get
them--not orders, of course, but very, _very_ urgent requests. And
I want Van Buskirk and his gang of Valerians, and Grand Fleet, with all
the trimmings, within easy striking distance of Dunstan's Region as
fast as you can possibly get them there. And I want--"

"Why all the excitement, Kim?" and "What do you know, son?" The two
interruptions came almost as one.

"I don't _know_ anything." Kinnison emphasized the verb very
strongly. "However, I suspect a lot. Everything, in fact, grading
downward from the Eich."

"But they were all destroyed, weren't they?" the girl protested.

"Far from it." This from Haynes. "Would the destruction of Tellus do
away with all mankind? I am beginning to think that the Eich are to
Boskonia exactly what we are to Civilization."



"So am I," Kinnison agreed. "And, such being the case, will you please
get hold of Nadreck of Palain VII for me? I don't know his pattern well
enough to Lens him from here."

"Why?" Clarrissa asked, curiously.

"Because he's a frigid, poison-breathing second stage Gray Lensman,"
Kinnison explained. "As such he is much closer to the Eich, in every
respect, than we are, and may very well have an angle that we haven't."
And in a few minutes the Palainian Lensman became _en rapport_
with the group.

"An interesting development, truly," his soft thought came in almost
wistfully when the status quo had been made clear to him. "I fear
greatly that I cannot be of any use, but I am not doing anything of
importance at the moment and will be very glad indeed to give you
whatever slight assistance may be possible to one of my small powers. I
come at speed to Lyrane II."




                                  XI.


Kinnison had not underestimated the power and capacity of his as
yet unknown opposition. Well it was for him and for his Patrol that
he was learning to think; for, as has already been made clear, this
phase of the conflict was not essentially one of physical combat.
Material encounters did occur, it is true, but they were comparatively
unimportant. Basically, fundamentally, it was brain against brain; the
preliminary but nevertheless prodigious skirmishing of two minds--or,
more accurately, two teams of minds--each trying, even while covering
up its own tracks and traces, to get at and to annihilate the other.

Each had certain advantages.

Boskonia--although we know now that Boskone was by no means the prime
mover in that dark culture which opposed Civilization so bitterly,
nevertheless, "Boskonia" it was and still is being called--for a
long time had the initiative, forcing the Patrol to wage an almost
purely defensive fight. Boskonia knew vastly more about Civilization
than Civilization knew about Boskonia. The latter, almost completely
unknown, had all the advantages of stealth and of surprise; her forces
could and did operate from undeterminable points against precisely
plotted objectives. Boskonia had the hyperspatial tube long before
the Conference of Scientists solved its mysteries; and even after the
Patrol could use it, it could do Civilization no good unless and until
something could be found at which to aim it.

Upon the other hand, Civilization had the Lens. It had the backing of
the Arisians; maddeningly incomplete and unsatisfactory though that
backing seemed at times to be. It had a few entities, notably one
Kimball Kinnison, who were learning to think really efficiently. Above
all, it had a massed purpose, a loyalty, an _esprit de corps_
backboning a morale which the whip-driven ranks of autocracy could
never match and which the whip-wielding drivers could not even dimly
understand.

Kinnison, then, with all the powers of his own mind and the minds of
his friends and coworkers, sought to place and to identify the real
key mentality at the destruction of which the mighty Boskonian Empire
must begin to fall apart; that mentality, in turn, was trying with its
every resource to find and to destroy the intellect which, pure reason
showed, was the one factor which had enabled Civilization to throw the
fast-conquering hordes of Boskonia back into their own galaxy.

Now, from our point of vantage in time and in space--through the vistas
of years of time and of parsecs of space--we can study at leisure and
in detail many things which Kimball Kinnison could only surmise and
suspect and deduce. Thus, he knew definitely only the fact that the
Boskonian organization did not collapse with the destruction of the
planet Jarnevon.

We know now, however, all about the Thralian solar system
and about Alcon of Thrale, its unlamented tyrant. The planet
Thrale--planetographically speaking, Thrallis II--so much like Tellus
that its natives, including the unspeakable Alcon, were human
practically to the limit of classification; and about Onlo, or Thrallis
IX, and its monstrous natives. We know now that the duties and the
authorities of the Council of Boskone were taken over by Alcon of
Thrale; we now know how, by reason of his absolute control over both
the humanity of Thrale and the monstrosities of Onlo, he was able to
carry on.

Unfortunately, like the Eich, the Onlonians simply cannot be
described by or to man. This is, as is already more or less widely
known, due to the fact that all such non-aqueous, subzero-blooded,
nonoxygen-breathing peoples have of necessity a metabolic
extension into the hyper-dimension; a fact which makes even their
three-dimensional aspect subtly incomprehensible to any strictly
three-dimensional mind.

Not all such races, it may be said here, belonged to Boskonia. Many
essentially similar ones, such as the natives of Palain VII, adhered
to our culture from the very first. Indeed, it is held that sexual
equality is the most important criterion of that which we know as
Civilization. But, since this is not a biological treatise, this point
is merely mentioned, not discussed.

The Onlonians, then, while not precisely describable to man, were very
similar to the Eich--as similar, say, as a Posenian and a Tellurian
are to each other in the perception of a Palainian. That is to say
practically identical; for to the unknown and incomprehensible senses
of those frigid beings the fact that the Posenian possesses four arms,
eight hands, and no eyes at all, as compared with the Tellurian's
simply paired members, constitutes a total difference so slight as to
be negligible.

       *       *       *       *       *

But to resume the thread of history, we are at liberty to know things
that Kinnison did not. Specifically, we may observe and hear a
conference which tireless research has re-constructed _in toto_.
The place was upon chill, dark Onlo, in a searingly cold room whose
normal condition of utter darkness was barely ameliorated now by a
dim blue glow. The time was just after Kinnison had left Lonabar
for Lyrane II. The conferees were Alcon of Thrale and his Onlonian
cabinet officers. The armor-clad Tyrant, in whose honor the feeble
illumination was, lay at ease in a reclining chair; the pseudoreptilian
monstrosities were sitting or standing in some obscure and inexplicable
fashion at a long, low bench of stone.

"The fact is," one of the Onlonians was radiating harshly, "that our
minions in the other galaxy could not or would not or simply did not
think. For years things went so smoothly that no one had to think. The
Great Plan, so carefully worked out, gave every promise of complete
success. It was inevitable, it seemed, that that entire galaxy would be
brought under our domination, its Patrol destroyed, before any inkling
of our purpose could be perceived by the weaklings of humanity.

"The Plan took cognizance of every known factor of any importance.
When, however, an unknown, unforeseeable factor, the Lens of the
Patrol, became of real importance, that Plan, of course, broke down.
Instantly, upon the recognition of an unconsidered factor, the Plan
should have been revised. All action should have ceased until that
factor had been evaluated and guarded against. But no--no one of our
commanders in that galaxy or handling its affairs ever thought of such
a thing--"

"It is you who are not thinking now," the Tyrant of Thrale broke in.
"If any underling had dared any such suggestion, you yourself would
have been among the first to demand his elimination. The Plan should
have been revised, it is true; but the fault does not lie with the
underlings. Instead, it lies squarely with the Council of Boskone--by
the way, I trust that those six of that council who escaped destruction
upon Jarnevon by means of their hyperspatial tube have been dealt with?"

"They have been liquidated," another officer replied.

"It is well. They were supposed to think, and the fact that they
neither coped with the situation nor called it to your attention until
it was too late to mend matters, rather than any flaw inherent in the
Plan, is what has brought about the present absolutely intolerable
situation.

"Underlings are not supposed to think. They are supposed to
report facts; and, if so requested, opinions and deductions. Our
representatives there were well trained and skillful. They reported
accurately, and that was all that was required of them. Helmuth
reported truly, even though Boskone discredited his reports. So did
Prellin, and Crowninshield, and Jalte. The Eich, however, failed in
their duties of supervision and correlation; which is why their leaders
have been punished and their operators have been reduced in rank--why
we have assumed a task which, it might have been supposed and was
supposed, lesser minds could have and should have performed.

"Let me caution you now that to underestimate a foe is a fatal error.
Lan of the Eich prated largely upon this very point, but in the
eventuality he did, in fact, underestimate very seriously the resources
and the qualities of the Patrol; with what disastrous consequences
we are all familiar. Instead of thinking, he attempted to subject a
purely philosophical concept, the Lens, to a mathematical analysis.
Neither did the heads of our military branch think at all deeply, or
they would not have tried to attack Tellus until after this new and
enigmatic factor had been resolved. Its expeditionary forces vanished
without sign or signal--in spite of its primaries, its negative-matter
bombs, its supposedly irresistible planets--and accursed Tellus still
circles untouched about Sol, its sun. The condition is admittedly not
to be borne; but I have always said, and I now do and shall insist,
that no further action be taken until the Great Plan shall have been so
revised as reasonably to take into account the Lens. What of Arisia?"
he demanded of a third cabineteer.

"It is feared that nothing can be done about Arisia at present," that
entity replied. "Expeditions have been sent, but they were dealt with
as simply and as efficiently as were Lan and Amp of the Eich. Planets
have also been sent, but they were detected by the Patrol and were
knocked out by far-ranging dirigible planets of the enemy. However, I
have concluded that Arisia, of and by itself, is not of prime immediate
importance. It is true that the Lens did in all probability originate
with the Arisians. It is hence true that the destruction of Arisia and
its people would be highly desirable, in that it would insure that no
more Lenses would be produced. Such destruction would not do away,
however, with the myriads of the instruments which are already in use
and whose wearers are operating so powerfully against us. Our most
pressing business, it seems to me, is to hunt down and exterminate all
Lensmen; particularly the one whom Jalte called THE Lensman, who,
Eichmil was informed by Lensman Morgan, was known to even other Lensmen
only as Star A Star. In that connection, I am forced to wonder--is Star
A Star in reality only one mind?"

"That question has been considered both by me and by your chief
psychologist," Alcon made answer. "Frankly, we do not know. We have not
enough reliable data upon which to base a finding of fact. Nor does it
matter in the least. Whether one or two or a thousand, we must find and
we must slay until it is feasible to resume our orderly conquest of
the universe. We must also work unremittingly upon a plan to abate the
nuisance which is Arisia. Above all, we must see to it with the utmost
diligence that no iota of information concerning us ever reaches any
member of the Galactic Patrol. I do not want either of our worlds to
become as Jarnevon now is."

"Hear! Bravo! Nor I!" came a chorus of thoughts, interrupted by
an emanation from one of the sparkling force-ball intergalactic
communicators.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Yes? Alcon acknowledging," the Tyrant took the call.

It was a zwilnik upon far Lonabar, reporting through Lyrane VIII
everything that Cartiff had done. "I do not know--I have no
idea--whether or not this matter is either unusual or important," the
observer concluded. "I would, however, rather report ten unimportant
things than miss one which might later prove to have had significance."

"Right. Report received," and discussion raged. Was this affair
actually what it appeared upon the surface to be, or was it another
subtle piece of the work of that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned
Lensman?

The observer was recalled. Orders were given and were carried out.
Then, after it had been learned that Bleeko's palace and every particle
of its contents had been destroyed, that Cartiff had vanished utterly,
and that nobody could be found upon the face of Lonabar who could throw
any light whatever upon the manner or the time of his going; then,
after it was too late to do anything about it, it was decided that
this must have been the work of THE Lensman. And it was useless to
storm or to rage. Such a happening could not have been reported sooner
to so high an office. The routine events of a hundred million planets
simply could not be reported, nor could they have been considered if
they were. And since this Lensman never repeated--his acts were always
different, alike only in that they were drably routine acts until their
crashing finales--the Boskonian observers never had been and never
would be able to report his activities in time.

"But he got nothing _this_ time, I am certain of that," the chief
psychologist exulted.

"How can you be so sure?" Alcon snapped.

"Because Menjo Bleeko of Lonabar knew nothing whatever of our
activities or of our organization except at such times as one of my
men was in charge of his mind," the scientist gloated. "I and my
assistants know mental surgery as those crude hypnotists, the Eich,
never will know it. Even our lowest agents are having those clumsy and
untrustworthy false teeth removed as fast as my therapists can operate
upon their minds."

"Nevertheless, you are even now guilty of underestimating," Alcon
reproved him sharply, energizing a force-ball communicator. "It is
quite eminently possible that he who wrought so upon Lonabar may have
been enabled--by pure chance, perhaps--to establish a linkage between
that planet and Lyrane--"

The cold, crisply incisive thought of an Eich answered the Tyrant's
call.

"Have you of Lyrane perceived or encountered any unusual occurrences or
indications?" Alcon demanded.

"We have not."

"Expect them, then," and the Thralian despot transmitted in detail all
the new developments.

"We always expect new and untoward things," the Eich more than half
sneered. "We are prepared momently for anything that can happen, from a
visitation by Star A Star and any or all of his Lensmen up to an attack
by the massed Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol. Is there anything
else, your supremacy?"

"No. I envy you your self-confidence and your assurance, but I mistrust
exceedingly the soundness of your judgment. That is all." Alcon turned
his attention to the chief psychologist. "Have you operated upon the
minds of those Eich and those self-styled Overlords as you did upon
that of Menjo Bleeko?"

"No!" the mind surgeon gasped. "Impossible! Not physically, perhaps,
but would not such a procedure interfere so seriously with the work
that it--"

"That is your problem--solve it," Alcon ordered, curtly. "See to it,
however it is solved, that no traceable linkage exists between any of
those minds and us. Any mind capable of thinking such thoughts as those
which we have just received is not to be trusted."

       *       *       *       *       *

As has been said, Kinnison-ex-Cartiff was en route for Lyrane II while
the foregoing conference was taking place. Throughout the trip he
kept in touch with Mac. At first he tried, with his every artifice of
diplomacy, cajolery, and downright threats, to make her lay off; he
finally invoked all his Unattached Lensman's transcendental authority
and ordered her summarily to lay off.

No soap. How did he get that way, she wanted furiously to know, to
be ordering her around as though she were an uncapped probe? She was
a Lensman, too, by Klono's curly whiskers! She had a job to do and
she was going to do it. She was on a definite assignment--his own
assignment, too, remember--and she wasn't going to be called off of
it just because he had found out all of a sudden that it might not be
quite as safe as dunking doughnuts at a down-river picnic. What kind of
a sun-baked, space-tempered crust did he have to pull a crack like that
on _her_? Would he have the barefaced, unmitigated gall to spring
a thing like that on any other Lensman in the whole cockeyed universe?

That stopped him--cold. Lensmen always went in; that was their code.
For any Tellurian Lensman, anywhere, to duck or to dodge because of any
possible personal danger was sheerly, starkly unthinkable. The fact
that she was, to him, the sum total of all the femininity of the Galaxy
could not be allowed any weight whatever; any more than the converse
aspect had ever been permitted to sway him. Fair enough. Bitter, but
inescapable. This was one--just one--of the consequences which Mentor
had foreseen. He had foreseen it, too, in a dimly unreal sort of way,
and now that it was here he'd simply have to take it. QX.

"But be careful, Chris, anyway," he surrendered. "Awfully careful--as
careful as I would myself."

"I could be ever so much more careful than that and still be pretty
reckless." Her low, entrancing chuckle came through as though she were
present in person. "And by the way, Kim, did I ever tell you that I am
fast getting to be a gray Lensman?"

"You always were, ace--you couldn't very well be anything else."

"No--I mean actually gray. Did you ever stop to consider what the
laundry problem would be upon this heathenish planet?"

"Chris, I'm surprised at you--what do you need of a laundry?" he
derided her, affectionately. "Here you've been blasting me to a cinder
about not taking your Lensmanship seriously enough, and yet you are
violating one of the prime tenets--that of conformation to planetary
customs. Shame on you!"

He felt her hot blush across all those parsecs of empty space. "I tried
it at first, Kim, but it was just simply _terrible_!"

"You've got to learn how to be a Lensman or else quit throwing your
weight around like you did a while back. No back chat, either, you
insubordinate young jade, or I'll take that Lens away from you and
heave you into the clink."

"You and what regiment of Valerians? Besides, it didn't make any
difference," she explained, triumphantly. "These matriarchs don't like
me one bit better, no matter what I wear or don't wear."

Time passed, and in spite of Kinnison's highly disquieting fears,
nothing happened. Right on schedule the Patrol ship eased down to a
landing at the edge of the Lyranian airport. Mac was waiting; dressed
now, not in nurse's white, but in startlingly nondescript gray shirt
and breeches.

"Not the gray leather of my station, but merely dirt color," she
explained to Kinnison after the first fervent greetings. "These women
are clean enough physically, but I simply haven't got a thing fit to
wear. Is your laundry working?"

It was, and very shortly Sector Chief Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall
appeared in her wonted immaculately white stiffly starched uniform. She
did not, then or ever, wear the gray to which she was entitled; nor did
she ever--except when defying Kinnison--lay claims to any of the rights
or privileges which were so indubitably hers. She was not, never had
been, and never would or could be a _real_ Lensman, she always did
insist. At best, she was only a synthetic--or an imitation--or a sort
of an amateur--or maybe a "Red" Lensman--handy to have around, perhaps,
for certain kinds of jobs, but absolutely and definitely not a regular
Lensman. And it was this attitude which was to make the Red Lensman not
merely tolerated, but loved as she was loved by Lensmen, Patrolmen,
and civilians alike throughout the length, breadth, and thickness of
Civilization's bounds.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ship lifted from the airport and went north into the uninhabited
temperate zone. The matriarchs did not have a thing which the
Tellurians either needed or wanted; the Lyranians disliked the visitors
so openly and so intensely that to move away from the populated belt
was the only logical and considerate thing to do.

The _Dauntless_ arrived a day later, bringing Worsel and
Tregonsee; followed closely by Nadreck in his ultrarefrigerated
speedster. Five Lensmen, then, studied intently a globular map
of Lyrane II which Clarrissa had made. Four of them, the oxygen
breathers, surrounded it in the flesh, while Nadreck was with them
only in essence. Physically he was far out in the comfortably subzero
reaches of the stratosphere, but his mind was _en rapport_ with
theirs; his sense of perception scanned the markings upon the globe as
carefully and as accurately as did theirs.

"This belt which I have colored pink," Mac explained, "corresponding
roughly to the torrid zone, is the inhabited area of Lyrane II.
Nobody lives anywhere else. Upon it I have charted every unexplained
disappearance that I have been able to find out about. Each of these
black crosses is where one such person lived. The black circle--or
circles, for frequently there are more than one--connected to each
cross by a black line, marks the spot--or spots--where that person
was seen for the last time or times. If the black circle is around
the cross, it means that she was last seen at home. I'm sorry that I
couldn't get any real information; that this jumble is all that I could
discover for you."

The crosses were distributed fairly evenly all around the globe and
throughout the populated zone. The circles, however, tended markedly to
concentrate upon the northern edge of that zone; and practically all
of the encircled crosses were very close to the northern edge of the
populated belt. To four of the Lensmen present the full grisly meaning
of the thing was starkly plain.

Nadreck was the first to speak. "Ah, very well done, Lensman
MacDougall," he congratulated. "Your data are amply sufficient. A right
scholarly and highly informative bit of work, eh, friend Worsel?"

"It is so--it is indeed so," the Velantian agreed, the while a shudder
rippled along the thirty-foot length of his sinuous body. "I suspected
many things, but not this--certainly not this, ever, away out here."

"Nor I." Tregonsee's four horn-lipped, toothless mouths snapped open
and shut; his cabled arms writhed in detestation.

"Nor I," from Kinnison. "If I had, I'd've had a hundred Lyranians mob
you, Chris, and tie you down. It would be just about here, I'd say,
from the trend of the lines of vanishment." He placed a fingertip near
the north pole of the globe. He thought for a moment, his jaw setting
and his eyes growing hard, then spoke aloud to the girl. "Chris, the
next time I tell you to hide and you don't do it I'm going to take that
Lens away from you and flash it with a DeLameter--then you'll go back
to Tellus and you'll stay there." His voice was grimmer than she had
ever before heard it.

"You don't mean ... why, it can't be ... you're all thinking ...
Overlords!" she gasped. Her face turned white; both hands flew to her
throat.

"Just that. Overlords. Nothing else but." He pictured in imagination
his fiancée's body writhing in torment upon a Delgonian torture screen
until his mind revolted; all unconscious that his thoughts were as
clear as a telescreen picture to all the others. "If they had detected
_you_--You know that they would do anything to get hold of a
mind and a vital force like yours--But, thank all the gods of space,
they didn't." He shook himself and drew a tremendously deep breath of
relief. "Well, all I've got to say is that if we ever have any kids and
they don't bawl when I tell them about this, I'll certainly give them
something to bawl about!"




                                 XII.


"But listen, Kim!" Clarrissa protested. "What makes you all so sure
that it's Overlords? There's nothing on my map there to prove--Why, it
might be _anything_!"

"It might not, too," Kinnison stated. "Barring the contingency of the
existence of a life form unknown to any one of the four of us and
which operates exactly as the Overlords do operate, that hypothesis is
the only one both necessary and sufficient to explain all the facts
which you have plotted upon your chart. Think a minute--you know how
they work. They tune in on some one mind, the stronger and more vital
the better. The fact that the Lyranians have such powerful minds
is undoubtedly one big reason why the Overlords are here. In that
connection, it's a mystery to me how Helen has lived so long--all the
persons who disappeared had high-powered minds, didn't they?"

She thought for a space. "Now that you mention it, I believe that they
did; as far as I know, anyway."

"Thought so. That clinches it, if it needed any clinching. But to go
on, they tune in and blank out the victim's mind completely, filling it
with an overwhelming urge to rush directly to the cavern. How else can
you explain the number of these disappearances; and above all, the fact
that the great majority of those lines of yours point directly to that
one spot? For your information, I will add that the ones that do not
so point are probably observational errors--the person was seen before
she disappeared, instead of afterward."

"But that's so ... so _evident_," she began. "Would they do
anything--"

"It wasn't evident to you at first, was it?" he countered. "And,
evident or not, they always have worked that way; and, as far as anyone
has been able to find out, they never have worked any other way. Quite
probably, therefore, they can't. The Eich undoubtedly told them to
lay off, just as they did before; but apparently they can't do that,
either--permanently. This torturing and life eating of theirs seems
to be a racial vice--like a drug habit, only worse. They can quit it
for a while, but after about so long they simply have to go on another
bender. Convinced?"

"Wel-l-l, I suppose so," she admitted doubtfully, and Kinnison turned
to the group at large.

"There is no doubt, I take it, as to what course of action we are
to pursue in the matter of this cavern of Overlords?" he asked,
superfluously.

There was none. The decision was unanimous and instant that it must
be wiped out. The two great ships, the incomparable _Dauntless_
and the camouflaged warship which had served Kinnison-Cartiff so well,
lifted themselves into the stratosphere and headed north. The Lensmen
did not want to advertise their presence and there was no great hurry,
therefore both vessels had their thought-screens out and both rode upon
baffled jets.

Practically all of the crewmen of the _Dauntless_ had seen
Overlords in the substance; so far as is known they were the only human
beings who had ever seen an Overlord and had lived to tell of it.
Twenty-two of their former fellows had seen Overlords and had died.
Kinnison, Worsel and Van Buskirk had slain Overlords in unscreened
hand-to-hand combat in the fantastically incredible environment of a
hyperspatial tube--that uncanny medium in which man and monster could
and did occupy the same space at the same time without being able to
touch each other; in which the air or pseudoair is thick and viscous;
in which the only substance common to both sets of dimensions and thus
available for combat purposes is a synthetic material so treated and so
saturated as to be of enormous mass and inertia.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is easier to imagine, then, than to describe the emotion which
seethed through the crew as the news flew around that the business next
in order was the extirpation of a flock of Overlords.

"How about a couple or three nice duodec torpedoes, Kim,
steered right down into the middle of that cavern and touched
off--_powie!_--slick, don't you think?" Henderson insinuated.

"Aw, let's not, Kim!" protested Van Buskirk, who, as one of the three
Overlord slayers, had been called into the control room. "This ain't
going to be in a tube, Kim; it's in a cavern on a planet--made to order
for ax work. Let me and the boys put on our screens and bash their ugly
damn skulls in for 'em. How about it, huh?"

"Not duodec, Hen--not yet, anyway," Kinnison decided. "As for ax work,
Bus--maybe, maybe not. Depends. We want to catch some of them alive,
so as to get some information--but you and your boys will be good for
that, too, so you might as well go and start getting them ready." He
turned his thought to his snakish comrade in arms.

"What do you think, Worsel, is this hide-out of theirs heavily
fortified, or just hidden?"

"Hidden, I would say from what I know of them--well-hidden," the
Velantian replied promptly. "Unless they have changed markedly; and,
like you, I do not believe that a race so old can change that much. I
could tune them in, as I have done before, but it might very well do
more harm than good."

"Certain to, I'm afraid." Kinnison knew as well as did Worsel that
a Velantian was the tastiest dish which could be served up to any
Overlord. Both knew also, however, the very real mental ability
of the foe; knew that the Overlords would be sure to suspect that
any Velantian so temptingly present upon Lyrane II must be there
specifically for the detriment of the Delgonian race; knew that they
would almost certainly refuse the proffered bait. And not only would
they refuse to lead Worsel to their cavern, but in all probability
they would cancel even their ordinary activities, thus making it
impossible to find them at all, until they had learned definitely that
the hook-bearing titbit and its accomplices had left the Lyranian solar
system entirely. "No, what we need right now is a good, strong-willed
Lyranian."

"Shall we go back and grab one? It would take only a few minutes,"
Henderson suggested, straightening up at his board.

"Uh-uh," Kinnison demurred. "That might smell a bit on the cheesy side,
too, don't you think, fellows?" And Worsel and Tregonsee agreed that
such a move would be ill-advised.

"Might I offer a barely tenable suggestion?" Nadreck asked diffidently.

"I'll say you can--come in."

"Judging by the rate at which Lyranians have been vanishing of late,
it would seem that we would not have to wait too long before another
one comes hither under her own power. Since the despised ones will have
captured her themselves, and themselves will have forced her to come to
them, no suspicion will be or can be aroused."

"That's a thought, Nadreck--that _is_ a thought!" Kinnison
applauded. "Shoot us up, will you, Hen? 'Way up, and hover over the
center of the spread of intersections of those lines. Put observers on
every plate you've got here--you, too, Captain Craig, please, all over
the ship. Have half of them search the air all around as far as they
can reach for an airplane in flight; have the rest comb the terrain
below, both on the surface and underground, with spy-rays, for any sign
of a natural or artificial cave."

"What kind of information do you think they may have, Kinnison?" asked
Tregonsee the Rigellian.

"I don't know." Kinnison pondered for minutes. "Somebody--around here
somewhere--has got some kind of a tie-up with some Boskonian entity
or group that is fairly well up the ladder; I'm pretty sure of that.
Bleeko sent ships here--one speedster, certainly, and there's no reason
to suppose that it was an isolated case--"

"There is nothing to show, either, that it was not an isolated case,"
Tregonsee commented quietly, "and the speedster landed, not up here
near the pole, but in the populated zone. Why? To secure some of the
women?" The Rigellian was not arguing against Kinnison; he was, as they
all knew, helping to subject every facet of the matter to scrutiny.

"Possibly--but this is a transfer point," Kinnison pointed out. "Illona
was to start out from here, remember. And those two ships--coming to
meet her, or perhaps each other, or--"

"Or perhaps called there by the speedster's crew, for aid," Tregonsee
supplied the complete thought.

"One but quite possibly not both," Nadreck suggested. "We agreed, I
think, that the probability of a Boskonian connection is sufficiently
large to warrant the taking of these Overlords alive in order to read
their minds?"

       *       *       *       *       *

They were; hence the discussion then turned naturally to the question
of how this none-too-easy feat was to be accomplished. The two Patrol
ships had climbed and were cruising in great, slow circles; the spy-ray
men and the other observers were hard at work. Before they had found
anything upon the ground, however:

"Plane, ho!" came the report, and both vessels, with spy-ray blocks out
now as well as thought-screens, plunged silently into a flatly slanting
dive. Directly over the slow Lyranian craft, high above it, they turned
as one to match its course and slowed down to match its pace.

"Come to life, Kim--don't let them have her!" Clarrissa exclaimed.
Being _en rapport_ with them all, she knew that both unhuman
Worsel and monster Nadreck were perfectly willing to let the helpless
Lyranian become a sacrifice; she knew that neither Kinnison nor
Tregonsee had as yet given that angle of the affair a single thought.
"Surely, Kim, you don't have to let them kill her, do you? Isn't
showing you the gate or whatever it is, enough? Can't you rig up
something to do something with when she gets almost inside?"

"Why ... uh ... I s'pose so." Kinnison wrenched his attention away from
a plate. "Oh, sure, Chris. Hen! Drop us down a bit, and have the boys
get ready to spear that crate with a couple of tractors when I give the
word."

The plane held its course, directly toward a range of low, barren,
precipitous hills. As it approached them it dropped, as though to
attempt a landing upon a steep and rocky hillside.

"She can't land there," Kinnison breathed, "and Overlords would
want her alive, not dead--suppose I've been wrong all the time? Get
ready, fellows!" he snapped. "Take her at the very last possible
instant--before--she--crashes--_now!_" As he yelled the command
the powerful beams leaped out, seizing the disaster-bound vehicle in a
gently unbreakable grip. Had they not done so, however, the Lyranian
would not have crashed; for in that last split second a section of the
rugged hillside fell inward. In the very mouth of that dread opening
the little plane hung for an instant; then:

[Illustration: _Immaterial fingers of tractor rays snatched at the
plane an instant before it crashed--_]

<hr class="chap">

"Grab the woman, quick!" Kinnison ordered, for the Lyranian was going
to jump.

And, such was the awful measure of the Overlords' compulsion, she did
jump; without a parachute, without knowing or caring what, if anything,
was to break her fall. But before she struck ground a tractor beam had
seized her, and passive plane and wildly struggling pilot were both
borne rapidly aloft.

"Why, Kim, it's _Helen_!" Clarrissa shrieked in surprise, then
voice and manner became transformed. "The poor, poor thing," she
crooned. "Bring her in at No. 6 Lock. I'll meet her there--you fellows
keep clear. In the state she's in a shock--especially such a shock as
seeing such a monstrous lot of males--would knock her off the beam,
sure."

       *       *       *       *       *

Helen of Lyrane ceased struggling in the instant of being drawn through
the thought-screen surrounding the _Dauntless_. She had not been
unconscious at any time. She had known exactly what she had been doing;
she had wanted intensely--such was the insidiously devastating power of
the Delgonian mind--to do just that and nothing else. The falseness of
values, the indefensibility of motivation, simply could not register
in her thoroughly suffused, completely blanketed mind. When the screen
cut off the Overlords' control, however, thus restoring her own, the
shock of realization of what she had done--what she had been forced to
do--struck her like a physical blow. Worse than a physical blow, for
ordinary physical violence she could understand.

This mischance, however, she could not even begin to understand.
It was utterly incomprehensible. She knew what had happened; she
knew that her mind had been taken over by some monstrously alien,
incredibly powerful mentality, for some purpose so obscure as to be
entirely beyond her ken. To her narrow philosophy of existence, to her
one-planet insularity of viewpoint and outlook, the very existence,
anywhere, of such a mind with such a purpose was in simple fact
impossible. For it actually to exist upon her own planet, Lyrane II,
was sheerly, starkly unthinkable.

She did not recognize the _Dauntless_, of course. To her all
spaceships were alike. They were all invading warships, full of
enemies. All things and all beings originating elsewhere than upon
Lyrane II were, perforce, enemies. Those outrageous males, the
Tellurian Lensman and his cohorts, had pretended not to be inimical,
as had the peculiar, white-swathed Tellurian near-person who had
been worming itself into her confidence in order to study the
disappearances; but she did not trust even them.

She now knew the manner of, if not the reason for, the vanishment of
her fellow Lyranians. The tractors of the spaceship had saved her
from whatever fate it was that impended. She did not, however, feel
any thrill of gratitude. One enemy or another, what difference did it
make? Therefore, as she went through the blocking screen and recovered
control of her mind, she set herself to fight; to fight with every iota
of her mighty mind and with every fiber of her lithe, hard-schooled,
tigress' body. The air-lock doors opened and closed--she faced, not an
armed and armored male all set to slay, but the white-clad person whom
she already knew better than she ever would know any other non-Lyranian.

"Oh, Helen!" the girl half sobbed, throwing both arms around the
still-braced Chief Person. "I'm _so_ glad that we got to you in
time! And there will be no more disappearances, dear--the boys will see
to that!"

Helen did not know, really, what disinterested friendship meant.
Since the nurse had put her into a wide-open two-way, however, she
knew beyond all possibility of doubt that these Tellurians wished
her and all her kind well, not ill; and the shock of that knowledge,
superimposed upon the other shocks which she had so recently undergone,
was more than she could bear. For the first and only time in her hard,
busy, purposeful life, Helen of Lyrane fainted; fainted dead away in
the circle of the Earthgirl's arms.

The nurse knew that this was nothing serious; in fact, she was
professionally quite in favor of it. Hence, instead of resuscitating
the Lyranian, she swung the pliant body into a carry--as has been
previously intimated, Clarrissa MacDougall was no more a weakling
physically than she was mentally--and without waiting for orderlies
and stretcher she bore it easily away to her own quarters. And there,
instead of administering restoratives, she took out her ubiquitous
hypodermic and made sure that her patient would rest quietly for many
hours to come.




                                 XIII.


In the meantime the more warlike forces of the _Dauntless_ had not
been idle. In the instant of the opening of the cavern's doors Captain
Craig erupted orders, and as soon as the Lyranian was out of the line
of fire, keen-eyed needle-ray men saw to it that those doors were in no
mechanical condition to close. The _Dauntless_ settled downward;
landed in front of the entrance to the cavern. The rocky, broken
terrain meant nothing to her; the hardest, jaggedest boulders crumbled
instantly to dust as her enormous mass drove the file-hard, inflexible
armor of her midzone deep into the ground. Then, while alert beamers
watched the entrance and while spy-ray experts combed the interior
for other openings which Kinnison and Worsel were already practically
certain did not exist, the forces of Civilization formed for the attack.

Worsel was fairly shivering with eagerness for the fray. His was, and
with plenty of reason, the bitterest by far of all the animosities
there present against the Overlords. For Delgon and his own native
planet, Velantia, were neighboring worlds, circling about the same
sun. Since the beginning of Velantian space flights, the Overlords
of Delgon had preyed upon the Velantians; in fact, the Overlords had
probably caused the first Velantian spaceship to be built. They had
called them, in a never-ending stream, across the empty gulf of space.
They had pinned them against their torture screens, had flayed them
and had tweaked them to bits, had done them to death in every one of
the numberless slow and hideous fashions which had been developed by a
race of sadists who had been specializing in the fine art of torture
for thousands upon thousands of years. Then, in the last minutes of the
long-drawn-out agony of death, the Overlords were wont to feed, with a
passionate, greedy, ineradicably ingrained lust utterly inexplicable to
any civilized mind, upon the life forces which the mangled bodies could
no longer contain.

This horrible parasitism went on for ages. The Velantians fought
vainly; their crude thought-screens were almost useless until after
the coming of the Patrol. Then, with screens that were of real use,
and with ships of power and with weapons of might, Worsel himself had
taken the lead in the clean-up of Delgon. He was afraid, of course.
Any Velantian was and is frightened to the very center of his being
by the mere thought of an Overlord. He cannot help it; it is in his
heredity, bred into the innermost chemistry of his body; the cold grue
of a thousand thousand fiendishly tortured ancestors simply will not be
denied or cast aside.

Many of the monsters had succeeded in fleeing Delgon, of course.
Some departed in the ships which had ferried their victims to the
planet, some were removed to other solar systems by the Eich. The
rest were slain; and as the knowledge that a Velantian _could_
kill an Overlord gained headway, the emotions toward the oppressors
generated within minds such as the Velantians' became literally
indescribable. Fear was there yet, and in abundance--it simply could
not be eradicated. Horror and revulsion. Sheer, burning hatred; and,
more powerful than all, amounting almost to an obsession, a clamoring,
shrieking, driving urge for revenge which was almost tangible. All
these, and more, Worsel felt as he waited, twitching.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Valerians wanted to go in because it meant a hand-to-hand fight.
Fighting was their business, their sport, and their pleasure; they
loved it for its own sweet sake, with a simple, whole-hearted
devotion. To die in combat was a Valerian soldier's natural and
much-to-be-desired end; to die in any peaceful fashion was a disgrace
and a calamity. They did and do go into battle with very much the same
joyous abandon with which a sophomore goes to meet his date in Lovers'
Lane. And now, to make physical combat all the nicer and juicier, they
carried semiportable tractors and pressors, for the actual killing was
not to take place until after the battle proper was over. Blasting the
Overlords out of existence would have been simplicity itself; but they
were not to die until after they had been forced to divulge whatever
they might have of knowledge or of information.

Nadreck of Palain wanted to go in solely to increase his already vast
store of knowledge. His thirst for facts was a purely scientific
one; the fashion in which it was to be satisfied was the veriest,
the most immaterial detail. Indeed, it is profoundly impossible to
portray to any human intelligence the serene detachment, the utterly
complete indifference to suffering exhibited by practically all
of the frigid-blooded races, even those adherent to Civilization,
especially when the suffering is being done by an enemy. Nadreck did
know, academically and in a philological sense, from his reading, the
approximate significance of such words as "compunction," "sympathy" and
"squeamishness"; but he would have been astounded beyond measure at any
suggestion that they would apply to any such matter-of-fact business
as the extraction of data from the mind of an Overlord of Delgon, no
matter what might have to be done to the unfortunate victim in the
process.

Tregonsee went in simply because Kinnison did--to be there to help out
in case the Tellurian should need him.

Kinnison went in because he felt that he had to. He knew full well
that he was not going to get any kick at all out of what was going to
happen. He was not going to like it, any part of it. Nor did he. In
fact, he wanted to be sick--violently sick--before the business was
well started. And Nadreck perceived his mental and physical distress.

"Why stay, Friend Kinnison, when your presence is not necessary?" he
asked, with the slightly pleased, somewhat surprised, hellishly placid
mental immobility which Kinnison was later to come to know so well.
"Even though my powers are admittedly small, I feel eminently qualified
to cope with such minor matters as the obtainment and the accurate
transmittal of that which you wish to know. I cannot understand your
emotions, but I realize fully that they are essential components of
that which makes you what you fundamentally are. There can be no
justification for your submitting yourself needlessly to such stresses,
such psychic traumata."

And Kinnison and Tregonsee, realizing the common sense of the
Palainian's statement and very glad indeed to have an excuse for
leaving the outrageous scene, left it forthwith.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is no need to go into detail as to what actually transpired
within that cavern's dark and noisome depths. It took a long time, nor
was any of it gentle. The battle itself, before the Overlords were
downed, was bad enough in any Tellurian's eyes. Clad in armor of proof
although they were, more than one of the Valerians died. Worsel's armor
was shattered and rent, his almost steel-hard flesh was slashed, burned
and mangled before the last of the monstrous forms was pinned down and
helpless. Nadreck alone escaped unscathed--he did so, he explained
quite truthfully, because he did not go in there to fight, but only to
learn.

What followed the battle, however, was infinitely worse. The
Delgonians, as has been said, were hard, cold, merciless, even among
themselves; they were pitiless and unyielding and refractory in the
extreme. It need scarcely be emphasized then, that they did not yield
to persuasion either easily or graciously; that their own apparatus
and equipment had to be put to its fullest grisly use before those
stubborn minds gave up the secrets so grimly and so implacably
sought. Worsel, the raging Velantian, used those torture tools with a
vengeful savagery and a snarling ferocity which are at least partially
understandable; but Nadreck employed them with a calm capability, a
coldly, emotionlessly efficient callousness the mere contemplation of
which made icy shivers chase each other up and down Kinnison's spine.

At long last the job was done. The battered Patrol forces returned
to the _Dauntless_, bringing with them their spoils and their
dead. The cavern and its every molecule of contents were bombed
out of existence. The two ships took off; Cartiff's heavily armed
"merchantman" to do the long flit back to Tellus, the _Dauntless_
to drop Helen and her plane off at her airport and then to join her
sister superdreadnoughts which were already beginning to assemble in
Rift 94.

"Come down here, will you please, Kim?" came Clarrissa's thought.
"I've been keeping her pretty well blocked out, but she wants to talk
to you--in fact, she insists upon it--before she leaves the ship."

"Hm-m-m--now that _is_ something!" the Lensman exclaimed, and
hurried to the nurse's cabin.

There stood the Lyranian queen; a full five inches taller than Mac's
five feet six, a good thirty-five pounds heavier than Mac's not
inconsiderable one hundred and forty-five. Hard, fine, supple; erectly
poised she stood there, an exquisitely beautiful statue of pale bronze,
her flaming hair a gorgeous riot. Head held proudly high, she stared
only slightly upward into the Earthman's quiet, understanding eyes.

"Thanks, Kinnison, for everything that you and yours have done for me
and mine," she said simply, and held out her right hand in what she
knew was the correct Tellurian gesture.

"Uh-uh, Helen," Kinnison denied, gently, making no motion to grasp the
proffered hand--which was promptly and enthusiastically withdrawn.
"Nice, and it's really big of you, but don't strain yourself." This was
neither slang nor sarcasm; he meant precisely and only what he said.
"Don't overdrive in trying to force yourself to like us men too much
or too soon; you must get used to us gradually. We like you a lot, and
we respect you even more, but we have been around and you haven't.
You can't be feeling friendly enough yet to enjoy shaking hands with
me--you certainly haven't got jets enough to swing _that_ load--so
this time we'll take the thought for the deed. Keep trying, though,
Toots old girl, and you'll make it yet. In the meantime we're all
pulling for you, and if you ever need any help, shoot us a beam on the
communicator Chris is giving you. Clear ether, ace!"

"Clear ether, MacDougall and Kinnison!" Helen's eyes were softer than
either of the Tellurians had ever seen them before. "There is, I think,
something of wisdom, of efficiency, in what you have said. It may
be ... that is, there is a possibility ... you of Civilization are,
perhaps, persons--of a sort that is--after all. Thanks--_really_
thanks, I mean, this time. Good-by."

Helen's plane had already been unloaded. She disembarked and stood
beside it; watching, with a peculiarly untranslatable expression, the
huge cruiser until it was out of sight.

"It was just like pulling teeth for her to be civil to me," Kinnison
grinned at his fiancée, "but she finally made the lift. She's a grand
girl, that Helen, in her peculiar, poisonous way."

"Why, Kim!" Mac protested. "She's nice, really, when you get to know
her. And she's so stunningly, so ravishingly beautiful!"

"Uh-huh," Kinnison agreed, without a trace of enthusiasm. "Cast her in
chilled stainless steel--she'd just about do as she is, without any
casting--and she'd make a mighty fine statue."

"Kim! Shame on you!" the girl exclaimed. "Why, she's the most perfectly
_beautiful_ thing I ever saw in my whole life!" Her voice
softened. "I wish that I looked like that," she added wistfully.

"She's beautiful enough--in her way--of course," the man admitted,
entirely unimpressed. "But, then, so is a Radeligian cateagle, so is
a spire of frozen helium, and so is a six-foot-long, armor-piercing
punch. As for you wanting to look like her--I'm terrifically glad that
you don't. That's sheer tripe, Chris, and you know it. If you want to
look at something _really_ beautiful, get a mirror--beside you,
all the Helens that ever lived, with Cleopatra, Dessa Desplaines and
Illona Potter thrown in, wouldn't make a baffled flare--"

That was, of course, what she wanted him to say; and what followed is
of no particular importance here.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shortly after the _Dauntless_ cleared the stratosphere, Nadreck
reported that he had finished assembling and arranging the data,
and Kinnison called the Lensmen together in his con room for an
ultraprivate conference. Worsel, it appeared, was still in the surgery.

"'Smatter, doc?" Kinnison asked, casually. He knew that there was
nothing really serious the matter--Worsel had come out of the cavern
under his own power, and a Velantian recovers with startling rapidity
from any wound which does not kill him outright. "Having trouble with
your stitching?"

"I'll say we are!" the surgeon grunted. "Have to bore holes with
an electric drill and use linemen's pliers. Just about done now,
though--he'll be with you in a couple of minutes," and in a very little
more than the stipulated time the Velantian joined the other Lensmen.

He was bandaged and taped, and did not move at his customary headlong
pace, but he fairly radiated self-satisfaction, bliss and contentment.
He felt better, he declared, than he had at any time since he cleaned
out the last cavern upon Delgon.

Kinnison stopped the interplay of thoughts by starting up his
Lensman's projector. This mechanism was something like the ordinary
three-dimensional color-and-sound machine, except instead of emitting
sounds it radiated thoughts. Sometimes the thoughts of one or more
Overlords, at other times the thoughts of the Eich or other beings
as registered upon the minds of the Overlords, at still others the
thoughts of Nadreck or of Worsel explaining or amplifying a preceding
thought passage or some detail which was being shown at the moment.
The spool of tape now being run, with others, formed the Lensmen's
record of what they had done. This record would go to Prime Base under
Lensman's Seal; that is, only a Lensman could handle it or see it.
Later, after the emergency had passed, copies of it would go to various
Central Libraries and thus become available to properly accredited
students. Indeed, it is only from such records, made upon the scene and
at the time by keen-thinking, logical, truth-seeking Lensmen, that such
a factual, minutely detailed history as this can be compiled; and your
historian is supremely proud that he was the first person other than a
Lensman to be allowed to study a great deal of this priceless data.

Worsel knew the gist of the report, Nadreck the compiler knew it all;
but to Kinnison, Mac and Tregonsee the unreeling of the tape brought
shocking news. For, as a matter of fact, the Overlords had known more,
and there was more in the Lyranian solar system to know than Kinnison's
wildest imaginings had dared to suppose. That system was one of the
main focal points for the zwilnik business of an immense volume of
space; Lyrane II was the meeting place, the dispatcher's office, the
nerve center from which thousands of invisible, immaterial lines
reached out to thousands of planets peopled by warm-blooded oxygen
breathers. Menjo Bleeko had sent to Lyrane II not one expedition, but
hundreds of them; the affair of Illona and her escorts had been the
veriest, the most trifling incident.

The Overlords, however, did not know of any Boskonian in the Second
Galaxy. They had no superiors, anywhere. The idea of anyone or anything
anywhere being superior to an Overlord was unthinkable. They did,
however, co-operate with--here came the really stunning fact--certain
of the Eich who lived upon eternally dark Lyrane VIII, and who
managed things for the frigid-blooded, poison-breathing Boskonians
of the region in much the same fashion as the Overlords did for the
warm-blooded, light-loving races. To make the co-operation easier and
more efficient, the two planets were connected by a hyperspatial tube.

"Just a sec!" Kinnison interrupted, as he stopped the machine for
a moment. "The Overlords were kidding themselves a bit there, I
think--they must have been. If they didn't report to or get orders from
the Second Galaxy or some other higher-up office, the Eich must have;
and since the records and plunder and stuff were not in the cavern,
they must be upon Eight. Therefore, whether they realized it or not,
the Overlords must have been inferior to the Eich and under their
orders. Check?"

"Check," Nadreck agreed. "Worsel and I concluded that they knew the
facts, but were covering up even in their own minds, to save face. Our
conclusions, and the data from which they were derived, are in the
introduction--another spool. Shall I get it?"

"By no means--just glad to have the point cleared up, is all. Thanks--"
and the showing went on.

The principal reason why the Lyranian system had been chosen for that
important headquarters was that it was one of the very few outlying
solar systems, completely unknown to the scientists of the Patrol,
in which both the Eich and the Overlords could live in their natural
environments. Lyrane VIII was, of course, intensely, bitterly cold.
This quality is not rare, since all No. 8 planets are; its uniqueness
lay in the fact that its atmosphere was almost exactly like that of
Jarnevon.

And Lyrane II suited the Overlords perfectly. Not only did it have the
correct temperature, gravity and atmosphere, but also it offered that
much rarer thing without which no cavern of Overlords would have been
content for long--a native life form possessing strong and highly vital
minds upon which they could prey.

There was more, much more; but the rest of it was not directly
pertinent to the immediate question. The tape ran out, Kinnison snapped
off the projector, and the Lensmen went into a five-way.

Why was not Lyrane II defended? Worsel and Kinnison had already
answered that one. Secretiveness and power of mind, not armament,
had always been the natural defenses of all Overlords. Why hadn't
the Eich interfered? That was easy, too. The Eich looked after
themselves--if the Overlords couldn't, that was just too bad. The
two ships that had come to aid and had remained to revenge had
certainly not come from Eight--their crews had been oxygen breathers.
Probably a rendezvous--immaterial, anyway. Why wasn't the whole solar
system ringed with outposts and screens? Too obvious. Why hadn't the
_Dauntless_ been detected? Because of her nullifiers; and if she
had been spotted by any short-range stuff she had been mistaken for
another zwilnik ship. They hadn't detected anything out of the way
upon Eight because it had not occurred to anybody to swing an analyzer
upon that particular planet. They would find that Eight was defended
plenty. Had the Eich had time to build defenses? They must have had,
or they wouldn't be there--they certainly were not taking that kind
of chances. And, by the way, hadn't they better do a bit of snooping
near Lyrane VIII before they went back to join the _Z9M9Z_ and the
Fleet? They had.

Thereupon the _Dauntless_ faced about and retraced her path toward
the now highly important system of Lyrane. In their previous approaches
the Patrolmen had observed the usual precautions to avoid revealing
themselves to any zwilnik vessel which might have been on the prowl.
Those precautions were now intensified to the limit, since they knew
that Lyrane VIII was the site of a base manned by the Eich themselves.

As the big cruiser crept toward her goal, nullifiers full out and every
instrument of detection and reception as attentively outstretched as
the whiskers of a tomcat slinking along a black alley at midnight, the
Lensmen again pooled their brains in conference.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Eich. This was going to be _no_ push-over. Even the approach
would have to be figured to a hair; because, since the Boskonians had
decided that it would be poor strategy to screen in their whole solar
system, it was a cold certainty that they would have their own planet
guarded and protected by every device which their inhuman ingenuity
could devise. The _Dauntless_ would have to stop just outside
the range of the electromagnetic detection, for the Boskonians would
certainly have a five-hundred-percent overlap. Their nullifiers would
hash up the electros somewhat, but there was no use in taking too many
chances. Previously, on right-line courses to and from Lyrane II, that
had not mattered, for two reasons--not only was the distance extreme
for accurate electro work, but also it would have been assumed that
their ship was a zwilnik. Laying a course for Eight, though, would be
something else entirely. A zwilnik would take the tube, and they would
not, even if they had known where it was.

That left the visuals. The cruiser was a mighty small target at
interplanetary distances; but there were such things as electronic
telescopes, and the occultation of even a single star might prove
disastrous. Kinnison called the chief pilot.

"Stars must be thin in certain regions of the sky out here, Hen.
Suppose you can pick us out a line of approach along which we will
occult no stars and no bright nebulae?"

"I should think so, chief--just a sec; I'll see--Yes, easily. There is
a lot of black background, especially to the nadir"--and the conference
continued.

They would have to go through the screens of electros in Kinnison's
inherently indetectable black speedster. QX, but she was nobody's
fighter--she didn't have a beam hot enough to light a match. And
besides, there were the thought-screens and the highly probable other
stuff about which the Lensmen could know nothing.

Kinnison quite definitely did not relish the prospect. He remembered
all too vividly what had happened when he had scouted the Eich's base
upon Jarnevon; when it was only through Worsel's aid that he had
barely--_just_ barely--escaped with his life. And Jarnevon's
defenders had probably been exerting only routine precautions, whereas
these fellows were undoubtedly cocked and primed for _the_
Lensman. He would go in, of course, but he'd probably come out feet
first--he didn't know any more about their defenses than he had known
before, and that was nothing, flat.

"Excuse the interruption, please," Nadreck's thought apologized, "but
it would seem to appear more desirable, would it not, to induce the one
of them possessing the most information to come out to us?"

"Huh?" Kinnison demanded. "It would, of course--but how in all your
purple hells do you figure on swinging _that_ load?"

"I am, as you know, a person of small ability," Nadreck replied in
his usual circuitous fashion. "Also, I am of almost negligible mass
and strength. Of what is known as bravery I have no trace--in fact,
I have pondered long over that, to me, incomprehensible quality and
have decided that it has no place in my scheme of existence. I have
found it much more efficient to perform the necessary tasks in the
easiest possible manner, which is usually by means of stealth, deceit,
indirection and other cowardly artifices."

"Any of those, or all of them, would be QX with me," Kinnison assured
him. "Anything goes, with gusto and glee, as far as the Eich are
concerned. What I don't see is how we can put it across."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Thought-screens interfered so seriously with my methods of procedure,"
the Palainian explained, "that I was forced to develop a means of
puncturing them without upsetting their generators. The device is not
generally known, as it is still in a very crude, experimental form; but
it does function, in a meager, unsatisfactory way. Might I suggest that
the four of you put on heated armor and come with me to my vessel in
the hold? It will take some little time to transfer my apparatus and
equipment to your speedster."

"Is it nonferrous--undetectable?" Kinnison asked.

"Of course," Nadreck replied in surprise. "I work, as I told you, by
stealth. My vessel is, except for certain differences necessitated by
racial considerations, a duplicate of your own."

"Why didn't you say so?" Kinnison wanted to know. "Why bother to move
the gadget? Why not use your speedster?"

"Because I was not asked. We should not bother. The only reason for
using your vessel is so that you will not suffer the discomfort of
wearing armor," Nadreck replied, categorically.

"Cancel it, then," Kinnison directed. "You've been wearing armor all
the time you were with us--turn about for a while will be QX. Better
that way, anyway, as this is very definitely your party, not ours. Not?"

"As you say; and with your permission," Nadreck agreed. "Also it may
very well be that you will be able to suggest improvements in my device
whereby its efficiency may be increased."

"I doubt it." The Tellurian's already great respect for this retiring,
soft-spoken, "cowardly" Lensman was increasing constantly. "But we
would like to study it, and perhaps copy it, if you so allow."

"Gladly."

And so it was arranged.

The _Dauntless_ crept among a black backgrounded pathway and
stopped. Nadreck, Worsel and Kinnison--three were enough and neither
Mac nor Tregonsee insisted upon going--boarded the Palainian speedster.

Away from the mother ship it sped upon muffled jets, and through the
far-flung, heavily overlapped electromagnetic detector zones. Through
the outer thought-screens. Then, ultra-slowly, as space speeds go, the
speedster moved forward, feeling for whatever other blocking screens
there might be.

All three of those Lensmen were in fact detectors themselves--their
Arisian-imparted special senses made ethereal, even sub-ethereal,
vibrations actually visible or tangible--but they did not depend only
upon their bodily senses. That speedster carried instruments unknown
to space pilotry, and the Lensmen used them unremittingly. When they
came to a screen they opened it, so insidiously that its generating
mechanisms gave no alarms. Even a meteorite screen, which was supposed
to forbid the passage of any material object, yielded without protest
to Nadreck's subtle manipulation.

Slowly, furtively, a perfectly absorptive black body sinking through
blackness so intense as to be almost palpable, the Palainian speedster
settled downward toward the Boskonian fortress of Lyrane VIII.




                                 XIV.


This is perhaps as good a place as any to glance in passing at the
fashion in which the planet Lonabar was brought under the aegis of
Civilization. No attempt will or can be made to describe it in any
detail, since any adequate treatment of it would fill a volume--indeed,
many volumes have already been written concerning various phases of the
matter--and since it is not strictly germane to the subject in hand.
However, some knowledge of the modus operandi in such cases is highly
desirable for the full understanding of this history, in view of the
vast number of planets which Co-ordinator Kinnison and his associates
did have to civilize before the Second Galaxy was made secure.

Scarcely had Cartiff-Kinnison moved out than the Patrol moved in. If
Lonabar had been heavily fortified, a fleet of appropriate size and
power would have cleared the way. As it was, the fleet which landed was
one of transports, not of battleships, and all the fighting from then
on was purely defensive.

Propagandists took the lead; psychologists; Lensmen skilled not only
in languages but also in every art of human relationships. The case
of Civilization was stated plainly and repeatedly, the errors and the
fallacies of autocracy were pointed out. A nucleus of government was
formed; not of Civilization's imports, but of solid Lonabarian citizens
who had passed the Lensmen's tests of ability and trustworthiness.

Under this local government a pseudodemocracy began haltingly to
function. At first its progress was painfully slow; but as more and
more of the citizens perceived what the Patrol actually was doing, it
grew apace. Not only did the invaders allow--yes, foster--free speech
and statutory liberty; they suppressed ruthlessly any person or any
faction seeking to build a new dictatorship, whatever its nature, upon
the ruins of the old. _That_ news traveled fast; and laboring
always and mightily upon Civilization's side were the always-present,
however deeply buried, urges of all intelligent entities toward
self-expression.

There was opposition, of course. Practically all of those who had waxed
fat upon the old order were very strongly in favor of its continuance.
There were the hordes of the down-trodden who had so long and so dumbly
endured oppression that they could not understand anything else; in
whom the above-mentioned urges had been beaten and tortured almost out
of existence. They themselves were not opposed to Civilization--for
them it meant at worst only a change of masters--but those who sought
by the same old wiles to re-enslave them were foes indeed.

Menjo Bleeko's sycophants and retainers were told to work or starve.
The fat hogs could support the new order--or else. The thugs had to
choose between honest co-operation with their fellow men and flitting
to some zwilnik planet. Those who tried to prey upon and exploit the
dumb masses were extirpated, one and all.

Little could be done, however, about the dumb themselves, for in them
the spark was feeble indeed. The new government nursed that spark
along, the while ruling them as definitely, although not as harshly,
as had the old; the Lensmen backing the struggling young Civilization
knowing full well that in the children or in the children's children of
these unfortunates the spark would flame up into a great, white light.

It is seen that this government was not, and could not for many years
become, a true democracy. It was in fact a benevolent semiautocracy;
autonomous in a sense, yet controlled by the Galactic Council through
its representatives, the Lensmen. It was, however, so infinitely more
liberal than anything theretofore known by the Lonabarians as to be a
political revelation, and since corruption, that cosmos-wide curse of
democracy, was not allowed a first finger-hold, the principles of real
democracy and of Civilization took deeper root year by year.

       *       *       *       *       *

To get back into the beam of narrative, Nadreck's blackly indetectable
speedster settled to ground far from the Boskonians' central dome; well
beyond the far-flung screens. The Lensmen knew that no life existed
outside that dome and they knew that no possible sense of perception
could pierce those defenses. They did not know, however, what other
resources of detection, of offense or of defense the foe might
possess; hence the greatest possible distance at which they could work
efficiently was the best distance.

"I realize that it is useless to caution any active mind not to think
at all," Nadreck remarked as he began to manipulate various and sundry
controls, "but you already know from the nature of our problem that
any extraneous thought will wreak untold harm. For that reason I beg
of you to keep your thought-screens up at all times, no matter what
happens. It is, however, imperative that you be kept informed, since I
may require aid or advice at any moment. To that end I ask you to hold
these electrodes, which are connected to a receptor. Do not hesitate
to speak freely to each other or to me; but please use only a spoken
language, as I am averse even to Lensed thoughts at this juncture. Are
we agreed? Are we ready?"

They were agreed and ready. Nadreck actuated his peculiar drill--a
tube of force somewhat analogous to a Q-type helix except in that it
operated within the frequency range of thought--and began to increase,
by almost infinitesimal increments, its power. Nothing, apparently,
happened; but finally the instruments upon the speedster's board
registered the fact that it was through.

"This is none too safe, friends," the Palainian announced from one part
of his multicompartmented brain, without distracting any part of his
attention from the incredibly delicate operation he was performing.
"Might I suggest, Kinnison, in my cowardly way, that you place yourself
at the controls and be ready to take us away from this planet at speed
and without notice?"

"I'll say you may!" and the Tellurian complied, with alacrity. "I'd a
lot rather be a live coward than a dead hero!"

But through course after course of screen the hollow drill gnawed its
cautious way without giving alarm; until at length there began to come
through the interloping tunnel a vague impression of foreign thought.
Nadreck stopped the helix, then advanced it by tiny steps until the
thoughts came in coldly clear--the thoughts of the Eich going about
their routine businesses. In the safety of their impregnably shielded
dome the proudly self-confident monsters did not wear their personal
thought-screens; which, for Civilization's sake, was just as well.

It had been decided previously that the mind they wanted would be
that of a psychologist; hence the thought sent out by the Palainian
was one which would appeal only to such a mind; in fact, one
practically imperceptible to any other. It was extremely faint;
wavering uncertainly upon the very threshold of perception. It was so
vague, so formless, so inchoate that it required Kinnison's intensest
concentration even to recognize it as a thought. Indeed, so starkly
unhuman was Nadreck's mind and that of his proposed quarry that it
was all the Tellurian Lensman could do to so recognize it. It dealt,
fragmentarily and in the merest glimmerings, with the nature and the
mechanisms of the First Cause; with the fundamental ego, its _raison
d'étre_, its causation, its motivation, its differentiation; with
the stupendously awful concepts of the Prime Origin of all things ever
to be.

Unhurried, monstrously patient, Nadreck neither raised the power of
the thought nor hastened its slow tempo. Stolidly, for minute after
long minute he held it, spraying it throughout the vast dome as mist
is sprayed from an atomizer nozzle. And finally he got a bite. A mind
seized upon that wistful, homeless, incipient thought; took it for its
own. It strengthened it, enlarged upon it, built it up. And Nadreck
followed it.

He did not force it; he did nothing whatever to cause any suspicion
that the thought was or ever had been his. But as the mind of the Eich
busied itself with that thought he all unknowingly let down the bars to
Nadreck's invasion.

Then, perfectly in tune, the Palainian subtly insinuated into the mind
of the Eich the mildly disturbing idea that he had forgotten something,
or had neglected to do some trifling thing. This was the first really
critical instant, for Nadreck had no idea whatever of what his victim's
duties were or what he could have left undone. It had to be something
which would take him out of the dome and toward the Patrolmen's
concealed speedster, but what it was, the Eich would have to develop
for himself: Nadreck could not dare to attempt even a partial control
at this stage and at this distance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kinnison clenched his teeth and held his breath, his big hands
clutching fiercely the pilot's bars; Worsel unheedingly coiled his
supple body into an ever smaller, ever harder and more compact bale.

"Ah!" Kinnison exhaled explosively. "It worked!" The psychologist, at
Nadreck's impalpable suggestion, had finally thought of the thing. It
was a thought-screen generator which had been giving a little trouble
and which really should have been checked before this.

Calmly, with the mild self-satisfaction which comes of having
successfully recalled to mind a highly elusive thought, the Eich
opened one of the dome's unforcible doors and made his unconcerned way
directly toward the waiting Lensmen; and as he approached, Nadreck
stepped up by logarithmic increments the power of his hold.

"Get ready, please, to cut your screens and to synchronize with me in
case anything slips and he tries to break away," Nadreck cautioned; but
nothing slipped.

The Eich came up unseeing to the speedster's side and stopped. The
drill disappeared. A thought-screen encompassed the group narrowly.
Kinnison and Worsel released their screens and also tuned in to the
creature's mind. And Kinnison swore briefly, for what they found was
meager enough. It was well, however, that they got what they did when
they did; for, as has been seen, even that little was very shortly
thereafter to be removed.

He knew a great deal concerning the zwilnik doings of the First Galaxy;
but so did the Lensmen; they were not interested in them. Neither
were they interested, at the moment, in the files or in the records.
Regarding the higher-ups, he knew of two, and only two, personalities.
By means of an intergalactic communicator he received orders from,
and reported to, a clearly defined, somewhat Eichlike entity known to
him as Kandron; and vaguely, from occasional stray and unintentional
thoughts of this Kandron, he had visualized as being somewhere in the
background a human being named Alcon. He supposed that the planets upon
which these persons lived were located in the Second Galaxy, but he was
not certain, even of that. He had never seen either of them; he was
pretty sure that none of his group ever would be allowed to see them.
He had no means of tracing them and no desire whatsoever to do so. The
only fact he really knew was that at irregular intervals Kandron got
into communication with this base of the Eich.

That was all. Kinnison and Worsel let go and Nadreck, with a minute
attention to detail which would be wearisome here, jockeyed the
unsuspecting monster back into the dome. The native knew fully where
he had been, and why. He had inspected the generator and had found it
in good order. Every second of elapsed time was accounted for exactly.
He had not the slightest inkling that anything out of the ordinary had
happened to him or anywhere around him.

       *       *       *       *       *

As carefully as the speedster had approached the planet, she departed
from it. She rejoined the _Dauntless_, in whose control room
Kinnison lined out a solid communicator beam to the _Z9M9Z_ and to
Port Admiral Haynes. He reported crisply, rapidly, everything that had
transpired.

"So our best bet, chief, is for you and the Fleet to get out of here
as fast as Klono will let you," he concluded. "Go straight out Rift
94, staying as far away as possible from both the spiral arm and the
Galaxy proper. Unlimber every spotting screen you've got--put them to
work along the line between Lyrane and the Second Galaxy. Plot all the
punctures, extending the line as fast as you can. We'll join you at max
and transfer to the _Z9M9Z_--her tank is just what the doctors
ordered for the job we've got to do."

"Well, if you say so, I suppose that's the way it's got to be," Haynes
grumbled. He had been growling and snorting under his breath ever since
it had become evident what Kinnison's recommendation was to be. "I
don't like this thing of standing by and letting zwilniks thumb their
noses at us, like Prellin did on Bronseca. That once was once too
damned often."

"Well, you got him, finally, you know," Kinnison reminded, quite
cheerfully, "and you can have these Eich, too--sometime."

"I hope," Haynes acquiesced, something less than sweetly. "QX,
then--but put out a few jets. The quicker you get out here the sooner
we can get back and clean out this hooraw's nest."

Kinnison grinned as he cut his beam. He knew that it would be some time
before the port admiral could hurl the metal of the Patrol against
Lyrane VIII; but even he did not realize just how long a time it was to
be.

What occasioned the delay was not the fact that the communicator was in
operation only at intervals: so many screens were out, they were spaced
so far apart, and the punctures were measured and aligned so accurately
that the periods of non-operation caused little or no loss of time. Nor
was it the vast distance involved; since, as has already been pointed
out, the matter in the intergalactic void is so tenuous that spaceships
are capable of enormously greater velocities than any attainable in the
far denser medium filling interstellar space.

No; what gave the Boskonians of Lyrane VIII their greatly lengthened
reprieve was simply the direction of the line established by the
communicator-beam punctures. Reasoning from analogy, the Lensmen had
supposed that it would lead them into a star cluster, fairly well away
from the main body of the Galaxy in either the zenith or the nadir
direction. Instead of that, however, when the Patrol surveyors got
close enough to the Second Galaxy so that their cone of possible error
was very small in comparison with the gigantic lens of the island
universe which they were approaching, it became clear that their
objective lay deep within the Galaxy itself. At least, the prolongation
of their line led well into it, and that fact gave the Lensmen to pause.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I don't like this line a bit, chief," Kinnison told the admiral then.
"Maybe it runs into a cluster on this side, but we can't figure on it.
It'd smell like Limburger to have a fleet of this size and power nosing
into their home territory, along what must be one of the hottest lines
of communication they've got."

"Check," Port Admiral Haynes agreed. "QX so far, but it would begin
to stink pretty quick now. We've got to assume that they know about
spotting screens, whether they really do or not. If they do, they'll
have this line trapped from stem to gudgeon, and the minute they detect
us they'll cut this line out entirely. Then where'll you be?"

"Right back where I started from--that's what I'm yapping about. And to
make matters worse, it's a thousand to one that the ape we are looking
for is not going to be anywhere near the end of this line."

"Huh? How do you dope that out?" Haynes demanded.

"Logic. We're getting up now to where these zwilniks can really think.
You have already assumed that they know that we can trace their beam,
and we know that they know about our detector nullifiers. Go further.
Assume that they have deduced, from things we have already done, that
we have ships--one or two, at least--that are inherently indetectable
and almost perfectly absorptive. Where does that land you?"

"Hm-m-m. I see. Since they can't change the nature of the beam, they
would run it through a series of relays, with each leg trapped with
everything they could think of, and at the first sign of interference
with any one of them they would switch to another, maybe halfway across
the Galaxy. Also, they might very well move it around once in a while,
anyway, just on general principles."

"Check. That's why you had better take the Fleet back home, leaving
Nadreck and me to work the rest of this line with our speedsters."

"Don't be silly, son--I thought you could think"--and Haynes gazed
quizzically at the younger man.

"What else? Where am I overlooking a bet?" Kinnison demanded.

"It is elementary tactics, young man," the admiral instructed, "to
cover up any small, quiet operation with a large and noisy one. Thus,
if I want to make an exploratory sortie in one sector I should always
attack in force in another."

"But what would it get us?" Kinnison expostulated. "What's the
advantage to be gained, to make up for the unavoidable losses?"

"Don't be dumb. Advantage? Listen!" Haynes' bushy gray hair fairly
bristled in eagerness. "We've been on the defensive long enough. They
must be weak, after their losses at Tellus; and now, before they can
rebuild, is the time to strike. It's good tactics, as I said, to make
a diversion to cover you up, but I want to do more than that. I think
that we had better start an actual, serious invasion, right now. When
you can swing it, the best possible defense--even in general--is a
powerful offense, and we're all set to go. We will begin it with this
fleet, and then, as soon as we are sure that they haven't got enough
power to counter-invade, we will bring up everything we have except
for some purely defensive stuff, such as sunbeams and so on, around
Tellus and the other most important bases. We'll hit them so hard that
they won't be able to worry about such a little thing as a communicator
line."

"Hm-m-m. Never thought of it from that angle, but it'd be nice. We are
coming over here sometime, anyway--why not now? I suppose that you'll
start on the edge, or in a spiral arm, just as though you were going
ahead with the conquest of the whole Galaxy?"

"Not 'just as though,'" Haynes declared. "We _are_ going through
with it. Find a planet on the outer edge of a spiral arm, as nearly
like Tellus as possible--"

"Make it nearly enough like Tellus and maybe I can use it for our
headquarters on this 'co-ordinator' thing." And Kinnison grinned.

"More truth than poetry in that, fellow. We find it and take it over.
Comb out the zwilniks with a fine-tooth comb. Make it the biggest,
toughest base the Universe ever saw--like Jarnevon, only more so.
Bring in everything we've got and expand from that planet as a center,
cleaning everything out as we go. We'll civilize 'em!"

And so, after considerable ultrarange communicator work, it was decided
that the Galactic Patrol would forthwith assume the offensive.

       *       *       *       *       *

Haynes assembled the Fleet. Then, while the two black speedsters kept
unobtrusively on with the task of plotting the line, Civilization's
mighty armada moved a few thousand parsecs aside and headed at normal
touring blast for the nearest out-cropping of the Second Galaxy.

There was nothing of stealth in this maneuver, nothing of finesse,
excepting in the arrangements of the units. First, far in the van,
flew the prodigious, irregular cone of scout cruisers. They were
comparatively small, not heavily armed or armored, but they were
ultrafast and were provided with the most powerful detectors, spotters
and locators known. They adhered to no rigid formation, but at the
will of their individual commanders, under the direct supervision of
Grand Fleet Operations in the _Z9M9Z_, flashed hither and thither
ceaselessly--searching, investigating, mapping, reporting.

Backing them up came the light cruisers and the cruising bombers--a
new type, this latter, designed primarily to bore in to close quarters
and to hurl bombs of negative matter. Third in order were the heavy
defensive cruisers. These ships had been developed specifically for
hunting down Boskonian commerce raiders within the Galaxy. They wore
practically an impenetrable screen, so that they could lock to and
hold even a superdreadnought. They had never before been used in Grand
Fleet formation; but since they were now equipped with tractor zones
and bomb tubes, theoretical strategy found a good use for them in this
particular place.

Next came the real war head--a solidly packed phalanx of maulers.
All the ships up ahead had, although in varying degrees, freedom of
motion and of action. The scouts had practically nothing else; fighting
was not their business. They could fight, a little, if they had to;
but they always ran away if they could, in whatever direction was
most expedient at the time. The cruising bombers could either take
their fighting or leave it alone, depending upon circumstances--in
other words, they fought light cruisers, but ran away from big stuff,
stinging as they ran. The heavy cruisers would fight anything short of
a mauler, but never in formation: they always broke ranks and fought
individual dog fights, ship-to-ship.

But that terrific spearhead of maulers had no freedom of motion
whatever. It knew only one direction--straight ahead. It would swerve
aside for an inert planet, but for nothing smaller; and when it
swerved it did so as a whole, not by parts. Its function was to blast
through--straight through--any possible opposition, if and when that
opposition should have been successful in destroying or dispersing
the screens of lesser vessels preceding it. A sunbeam was the only
conceivable weapon with which that stolid, power-packed mass of metal
could not cope; and, the Patrolmen devoutly hoped, the zwilniks didn't
have any sunbeams--yet.

A similar formation of equally capable maulers, meeting it head-on,
could break it up, of course. Theoretical results and war game
solutions of this problem did not agree, either with each other or
among themselves, and the thing had never been put to the trial of
actual battle. Only one thing was certain--when and if that trial did
come there was bound to be, as in the case of the fabled meeting of the
irresistible force with the immovable object, a lot of very interesting
by-products.

Flanking the maulers, streaming gracefully backward from their massed
might in a parabolic cone, were arranged the heavy battleships and
the superdreadnoughts; and directly behind the bulwark of flying
fortresses, tucked away inside the protecting envelope of big battle
wagons, floated the _Z9M9Z_--the brains of the whole outfit.

There were no free planets, no negaspheres of planetary antimass, no
sunbeams. Such things were useful either in the defense of a Prime
Base or for an all-out, ruthlessly destructive attack upon such a
base. Those slow, cumbersome, supremely powerful weapons would come
later, after the Patrol had selected the planet which they intended
to hold against everything which the Boskonians could muster. This
present expedition had as yet no planet to defend, it sought no planet
to destroy. It was the vanguard of Civilization, seeking a suitable
foothold in the Second Galaxy and thoroughly well equipped to argue
with any force mobile enough to bar its way.

       *       *       *       *       *

While it has been said that there was nothing of stealth in this
approach to the Second Galaxy, it must not be thought that it was
unduly blatant or obvious--any carelessness or ostentation would have
been very poor tactics indeed. Civilization's Grand Fleet advanced
in strict formation, with every routine military precaution. Its
nullifiers were full on, every blocking screen was out, every plate
upon every ship was hot and was being scanned by alert and keen-eyed
observers.

But every staff officer from Port Admiral Haynes down, and practically
every line officer as well, knew that the enemy would locate the
invading fleet long before it reached even the outer fringes of the
galaxy toward which it was speeding. That stupendous tonnage of ferrous
metal could not be disguised; nor could it by any possible artifice be
made to simulate any normal tenant of the space which it occupied.

The gigantic flares of the heavy stuff could not be baffled, and the
combined grand flare of Grand Fleet made a celestial object which would
certainly attract the electronic telescopes of plenty of observatories.
And the nearest such 'scopes, instruments of incredible powers of
resolution, would be able to pick them out, almost ship by ship,
against the relatively brilliant background of their own flares.

The Patrolmen, however, did not care. This was, and was intended to
be, an open, straightforward invasion; the first wave of an attack
which would not cease until the Galactic Patrol had crushed Boskonia
throughout the entire Second Galaxy.

Grand Fleet bored serenely on. Superbly confident in her awful might,
grandly contemptuous of whatever she was to face, she stormed along;
uncaring that at that very moment the foe was massing his every
defensive arm to hurl her back or to blast her out of existence.




                                  XV.


As Haynes and the Galactic Council had already surmised, Boskonia was
now entirely upon the defensive. She had made her supreme bid in the
effort which had failed so barely to overcome the defenses of hard-held
Tellus. It was, as has been seen, a very near thing indeed, but the
zwilnik chieftains did not and could not know that. Communication
through the hyperspatial tube was impossible, no ordinary communicator
beam could be driven through the Patrol's scramblers, no Boskonian
observers could be stationed near enough to the scene of action to
perceive or to record anything that had occurred, and no single zwilnik
ship or entity survived to tell of how nearly Tellus had come to
extinction.

And, in fine, it would have made no difference in the mind of Alcon
of Thrale if he had known. A thing which was not a full success was a
complete failure; to be almost a success meant nothing. The invasion
of Tellus had failed. They had put everything they had into that
gigantically climactic enterprise. They had shot the whole wad, and
it had not been enough. They had, therefore, abandoned for the nonce
humanity's galaxy entirely, to concentrate their every effort upon the
rehabilitation of their own depleted forces and upon the design and
construction of devices of hitherto unattempted capability and power.

But they simply had not had enough time to prepare properly to meet
the invading Grand Fleet of Civilization. It takes time--lots of
time--to build such heavy stuff as maulers and flying fortresses, and
they had not been allowed to have it. They had plenty of lighter stuff,
since the millions of Boskonian planets could furnish upon a few hours'
notice more cruisers, and even more first-line battleships, than could
possibly be used in Grand Fleet formation, but their backbone of brute
force and firing power was woefully weak.

Since the destruction of a solid center of maulers was, theoretically,
improbable to the point of virtual impossibility, neither Boskonia nor
the Galactic Patrol had built up any large reserve of such structures.
Both would now build up such a reserve as rapidly as possible, of
course, but half-built structures could not fight.

The zwilniks had many dirigible planets, but they were _too_ big.
Planets, as has been seen, are too cumbersome and unwieldy for use
against a highly mobile and adequately controlled fleet.

Conversely, humanity's Grand Fleet was up to its maximum strength and
perfectly balanced. It had suffered staggering losses in the defense of
Prime Base, it is true; but those losses were of comparatively light
craft, which Civilization's inhabited worlds could replace as easily
and as quickly as could Boskonia's. Very few maulers had been lost,
and those empty places were filled by substitutes withdrawn from minor
bases or other stations at which they were not imperatively necessary.

Hence, Boskonia's fleet was at a very serious disadvantage as it
formed to defy humanity just outside the rim of its galaxy. At two
disadvantages, really, for Boskonia then had neither Lensmen nor a
_Z9M9Z_; and Haynes, canny old master strategist that he was,
worked upon them both.

Grand Fleet so far had held to one right-line course, and upon this
line the zwilnik defense had been built. Now Haynes swung aside,
forcing the enemy to re-form--they had to engage him, he did not have
to engage them. Then, as they shifted--raggedly, as he had supposed
and had hoped that they would--he swung again. Again, and again; the
formation of the enemy becoming more and more hopelessly confused with
each shift.

The scouts had been reporting constantly; in the seven-hundred foot
lenticular tank of the _Directrix_ there was spread in exact
detail the disposition of every unit of the foe. Four Rigellian
Lensmen, now thoroughly trained and able to perform the task almost
as routine, condensed the picture--summarized it--in Haynes' ten-foot
tactical tank. And finally, so close that another swerve could not be
made, and with the line of flight of his solid fighting core pointing
straight through the loosely disorganized nucleus of the enemy, Haynes
gave the word to engage.

The scouts, remaining free, flashed aside into their pre-arranged
observing positions. Everything else went inert and bored ahead. The
light cruisers and the cruising bombers clashed first, and a chill
struck at Haynes' stout old heart as he learned that the enemy did have
negative-matter bombs.

Upon that point there had been much discussion. One view was that
the Boskonians would have them, since they had seen them in action
and since their scientists were fully as capable as were those of
Civilization. The other was that, since it had taken all the massed
intellect of the Conference of Scientists to work out a method of
handling and of propelling such bombs, and since the Boskonians were
probably not as co-operative as were the civilized races, they could
not have them.

Approximately half of the light cruisers of Grand Fleet were bombers.
This was deliberate, for in the use of the new arm there were involved
problems which theoretical strategy could not solve definitely.
Theoretically, a bomber could defeat a conventional light cruiser of
equal tonnage one hundred percent of the time, _provided_--here
was the rub!--that the conventional cruiser did not blast her out of
the ether before she could get her bombs into the vitals of the foe,
in order to accommodate the new equipment, something of the old had to
be decreased--something of power, of armament, of primary or secondary
beams, or of defensive screen. Otherwise the size and mass must be so
increased that the ship would no longer be a light cruiser, but a heavy
one.

And the Patrol's psychologists had had ideas, based upon facts which
they had gathered from Kinnison and from Illona and from various and
sundry spools of tape--ideas by virtue of which it was eminently
possible that the conventional light cruisers of Civilization, with
their heavier screen and more and hotter beams, could vanquish the
light cruisers of the foe, even though they should turn out to be
negative-matter bombers.

Hence the fifty-fifty division of types; but, since Haynes was not
thoroughly sold upon either the psychologists or their ideas, the
commanders of his standard light cruisers had received very explicit
and definite orders. If the Boskonians should have bombs and if the
high-brows' ideas did not pan out, they were to turn tail and run, at
maximum and without stopping to ask questions or to get additional
instructions.

Haynes had not really believed that the enemy would have negabombs,
they were so new and so atrociously difficult to handle. He wanted--but
was unable--to believe implicitly in the psychologists' findings.
Therefore, as soon as he saw what was happening, he abandoned his tank
for a moment to seize a plate and get into full touch with the control
room of one of the conventional light cruisers then going into action.

He watched it drive boldly toward a Boskonian vessel which was in the
act of throwing bombs. He saw that the agile little vessel's tractor
zone was out. He watched the bombs strike that zone and bounce. He
watched the tractor men go to work and he saw the psychologists' idea
bear splendid fruit. For what followed was a triumph, not of brute
force and striking power, but of morale and manhood. The brain men had
said, and it was now proved, that the Boskonian gunners, low class as
they were and driven to their tasks like the slaves they were, would
hesitate long enough before using tractor beams as pressors so that the
Patrolmen could take their own bombs away from them!

For negative matter, it must be remembered, is the exact opposite of
ordinary matter. It is built up of negative _mass_; in every
equation of physics and mechanics where mass appears, a minus sign
appears when negative matter is concerned. To it a pull is, or becomes,
a push; the tractor beam which pulls ordinary matter toward its
projector actually pushes negative matter away.

The "boys" of the Patrol knew that fact thoroughly. They knew all about
what they were doing, and why. They were there because they wanted to
be, as Illona had so astoundingly found out, and they worked with their
officers, not because of them. With the Patrol's gun crews it was a
race to see which crew could capture the first bomb and the most.

       *       *       *       *       *

Aboard the Boskonian how different it was! There the dumb cattle had
been told what to do, but not why. They did not know the fundamental
mechanics of the bomb tubes they operated by rote, did not know that
they were essentially tractor beam projectors. They did know, however,
that tractor beams pulled things toward them; and when they were
ordered to swing their ordinary tractors upon the bombs which the
Patrolmen were so industriously taking away from them, they hesitated
for seconds, even under the lash.

This hesitation was fatal. Haynes' gleeful gunners, staring through
their special finders, were very much on their toes; seconds were
enough. Their fierce-driven tractors seized the inimical bombs in
midspace, and before the Boskonians could be made to act in the only
possible opposition hurled them directly backward against the ship
which had issued them. Ordinary defensive screen did not affect them;
repulsor screen, meteorite and wall shields only sucked them inward the
faster.

And ordinary matter and negative matter cannot exist in contact. In
the instant of touching, one atom of negative matter and one of normal
matter unite and disappear. One negabomb was enough to put any cruiser
out of action, but here there were usually three or four at once.
Sometimes as many as ten; enough, almost, to consume the total mass of
a ship.

A bomb struck; ate in. Through solid armor it melted. Atmosphere rushed
out, to disappear en route--for air is normal matter. Along beams and
trusses the hellish hypersphere traveled freakishly, although usually
in the direction of greatest mass. It clung, greedily. Down stanchions
it flowed; leaving nothing in its wake, flooding all circumambient
space with lethal emanations. Into and through converters. Into
pressure tanks which blew up enthusiastically. Men's bodies it did not
seem to favor--not massive enough, perhaps--but even them it did not
refuse if offered. A Boskonian, gasping frantically for air which was
no longer there and already half mad, went completely mad as he struck
savagely at the thing and saw his hand and his arm to the shoulder
vanish instantaneously, as though they had never been.

Satisfied, Haynes wrenched his attention back to his tank. Most of his
light cruisers were through and in the clear; they were reporting by
thousands. Losses were very small. The conventional-type cruisers had
won either by using the enemies' own bombs, as he had seen them used,
or by means of their heavier armor and armament. The bombers had won
in almost every case; not by superior force, for in arms and equipment
they were to all intents and purposes identical with their opponents,
but because of their infinitely higher quality of personnel. To brief
it, scarcely a handful of Boskonia's light cruisers were able to flee
the fatal scene.

The heavy cruisers came up, broke formation, and went doggedly to
work. They were the blockers. Each took one ship--a heavy cruiser or a
battleship--out of the line, and held it out. It tried to demolish it
with every weapon it could swing, but even if it could not vanquish its
foe, it could and did hang on until some big bruiser of a battleship
could come up and administer the _coup de grâce_.

And battleships and superdreadnoughts were coming up in the thousands
and the myriads. All of them, in fact, but those enough to form a tight
globe, packed screen to screen, around the _Z9M9Z_.

Slowly, ponderously, inert, the war head of maulers came crawling
up. The maulers and fortresses of the Boskonians were hopelessly
outnumbered and were badly scattered in position. Hence this meeting of
the ultra-heavies was not really a battle at all, but a slaughter. Ten
or more of Haynes' gigantic structures could concentrate their entire
combined fire power upon any luckless one of the enemy; with what awful
effect it would be superfluous to enlarge upon.

When the mighty fortresses had done their work they englobed the
_Directrix_, enabling the guarding battleships to join their
sister moppers-up; but there was very little left to do. Civilization
had again triumphed; and, this time, at very little cost. Some of the
pirates had escaped, of course; observers from afar might very well
have had scanners and recorders upon the entire conflict; but, whatever
of news was transmitted or how, Alcon of Thrale and Boskonia's other
master minds would or could derive little indeed of comfort from the
happenings of this important day.

"Well, that is that--for a while, at least, don't you think?" Haynes
asked his Council of War.

It was decided that it was; that if Boskonia could not have mustered
a heavier center for her defensive action here, she would be in no
position to make any really important attack for months to come.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grand Fleet, then, was reformed; this time into a purely defensive and
exploratory formation. In the center, of course, was the _Z9M9Z_.
Around her was a close-packed quadruple globe of maulers. Outside
of them in order, came sphere after sphere of superdreadnoughts, of
battleships, of heavy cruisers, and of light cruisers. Then, not in
globe at all, but ranging far and wide, were the scouts. Into the edge
of the nearest spiral arm of the Second Galaxy the stupendous formation
advanced, and along it it proceeded at dead-slow blast--dead-slow, to
enable the questing scouts to survey thoroughly each planet of every
solar system as they came to it.

And finally an Earthlike planet was found. Several approximately
Tellurian worlds had been previously discovered and listed as
possibilities; but this one was so perfect that the search ended then
and there. Apart from the shape of the continents and the fact that
there was somewhat less land surface and a bit more salt water, it was
practically identical with Tellus. As was to be expected, its people
were human to the limit of classification. Entirely unexpectedly,
however, the people of Klovia--which is as close as English can come to
the native name--were not zwilniks. They had never heard of, nor had
they ever been approached by, the Boskonians. Space travel was to them
only a theoretical possibility, as was atomic energy.

They had no planetary organization, being still divided politically
into sovereign states which were all too often at war with each other.
In fact, a world war had just burned itself out, a war of such savagery
that only a fraction of the world's population remained alive. There
had been no victor, of course. All had lost everything--the survivors
of each nation, ruined as they were and without either organization or
equipment, were trying desperately to rebuild some semblance of what
they had once had.

Upon learning these facts the psychologists of the Patrol breathed
deep sighs of relief. This kind of thing was made to order; civilizing
this planet would be simplicity itself. And it was. The Klovians did
not have to be overawed by a show of superior force. Before this last,
horribly internecine war, Klovia had been a heavily industrialized
world, and as soon as the few remaining inhabitants realized what
Civilization had to offer, that no one of their neighboring competitive
states was to occupy a superior position, and that full, world-wide
production was to be resumed as soon as was humanly possible, their
relief and joy were immeasurable.

Thus the Patrol took over without difficulty. But they were, the
Lensmen knew, working against time. As soon as the zwilniks could get
enough heavy stuff built they would attack, grimly determined to blast
Klovia and everything upon it out of space. Even though they had known
nothing about the planet previously, it was idle to hope that they were
still in ignorance either of its existence or of what was in general
going on there.

Haynes' first care was to have the heaviest metalry of the Galactic
Patrol--loose planets, sunbeams, fortresses, and the like--rushed
across the void to Klovia at maximum. Then, as well as putting every
employable of the new world to work, at higher wages than he had ever
earned before, the Patrol imported millions upon millions of men, with
their women and families, from hundreds of Earthlike planets in the
First Galaxy.

They did not, however, come blindly. They came knowing that Klovia was
to be primarily a military base, the most supremely powerful base that
had ever been built. They knew that it would bear the brunt of the most
furious attacks that Boskone could possibly deliver; they knew full
well that it might fall. Nevertheless, men and women, they came in
their multitudes. They came with high courage and high determination,
glorying in that which they were to do. People who could and did so
glory were the only ones who came; which fact accounts in no small part
for what Klovia is today.

People came, and worked, and stayed. Ships came, and trafficked. Trade
and commerce increased tremendously. And further and further abroad,
as there came into being upon that formerly almost derelict planet
some seventy-odd gigantic defensive establishments, there crept out
an ever-widening screen of scout ships, with all their high-powered
feelers hotly outstretched.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile Kinnison and frigid-blooded Nadreck had worked their line,
leg by tortuous leg, to Onlo and thence to Thrale. A full spool should
be devoted to that working alone; but, unfortunately, as space here
must be limited to the barest essentials, it can scarcely be mentioned.
As Kinnison and Haynes had foreseen, that line was heavily trapped.
Luckily, however, it had not been moved so radically that the searchers
could not rediscover it; the zwilniks were, as Haynes had promised,
very busily engaged with other and more important matters. All of those
traps were deadly, and many of them were ingenious indeed--so ingenious
as to test to the utmost the "cowardly" Palainian's skill and mental
scope. All, however, failed. The two Lensmen held to the line in spite
of the pitfalls and followed it to the end. Nadreck stayed upon or near
Onlo, to work in its frightful environment against the monsters to whom
he was biologically so closely allied, while the Tellurian went on to
Thrale, to try conclusions with that planet's physically human tyrant,
Alcon.

Again he had to build up an unimpeachable identity and here there
were no friendly thousands to help him do it. He had to get
close--_really_ close--to Alcon, without antagonizing him or in
any way arousing his hair-trigger suspicions. Kinnison had studied that
problem for days. Not one of his previously used artifices would work,
even had he dared to repeat a procedure. Also, time was decidedly of
the essence.

There was a way. It was not an easy way, but it was fast and, if it
worked at all, it would work perfectly. Kinnison would not have risked
it even a few months back, but now he was pretty sure that he had jets
enough to swing it.

He needed a soldier of about his own size and shape--details were
unimportant. The man should not be in Alcon's personal troops, but
should be in a closely allied battalion, from which promotion into that
select body would be logical. He should be relatively inconspicuous,
yet with a record of accomplishment, or at least of initiative, which
would square up with the rapid promotions which were to come.

The details of that man hunt are interesting, but not of any real
importance here, since they did not vary in any essential from
other searches which have been described at length. He found him--a
lieutenant in the Royal Guard--and the ensuing mind study was as
assiduous as it was insidious. In fact, the Lensman memorized
practically every memory chain in the fellow's brain. Then the officer
took his regular furlough and started for home--but he never got there.

Instead, it was Kimball Kinnison who wore the Thralian's gorgeous
full-dress uniform and who greeted in exactly appropriate fashion the
Thralian's acquaintances and lifelong friends. A few of these, who
chanced to see the guardsman first, wondered briefly at his changed
appearance or thought that he was a stranger. Very few, however, and
very briefly; for the Lensman's sense of perception was tensely alert
and his mind was strong. In moments, then, those chance few forgot
that they had ever had the slightest doubt concerning this soldier's
identity; they knew calmly and as a matter of fact that he was the
Traska Gannel whom they had known so long.

Living minds presented no difficulty except for the fact that of course
he could not get in touch with everyone who had ever known the real
Gannel. However, he did his best. He covered plenty of ground and he
got most of them--all that could really matter.

Written records, photographs, and tapes were something else again.
He had called Worsel in on that problem long since, and the purely
military records of the Royal Guards were QX before Gannel went on
leave. Although somewhat tedious, that task had not proved particularly
difficult. Upon a certain dark night a certain light circuit had gone
dead, darkening many buildings. Only one or two sentries or guards had
put their flashlights upon either Worsel or Kinnison, and they never
afterward recalled having done so. And any record that has ever been
made can be remade to order by the experts of the Secret Service of the
Patrol!

       *       *       *       *       *

And thus it was also with the earlier records. Gannel had been born in
a hospital. QX--that hospital was visited, and thereafter Gannel's
baby footprints were actually those of infant Kinnison. He had gone to
certain schools--those schools' records also were made to conform to
the new facts.

Little could be done, however, about pictures. No man can possibly
remember how many times he has had his picture taken, or who has the
negatives, or to whom he had given photographs, or in what papers,
books, or other publications his likeness has appeared.

The older pictures, Kinnison decided, did not count. Even if the
likenesses were good, he looked enough like Gannel so that the boy
or the callow youth might just about as well have developed into
something that would pass for Kinnison in a photograph as into the man
which he actually did become. Where was the dividing line? The Lensman
decided--or rather, the decision was forced upon him--that it was at
his graduation from the military academy.

There had been an annual, in which volume appeared an individual
picture, fairly large, of each member of the graduating class. About
a thousand copies of the book had been issued, and now they were
scattered all over space. Since it would be idle even to think of
correcting them all, he could not correct any of them. Kinnison
studied that picture for a long time. He didn't like it very well.
The cub was just about grown up, and this photo looked considerably
more like Gannel than it did like Kinnison. However, the expression
was self-conscious, the pose strained--and, after all, people hardly
ever looked at old annuals. He'd have to take a chance on that.
Later poses--formal portraits, that is; snapshots could not be
considered--would have to be fixed up.

Thus it came about that certain studios were raided very
surreptitiously. Certain negatives were abstracted and were deftly
re-retouched. Prints were made therefrom, and in several dozens of
places in Gannel's home town, in albums and in frames, stealthy
substitutions were made.

The furlough was about to expire. Kinnison had done everything that he
could do. There were holes, of course--there couldn't help but be--but
they were mighty small and, if he played his cards right, they would
never show up. Just to be on the safe side, however, he'd have Worsel
stick around for a couple of weeks or so, to watch developments and to
patch up any weak spots that might develop. The Velantian's presence
upon Thrale would not create any suspicion--there were lots of such
folks flitting from planet to planet--and if anybody did get just a
trifle suspicious of Worsel, it might be all the better.

So it was done, and Lieutenant Traska Gannel of the Royal Guard went
back to duty.




                                 XVI.


Nadreck, the furtive Palainian, had prepared as thoroughly in his
own queerly underhanded fashion as had Kinnison in his bolder one.
Nadreck was cowardly, in Earthly eyes, there can be no doubt of that;
as cowardly as he was lazy--or at least, if not exactly lazy, highly
averse to any unnecessary effort. To his race, however, those traits
were eminently sensible; and those qualities did in fact underlie his
prodigious record of accomplishment. Being so careful of his personal
safety, he had lived long and would live longer; by doing everything
in the easiest possible way he had conserved his resources. Why take
chances with a highly valuable life? Why be so inefficient as to work
hard in the performance of a task when it could always be done in some
easy way?

Nadreck moved in upon Onlo, then, absolutely imperceptibly. His dark,
cold, devious mind, so closely akin to those of the Onlonians, reached
out, indetectably _en rapport_ with theirs. He studied, dissected,
analyzed and neutralized their defenses, one by one. Then, his
ultra-black speedster securely hidden from their every prying mechanism
and sense, although within easy working distance of the control dome
itself, he snuggled down into his softly cushioned resting place and
methodically, efficiently, he went to work.

Thus, when Alcon of Thrale next visited his monstrous henchmen, Nadreck
flipped a switch and every thought of the zwilnik's conference went
permanently on record.

"What have you done, Kandron, about the Lensman?" the Tyrant demanded
in harsh tones. "What have you concluded?"

"We have done very little," the chief psychologist replied, coldly.
"Beyond the liquidation of a few Lensmen--with nothing whatever
to indicate that any of them had any leading part in our recent
reverses--our agents have accomplished nothing.

"As to conclusions, I have been unable to draw any except the highly
negative one that every Boskonian psychologist who has ever summed up
the situation has, in some respect or other, been seriously in error."

"And only _you_ are right!" Alcon sneered. "Why?"

"I am right only in that I admit my inability to draw any valid
conclusions," Kandron replied, imperturbably. "The available data are
too meager, too inconclusive, and above all, too contradictory to
justify any positive statements. There is a possibility that there
are two Lensmen who have been and are mainly responsible for what has
happened. One of these, the lesser, may be--note well that I say 'may
be,' not 'is'--a Tellurian or an Aldebaranian or some other definitely
human being; the other and by far the more powerful one is apparently
absolutely and entirely unknown, except by his works."

"Star A Star," Alcon declared.

"Call him so if you like," Kandron assented, flatly. "But this Star A
Star is an operator. As the supposed Director of Lensmen he is merely a
figment of the imagination."

"But this information came from the Lensman Morgan!" Alcon protested.
"He was questioned under the drug of truth; he was tortured and all but
slain; the Overlord of Delgon consumed all his life force except for
the barest possible moiety!"

"How do you know all these things?" Kandron asked, unmoved. "Merely
from the report of the Overlord and from the highly questionable
testimony of one of the Eich, who was absent from the scene during all
of the most important time?"

"You suspect, then, that--" Alcon broke off, shaken visibly.

"I do," the psychologist replied, dryly. "I suspect very strongly
indeed that there is working against us a mind of a power and scope,
but little inferior to my own. A mind able to overcome that of an
Overlord; one able at least if unsuspected and hence unopposed, to
deceive even the admittedly capable minds of the Eich. I suspect that
the Lensman Morgan was, if he existed at all, merely a puppet. The Eich
took him too easily by far. It is, therefore, eminently possible that
he had no physical actuality of existence--"

"Oh, come, now! Don't be ridiculous!" Alcon snapped. "With all Boskone
there as witnesses? Why, his hand and Lens remained!"

"Improbable, perhaps, I admit--but still eminently possible," Kandron
insisted. "Admit for the moment that he was actual, and that he did
lose a hand--but remember also that the hand and the Lens may very well
have been brought along and left there as reassurances; we cannot be
sure even that the Lens matched the hand. But admitting all this, I am
still of the opinion that Lensman Morgan was not otherwise tortured,
that he lost none of his vital force, that he and the unknown I have
already referred to returned practically unharmed to their own galaxy.
And not only did they return, they must have carried with them the
information which was later used by the Patrol in the destruction of
Jarnevon."

"Utterly preposterous!" Alcon snorted. "Tell me, if you can, upon what
facts you have been able to base such fantastic opinions."

"Gladly," Kandron assented. "I have been able to come to no really
valid conclusions, and it may very well be that your fresh viewpoint
will enable us to succeed where I alone have failed. I will, therefore,
summarize very briefly the data which seem to me most significant.
Attend closely, please:

       *       *       *       *       *

"For many years, as you know, everything progressed smoothly. Our
first setback came when a Tellurian warship, manned by Tellurians and
Valerians, succeeded in capturing almost intact one of the most modern
and most powerful of our vessels. The Valerians may be excluded from
consideration, in so far as mental ability is concerned. At least one
Tellurian escaped, in one of our own, supposedly derelict, vessels.
This one, whom Helmuth thought of, and reported, as 'the' Lensman,
eluding all pursuers, went to Velantia; upon which planet he so wrought
as to steal bodily six of our ships sent there especially to hunt
him down. In those ships he won his way back to Tellus in spite of
everything Helmuth and his force could do.

"Then there were the two episodes of the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I. In
the first one a Tellurian Lensman was defeated--possibly killed. In
the second our base was destroyed--tracelessly. Note, however, that
the base next above it in order was, so far as we know, not visited or
harmed.

"There was the Boyssia affair, in which the human being Blakeslee did
various unscheduled things. He was obviously under the control of some
far more powerful mind; a mind which did not appear, then or ever.

"We jump then to this, our own galaxy--the sudden, inexplicable
disappearance of the planet Medon.

"Back to theirs again--the disgraceful and closely connected debacles
at Shingvors and Antigan. Traceless both, but again neither was
followed up to any higher headquarters."

Nadreck grinned at that, if a Palainian can be said to grin. Those
matters were purely his own. He had done what he had been requested to
do--thoroughly--no following up had been either necessary or desirable.

"Then Radelix," Kandron's summary went concisely on. "The female
agents, Bominger, the Kalonian observers--all wiped out. Was or was not
some human Lensman to blame? Everyone, from Chester Q. Fordyce down to
a certain laborer upon the docks, was suspected, but nothing definite
could be learned.

"The senselessly mad crew of the _27L462P_--Wynor--Grantlia. Again
completely traceless. Reason obscure, and no known advantage gained, as
this sequence also was dropped."

Nadreck pondered briefly over this material. He knew nothing of any
such matters nor, he was pretty sure, did Kinnison. _The_ Lensman
apparently was getting credit for something that must have been
accidental or wrought by some internal enemy. QX. He listened again:

"After the affair of Bronseca, in which so many Lensmen were engaged
that particularization was impossible, and which again was not
followed up, we jump to the Asteroid Euphrosyne, Miners' Nest, and
Wild Bill Williams of Aldebaran II. If it was a coincidence that Bill
Williams became William Williams and followed our line to Tressilia,
it is a truly remarkable one--even though, supposedly, said Williams
was so stupefied with drugs as to be incapable either of motion or
perception.

"Jalte's headquarters was, apparently, missed. However, it must have
been invaded--tracelessly--for it was the link between Tressilia and
Jarnevon, and Jarnevon was found and was destroyed.

"Now, before we analyze the more recent events, what do you yourself
deduce from the above facts?" Kandron asked.

While the Tyrant was cogitating, Nadreck indulged in a minor gloat.
This psychologist, by means of impeccable logic and reasoning
from definitely known facts, had arrived at _such_ erroneous
conclusions! However, Nadreck had to admit, his own performances and
those in which Kinnison had acted indetectably, when added to those of
some person or persons unknown, did make a really impressive total.

       *       *       *       *       *

"You may be right," Alcon admitted finally. "At least two entirely
different personalities and methods of operation. Two Lensmen are
necessary to satisfy the above requirements--and, as far as we know,
sufficient. One of the necessary two is a human being, the other an
absolutely unknown. Cartiff was, of course, the human Lensman. A
masterly piece of work, that--but, with the co-operation of the Patrol,
both logical and fairly simple. This human being is always in evidence,
yet is so cleverly concealed by his very obviousness that nobody ever
considers him important enough to be worthy of a close scrutiny.
Or--perhaps--"

"That is better," Kandron commented. "You are beginning to see why I
was so careful in saying that the known Tellurian factor 'may be,' not
'is,' of any real importance."

"But he _must_ be!" Alcon protested. "It was a human being who
tried and executed our agent; Cartiff was a human being--to name only
two."

"Of course," Kandron admitted half contemptuously. "But we have no
proof whatever that any of those human beings actually did, of their
own volition, any of the things for which they have been given credit.
Thus, it is now almost certain that that widely advertised 'mind-ray
machine' was simply a battery of spotlights--the man operating them may
very well have done nothing else. Similarly, Cartiff may have been an
ordinary gangster controlled by the Lensman--we may as well call him
Star A Star as anything else--or a Lensman or some other member of the
Patrol acting as a dummy to distract our attention from Star A Star,
who himself did the real work, all unperceived."

"Proof?" the Tyrant snapped.

"No proof--merely a probability," the Onlonian stated flatly. "We
_know_, however, definitely and for a fact--visiplates and
long-range communicators cannot be hypnotized--that Blakeslee was one
of Helmuth's own men. Also that he was the same man, both as a loyal
Boskonian of very ordinary mental talents and as an enemy having a
mental power which he as Blakeslee never did and never could possess."

"I see," Alcon thought deeply. "Very cogently put. Instead of there
being two Lensmen, working sometimes together and sometimes separately,
you think that there is only one really important mind and that this
mind at times works with or through some Tellurian?"

"But not necessarily the same Tellurian--exactly. And there is
nothing to give us any indication whatever as to Star A Star's real
nature or race. We cannot even deduce whether or not he is an oxygen
breather--and that is bad."

"Very bad," the Tyrant assented. "Star A Star, or Cartiff or both
working together, found Lonabar. They learned of the Overlords, or at
least of Lyrane II--"

"By sheer accident, if they learned it there at all, I am certain of
that," Kandron insisted. "They did not get any information from Menjo
Bleeko's mind; there was none there to get."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Accident or not, what boots it?" Alcon impatiently brushed aside the
psychologist's protests. "They found Bleeko and killed him. A raid
upon the cavern of the Overlords upon Lyrane II followed immediately.
From the reports sent by the Overlords to the Eich of Lyrane VIII we
know that there were two Patrol ships involved. One, not definitely
identified as Cartiff's, took no part in the real assault. The other,
the superdreadnought _Dauntless_, did that alone. She was manned
by Tellurians, Valerians, and at least one Velantian. Since they went
to the trouble of taking the Overlords alive, we may take it for
granted that they obtained from them all the information they possessed
before they destroyed them and their cavern?"

"It is at least highly probable that they did so," Kandron admitted.

"We have, then, many questions and few answers," and the Tyrant strode
up and down the dimly blue-lit room. "It would be idle, indeed, in
view of the facts, to postulate that Lyrane II was left, as were some
others, a dead end. Has Star A Star attempted Lyrane VIII? If not,
why has he delayed? If so, did he succeed or fail in penetrating the
defenses of the Eich? They swear that he did not, that he could not--"

"Of course," Kandron sneered. "But while asking questions, why not
ask why the Patrol chose this particular time to invade our galaxy in
such force as to wipe out our Grand Fleet? To establish themselves so
strongly as to make it necessary for us of the High Command to devote
our entire attention to the problem of dislodging them?"

"What!" Alcon exclaimed, then sobered quickly and thought for minutes.
"You think, then, that--" His thoughts died away.

"I do so think," Kandron thought, glumly. "It is very decidedly
possible--yes, perhaps even probable--that the Eich of Lyrane VIII were
able to offer no more resistance to the penetration of Star A Star than
was Jalte the Kalonian. That this massive thrust was timed to cover the
insidious tracing of our lines of communication or whatever other leads
the Lensman had been able to discover."

"But the traps--the alarms--the screens and zones!" Alcon exclaimed,
manifestly jarred by this new and disquietingly keen thought.

"No alarm was tripped, as you know; no trap was sprung," Kandron
replied, quietly. "The fact that we have not as yet been attacked here
may or may not be significant. Not only is Onlo very strongly held,
not only is it located in such a central position that their lines of
communication would be untenable, but also--"

"Do you mean to admit _you_ may have been invaded and
searched--tracelessly?" Alcon fairly shrieked the thought.

"Certainly," the psychologist replied, coldly. "While I do not believe
that it has been done, the possibility must be conceded. What we could
do, we have done; but what science can do, science can circumvent. To
finish my thought, it is a virtual certainty that it is not Onlo and I
who are their prime objectives, but Thrale and you. Especially you."

"You may be right. You probably _are_ right; but with no data
whatever upon who or what Star A Star really is, with no tenable theory
as to how he could have done what actually has been done, speculation
is idle."

Upon this highly unsatisfactory note the interview closed. Alcon
the Tyrant went back to Thrale; and as he entered his palace
grounds he passed within forty inches of his Nemesis. For Star A
Star-Kinnison-Traska Gannel was, as Alcon himself so clearly said,
rendered invisible and imperceptible by his own obviousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Although obvious, Kinnison was very busy indeed. As a lieutenant
of Guardsmen, the officer in charge of a platoon whose duties were
primarily upon the ground, he had very little choice of action. His
immediate superior, the first lieutenant of the same company, was not
much better off. The captain had more authority and scope, since he
commanded aërial as well as ground forces. Then, disregarding side
lines of comparative seniority, came the major, the colonel, and
finally the general, who was in charge of all the regular armed forces
of Thrale's capital city. Alcon's personal troops were, of course, a
separate organization, but Kinnison was not interested in them--yet.

The major would be high enough, Kinnison decided. Big enough to have
considerable authority and freedom of motion, and yet not important
enough to attract undesirable attention.

The first lieutenant, a stodgy, strictly rule-of-thumb individual, did
not count. He could step right over his head into the captaincy. The
real Gannel had always, in true zwilnik fashion, hated his captain
and had sought in devious ways to undermine him. The pseudo-Gannel
despised the captain as well as hating him, and to the task of sapping
he brought an ability enormously greater than any which the real Gannel
had ever possessed.

Good Boskonian technique was to work upward by stealth and treachery,
aided by a carefully built-up personal following of spies and agents.
Gannel had already formed such a staff; had already selected the
man who, in the natural course of events, would assassinate the
first lieutenant. Kinnison retained Gannel's following, but changed
subtly its methods of operation. He worked almost boldly. He himself
criticized the captain severely, within the hearing of two men whom he
knew to belong, body and soul, to his superior.

This brought quick results. He was summoned pre-emptorily to the
captain's office; and, knowing that the company commander would not
dare to have him assassinated there, he went. In that office there were
a dozen people; it was evident that the captain intended this rebuke to
be a warning to all upstarts, forever.

"Lieutenant Traska Gannel, I have had my eye upon you and your
subversive activities for some time," the captain ordered. "Now, purely
as a matter of form, and in accordance with Paragraph 5, Section 724
of General Regulations, you may offer whatever you have of explanation
before I reduce you to the ranks for insubordination."

"I have a lot to say," Kinnison replied, coolly. "I don't know what
your spies have reported, but to whatever it was I would like to add
that having this meeting here as you are having it proves that you are
as fat in the head as you are in the belly--"

"Silence! Seize him, men!" the captain commanded, fiercely. He was not
really fat. He had only a scant inch of equatorial bulge; but that
small surplusage was a sore point indeed. "Disarm him!"

"The first man to move dies in his tracks," Kinnison countered; his
coldly venomous tone holding the troopers motionless. He wore two hand
weapons more or less similar to DeLameters, and now his hands rested
lightly upon their butts. "I cannot be disarmed until after I have been
disrated, as you know very well; and that will never happen. For, if
you demote me, I will take an appeal, as is my right, to the colonel's
court, and there I will prove that you are stupid, inefficient,
cowardly, and unfit generally to command. You really are, and you
know it. Your discipline is lax and full of favoritism; your rewards
and punishments are assessed, not by logic, but by whim, passion, and
personal bias. Any court that can be named would set you down into
the ranks, where you belong, and would give me your place. If this
is insubordination and if you want to make something out of it, you
pussy-gutted, pusillanimous, brainless tub of lard, cut in your jets!"

The maligned officer half rose, white-knuckled hands gripping the arms
of his chair, then sank back craftily. He realized now that he had
blundered; he was in no position to face the rigorous investigation
which Gannel's accusation would bring on. But there was a way out.
This could now be made a purely personal matter, in which a duel would
be _de rigueur_. And in Boskonian dueling the superior officer,
not the challenged, had the choice of weapons. He was a master of the
saber; he had outpointed Gannel regularly in the regimental games.
Therefore he choked down his wrath and:

"These personal insults, gratuitous and false as they are, take the
matter out of military channels," he declared smoothly. "Meet me, then,
tomorrow, half an hour before sunset, in the Place of Swords. It will
be with sabers."

"Accepted." Kinnison meticulously followed the ritual. "To first blood
or to the death?" This question was superfluous--the stigma of the
Lensman's epithets, delivered before such a large group, could not
possibly be expunged by the mere letting of a little blood.

"To the death"--curtly.

"So be it, O Captain!" Kinnison saluted punctiliously, executed a
snappy about-face, and marched stiffly out of the room.

QX. This was fine--strictly according to Hoyle. The captain was a
swordsman, surely; but Kinnison was no slouch. He didn't think that he
would have to use a thought beam to help him. He had had five years of
intensive training. Quarterstaff, nightstick, club, knife, and dagger;
foil, _épée_, rapier, saber, broadsword, scimitar, bayonet, what
have you--with practically any nameable weapon any Lensman had to be as
good as he was with fists and feet.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Place of Swords was in fact a circular arena, surrounded by tiers
of comfortably padded seats. It was thronged with uniforms, with
civilian formal afternoon dress, and with modish gowns; for such duels
as this were sporting events of the first magnitude.

To guard against such trickery as concealed armor, the contestants
were almost naked. Each wore only silken trunks and a pair of low
shoes, whose cross-ribbed, flexible composition soles could not be made
to slip upon the corrugated surface of the corklike material of the
arena's floor.

The colonel himself, as master of ceremonies, asked the usual
perfunctory questions. No, reconciliation was impossible. No, the
challenged would not apologize. No, the challenger's honor could not
be satisfied with anything less than mortal combat. He then took two
sabers from an orderly, measuring them to be sure that they were of
precisely the same length. He tested each edge for keenness, from hilt
to needle point, with an expert thumb. He pounded each hilt with a
heavy testing club. Lastly, still in view of the spectators, he slipped
a guard over each point and put his weight upon the blades. They bent
alarmingly, but neither broke and both snapped back truly into shape.
No spy or agent, everyone then knew, had tampered with either one of
those beautiful weapons.

Removing the point guards, the colonel again inspected those slenderly
lethal tips and handed one saber to each of the duelists. He held out
a baton, horizontal and shoulder high. Gannel and the captain crossed
their blades upon it. He snapped his stick away and the duel was on.

Kinnison fought in Gannel's fashion exactly; in his characteristic
crouch and with his every mannerism. He was, however a trifle faster
than Gannel had ever been--just enough faster so that by the exertion
of everything he had of skill and finesse, he managed to make the
zwilnik's blade meet steel instead of flesh during the first long five
minutes of furious engagement. The guy was good, no doubt of that.
His saber came writhing in, to disarm. Kinnison flicked his massive
wrist. Steel slithered along steel; hilt clanged against heavy basket
hilt. Two mighty right arms shot upward, straining to the limit. Breast
to hard-ridged breast, left arms pressed against bulgingly corded
backs, every taut muscle from floor-gripping feet up to powerful
shoulders thrown into the effort, the battlers stood motionlessly _en
tableau_ for seconds.

The ape wasn't fat, at that, Kinnison realized then; he was as hard as
cordwood underneath. Not fat enough, anyway, to be anybody's push-over;
although he was probably not in good-enough shape to last very long--he
could probably wear him down. He wondered fleetingly, if worse came to
worst, whether he would use his mind or not. He didn't want to--but he
might have to. Or would he, even then--_could_ he? But he'd better
snap out of it. He couldn't get anywhere with this body-check business;
the zwilnik was fully as strong as he was.

They broke, and in the breaking Kinnison learned a brand-new cut. He
sensed it coming, but he could not parry or avoid it entirely; and
the crowd shrieked madly as the captain's point slashed into Gannel's
trunks and a stream of crimson trickled down Gannel's left leg.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Stamp! Stamp!_ Cut, thrust, feint, slash and parry, the grim game
went on. Again, in spite of all he could do, Kinnison was pinked; this
time by a straight thrust aimed at his heart. He was falling away from
it, though, so got only half an inch or so of the point in the fleshy
part of his left shoulder. It bled spectacularly, however, and the
throng yelled ragingly for the kill. Another--he never did know exactly
how he got that one--in the calf of his right leg; and the bloodthirsty
mob screamed still louder.

Then, the fine edge of the captain's terrific attack worn off, Kinnison
was able to assume the offensive. He maneuvered his foe into an awkward
position, swept his blade aside, and slashed viciously at the neck. But
the Thralian was able partially to cover. He ducked frantically, even
while his parrying blade was flashing up. Steel clanged, sparks flew;
but the strength of the Lensman's arm could not be entirely denied.
Instead of the whole head, however, Kinnison's razor-edged weapon
snicked off only an ear and a lock of hair.

Again the spectators shrieked frenzied approval. They did not care
whose blood was shed, so long as it _was_ shed; and this duel, of
two superb swordsmen so evenly matched, was the best they had seen for
years. It was, and promised to keep on being, a splendidly gory show
indeed.

Again and again the duelists engaged at their flashing top speed; once
again each drew blood before the colonel's whistle shrilled.

Time out for repairs: to have either of the contestants bleed to death,
or even to the point of weakness, was no part of the code. The captain
had outpointed the lieutenant, four to two, just as he always did in
the tournaments; but he now derived very little comfort from the score.
He was weakening, and knew it, while Gannel's arm seemed as strong and
as rock-steady as it had been at the bout's beginning. Kinnison also
knew these facts.

Surgeons gave hasty but effective treatment, new and perfect sabers
replaced the badly nicked weapons, the ghastly thing went on. The
captain tired slowly but surely; Gannel took, more and more openly and
more and more savagely, the offensive.

When it was over Kinnison flipped his saber dexterously, so that its
point struck deep into the softly resilient floor beside that which had
once been his captain. Then, while the hilt swung back and forth in
slow arcs, he faced one segment of the now satiated throng and crisply
saluted the colonel.

"Sir, I trust that I have won honorably the right to be examined for
fitness to become the captain of my company?" he asked, formally; and:

"You have, sir," the colonel as formally replied.




                                 XVII.


Kinnison's wounds, being superficial, healed rapidly. He passed the
examination handily. He should have; since, although it was rigorous
and comprehensive, Traska Gannel himself could have passed it and
Kinnison, as well as knowing practically everything that the Thralian
had ever learned, had his own vast store of knowledge upon which to
draw. Also, if necessary, he could have read the answers from the minds
of the examiners.

As a captain, the real Gannel would have been a hard and brilliant
commander, noticeable even among the select group of tried and
fire-polished veterans who officered the Guards. Hence Kinnison
became so; in fact, considerably more so than most. He was harsh, he
was relentless and inflexible; but he was absolutely fair. He did
not punish a given breach of discipline with twenty lashes one time
and with a mere reprimand the next; fifteen honest, scarring strokes
it became for each and every time, whoever the offender. Whatever
punishment a man deserved by the book he got, promptly and mercilessly;
whatever reward was earned was bestowed with equal celerity,
accompanied by a crisply accurate statement of the facts in each case,
at the daily parade review.

His men hated him, of course. His noncoms and lieutenants, besides
hating him, kept on trying to cut him down. All, however, respected him
and obeyed him without delay and without question, which was all that
any Boskonian officer could expect and which was far more than most of
them ever got.

Having thus consolidated his position, Kinnison went blithely to work
to undermine and to supplant the major. Since Alcon, like all dictators
everywhere, was in constant fear of treachery and of revolution, war
games were an almost constant form of drill. The general himself
planned and various officers executed the mock attacks, by space,
air, and land; the Royal Guards and Alcon's personal troops, heavily
outnumbered, always constituted the defense. An elaborate system
of scoring had been worked out long since, by means of which the
staff officers could study in detail every weak point that could be
demonstrated.

"Captain Gannel, you will have to hold Passes 25, 26, and 27,"
the obviously worried major told Kinnison, the evening before a
particularly important sham battle was to take place.

The Lensman was not surprised. He himself had insinuated the idea into
his superior's mind. Moreover, he already knew, from an intensive job
of spying, that his major was to be in charge of the defense, and that
the colonel, who was to direct the attacking forces, had decided to
route his main column through Pass 27.

"Very well, sir," Kinnison acknowledged. "I wish to protest formally,
however, against those orders. It is manifestly impossible, sir, to
hold all three of those passes with two platoons of infantry and one
squadron of speedsters. May I offer a suggestion--"

"You may not," the major snapped. "We have deduced that the real attack
is coming from the north, and that any activity in your section will be
merely a feint. Orders are orders, captain!"

"Yes, sir," Kinnison replied, meekly, and signed for the thick sheaf of
orders which stated in detail exactly what he was to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next evening, after Kinnison had won the battle by disregarding
every order he had been given, he was summoned to the meeting of the
staff. He had expected that, too, but he was not at all certain of
how it was coming out. It was in some trepidation, therefore, that he
entered the lair of the big brass hats.

"Har-rumph!" he was greeted by the adjutant. "You have been called--"

"I know why I was called," Kinnison interrupted, brusquely. "Before
we go into that, however, I wish to prefer charges before the general
against Major Delios of stupidity, incompetence, and inefficiency."

Sheer astonishment resounded throughout the room in a ringing silence,
broken finally by the general.

"Those are serious charges indeed, Captain Gannel; but you may state
your case."

"Thank you, sir. First, stupidity: He did not perceive, at even as late
a time as noon, when he took all my air away from me to meet the feint
from the north, that the attack was not to follow any orthodox pattern.
Second, incompetence. The orders he gave me could not possibly have
stopped any serious attack through any one of the passes I was supposed
to defend. Third, inefficiency: No efficient commander refuses to
listen to suggestions from his officers, as he refused to listen to me
last night."

"Your side, major?" And the staff officers listened to a defense based
upon blind, dumb obedience to orders.

"We will take this matter under advisement," the general announced
then. "Now, captain, what made you suspect that the colonel was coming
through Pass 27?"

"I didn't," Kinnison replied, mendaciously. "To reach any one of those
passes, however, he would have to come down this valley"--tracing it
with his forefinger upon the map. "Therefore I held my whole force back
here at Hill 562, knowing that, warned by my air of his approach, I
could reach any one of the passes before he could."

"Ah. Then, when your air was sent elsewhere?"

"I commandeered a flitter--my own, by the way, and sent it up so high
as to be indetectable. I then ordered motorcycle scouts out, for the
enemy to capture; to make the commander of any possible attacking or
reconnaissance force think that I was blind."

"Ah--smart work. And then?"

"As soon as my scout reported troop movements in the valley, I got
my men ready to roll. When it became certain that Pass 27 was the
objective, I rushed everything I had into preselected positions
commanding every foot of that pass. Then, when the colonel walked
into the trap, I wiped out most of his main column. However, I had a
theoretical loss of three-quarters of my men in doing it"--bitterly.
"If I had been directing the defense, I would have wiped out the
colonel's entire force, ground and air both, with a loss of less than
two percent."

This was strong talk. "Do you realize, Captain Gannel, that this is
sheer insubordination?" the general demanded. "That you are in effect
accusing me also of stupidity in planning and in ordering such an
attack?"

"Not at all, sir," Kinnison replied instantly. "It was quite evident,
sir, that you did it deliberately, to show all of us junior officers
the importance of thought. To show us that, while unorthodox attacks
may possibly be made by unskilled tacticians, any such attack is of
necessity fatally weak if it be opposed by good tactics. In other
words, that orthodox strategy is the only really good strategy. Was not
that it, sir?"

Whether it was or not, that viewpoint gave the general an out, and he
was not slow in taking advantage of it. He decided then and there, and
the always subservient staff agreed with him, that Major Delios had
indeed been stupid, incompetent, and inefficient; and Captain Gannel
forthwith became Major Gannel.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then the Lensman took it easy. He wangled and phenagled various and
sundry promotions and replacements, until he was once more surrounded
by a thoroughly subsidized personal staff and in good position to go to
work upon the colonel. Then, however, instead of doing so, he violated
another Boskonian precedent by having a frank talk with the man whom
normally he should have been trying to displace.

"You have found out that you can't kill me, colonel," he told his
superior, after making sure that the room was really shielded. "Also
that I can quite possibly kill you. You know that I know more than you
do--that all my life, while you other fellows were helling around, I
have been working and learning--and that I can, in a fairly short time,
take your job away from you without killing you. However, I don't want
it."

"You don't _want_ it!" The colonel stared, narrow-eyed. "What
_do_ you want, then?" He knew, of course, that Gannel wanted
something.

"Your help," Kinnison admitted, candidly. "I want to get onto Alcon's
personal staff, as adviser. With my experience and training, I figure
that there's more in it for me there than here in the Guards. Here's
my proposition--if I help you, by showing you how to work out your
field problems and in general building you up however I can instead of
tearing you down, will you use your great influence with the general
and Prime Minister Fossten to have me transferred to the Household?"

"Will I? I'll say I will!" the colonel agreed, with fervor. He did not
add "if I cannot kill you first"--that was understood.

And Kinnison did build the colonel up. He taught him things about the
military business which that staff officer had never even suspected;
he sounded depths of strategy theretofore completely unknown to the
zwilnik. And the more Kinnison taught him, the more eager the colonel
became to get rid of him. He had been suspicious and only reluctantly
co-operative at first; but as soon as he realized that he could not
kill his tutor and that if the latter stayed in the Guards it would
be only a matter of days--at most of weeks--until Gannel would force
himself into the colonelcy by sheer force of merit, he pulled in
earnest every wire that he could reach.

Before the actual transfer could be effected, however, Kinnison
received a call from Nadreck.

"Excuse me, please, for troubling you," the Palainian apologized, "but
there has been a development in which you may perhaps be interested.
This Kandron has been given orders by Alcon to traverse a hyperspatial
tube, the terminus of which will appear at co-ordinates 217-493-28 at
hour eleven of the seventh Thralian day from the present."

"Fine business! And you want to chase him, huh?" Kinnison jumped at the
conclusion. "Sure--go ahead. I'll meet you there. I'll fake up some
kind of an excuse to get away from here and we'll run him ragged--"

"I do not," Nadreck interrupted, decisively. "If I leave my work here,
it will all come undone. Besides, it would be dangerous--and foolhardy.
Not knowing what lies at the other end of that tube, we could make no
plans and could have no assurance of safety, or even of success. You
should not go, either--that is unthinkable. I am reporting this matter
in view of the possibility that you may think it significant enough
to warrant the sending of some observer whose life is of little or no
importance."

"Oh ... uh-huh ... I see. Thanks, Nadreck." Kinnison did not allow any
trace of his real thought to go out before he broke the line. Then:

"Funny ape, Nadreck," he cogitated, as he called Haynes. "I don't get
his angle at all--I simply can't figure him out. Haynes? Kinnison"--and
he reported in full.

"The _Dauntless_ has all the necessary generators and equipment,
and the place is far enough out so that she can make the approach
without any trouble," the Lensman concluded. "We'll burn whatever
is at the other end of that tube clear out of the ether. Send along
as many of the old gang as you can spare. Wish we had time to get
Cardynge--he'll howl like a wolf at being left out--but we've got only
a week--"

"Cardynge is here," Haynes broke in. "He has been working out some
stuff for Thorndyke on the sunbeam. He is finished now, though, and
will undoubtedly want to go along."

"Fine!"

And explicit arrangements for the rendezvous were made.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was not unduly difficult for Kinnison to make his absence from duty
logical, even necessary. Scouts and observers reported inexplicable
interferences with certain communications lines. With thoughts of
_the_ Lensman suffusing the minds of the higher-ups, and because
of Gannel's already demonstrated prowess and keenness, he scarcely had
to signify a willingness to investigate the phenomena in order to be
directed to do so.

Nor did he pick a crew of his own sycophants. Instead, he chose the
five highest-ranking privates of the battalion to accompany him upon
this supposedly extremely dangerous mission; apparently completely
unaware two of them belonged to the colonel, two to the general, and
one to the captain who had taken his place.

The colonel wished Major Gannel good luck, verbally, even while hoping
fervently that _the_ Lensman would make cold meat of him in a
hurry; and Kinnison gravely gave his well-wisher thanks as he set out.
He did not, however, go near any communications lines; although his
spying crew did not realize the fact. They did not realize anything;
they did not know even that they became unconscious within five minutes
after leaving Thrale.

They remained unconscious while the speedster in which they were was
drawn into the _Dauntless'_ capacious hold. In the Patrol ship's
sick bay, under expert care, they remained unconscious during the
entire duration of their stay on board.

The Patrol pilots picked up Kandron's flying vessel with little
difficulty; and, nullifiers full out, followed it easily. When the
zwilnik ship slowed down to feel for the vortex, the _Dauntless_
slowed also, and baffled her driving jets as she sneaked up to the very
edge of electrodetector range. When the objective disappeared from
three-dimensional space the point of vanishment was marked precisely,
and up to that point the Patrol ship flashed in seconds.

The regular driving blasts were cut off, the special generators were
cut in. Then, as the force fields of the ship reacted against those of
the Boskonian "shore" station, the Patrolmen felt again in all their
gruesome power the appallingly horrible sensation of interdimensional
acceleration. For that sensation is, literally, indescribable. A man in
good training can overcome seasickness, airsickness, and spacesickness.
He can overcome the nausea and accustom himself to the queasily
terrifying endless-fall sensation of weightlessness. He can, and does,
become so inured to as to regard as perfectly normal the outrages
to the sensibilities incident to inertialessness in its crudest
forms. No man has, however, been able to get used to interdimensional
acceleration.

It is best likened to a compression; not as a whole, but atom by atom.
A man feels as though he were being twisted--cork-screwed in some
monstrously obscure fashion which permits him neither to move from his
place nor to remain where he is. It is a painless but utterly revolting
transformation, progressing in a series of waves; a rearrangement, a
writhing, crawling distortion, an incomprehensibly impossible extrusion
of each ultimate particle of his substance in an unknowable, ordinarily
nonexistent direction.

       *       *       *       *       *

The period of acceleration over, the _Dauntless_ traveled at
uniform velocity along whatever course it was that the tube took and
the men, although highly uncomfortable and uneasy, could once more move
about and work. Sir Austin Cardynge in particular was actually happy
and eager as he flitted from one to another of the automatic recording
instruments upon his special panel. He resembled more closely than ever
a lean, gray tomcat, Kinnison thought--he almost expected to see him
begin to lick his whiskers and pur.

"You see, my ignorant young friend"--the scientist almost did pur as
one of the recording pens swung widely across the ruled paper--"it
is as I told you--the lack of exact data upon even one tiny factor
of this extremely complex phenomenon is calamitous. While my
notes were apparently complete and were certainly accurate, our
experimental tubes did not function perfectly. The time factor was
irreconcilable--completely so, in every aspect, even that of departure
from and return to normal space--and it is unthinkable that time, one
of the fundamental units, is or can be intrinsically variable--"

"You think so?" Kinnison broke in. "Look at that"--pointing to the
ultimate of timepieces, Cardynge's own triplex chronometer. "No. 1
says that we have been in this tube for an hour, No. 2 says a little
over nine minutes, and according to No. 3 we won't be starting for
twenty minutes yet--it must be running backward--let's see you comb
_that_ out of your whiskers!"

"Oh-h ... ah ... a-hum." But only momentarily was Sir Austin taken
aback. "Ah, I was right all the time!" he cackled gleefully. "I thought
it practically impossible for me to commit an error or to overlook any
possibilities, and I have now proved that I did not. Time, in this
hyperspatial region or condition, _is_ intrinsically variable, in
major degree!"

"And what does that get you?" Kinnison asked, pointedly.

"Much, my impetuous youngster, much," Cardynge replied. "We observe, we
note facts. From the observations and facts we theorize and we deduce;
thus arriving very shortly at the true inwardness of time."

"You hope," the Lensman snorted, dubiously; and in his skepticism he
was right and Sir Austin was wrong. For the actual nature and mechanism
of time remained, and still constitute, a mystery, or at least an
unsolved problem. The Arisians--perhaps--understand time; no other race
does.

To some of the men, then, and to some of the clocks and other
time-measuring devices, the time seemed--or actually was?--very long;
to other and similar beings and mechanisms it seemed--or was--short.
Short or long, however, the _Dauntless_ did not reach the
Boskonian end of the hyperspatial tube.

       *       *       *       *       *

In midflight there came a crunching, twisting _cloonk!_ and
an abrupt reversal of the inexplicably horrible interdimensional
acceleration--a deceleration as sickeningly disturbing, both physically
and mentally, as the acceleration had been.

While within the confines of the hyperspatial tube every eye of the
_Dauntless_ had been blind. To every beam upon every frequency,
visible or invisible, ether-borne or carried upon the infinitely faster
waves of the sub-ether, the murk was impenetrable. Every plate showed
the same mind-numbing blankness; a vague, eerily shifting, quasi-solid
blanket of formless, textureless grayness. No lightness or darkness,
no stars or constellations or nebulae, no friendly, deep-space
blackness--nothing.

Deceleration ceased; the men felt again the wonted homeliness and
comfort of normal pseudoinertia. Simultaneously the gray smear of the
visiplates faded away into commonplace areas of jetty black, pierced
the brilliantly dimensionless varicolored points of light which were
the familiar stars of their own familiar space.

But were they familiar? Was that our galaxy, or anything like it? They
were not. It was not. Kinnison stared into his plate, aghast.

He would not have been surprised to have emerged into three-dimensional
space anywhere within the Second Galaxy. In that case, he would have
seen a Milky Way; and from its shape, apparent size, and texture he
could have oriented himself fairly closely in a few minutes. But the
_Dauntless_ was not within any lenticular galaxy--nowhere was
there any sign of a Milky Way!

He would not have been really surprised to have found himself and his
ship out in open intergalactic space. In that case he would have seen
a great deal of dead-black emptiness, blotched with a hundred or so
lenticular bodies which were in fact galaxies. Orientation would then
have been more difficult; but, with the aid of the Patrol charts, it
could have been accomplished. But here there were no galaxies--no
nebulae of any kind!




                                XVIII.


Here, upon the background of a blackness so intense as to be obviously
barren of nebular material, there lay a multitude of blazingly
resplendent stars--and nothing except stars. A few hundred were of a
visual magnitude of about minus three. Approximately the same number
were of minus two or thereabouts, and so on down; but there did not
seem to be a star or other celestial object in that starkly incredible
sky of an apparent magnitude greater than about plus four.

"What do you make of this, Sir Austin?" Kinnison asked, quietly. "It's
got me stopped like a traffic light."

The mathematician ran toward him and the Lensman stared. He had never
known Cardynge to hurry--in fact, he was not really running now. He was
walking, even though his legs were fairly twinkling in their rapidity
of motion. As he approached Kinnison his mad pace gradually slowed to
normal.

"Oh--time must be cockeyed here, too," the Lensman observed. "Look over
there--see how fast those fellows are moving, and how slow those others
over that way are?"

"Ah, yes. Interesting--intensely interesting. Truly, a most remarkable
and intriguing phenomenon," the fascinated mathematician enthused.

"But that wasn't what I meant. Swing this plate--it's on visual--around
outside, so as to get the star aspect and distribution. What do you
think of it?"

"Peculiar--I might almost say unique," the scientist concluded, after
his survey. "Not at all like any normal configuration or arrangement
with which I am familiar. We could perhaps speculate, but would it not
be preferable to secure data first? Say by approaching a solar system
and conducting systematic investigations?"

"Uh-huh"--and again Kinnison stared at the wispy little physicist in
surprise. Here was a _man_! "You're certainly something to tie to,
ace, do you know it?" he asked, admiringly. Then, as Cardynge gazed at
him questioningly, incomprehendingly:

"Skip it. Can you hear me, Henderson?"

"Yes--just barely."

"Shoot us across to one of those nearer stars, stop, and go inert."

"QX, chief." The pilot obeyed.

And in the instant of inerting, the visiplate into which the two men
stared went blank. The thousands of stars studding the sky a moment
before had disappeared as though they had never been.

"Why.... What.... How in all the yellow hells of space can _that_
happen?" Kinnison blurted.

Without a word, Cardynge reached out and snapped the plate's receiver
over from "visual" to "ultra," whereupon the stars reappeared as
suddenly as they had vanished.

"Something's screwy somewhere!" the Lensman protested. "We _can't_
have an inert velocity greater than that of light--it's impossible!"

"Few things, if any, can be said definitely to be impossible; and
everything is relative, not absolute," the old scientist declared,
pompously. "This space, for instance. You have not yet perceived, I
see, even that you are not in the same three-dimensional space in which
we have heretofore existed."

Kinnison gulped. He was going to protest about that, too, but in the
face of Cardynge's unperturbed acceptance of the fact he did not quite
dare to say what he had in mind.

"That is better," the old man declaimed. "Do not get excited--to
do so dulls the mind. Take nothing for granted, do not jump at
conclusions--to commit either of those errors will operate powerfully
against success. Working hypotheses, young man, must be based upon
accurately determined facts; not upon mere guesses, superstitions, or
the figments of personal prejudices."

"Bub-bub-but ... QX--skip it!" Nine-tenths of the _Dauntless'_
crew would have gone out of control at the impact of the knowledge of
what had happened; even Kinnison's powerful mind was shaken. Cardynge,
however, was--not seemed to be, but actually was--as calm and as
self-contained as though he were in his own quiet study. "Explain it to
me, will you please, in words of as nearly one syllable as possible?"

"Our looser thinkers have for centuries speculated upon the possibility
of an entire series of different spaces existing simultaneously, side
by side in a hypothetical hypercontinuum. I have never indulged in
such time-wasting; but now that actual corroborative data have become
available, I regard it as a highly fruitful field of investigation.
Two extremely significant facts have already become apparent; the
variability of time and the non-applicability of our so-called 'laws'
of motion. Different spaces, different laws, it would seem."

"But when we cut our generators in that other tube we emerged into our
own space," Kinnison argued. "How do you account for that?"

"I do not as yet try to account for it!" Cardynge snapped. "Two very
evident possibilities should already be apparent, even to your feeble
brain. One, that at the moment of release your vessel happened to be
situated within a fold of our own space. Two, that the collapse of the
ship's force fields always returns it to its original space, while
the collapse of those of the shore station always forces it into some
other space. In the latter case, it would be reasonable to suppose
that the persons or beings at the other end of the tube may have
suspected that we were following Kandron, and, as soon as he landed,
cut off their forces deliberately to throw us out of space. They may
even have learned that persons of lesser ability, so treated, never
return. Do not allow yourself to be at all impressed by any of these
possibilities, however, as the truth may very well lie in something
altogether different. Bear it in mind that we have as yet very little
data upon which to formulate any theories, and that the truth can be
revealed only by a very careful, accurate, and thorough investigation.
Please note also that I would surely have discovered and evaluated all
these unknowns during the course of my as yet incomplete study of our
own hyperspatial tubes; that I am merely continuing here a research in
which I have already made noteworthy progress."

Kinnison really gasped at that--the guy was certainly terrific! He
called the chief pilot. "Go free, Hen, and start flitting for a
planet--we've got to sit down somewhere before we can start back home.
When you find one, land free. Stay free, and watch your Bergs--I don't
have to tell you what will happen if they quit on us."

[Illustration: _"I will not have my mind invaded," Kim snapped. "That
is a violation of my personal privacy I will not yield!"_]

Then Thorndyke. "Verne? Break out some personal neutralizers. We've got
a job of building to do--inertialess"--and he explained to both men
in flashing thoughts what had happened and what they had to do.

"You grasp the basic idea, Kinnison," Cardynge approved, "that it
is necessary to construct a station apart from the vessel in which
we propose to return to our normal environment. You err grievously,
however, in your insistence upon the necessity of discovering a planet,
satellite, asteroid, or other similar celestial body upon which to
build it."

"Huh?" Kinnison demanded.

"It is eminently possible--yes, even practicable--for us to use the
_Dauntless_ as an anchorage for the tube and for us to return in
the lifeboats," Cardynge pointed out.

"What? Abandon this ship? Waste all that time rebuilding all the boats?"

"It is preferable, of course, and more expeditious, to find a planet,
if possible," the scientist conceded. "However, it is plain that it is
in no sense necessary. Your reasoning is fallacious, your phraseology
is deplorable. I am correcting you in the admittedly faint hope of
teaching you scientific accuracy of thought and of statement."

"Wow! Wottaman!" Kinnison breathed to himself, as, heroically, he
"skipped it."

       *       *       *       *       *

Somewhat to Kinnison's surprise--he had more than half expected that
planets would be nonexistent in that space--the pilots did find a solid
world upon which to land. It was a peculiar planet indeed. It did
not move right, it did not look right, it did not feel right. It was
waterless, airless, desolate; a senseless jumble of jagged fragments,
mostly metallic. It was neither hot nor cold--indeed, it seemed to have
no temperature of its own at all. There was nothing whatever right
about it, Kinnison declared.

"Oh, yes, there is!" Thorndyke contradicted. "Time is constant here,
whatever its absolute rate may be, these metals are nice to work
with, and some of this other stuff will make insulation. Or hadn't
you thought of that? Which would be faster, cutting down an intrinsic
velocity of fifteen lights to zero or building the projector out of
native materials? And if you match intrinsics, what will happen when
you hit our normal space again?"

"Plenty, probably ... uh-huh, faster to use the stuff that belongs
here. Careful, though, fella!"

And care was indeed necessary; extreme care that not a particle of
matter from the ship was used in the construction and that not a
particle of the planet's substance by any mischance got aboard the
spaceship.

The actual work was simple enough. Cardynge knew exactly what had to be
done. Thorndyke knew exactly how to do it, as he had built precisely
similar generators for the experimental tubes upon Tellus. He had a
staff of experts; the _Dauntless_ carried a machine shop and
equipment second to none. Raw material was abundant, and it was an easy
matter to block out an inertialess room within which the projectors and
motors were built. And, after they were built, they worked.

It was not the work, then, but the strain which wore Kinnison down. The
constant, wearing strain of incessant vigilance to be sure that the
Bergenholms and the small units of the personal neutralizers did not
falter for a single instant. He did not lose a man, but again and again
there flashed into his mind the ghastly picture of one of his boys
colliding with the solid metal of the planet at a relative velocity
fifteen times that of light! The strain of the endless checking and
rechecking to make certain that there was no exchange of material,
however slight, between the ship and the planet.

Above all, the strain of knowing a thing which, apparently, no one else
suspected: that Cardynge, with all his mathematical knowledge, was not
going to be able to find his way back! He had never spoken of this to
the scientist. He did not have to. He knew that without a knowledge of
the fundamental distinguishing characteristics of our normal space--a
knowledge even less to be expected than that a fish should know the
fundamental equations and structure of water--they never could, save
by sheerest accident, return to their own space. And as Cardynge grew
more and more tensely, unsocially immersed in his utterly insoluble
problem, the more and more uneasy the Gray Lensman became. But this
last difficulty was resolved first, and in a totally unexpected fashion.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Ah, Kinnison of Tellus, here you are--I have been considering your
case for some twenty-nine of your seconds," a deep, well-remembered
voice resounded within his brain.

"Mentor!" he exclaimed, and at the sheer shock of his relief he came
very near indeed to fainting. "Thank Klono and Noshabkeming you found
us! How did you do it? How do we get ourselves out of here?"

"Finding you was elementary," the Arisian replied, calmly. "Since you
were not in your own environment you must be elsewhere. If my mind had
been really competent, I would have foreseen this event in detail. Even
though I did not so foresee it, however, it required but little thought
to perceive that it was a logical, in fact, an inevitable, development.
Such being the case, it needed very little additional effort to
determine what had happened, and how, and why; likewise precisely
where you must now be. As for departure therefrom, your mechanical
preparations are both correct and adequate. I could give you the
necessary knowledge, but it is rather technically specialized and not
negligible in amount; and since your brain is of very limited capacity,
it is better not to fill any part of it with mathematics for which you
will have no subsequent use. Put yourself _en rapport_, therefore,
with Sir Austin Cardynge. I will follow."

He did so, and as mind met mind there ensued a conversation whose
barest essentials Kinnison could not even dimly grasp. For Cardynge, as
has been said, could think in the universal language of mathematics;
in the esoteric symbology which very few minds have ever been able
even partially to master. The Lensman did not get it, nor any part of
it; he knew only that in that to him completely meaningless gibberish
the Arisian was describing to the physicist, exactly and fully, the
distinguishing characteristics of a vast number of parallel and
simultaneously coexistent spaces.

If that was "rather" technical stuff, the awed Lensman wondered, what
would really deep stuff be like? Not that he wanted to find out! No
wonder these mathematical wizards were nuts--went off the beam--he'd be
pure squirrel food if he had half that stuff in _his_ skull!

But Sir Austin took to it like a cat lapping up cream or doing away
with the canary. He brightened visibly; he swelled; and, when the
Arisian had withdrawn from his mind, he preened himself and swaggered
as he made meticulous adjustments of the delicate meters and controls
which the technicians had already built.

Preparations complete, Cardynge threw in the switches and everything
belonging to the _Dauntless_ was rushed aboard. The neutralizers,
worn so long and cherished so assiduously, were taken off with profound
sighs of relief. The vessel was briefly, tentatively inerted. QX--no
faster-than-light meteorites tore volatilizingly through her mass. So
far, so good.

Then the ship's generators were energized and smoothly, effortlessly
the big battle wagon took the interdimensional plunge. There came
the expected, but nevertheless almost unendurable acceleration; the
imperceptible, unloggable flight through the drably featureless
grayness; the horrible deceleration. Stars flashed beautifully upon the
plates.

"We made it!" Kinnison shouted in relief when he had assured himself
that they had emerged into "real" space inside the Second Galaxy, only
a few parsecs away from their point of departure. "By Klono's golden
grin, Sir Austin, you figured it to a red whisker! And when the Society
meets, Tuesday week, won't you just blast that ape Weingarde to a
cinder? Hot dog!"

"Having the basic data, the solution and the application followed of
necessity--automatically--uniquely," the scientist said, austerely. He
was highly pleased with himself, he was tremendously flattered by the
Lensman's ebullient praise; but not for anything conceivable would he
have so admitted.

"Well, the first thing we had better do is to find out what time of
what day it is," Kinnison went on, as he directed a beam to the Patrol
headquarters upon Klovia.

"Better ask 'em the year, too," Henderson put in, pessimistically--he
had missed Illona poignantly--but it was not that bad.

In fact, it was not bad at all; they had been gone only a little over
a week of Thralian time. This finding pleased Kinnison immensely, as
he had been more than half afraid that it had been a month. He could
explain a week easily enough, but anything over two weeks would have
been tough to handle.

The supplies of the Thralian speedster were adjusted to fit the actual
elapsed time, and Worsel and Kinnison engraved upon the minds of the
five unconscious Guardsmen completely detailed--even though equally
completely fictitious--memories of what they and Major Gannel had
done since leaving Thrale. Their memories were not exactly alike, of
course--each man had had different duties and experiences, and no two
observers see precisely the same things even while watching the same
event--but they were very convincing. Also, and fortunately, not even
the slightest scars were left by the operations, for in these cases no
memory chain had to be broken at any point.

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Dauntless_ blasted off for Klovia; the speedster started for
Thrale. Kinnison's crew woke up--without having any inkling that they
had ever been unconscious or that their knowledge of recent events did
not jibe exactly with the actual occurrences--and resumed work.

Immediately upon landing, Kinnison turned in a full official report
of the mission, giving himself neither too much nor too little credit
for what had been accomplished. They had found a Patrol sneak-boat
near Line 11. They had chased it so many parsecs, upon such-and-such a
course, before forcing it to engage. They had crippled it and boarded,
bringing away material, described as follows, which had been turned
over to Space Intelligence. And so on. It would hold, Kinnison knew;
and it would be corroborated fully by the ultraprivate reports which
his men would make to their real bosses.

The colonel made good; hence with due pomp and ceremony Major Traska
Gannel was inducted into the Household. He was given one of the
spy-ray-screened cigarette boxes in which Alcon's most trusted officers
were allowed to carry their private, secret insignia. Kinnison was
glad to get that--he could carry his Lens with him now, if the thing
was really ray proof, instead of leaving it buried in a can outside the
city limits.

The Lensman went to his first meeting of the Advisory Cabinet with his
mind set on a hair trigger. He hadn't been around Alcon very much, but
he knew that the Tyrant had a stronger mind shield than any untreated
human being had any right to have. He'd have to play this mighty close
to his chest--he didn't want any zwilnik reading his mind, yet he
didn't want to create suspicion by revealing the fact that he, too, had
an impenetrable block.

As he approached the cabinet chamber he walked into a zone of hypnosis,
and practically bounced. He threw up his head: it was all he could
do to keep his barriers down. It was general, he knew, not aimed
specifically at him--to fight the hypnotist would be to call attention
to himself as the only man able either to detect his work or to resist
him; would give the whole show away. Therefore he let the thing take
hold--with reservations--of his mind. He studied it. He analyzed it.
Sight only, eh? QX--he'd let Alcon have superficial control, and he
wouldn't put too much faith in anything he saw.

He entered the room; and, during the preliminaries, he reached out
delicately, to touch imperceptibly mind after mind. All the ordinary
officers were on the level; now he'd see about the prime minister. He'd
heard a lot about this Fossten, but had never met him before--he'd see
what the guy really had on the ball.

He did not find out, however. He did not even touch his mind, for that
worthy also had an automatic block; a block as effective as Alcon's or
as Kinnison's own.

Sight was unreliable; how about the sense of perception? He tried it,
very daintily and gingerly, upon Alcon's feet, legs, arms, and torso.
Alcon was real, and present in the flesh. Then the premier--and he
yanked his sense back, canceled it, appalled. Perception was blocked,
at exactly what his eyes told him was the fellow's skin!

That tore it--that busted it wide open. What in all the nine iridescent
hells did that mean? He didn't know of anything except a thought-screen
that could stop a sense of perception. He thought intensely. Alcon's
mind was bad enough. It had been treated, certainly; mind shields like
that didn't grow naturally on human or near-human beings. Maybe the
Eich, or the race of super-Eich to which Kandron belonged, could give
mental treatments of that kind. Fossten, though, was worse.

Alcon's boss! Probably not a man at all. It was he, it was clear,
and not Alcon, who was putting out the zone of compulsion. An Eich,
maybe? No, he was a warm-blooded oxygen breather; a frigid-blooded
super-big-shot would make Alcon come to him. A monster, almost
certainly, though; possibly of a type Kinnison had never seen before.
Working by remote control? Possibly; but probably he was smaller than
a man and was actually inside the dummy that everybody thought was the
prime minister--that was it, for all the tea in China--

       *       *       *       *       *

"And what do you think, Major Gannel?" the prime minister asked,
smoothly, insinuating his mind into Kinnison's as he spoke.

Kinnison, who knew that they had been discussing an invasion of the
First Galaxy, hesitated as though in thought. He was thinking, too, and
ultracarefully. If that ape was out to do a job of digging he'd never
dig again--QX, he was just checking Gannel's real thoughts against what
he was going to say.

"Since I am such a newcomer to this Council I do not feel as though
my opinions should be given too much weight," Kinnison said--and
thought--slowly, with the exactly correct amount of obsequiousness.
"However, I have a very decided opinion upon the matter. I believe very
firmly that it would be better tactics to consolidate our position here
in our own galaxy first."

"You advise, then, against any immediate action against Tellus?" the
prime minister asked. "Why?"

"I do, definitely. It seems to me that shortsighted, half-prepared
measures, based upon careless haste, were the underlying causes of our
recent reverses. Time is not an important factor--the Great Plan was
worked out, not in terms of days or of years, but of centuries and
millennia--and it seems self-evident that we should make ourselves
impregnably secure, then expand slowly; seeing to it that we can hold,
against everything that the Patrol can bring to bear, every planet that
we take."

"Do you realize that you are criticizing the chiefs of staff who are in
complete charge of military operations?" Alcon asked, venomously.

"Fully," the Lensman replied coldly. "I ventured this opinion because
I was asked specifically for it. The chiefs of staff failed, did
they not? If they had succeeded, criticism would have been neither
appropriate nor forthcoming. As it is, I do not believe that mere
criticism of their conduct, abilities, and tactics is sufficient. They
should be disciplined and demoted. New chiefs should be chosen; persons
abler and more efficient than the present incumbents."

This was a bomb shell. Dissentions waxed rife and raucous, but amidst
the turmoil the Lensman received from the prime minister a flash of
coldly congratulatory approval.

And as Major Traska Gannel made his way back to his quarters two
things were starkly plain:

First, he would have to cut Alcon down and himself become the Tyrant of
Thrale. It was unthinkable to attack or to destroy this planet. It had
too many too promising leads--there were too many things that didn't
make sense--above all, there were the stupendous files of information
which no one mind could scan in a lifetime.

Second, if he wanted to keep on living he would have to keep his
detector shoved out to maximum--this prime minister was just about as
touchy and just about as safe to play with as a hundred kilograms of
dry nitrogen iodide!




                                 XIX.


Nadreck, the Palainian Lensman, had not exaggerated in saying that he
could not leave his job, that his work would come undone if he did.

As has been intimated, Nadreck was cowardly and lazy and characterized
otherwise by traits not usually regarded by humankind as being noble.
He was, however, efficient; and he was now engaged in one of the most
colossal tasks ever attempted by any one Lensman. Characteristically,
he had told no one, not even Haynes or Kinnison, what it was that he
was trying to do--he never talked about a job until after it was done,
and his talking then was usually limited to a taped, Lensman's-sealed,
tersely factual report. He was "investigating" Onlo; that was all that
anybody knew.

Onlo was at that time perhaps the most heavily fortified planet in
the Universe. Compared to its massed might Jarnevon was weak; Tellus,
except for its sunbeams and its other open-space safeguards, a joke.
Onlo's defenses were all, or nearly all, planetary; Kandron's strategy,
unlike Haynes', was to let any attacking force get almost down to the
ground and then blast it out of existence.

Thus Onlo was in effect one tremendously armed, titanically powered
fortress; not one cubic foot of its poisonous atmosphere was out of
range of projectors theoretically capable of puncturing any defensive
screen possible of mounting upon a mobile base.

And Nadreck, the cowardly, the self-effacing, the apologetic, had
tackled Onlo--alone!

Using the technique which has already been described in connection with
his highly successful raid upon the Eich stronghold of Lyrane VIII,
he made his way through the Onlonian defensive screens and settled
down comfortably near one of the gigantic domes. Then, as though time
were of no consequence whatever, he proceeded to get acquainted with
the personnel. He learned the identifying symbol of each entity and
analyzed every one psychologically, mentally, intellectually, and
emotionally. He tabulated his results upon the Palainian equivalent of
index cards, then very carefully arranged the cards into groups.

In the same fashion he visited and took the census of dome after dome.
No one knew that he had been near, apparently he had done nothing; but
in each dome as he left it there had been sown seeds of discord and of
strife which, at a carefully calculated future time, would yield bitter
fruit indeed.

For every mind has some weakness, each intellect some trait of which it
does not care to boast, each Achilles his heel. That is true even of
Gray Lensmen--and the Onlonians, with their heredity and environment
of Boskonianism, were in no sense material from which Lensmen could be
made.

Subtly, then, and coldly and callously, Nadreck worked upon the
basest passions, the most ignoble traits of that far-from-noble
race. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, greed, revenge--quality by quality
he grouped them, and to each group he sent series after series of
horridly stimulating thoughts.

Jealousy, always rife, assumed fantastic proportions. Molehills became
mountains overnight. A passing word became a studied insult. No one
aired his grievances, however, for always and everywhere there was
fear--fear of discipline, fear of reprisal, fear of betrayal, fear of
the double cross. Each monster brooded, sullenly intense. Each became
bitterly, gallingly, hatingly aware of an unwarranted and intolerable
persecution. Not much of a spark would be necessary to touch off such
explosive material as that!

Nadreck left the headquarters dome until the last. In one sense it
was the hardest of all; in another the easiest. It was hard in that
the entities there had stronger minds than those of lower station;
minds better disciplined, minds more accustomed to straight thinking
and to logical reasoning. It was easy, however, in that those minds
were practically all at war already--fighting either to tear down
the one above or to resist the attacks of those below. On the whole,
therefore, the headquarters dome was relatively easy, since every mind
in it already hated, or feared, or distrusted, or was suspicious of or
jealous of some other.

       *       *       *       *       *

And while Nadreck labored thus deviously his wonders to perform,
Kinnison went ahead in his much more conventional and straightforward
fashion upon Thrale. His first care, of course, was to surround himself
with the usual coterie of spies and courtiers.

The selection of this group gave Kinnison many minutes of serious
thought. It was natural enough that he had not been able to place any
of his own men in the secret service of Alcon or the prime minister,
since they both had minds of power. It would not be natural, however,
for either of them not to be able to get an agent into his. For to be
too good would be to invite a mental investigation which he simply
could not as yet permit. He would have to play dumb enough so that his
hitherto unsuspected powers of mind would remain unsuspected.

He could, however, do much. Since he knew who the spies were, he was
able quite frequently to have his more trusted henchmen discover
evidence against them, branding them for what they were. Assassinations
were then, of course, very much in order. And even a strong suspicion,
even though it could not be documented, was grounds for a duel.

In this fashion, then, Kinnison built up his entourage and kept it
reasonably free from subversive elements; and, peculiarly enough, those
elements never happened to learn anything which the Lensman did not
want them to know.

Building up a strong personal organization was now easy, for at last
Kinnison was a real Boskonian big shot. As a major of the Household he
was a power to be toadied to and fawned upon. As a personal adviser to
Alcon the Tyrant he was one whose ill will should be avoided at all
costs. As a tactician who had so boldly, and yet so altruistically,
put the skids under the chiefs of staff, thereby becoming a favorite
even of the dreaded prime minister, he was marked plainly as a climber
to whose coat tails it would be wise to cling. In short, Kinnison made
good in a big--it might almost be said in a stupendous--way.

With such powers at work the time of reckoning could not be delayed
for long. Alcon knew that Gannel was working against him; learned very
quickly, since he knew exactly the personnel of Kinnison's "private"
secret service and could read at will any of their minds, that Gannel
held most of the trumps. The Tyrant had tried many times to read the
major's mind, but the latter, by some subterfuge or other, had always
managed to elude his inquisitor without making an issue of the matter.
Now, however, Alcon drove in a solid questing beam which, he was grimly
determined, would produce results of one kind or another.

It did: but, unfortunately for the Thralian, they were nothing which
he could use. For Kinnison, instead either of allowing the Tyrant to
read his whole mind or of throwing up an all-too-revealing barricade,
fell back upon the sheer native power of will which had made him unique
in his generation. He concentrated upon an all-inclusive negation;
which in effect was a rather satisfactory block and which was entirely
natural.

"I don't know what you are trying to do, Alcon," he informed his
superior, stiffly, "but whatever it is I do not like it. I think that
you are trying to hypnotize me. If you are, know now that you cannot
do it; that no possible hypnotic force can overcome my definitely and
positively opposed will."

"Major Gannel, you will--" the Tyrant began, then stopped. He was not
quite ready yet to come openly to grips with this would-be usurper.
Besides, it was now plain that Gannel had only an ordinary mind. He had
not even suspected all the prying that had occurred previously. He had
not recognized even this last powerful thrust for what it really was;
he had merely felt it vaguely and had supposed that it was an attempt
at hypnotism!

A few more days and he would cut him down. Hence Alcon changed his tone
and went on smoothly, "It is not hypnotism, Major Gannel, but a sort
of telepathy which you cannot understand. It is, however, necessary;
for in the case of a man occupying such a high position as yours, it is
self-evident that we can permit no secrets whatever to be withheld from
us--that we can allow no mental reservations of any kind. You see the
justice and the necessity of that, do you not?"

Kinnison did. He saw as well that Alcon was being superhumanly
forbearing. Moreover, he knew what the Tyrant was covering up so
carefully--the real reason for this highly unusual tolerance.

"I suppose you are right; but I _still_ don't like it," Gannel
grumbled. Then, without either denying or acceding to Alcon's right of
mental search, he went to his own quarters.

       *       *       *       *       *

And there--or thereabouts--Kinnison wrought diligently at a thing which
had been long in the making. He had known all along that his retinue
would be useless against Alcon, hence he had built up an organization
entirely separate from, and completely unknown to any member of, his
visible following. Nor was this really secret outfit composed of spies
or sycophants. Instead, its members were hard, able, thoroughly proven
men, each one carefully selected for the ability and the desire to take
the place of one of Alcon's present department heads. One at a time he
put himself _en rapport_ with them; gave them certain definite
orders and instructions.

Then he put on a mechanical thought-screen. Its use could not make the
prime minister any more suspicious than he already was, and it was the
only way he could remain in character. This screen was, like those
of Lonabar, decidedly pervious in that it had an open slit. Unlike
Bleeko's, however, which had their slits set upon a fixed frequency,
the open channel of this one could be varied, both in width and in wave
length, to any setting which Kinnison desired.

Thus equipped, Kinnison attended the meeting of the Council of
Advisers, and to say that he disrupted the meeting is no exaggeration.
The other advisers perceived nothing out of the ordinary, of course,
but both Alcon and the prime minister were so perturbed that the
session was cut very short indeed. The other members were dismissed
summarily, with no attempt at explanation. The Tyrant was raging,
furious; the premier was alertly, watchfully intent.

"I did not expect any more physical privacy than I have been granted,"
Kinnison grated, after listening quietly to a minute or two of Alcon's
unbridled language. "This thing of being spied upon continuously,
both by men and by mechanisms, while it is insulting and revolting to
any real man's self-respect, can--just barely--be borne. I find it
impossible, however, to force myself to submit to such an ultimately
degrading humiliation as the surrender of the only vestiges of privacy
I have remaining; those of my mind. I will resign from the Council if
you wish, I will resume my status as an officer of the line, but I
cannot and will not tolerate your extinction of the last spark of my
self-respect," he finished, stubbornly.

"Resign? Resume? Do you think that I will let you off _that_
easily, fool?" Alcon sneered. "Don't you realize what I am going to do
to you? That, were it not for the fact that I am going to watch you die
slowly and hideously, I would have you blasted where you stand?"

"I do not, no, and neither do you," Gannel answered, as quietly as
surprisingly. "If you were sure of your ability, you would be doing
something instead of talking about it." He saluted, turned, and walked
out.

Now the prime minister, as has been intimated, was considerably more
than he appeared upon the surface to be. He was in fact the power
behind the throne. His, not Alcon's, was the voice of authority,
although he worked so subtly that the Tyrant himself never did realize
that he was little better than a figurehead.

Therefore, as Gannel departed, the premier thought briefly but
cogently. This major was smart--too smart. He was too able, he knew
too much. His advancement had been just a trifle too rapid. That
thought-screen was an entirely unexpected development. The mind behind
it was not quite right, either--a glimpse through the slit had revealed
a flash of something that might be taken to indicate that Major Gannel
had an ability which ordinary Thralians did not have. This open
defiance of the Tyrant of Thrale did not ring exactly true--it was not
quite in character. If it had been a bluff, it was too good--much too
good. If it had not been a bluff, where was his support? How could
Gannel have grown so powerful without his, Fossten's, knowledge?

If Major Gannel were bona fide, all well and good. Boskonia needed
the strongest possible leaders, and if any other man showed himself
superior to Alcon, Alcon should and would die. However, there was a
bare possibility that--Was Gannel bona fide? That point should be
cleared up without delay. And the prime minister, after a quizzical,
searching, more than half contemptuous inspection of the furiously
discomfited Tyrant, followed the rebellious, the contumacious, the
enigmatic Gannel to his rooms.

He knocked and was admitted. A preliminary and entirely meaningless
conversation occurred. Then:

"Just when did you leave Eddore?" the visitor demanded.

"What do you want to know for?" Kinnison shot back. That question
didn't mean a thing to him. Maybe it didn't to the big fellow,
either--it could be just a catch--but he didn't intend to give any kind
of an analyzable reply to any question that this ape asked him.

Nor did he, through thirty minutes of viciously skillful verbal
fencing. That conversation was far from meaningless, but it was
entirely unproductive of results; and it was a baffled, intensely
thoughtful Fossten who at its conclusion left Gannel's quarters. From
those quarters he went to the Hall of Records, where he requisitioned
the major's dossier. Then to his own private laboratory, where he
applied to those records every test known to the scientists of his
ultrasuspicious race.

       *       *       *       *       *

The photographs were right in every detail. The prints agreed exactly
with those he himself had secured from the subject not twenty-four
hours since. The typing was right. The ink was right. Everything
checked. And why not? Ink, paper, fiber, and film were in fact exactly
what they should have been. There had been no erasures, no alterations.
Everything had been aged to the precisely correct number of days. For
Kinnison had known that this check-up was coming, and the experts of
the Patrol would make no such crass errors as those.

Even though he had found exactly what he had expected to find,
the suspicions of the prime minister were intensified rather than
allayed. Besides his own, there were two unreadable minds upon Thrale,
where there should have been only one. He knew how Alcon's had been
treated--could Gannel's possibly be a natural phenomenon? If not, who
had treated it, and why?

He left the palace then, ostensibly to attend a function at the
military academy. There, too, everything checked. He visited the town
in which Gannel had been born--finding no irregularities whatever in
the records of the birth. He went to the city in which Gannel had
lived for the greater part of his life; where he assured himself that
school records, club records, even photographs and negatives, all
dead-centered the beam.

He studied the minds of six different persons who had known Gannel
from childhood. As one they agreed that the Traska Gannel who was
now Traska Gannel was in fact the real Traska Gannel, and could not
by any possibility be anyone else. He examined their memory tracks
minutely for scars, breaks, or other evidences of surgery; finding
none. In fact, none existed, for the therapists who had performed those
operations had gone back clear to the very beginnings, to the earliest
memories of the Gannel child.

In spite of the fact that all the data thus far investigated were so
precisely what they should have been--or because of it--the prime
minister was now morally certain that Gannel was, in some fashion
or other, completely spurious. Should he go further, delve into
unimportant but perhaps highly revealing side issues? It would be
useless, he decided. The mind or minds who had falsified those records
so flawlessly--if they had in fact been falsified--had done a beautiful
piece of work: as masterly a job as he himself could have done. He
himself would have left no traces; neither, in all probability, had
they.

Who, then, and why? This was no ordinary plot, no part of any ordinary
scheme to overthrow Alcon. It was bigger, deeper, far more sinister.
Nothing so elaborate and efficient originating upon Thrale could
possibly have been developed and executed without his knowledge and at
least his tacit consent. Was there behind this thing someone who knew
who and what he was and who was seeking his life and his place? Highly
improbable. No--it must be--it _was_--the Patrol!

His mind flashed to Star A Star, reviewing everything that had been
ascribed to that mysterious personage. Then something clicked--in fact,
it stuck out.

BLAKESLEE!

This was much finer than the Blakeslee affair, of course; more subtle
and more polished by far. It was not nearly as obvious, as blatant,
but the basic similarity was nevertheless there. Could this similarity
have been accidental? No--unthinkable. In this undertaking accidents
could be ruled out--definitely. Whatever had been done had been done
deliberately and after meticulous preparation.

But Star A Star _never_ repeated. Therefore, this time, he
_had_ repeated; deliberately, to throw Alcon and his psychologists
off the trail. But he, Fossten, was not to be deceived by even such
clever tactics.

Gannel was, then, really Gannel, just as Blakeslee had really been
Blakeslee. Blakeslee had obviously been under control. Here, however,
there were two possibilities. First, Gannel might be under similar
control. Second, Star A Star might have operated upon Gannel's mind
so radically as to make an entirely different man of him. Either
hypothesis would explain Gannel's extreme reticence in submitting to
any except the most superficial mental examination. Each would account
for Gannel's calm certainty that Alcon was afraid to attack him openly.
Which of these hypotheses was the correct one could be determined
later. It was unimportant, anyway, for in either case there was now
accounted for the heretofore inexplicable power of Gannel's mind.

In either case it was not Gannel's mind at all, but that of THE
Lensman, who was making Gannel act as he could not normally have acted.
Somewhere hereabouts, in either case, there actually was lurking
Boskonia's Nemesis; the mentality whom above all others Boskonia was
raving to destroy; the one Lensman who had never been seen or heard or
perceived; the feared and detested Lensman about whom nothing whatever
had ever been learned.

That Lensman, whoever he might be, had at last met his match. Gannel,
as Gannel, was of no importance whatever; the veriest pawn. But he who
stood behind Gannel--Ah! He, Fossten himself, would wait and he would
watch. Then, at precisely the correct instant, he would pounce!

       *       *       *       *       *

And Kinnison, during the absence of the prime minister, worked swiftly
and surely. Twelve men died, and as they ceased to live twelve others,
grimly ready and thoroughly equipped for any emergency, took their
places. And during that same minute of time Kinnison strode into
Alcon's private sanctum.

The Tyrant hurled orders to his guards--orders which were not obeyed.
He then went for his own weapons, and he was fast--but Kinnison was
faster. Alcon's guns and hands disappeared and the sickened Tellurian
slugged him into unconsciousness. Then grimly, relentlessly, he took
every item of interest from the Thralian's mind, slew him, and assumed
forthwith the title and the full authority of the Tyrant of Thrale.

Unlike most such revolutions, this one was accomplished with very
little bloodshed and with scarcely any interference with the business
of the realm. Indeed, if anything, there was an improvement in almost
every respect, since the new men were more thoroughly trained and were
more competent than the previous officers had been. Also, they had
arranged matters beforehand so that their accessions could be made with
a minimum of friction.

They were as yet loyal to Kinnison and to Boskonia; and in a rather
faint hope of persuading them to stay that way, without developing any
queer ideas anent in turn overthrowing him, the Lensman called them
into conference.

"Men, you know how you got where you are," he began, coldly. "You are
loyal to me at the moment. You know that real co-operation is the only
way to achieve maximum productivity, and that true co-operation cannot
exist in any regime in which the department heads, individually or en
masse, are trying to do away with the dictator.

"Some of you will probably be tempted very shortly to begin to work
against me instead of for me and with me. I am not pleading with you,
nor even asking you out of gratitude for what I have done for you, to
refrain from such activities. Instead, I am telling you as a simple
matter of fact that any or all of you, at the first move toward any
such disloyalty, will die. In that connection, I know that all of you
have been exerting every resource to discover in what manner your
predecessors came so conveniently to die, and that none of you have
succeeded."

One by one they admitted that they had not.

"Nor will you, ever. Be advised that I know vastly more than Alcon
did, and that I am far more powerful. Alcon, while in no sense a
weakling, did not know how to command obedience. I do. Alcon's sources
of information were meager and untrustworthy; mine are comprehensive
and reliable. Alcon very often did not know that anything was being
plotted against him until the thing was well along; I shall always
know of the first seditious move. Alcon blustered, threatened, and
warned; he tortured; he gave some offenders a second chance before he
killed. I shall do none of those things. I do not threaten, I do not
warn, I do not torture. Above all, I give no snake a second chance to
strike at me. I execute traitors without bluster or fanfare. For your
own good, gentlemen, I advise you in all seriousness to believe that I
mean precisely every word that I have uttered."

They slunk out, but Boskonian habit was too strong. Thus, within three
days, three of Kinnison's newly appointed headmen died. He called
another cabinet meeting.

"The three new members have listened to the recording of our first
meeting, hence there is no need to repeat what I said at that time,"
the Tyrant announced, in a voice so silkily venomous that his listeners
cringed. "I will add to it merely that I will have full co-operation,
and only co-operation, if I have to kill all of you and all of your
successors to get it. You may go."




                                  XX.


This killing made Kinnison ill; physically and mentally sick. It was
ruthless, cowardly murder. It was worse than stabbing a man in the
back; the poor devils didn't have even the faintest shadow of a chance.
Nevertheless he did it.

When he had first invaded the stronghold of the Wheelmen of Aldebaran
I, he had acted without thinking at all. Lensmen always went in,
regardless of consequences. When he had scouted Jarnevon he had thought
but little more. True--and fortunately--he took Worsel along; but he
did not stop to consider whether or not there were minds in the Patrol
better fitted to cope with the problem than was his own. It was his
problem, he figured, and it was up to him to solve it.

Now, however, he knew bitterly that he could no longer act in that
comparatively thoughtless fashion. At whatever loss of self-esteem,
of personal stature, or of standing, he had to revise the Tellurian
Lensmen's Code. It griped him to admit it, but Nadreck was right. It
was not enough to give his life in an attempt to conquer a halfway
station; he must remain alive in order to follow through to completion
the job which was so uniquely his. He must _think_, assaying and
evaluating every factor of his entire task. Then, without considering
his own personal feelings, he must employ whatever forces and methods
were best fitted to do the work at the irreducible minimum of cost and
of risk.

Thus Kinnison sat unharmed upon the throne of the Tyrant of Thrale,
and thus the prime minister returned to the palace to find a _fait
accompli_ awaiting him. That worthy studied with care every aspect
of the situation then obtaining before he sought an audience with the
new potentate.

"Allow me to congratulate you, Tyrant Gannel," he said, smoothly. "I
cannot say that I am surprised, since I have been watching you and your
activities for some little time--with distinct approval, I may add. You
have fulfilled--more than fulfilled, perhaps--my expectations. Your
regime is functioning superbly; you have established in this very short
time a smoothness of operation and an _esprit de corps_ among
the rank and file which are decidedly unusual. There are, however,
certain matters about which it is possible that you are not completely
informed."

"It is possible," Kinnison agreed, with the merest trace of irony.
"Such as?"

"In good time. You know, do you not, who is the real authority here
upon Thrale?"

"I know who was," the Tellurian corrected, with the faintest
perceptible accent upon the verb. "In part only, however, for if you
had concerned yourself wholly, the late Alcon would not have made so
many nor so serious mistakes."

"I thank you. That is, as of course you know, because I have only
recently taken over. I want the Tyrant of Thrale to be the strongest
man of Thrale, and I may say without flattery that I believe he now is.
And I would suggest that you add 'sire' when you speak to me."

"I thank you in turn. I will so address you when you call me 'your
supremacy'--not sooner."

"We will let it pass for the moment. To come to your question, you
apparently do not know that the Tyrant of Thrale, whoever he may be,
opens his mind to me."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I have suspected that such a condition has existed in the past.
However, please be informed that I trust fully only those who so trust
me; and that thus far in my short life such persons have been few.
You will observe that I am still respecting your privacy in that I
am allowing your control of my sense of sight to continue. It is not
because I trust you, but because your true appearance is to me a matter
of complete indifference. For, frankly, I do not trust you at all. I
will open my mind to you just exactly as wide as you will open yours to
me--no wider."

"Ah--the bravery of ignorance. It is as I thought. You do not realize,
Gannel, that I can slay you at any moment I choose, or that a very few
more words of defiance from you will be enough." The prime minister did
not raise his voice, but his tone was instinct with menace.

"I do not, and neither do you, as I remarked to the then Tyrant Alcon
in this very room not long ago. I am sure that you will understand
without elaboration the connotations and implications inherent in that
remark." Kinnison's voice also was low and level, freighted in its
every clipped syllable with the calm assurance of power. "Would you be
interested in knowing why I am so certain that you will not accept my
suggestion of a mutual opening of minds?"

"Very much so."

"Because I suspect that you are, or are in league with, Star A Star of
the Galactic Patrol." Even at that astounding charge, Fossten gave no
sign of surprise or of shock. "I have not been able as yet to obtain
any evidence supporting that belief, but I tell you now that when I do
so, you die. Not by power of thought, either, but in the beam of my
personal ray gun."

"Ah--you interest me so strangely," and the premier's hand strayed
almost imperceptibly toward an inconspicuous button.

"Don't touch that switch!" Kinnison snapped. He did not quite see why
Fossten was letting him see the maneuver, but he would bite, anyway.

"Why not, may I ask? It is merely a--"

"I know what it is, and I do not like thought-screens. I prefer that my
mind be left free to roam."

Fossten's thoughts raced in turn. Since the Tyrant was on guard, this
was inconclusive. It might--or might not--indicate that Gannel was
controlled by or in communication with Star A Star.

"Do not be childish," he chided. "You know as well as I do that your
accusations are absurd. However, as I reconsider the matter, the
fact that neither of us trusts unreservedly the other may not after
all be an insuperable obstacle to our working together for the good
of Boskonia. I think now more than ever that yours is the strongest
Thralian mind, and as such, the logical one to wield the Tyrant's
power. It would be a shame to destroy you unnecessarily, especially in
view of the probability that you will come later of your own accord to
see the reasonableness of that which I have suggested."

"It is possible," Kinnison admitted, "but not, I would say, probable."
He thought that he knew why the lug had pulled in his horns, but he
wasn't sure. "Now that we have clarified our attitudes toward each
other, have decided upon an armed and suspicious truce, I see nothing
to prevent us from working together in a completely harmonious mutual
distrust for the good of all. The first thing to do, as I see it, is to
devote our every effort to the destruction of the planet Klovia and all
the Patrol forces based upon it."

"Right." If Fossten suspected that the Tyrant was somewhat less than
frank, he did not show it, and the conversation became strictly
technical.

"We must not strike until we are completely ready," was Kinnison's
first statement, and he repeated it so often thereafter during the
numerous conferences with the chiefs of staff that it came almost to be
a slogan.

       *       *       *       *       *

The prime minister did not know that Kinnison's main purpose was to
give the Patrol plenty of time to make Klovia utterly impregnable.
Fossten knew nothing of the Patrol's sunbeam, to which even the
mightiest fortress possible for man to build could offer scarcely more
resistance than could the lightest, the most fragile pleasure yacht.

Hence he grew more and more puzzled, more and more at a loss week
by week, as Tyrant Gannel kept on insisting upon building up the
strongest, the most logically perfect Grand Fleet which all the
ability of their pooled brains could devise. Once or twice he offered
criticisms and suggestions which, while defensible according to one
theory, would actually have weakened Grand Fleet's striking power.
These offerings Gannel rejected flatly; insisting, even to an
out-and-out break with his co-administrator if necessary, upon the
strongest possible armada.

The Tyrant wanted, and declared that he must and would have, more and
bigger of everything. More and heavier flying fortresses, more and
stronger battleships and superdreadnoughts, more and faster cruisers
and scouts, more and deadlier weapons.

"We want more of everything than our operations officers can possibly
handle in battle," he declared over and over; and he got them. Then:

"Now, you operations officers, learn how to handle them!" he commanded.

Even the prime minister protested at that, but it was finally
accomplished. Fossten was a real thinker, as was Kinnison, and between
them they worked out a system. It was crudeness and inefficiency
incarnate in comparison with the _Z9M9Z_, but it was so much
better than anything previously known to Boskonia's High Command that
everyone was delighted. Even the suspicious and cynical Fossten began
to entertain some doubts as to the infallibility of his own judgment.

And these doubts grew apace as the Tyrant drilled his Grand Fleet. He
drove the personnel unmercifully, especially the operations officers;
as relentlessly as he drove himself. He simply could not be satisfied,
his ardor and lust for efficiency were insatiable. His reprimands were
scathingly accurate; officer after officer he demoted bitingly during
ever more complicated, ever more inhumanly difficult maneuvers; until
finally he had what were unquestionably his best men in those supremely
important positions. Then, one day:

"QX, Kim, come ahead--we're ready," Haynes Lensed him, briefly.

For Kinnison had been in touch with the port admiral every day. He had
learned long since that the prime minister could not detect a Lensed
thought, particularly when the Lensman was wearing a thought-screen, as
he did practically constantly; wherefore the strategists of the Patrol
were as well informed as was Kinnison himself of every move made by the
Boskonians.

Then Kinnison called Fossten, and was staring glumly at nothing when
the latter entered the room.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Well, it would seem that we are about as nearly ready as we ever will
be," the Tyrant brooded, pessimistically. "Have you any suggestions,
criticisms, or other contributions to offer, of however minor a nature?"

"None whatever. You have done very well indeed."

"Unnhh," Gannel grunted, without enthusiasm. "You have observed, no
doubt, that I have said little if anything as to the actual method of
approach?"

The prime minister had indeed noticed that peculiar oversight, and said
so. Here, undoubtedly, he thought, was the rub. Here was where Star A
Star's minion would get in his dirty work.

"I have thought about it at length," Kinnison said, still in his brown
study. "But I know enough to recognize and to admit my own limitations.
I do know tactics and strategy, and thus far I have worked with only
known implements toward known objectives. That condition, however, no
longer exists. The simple fact is that I do not know enough about the
possibilities, the techniques and the potentialities, the advantages
and the disadvantages of the hyperspatial tube as an avenue of approach
to enable me to come to a defensible decision one way or the other. I
have decided, therefore, that if you have any preference in the matter
I will give you full authority and let you handle the approach in any
manner you please. I shall, of course, direct the actual battle, as in
that I shall again be upon familiar ground."

The premier was flabbergasted. This was incredible. Gannel must really
be working for Boskonia after all, to make such a decision as that.
Still skeptical, unprepared for such a startling development as that
one was, he temporized.

"The bad--the _very_ bad--features of the approach via tube are
two," he pondered aloud. "We have no means of knowing anything about
what happens; and, since our previous such venture was a total failure,
we must assume that, contrary to our plans and expectations, the enemy
was not taken by surprise."

"Right," Kinnison concurred, tonelessly.

"Upon the other hand, an approach via open space, while conducive to
the preservation of our two lives, would be seen from afar and would
certainly be met by an appropriate formation."

"Check," came emotionlessly noncommittal agreement.

"Haven't you the slightest bias, one way or the other?" Fossten
demanded, incredulously.

"None whatever," the Tyrant was coldly matter-of-fact. "If I had had
any such, I would have ordered the approach made in the fashion I
preferred. Having none, I delegated authority to you. When I delegate
authority I do so without reservations."

This was a stopper.

"Let it be open space, then," the prime minister finally decided.

"So be it." And so it was.

       *       *       *       *       *

Each of the component flotillas of Grand Fleet made a flying trip to
some nearby base, where each unit was serviced. Every item of mechanism
and of equipment was checked and rechecked. Stores were replenished,
and munitions--especially munitions. Then the mighty armada, the
most frightfully powerful aggregation ever to fly for Boskonia--the
mightiest fleet ever assembled anywhere, according to the speeches
of the politicians--remade its stupendous formation and set out for
Klovia. And as it flew through space, shortly before contact was made
with the Patrol's Grand Fleet, the premier called Kinnison into the
control room.

"Gannel, I simply cannot make you out," he remarked, after studying him
fixedly for five minutes. "You have offered no advice. You have not
interfered with my handling of the Fleet in any way. Nevertheless, I
still suspect you of treacherous intentions. I have been suspicious of
you from the first--"

"With no grounds whatever for your suspicions," Kinnison reminded him,
coldly.

"What? With all the reason possible!" Fossten declared. "Have you not
steadily refused to bare your mind to me?"

"Certainly. Why not? Do we have to go over that again? Just how do you
figure that I should so trust any being who refuses to reveal even his
true shape to me?"

"That is for your own good," the prime minister stated. "I have not
wanted to tell you this, but the truth is that no human being can
perceive my true self and retain his sanity."

"I'll take a chance on that," Kinnison replied, skeptically. "I've seen
a lot of monstrous entities in my time and I haven't conked out yet."

"There speaks the sheer folly of callow youth; the rashness of an
ignorance so abysmal as to be possible only to one of your ephemeral
race." The voice deepened, became more resonant. Kinnison, staring into
those inscrutable eyes which he knew did not in fact exist, thrilled
forebodingly; the timbre and the overtones of that voice reminded him
very disquietingly of something which he could not at the moment recall
to mind. "I forbear to discipline you, not from any doubt as to my
ability to do so, as you suppose, but because of the sure knowledge
that breaking you by force will destroy your usefulness. On the other
hand, it is certain that if you co-operate with me willingly you will
be the strongest, ablest leader that Boskonia has ever had. Think well
upon these matters, O Tyrant."

"I will," the Lensman agreed, more seriously than he had intended. "But
just what, if anything, has led you to believe that I am not working to
the fullest and best of my ability for Boskonia?"

"Everything." Fossten summarized. "I have been able to find no flaw in
your actions, but those actions do not fit in with your unexplained
and apparently unexplainable reticence in letting me perceive for
myself exactly what is in your mind. Furthermore, you have never even
troubled to deny accusations that you are in fact playing a far deeper
game than you appear upon the surface to be playing."

"That reticence I have explained over and over as an over-mastering
repugnance--call it a phobia if you like," Kinnison rejoined, wearily.
"I simply can't and won't. Since you cannot understand that, denials
would have been entirely useless. Would you believe anything that
I could possibly say--that I would swear to by everything I hold
sacred--whether it was that I am whole-heartedly loyal to Boskonia or
that I am in fact Star A Star himself?"

"Probably not," came the measured reply. "No, certainly not.
Men--especially men such as you, bent ruthlessly upon the acquisition
of power--are liars ... ah, could it, by any chance, be that the reason
for your intractability is that you have the effrontery to entertain
some insane idea of supplanting ME?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kinnison jumped mentally. That tore it--that was a flare-lit tip-off.
This man--this thing--being--entity--whatever he really was--instead
of being just another Boskonian big shot, must be the clear quill--the
real McCoy--BOSKONE HIMSELF! The end of the job must be right here!
This was--_must_ be--the real Brain for whom he had been searching
so long; here within three feet of him sat the creature with whom he
had been longing so fervently to come to grips!

"The reason is as I have said," the Tellurian stated, quietly. "I will
attempt to make no secret, however, of a fact which you must already
have deduced; that if and when it becomes apparent that you have any
authority above or beyond that of the Tyrant of Thrale I shall take it
away from you. Why not? Now that I have come so far, why should I not
aspire to sit in the highest seat of all?"

"_Hrrummphhh!_" the monster--Kinnison could no longer think of
him as Fossten, or as the prime minister, or as anything even remotely
human--snorted with such utter, such searing contempt that even the
Lensman's burly spirit quailed. "As well might you attempt to pit
your vaunted physical strength against that of the heaviest forging
ram ever built. Now, youth, have done. The time for temporizing is
past. As I have said, I desire to spare you, as I wish you to rule
this part of Boskonia as my viceroy. Know, however, that you are in no
sense essential, and that if you do not yield your mind fully to mine,
here and now, before this coming battle is joined, you most certainly
die." At the grim finality, the calmly assured certainty of the
pronouncement, a quick chill struck into the Gray Lensman's vitals.

This thing who called himself Fossten--who or what was he? What was
it that he reminded him of? He thought and talked like ... like ...
MENTOR! But it _couldn't_ be an Arisian, possibly--that wouldn't
make sense. But then, it didn't make any kind of sense, anyway, any way
you looked at it. Whoever he was, he had plenty of jets--jets enough
to lift a freighter off of the north pole of Valeria. And by the same
token, his present line of talk didn't make sense, either--there must
be some good reason why he hadn't made a real pass at him long before
this, instead of arguing with him so patiently. What could it be?
Oh, that was it, of course. He needed only a few minutes more, now;
he could probably stall off the final showdown that long by crawling
a bit--much as it griped him to let this zwilnik think that he was
licking his boots.

"Your forbearance is appreciated, sire." At the apparently unconscious
tribute to superiority and at the fact that the hitherto completely
self-possessed Tyrant got up and began to pace nervously up and
down the control room, the prime minister's austere mien softened
appreciably. "It is, however, passing strange. It is not quite in
character; it does not check quite satisfactorily with the facts
thus far revealed. I may, perhaps, as you say, be stupid. I may be
overestimating flagrantly my own abilities. To one of my temperament,
however, to surrender in such a craven fashion as you demand comes
hard--extremely, almost unbearably hard. It would be easier, I think,
if your supremacy would condescend to reveal his true identity, thereby
making plainly evident and manifest that which at present must be left
to unsupported words, surmise, and not too much conviction."

"But I told you, and now tell you again, that for you to look upon my
real form is to lose your reason!" the creature rasped.

"What do you care, really, whether or not I remain sane?" Kinnison shot
his bolt at last, in what he hoped would be taken for a last resurgence
of spirit. His time was about up. In less than one minute now the
screens of scout cruisers would be in engagement, and either he or the
prime minister or both would be expected to be devoting every cell of
their brains to the all-important battle of giants. And in that very
nick of time he would have to cripple the Bergenholms and thus inert
the flagship. "Could it be that the real reason for your otherwise
inexplicable forbearance is that you must know how my mind became as it
now is, and that the breaking down of my barriers by mental force will
destroy the knowledge which you, for your own security, must have?"

This was the blowoff. Kinnison still paced the room, but his pacings
took him nearer and ever nearer to a certain control panel. Behind his
thought-screen, which he could not now trust for a moment and which
he knew starkly would be worse than useless in what was coming, he
mustered every iota of his tremendous force of mind and of will. Only
seconds now. His left hand, thrust into his breeches pocket, grasped
the cigarette case within which reposed his Lens. His right arm and
hand were tensely ready to draw and to fire his ray gun.

"Die, then! I should have known from the sheer perfection of your work
that you were what you really are--Star A Star!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The mental blast came ahead even of the first word, but the Gray
Lensman, supremely ready, was already in action. One quick thrust of
his chin flicked off the thought-screen. The shielded cigarette case
flew open, his more-than-half-alive Lens blazed again upon his massive
wrist. His weapon leaped out of its scabbard, flaming destruction as
it came--a ravening tongue of incandescent fury which licked out of
existence in the twinkling of an eye the Bergenholms' control panels
and the operators clustered before it. The vessel went inert--much work
would have to be done before the Boskonian flagship could again fly
free!

These matters required only a fraction of a second. Well indeed it was
that they did not take longer, for the ever-mounting fury of the prime
minister's attack soon necessitated more--much more--than an automatic
block, however capable. But Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, Lensman of
Lensmen, had more--ever so much more--than that!

He whirled, lips thinned over tight-set teeth in a savage fighting
grin. Now he'd see what this zwilnik was and what he had. No fear,
no doubt of the outcome, entered his mind. He had suffered such
punishment as few minds have ever endured in learning to ward off
everything that Mentor, one of the mightiest intellects of this or
of any other universe, could send; but through that suffering he had
learned. This unknown entity was an able operator, of course, but he
certainly had a thick, hard crust to think that he could rub _him_
out!

So thinking, the Lensman hurled a bolt of his own, a blast of power
sufficient to have slain a dozen men--and, amazedly, saw it rebound
harmlessly from the premier's hard-held block.

Which of the two combatants was the more surprised it would be hard
to say; each had considered his own mind impregnable and invincible.
Now, as the prime minister perceived how astoundingly capable a foe
he faced, he sought to summon help by ordering the officers on duty
to blast their Tyrant down. In vain. For, even so early in that
ultimately lethal struggle, he could not spare enough of his mind to
control effectively any outsider; and in a matter of seconds there
were no minds left throughout that entire room in any condition to be
controlled.

For the first reverberations, the ricochets, the spent forces of the
monster's attack against Kinnison's shield had wrought grievously
among the mentalities of the innocent bystanders. Those forces
were deadly--deadly beyond telling--so inimical to and destructive
of intelligence that even their transformation products affected
tremendously the nervous systems of all within range.

Then, instants later, the spectacle of the detested and searingly
feared Lens scintillating balefully upon the wrist of their own ruler
was an utterly inexpressible shock. Some of the officers tried then
to go for their guns, but it was already too late; their shaking,
trembling, almost paralyzed muscles could not be forced to function.

       *       *       *       *       *

An even worse shock followed almost instantly, for the prime minister,
under the incredibly mounting intensity of the Lensman's poignant
thrusts, found it necessary to concentrate his every iota of power upon
his opponent. This revealed to all beholders, except Kinnison, what
their prime minister actually was--and he had not been very much wrong
in saying that that sight would drive any human being mad. Most of the
Boskonians did go mad, then and there; but they did not rush about nor
scream. They could not move purposefully, but only twitched and writhed
horribly as they lay grotesquely asprawl. They could not scream or
shriek, but only mouthed and mumbled meaningless burblings.

And ever higher, ever more brilliant flamed the Lens as Kinnison threw
all of his prodigious will power, all of his tremendous, indomitable
drive, through it and against the incredibly resistant thing to
which he was opposed. This was the supreme, the climactic battle of
his life thus far. Ether and sub-ether seethed and boiled invisibly
under the frightful violence of the forces there unleashed. The men
in the control room lay still; all life rived away. Now death spread
throughout the confines of the vast spaceship.

Indomitably, relentlessly, the Gray Lensman held his offense upon that
unimaginably high level; his Lens flooding the room with intensely
coruscant polychromatic light. He did not know, then or ever, how he
did it. It seemed as though his Lens, of its own volition in this
time of ultimate need, reached out into unguessable continua and drew
therefrom an added, an extra something. But, however it was done,
Kinnison and his Lens managed to hold; and under the appalling, the
never-ceasing concentration of force the monster's defenses began
gradually to weaken and to go down.

Then sketchily, patchily, there was revealed to Kinnison's sight and
sense of perception a ... a ... a BRAIN!

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a body, of sorts, of course--a peculiarly neckless body
designed solely to support that gigantic, thin-skulled head. There
were certain appendages or limbs, and suchlike appurtenances and
incidentalia to nourishment, locomotion, and the like; but to all
intents and purposes the thing was simply and solely a brain.

Kinnison knew starkly that it was an Arisian--it looked enough like
old Mentor to be his twin brother. He would have been stunned,
except for the fact that he was far too intent upon victory to
let any circumstance, however distracting, affect his purpose.
His concentration upon the task in hand was so complete that
nothing--literally nothing whatever--could sway him from it.

The monster's wall of illusion went down completely and then, step by
short, hard, jerky step, Kinnison advanced. Close enough, he selected
certain areas upon the sides of that enormous head and with big, hard,
open hands he went viciously to work. Right, left, right, left, he
slapped those bulging temples brutally, rocking monstrous head and
repulsive body from side to side, pendulumlike, with every stunning
blow.

His fist would have smashed that thin skull, would perhaps have buried
itself deep within the soft tissues of that tremendous brain; and
Kinnison did not want to kill his inexplicable opponent--yet. He had to
find out first what this was all about.

He knew that he was due to black out as soon as he let go, and he
intended to addle the thing's senses so thoroughly that he would be
completely out of action for hours--long enough to give the Lensman
plenty of time in which to recover his strength.

He did so.

Kinnison did not quite faint. He did, however, have to lie down flat
upon the floor; as limp, almost, as the dead men so thickly strewn
about.

And thus, while the two immense Grand Fleets met in battle, Boskonia's
flagship hung inert and silent in space afar; manned by fifteen hundred
corpses, one unconscious Brain, and one utterly exhausted Gray Lensman.




                                 XXI.


Boskonia's Grand Fleet was, as has been said, enormous. It was not as
large as the Patrol in total number of ships, since no ordinary brain
nor any possible combination of such brains could have co-ordinated and
directed the activities of so vast a number of units. Its center was,
however, heavier; composed of a number and a tonnage of supermaulers
which made it self-evidently irresistible.

In his training of his Grand Fleet operations staff, Kinnison had
not overlooked a single bet, had not made a single move which by its
falsity might have excited Premier Fossten's all-too-ready suspicions.
They had handled Grand Fleet as a whole in vast, slow maneuvers;
plainly the only kind possible to so tremendous a force. Kinnison and
his officers had in turn harshly and thoroughly instructed the subfleet
commanders in the various arts and maneuvers of conquering units equal
to or smaller than their own.

That was all; and to the Boskonians, even to Fossten, that had been
enough. That was obviously all that was possible. Not one of them
realized that Tyrant Gannel very carefully avoided any suggestion that
there might be any intermediate tactics, such as that of three or
four hundred subfleets, too widely spread in space and too numerous to
be handled by any ordinary mind or apparatus to inglobe and to wipe
out simultaneously perhaps fifty subfleets whose commanders were not
even in communication with each other. This technique was as yet the
exclusive property of the Patrol and the _Z9M9Z_.

And in that exact operation, a closed book to the zwilniks,
lay--supposedly and tactically--the Patrol's overwhelming advantage.
For Haynes, through his four highly specialized Rigellian Lensmen and
thence through the two hundred Rigellian operator-computers, could
perform maneuvers upon any intermediate scale he pleased. He could
handle his whole vast Grand Fleet and its every component part--he
supposed--as effectively, as rapidly, and almost as easily as a skilled
chess player handles his pieces and his pawns. Neither Kinnison nor
Haynes can be blamed, however, for the fact that their suppositions
were somewhat in error; it would have taken an Arisian to deduce that
this battle was not to be fought exactly as they had planned it.

Haynes had another enormous advantage in knowing the exact number,
rating, disposition, course, and velocity of every main unit of the
aggregation to which he was opposed. And third, he had the sunbeam,
concerning which the enemy knew nothing at all and which was now in
good working order.

It is needless to say that the sunbeam generators were already set to
hurl that shaft of irresistible destruction along the precisely correct
line, or that Haynes' Grand Fleet formation had been made with that
particular weapon in mind. It was not an orthodox formation; in any
ordinary space battle it would have been sheerly suicidal. But the port
admiral, knowing for the first time in his career every pertinent fact
concerning his foe, knew exactly what he was doing.

His fleet, instead of driving ahead to meet the enemy, remained inert
and practically motionless well within the limits of Klovia's solar
system. His heavy stuff, instead of being massed at the center, was
arranged in a vast ring. There was no center except for a concealing
screen of heavy cruisers.

When the far-flung screens of scout cruisers came into engagement,
then, the Patrol scouts near the central line did not fight, but sped
lightly aside. So did the light and heavy cruisers and the battleships.
The whole vast center of the Boskonians drove onward, unopposed,
into--nothing.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nevertheless they kept on driving. They could, without orders, do
nothing else, and no orders were forthcoming from the flagship.
Commanders tried to get in touch with Grand Fleet operations, but could
not; and, in failing, kept on under their original instructions. They
had, they could have, no suspicion that any minion of the Patrol was
back of what had happened to their admirals. The flagship had been in
the safest possible position and no attack had as yet been made. They
probably wondered futilely as to what kind of a mechanical breakdown
could have immobilized and completely silenced their High Command,
but that was--strictly--none of their business. They had had orders,
very definite orders, that no matter what happened they were to go on
to Klovia and to destroy it. Thus, however wondering, they kept on.
They were on the line. They would hold to it. They would blast out of
existence anything and everything which might attempt to bar their way.
They would reach Klovia and they would reduce it to its component atoms.

Unresisted, then, the Boskonian center bored ahead into nothing, until
Haynes, through his Rigellians, perceived that it had come far enough.
Then Klovia's brilliantly shining sun darkened almost to the point of
going out entirely. Along the line of centers, through the space so
peculiarly empty of Patrol ships, there came into being the sunbeam--a
bar of quasi-solid lightning into which there had been compressed
all the energy of well over four million tons _per second_ of
disintegrating matter.

Scouts and cruisers caught in that ravening beam flashed briefly,
like sparks flying from a forge, and vanished. Battleships and
superdreadnoughts the same. Even the solid war head of fortresses and
maulers was utterly helpless. No screen has ever been designed capable
of handling that hellish load; no possible or conceivable substance can
withstand, save momentarily, the ardor of a sunbeam. For the energy
liberated by the total annihilation of four million tons per second of
matter is in fact as irresistible as it is incomprehensible.

The armed and armored planets did not disappear. They contained too
much sheer mass for even that inconceivably powerful beam to volatilize
in any small number of seconds. Their surfaces, however, melted and
boiled. The controlling and powering mechanisms fused into useless
pools of molten metal. Inert, then, inactive and powerless, they no
longer constituted threats to Klovia's well-being.

The negaspheres also were rendered ineffective by the beam. Their
antimasses were not decreased of course--in fact, they were probably
increased a trifle by the fervor of the treatment--but, with the
controlling super-structures volatilized away, they became more of
menace to the Boskonian forces than to those of Civilization. Indeed,
several of the terrible things were drawn into contact with ruined
planets. Then negasphere and planet consumed each other, flooding all
nearby space with intensely hard and horribly lethal radiation.

The beam winked out, Klovia's sun flashed on. The sunbeam was--and
is--clumsy, unwieldy, quite definitely not rapidly maneuverable. But
it had done its work; now the component parts of Civilization's Grand
Fleet started in to do theirs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Since the Battle of Klovia--it was and still is called that, as though
it were the only battle which that warlike planet has ever seen--has
been fought over in the classrooms of practically every civilized
planet of two galaxies, it would be redundant to discuss it in detail
here.

It was, of course, unique. No other battle like it has ever been
fought, either before or since--and let us hope that no other such ever
will be. It is studied by strategists, who have so far offered many
thousands of widely variant profundities as to what Port Admiral Haynes
should have done. Its profound emotional appeal, however, lies only and
sheerly in its unorthodoxy. For in the technically proper space battle
there is no hand-to-hand fighting, no purely personal heroism, no
individual deeds of valor. It is a thing of logic and mathematics and
of science, the massing of superior fire power against a well-chosen
succession of weaker opponents. When the screens of a spaceship go down
that ship is done, her personnel only memories.

But here how different! With the supposed breakdown of the lines of
communication to the flagship, the subfleets carried on in formation.
With the destruction of the entire center, however, all semblance
of organization or of co-operation was lost. Every staff officer
knew that no more orders would emanate from the flagship. Each knew
chillingly that there could be neither escape nor succor. The captain
of each vessel, thoroughly convinced that he knew vastly more than
did his fleet commander, proceeded to run the war to suit himself. The
outcome was fantastic, so utterly bizarre that the _Z9M9Z_ and her
trained co-ordinating officers were useless. Science and tactics and
the million lines of communication could do nothing against a foe who
insisted upon making it a ship-to-ship, yes, man-to-man affair!

The result was the most gigantic dog fight in the annals of military
science. Ships--Civilization's perhaps as eagerly as Boskonia's--cut
off their projectors, cut off their screens, the better to ram, to
board, to come to grips personally with the enemy. Scout to scout,
cruiser to cruiser, battleship to battleship, the insane contagion
spread. Haynes and his staff men swore fulminantly, the Rigellians
hurled out orders, but those orders simply could not be obeyed. The
dog fight spread until it filled a good sixth of Klovia's entire solar
system.

Board and storm! Armor--DeLameters--axes! The mad blood lust of
hand-to-hand combat, the insensately horrible savagery of our pirate
forebears, multiplied by millions and spread out to fill a million
million cubic miles of space!

Haynes and his fellows wept unashamed as they stood by helpless,
unable to avoid or to prevent the slaughter of so many splendid men,
the gutting of so many magnificent ships. It was ghastly--it was
appalling--it was WAR!

       *       *       *       *       *

And far from this scene of turmoil and of butchery lay Boskonia's
great flagship, and in her control room Kinnison began to recover his
strength. He sat up groggily. He gave his throbbing head a couple of
tentative shakes. Nothing rattled. Good--he was QX, he guessed, even if
he did feel as limp as nine wet dish rags. Even his Lens felt weak; its
usually refulgent radiance was sluggish, wan, and dim. This had taken
plenty out of them, he reflected soberly; but he was mighty lucky to be
alive. But he'd better get his batteries charged. He couldn't drive a
thought across the room, the shape he was in now, and he knew of only
one brain in the Universe capable of straightening out _this_ mess.

After assuring himself that the highly inimical brain would not be
able to function normally for a long time to come, the Lensman made
his way to the galley. He could walk without staggering already--fine!
There he fried himself a big, thick, rare steak--his never-failing
remedy for all the ills to which flesh is heir--and brewed a pot of
the coffeelike beverage affected by Thralians; making it viciously,
almost corrosively strong. And as he ate and drank, his head cleared
magically. Strength flowed back into him in waves. His Lens flamed into
its normal splendor. He stretched prodigiously; inhaled gratefully a
few deep breaths. He was QX.

Back in the control room, after again checking up on the still
quiescent brain--he wouldn't trust this Fossten as far as he could
spit--he hurled a thought to far-distant Arisia and to Mentor, its
ancient sage.

"What's an Arisian doing in this Second Galaxy, working _against_
the Patrol? Just what is somebody trying to pull off?" he demanded
heatedly, and in a second of flashing thought reported what had
happened.

"Truly, Kinnison of Tellus, my mind is far from capable," the deeply
resonant, slow simulacrum of a voice resounded within the Lensman's
brain. The Arisian never hurried; nothing whatever, apparently, not
even such a cataclysmic upheaval as this, could fluster or excite
him. "It does not seem to be in accord with the visualization of the
Cosmic All which I hold at the moment that any one of my fellows is in
fact either in the Second Galaxy or acting antagonistically to the
Galactic Patrol. It is, however, a truism that hypotheses, theories,
and visualizations must fit themselves to known or observed facts,
and even your immature mind is eminently able to report truly upon
actualities. But before I attempt to revise my Cosmos to conform to
this admittedly peculiar circumstance, we must be very sure indeed of
our facts. Are you certain, youth, that the being whom you have beaten
into unconsciousness is actually an Arisian?"

"Certainly I'm certain!" Kinnison snapped. "Why, he's enough like you
to have been hatched out of half of the same egg. Take a look!"--and he
knew that the Arisian was studying every external and internal detail,
part, and organ of the erstwhile prime minister of Thrale.

"Ah, it would appear to be an Arisian, at that, youth," Mentor finally
agreed. "I do not know him, however, and I have been quite confident
that I am acquainted with each member of my race. He is old, as
you said--as old, perhaps, as I am. This will require some little
thought--allow me therefore, please, a moment of contemplation." The
Arisian fell silent, presently to resume:

"I have it now. Many millions of your years ago--so long ago that
it was with some little difficulty that I recalled it to mind--when
I was scarcely more than an infant, a youth but little older than
myself disappeared from Arisia. It was determined then that he was
aberrant--insane--and since only an unusually capable mind can predict
truly the illogical workings of a diseased and disordered mind for even
one year in advance, it is not surprising that in my visualization that
unbalanced youth perished long ago. Nor is it surprising that I do not
recognize him in the creature before you, for at the time of vanishment
no permanent pattern had as yet been formed."

"Well, aren't you surprised that I could get the best of him?" Kinnison
asked naïvely. He had really expected that Mentor would compliment him
upon his prowess, he figured that he had earned a few pats on the back;
but here the old fellow was mooning about his own mind and his own
philosophy, and acting as though knocking off an Arisian were something
to be taken in stride. And it wasn't, by half!

"No," came the flatly definite reply. "You have a force of will, a
totalizable and concentratable power, a mental and psychological drive
that no mind in the macrocosmic universe can break. I perceived those
latent capabilities when I assembled your Lens, and developed them
when I developed you. It was their presence which made it certain that
you would return here for that development; they made you what you
intrinsically are."

"QX, then--skip it. What shall I do with him? It's going to be a real
job of work, any way you figure it, for us to keep him alive and
harmless until we can get him back there to Arisia."

"We do not want him here," Mentor replied without emotion. "He has no
present or future place within our society. Nor, however I consider
the matter, can I perceive that he has any longer a permissible or
condonable place in the all-inclusive Scheme of Things. He has served
his purpose. Destroy him, therefore, forthwith, before he so much as
recovers consciousness; lest much and grievous harm befall you."

"I believe you, chief. You chirped it then, if anybody ever did.
Thanks"--and communication ceased.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Lensman's ray gun flamed briefly and what was mortal of Fossten the
prime minister became a smoking, shapeless heap.

Kinnison noticed then that a call light was shining brightly upon a
communicator panel. This thing must have taken longer than he had
supposed. The battle must be over, otherwise all space would still
be filled with interference through which no long-range communicator
beam could have been driven. Or--could Boskonia have--No, that was
unthinkable. The Patrol _must_ have won. This must be Haynes,
calling him--

It was. The frightful Battle of Klovia was over. While many of the
Patrol ships had yielded, either by choice or by necessity, to the
Boskonians' challenge, most of them had not. And the majority of those
who did so yield, came out victorious.

While fighting in any kind of recognized formation against such
myriads of independently operating, widely spaced individual ships
was, of course, out of the question, Haynes and his aids had been
able to work out a technique of sorts. General orders were sent out
to subfleet commanders, who in turn relayed them to the individual
captains by means of visual beams. Single vessels, then, locked to
equal or inferior craft--avoiding carefully anything larger than
themselves--with tractor zones and held grimly on. If they could defeat
the foe, QX. If not, they hung on; until shortly one of the Patrol's
maulers--who had no opposition of their own class to face--would
come lumbering up. And when the dreadful primary batteries of one of
_those_ things cut loose that was, very conclusively, that.

Thus Boskonia's mighty fleet vanished from the skies.

The all-pervading interference was cut off and Port Admiral Haynes,
brushing aside a communications officer, sat down at his board and
punched a call. Time after time he punched it. Finally he shoved it in
and left it in; and as he stared, minute after minute, into the coldly
unresponsive plate his face grew gray and old.

With a long, slightly tremulous sigh he was turning away from the plate
when suddenly it lighted up to show the smiling, deeply space-tanned
face of the one for whom he had just about given up hope.

"Thank God!" The commander in chief's exclamation was wholly reverent;
his strained old face lost twenty years in half that many seconds.
"Thank God you are safe. You did it, then?"

"I managed it, Pop, but just by the skin of my teeth--I didn't have
half a jet to spare. It was Old Man Boskone himself, in person. And
you?"

"Clean-up--one hundred point oh, oh, oh, oh percent."

"Fine business!" Kinnison exulted. "Everything's on the exact center of
the green, then--come on!"

And Civilization's Grand Fleet went.

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Z9M9Z_ flashed up to visibility, inerted, and with furious
driving blasts full ablaze, matched her intrinsic velocity to that
of the Boskonian flagship--the only Boskonian vessel remaining in
that whole vast volume of space. Tractors and pressors were locked
on and balanced. Flexible--or, more accurately, not ultimately
rigid--connecting tubes were pushed out and sealed. Hundreds,
yes--thousands, of men--men in full Thralian uniform--strode through
those tubes and into the Thralian ship. The _Directrix_ unhooked
and a battleship took her place. Time after time the maneuver was
repeated, until it seemed as though Kinnison's vessel, huge as she was,
could not possibly carry the numbers of men who marched aboard.

Those men were all human or approximately so--nearly enough human, at
least, to pass as Thralians under a casual inspection. More peculiarly,
that army contained an astounding number of Lensmen. So many Lensmen,
it is certain, had never before been gathered together into so small
a space. But the fact that they were Lensmen was not apparent; their
Lenses were not upon their wrists, but were high upon their arms,
concealed from even the most prying eyes within the heavy sleeves of
their tunics.

Then the captured flagship, her Bergenholms again at work, the
_Z9M9Z_, and the battleships which had already assumed the
intrinsic velocity possessed originally by the Boskonians, spread out
widely in space. Each surrounded itself with a globe of intensely vivid
red light. Orders as to course and power flashed out. The word was
given and spectacular fire flooded space as that vast host of ships,
guided by those red beacons and by the ever-watchful observers of the
_Directrix_, matched in one prodigious and beautiful maneuver its
intrinsic velocity to theirs.

Finally, all the intrinsics in exact agreement, Grand Fleet formation
was remade. The term "remade" is used advisedly, since this was not to
be a battle formation. For Traska Gannel had long since sent a message
to his capital; a terse and truthful message which was, nevertheless,
utterly misleading. It was:

"My forces have won, my enemy has been wiped out to the last man.
Prepare for a two-world broadcast, to cover both Thrale and Onlo, at
hour ten today of my palace time."

The formation, then, was not one of warfare, but of boasting triumph.
It was the consciously proud formation of a Grand Fleet which, secure
in the knowledge that it has blasted out of the ether everything which
can threaten it, returns victoriously to its Prime Base to receive as
its just due the plaudits and the acclaim of the populace.

Well in the van--alone in the van, in fact, and strutting--was the
flagship. She, having originated upon Thrale and having been built
specifically for a flagship, would be recognized at sight. Back of
her came, in gigantic co-axial cones, the subfleets; arranged now not
class by class of ships, but world by world of origin. One mauler,
perhaps, or two; from four or five to a dozen or more battleships; an
appropriate number of cruisers and of scouts; all flying along together
in a tight little group.

But not all of the Patrol's armada was in that formation. It would
have been very poor technique indeed to have had Boskonia's Grand
Fleet come back to home ether forty percent larger than it had set
out. Besides, the _Directrix_ simply could not be allowed to come
within detector range of any Boskonian lookout. She was utterly unlike
any other vessel ever to fly: she would not, perhaps, be recognized
for what she really was, but it would be evident to the most casual
observer that she was not and could not be of Thrale or of Boskonia.

The _Z9M9Z_, then, hung back--far back--escorted and enveloped by
the great number of warships which could not be made to fit into the
roll call of the Tyrant's original Grand Fleet.

The subfleet which was originally from Thrale could land without
any trouble; without arousing any suspicion. Boskonian and Patrol
designs were not identical, of course; but the requirements of sound
engineering dictated that externals should be essentially the
same. The individual ships now bore the correct identifying symbols
and insignia. The minor differences could not be perceived until
after the vessels had actually landed, and that would be--for the
Thralians--entirely too late.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thralian hour ten arrived. Kinnison, after a long, minutely searching
inspection of the entire room, became again in every millimeter Traska
Gannel, the Tyrant of Thrale. He waved a hand. The scanner before
him glowed: for a full minute he stared into it haughtily, to give
his teeming millions of minions ample opportunity to gaze upon the
inspiring countenance of His Supremacy the Feared.

He knew that the scanner revealed clearly every detail of the control
room behind him, but everything there was QX. There was not even a
chance that some person would fail to recognize a familiar face at any
post, for not a single face except his own would be visible. Not a head
back of him would turn, not even a rear quarter profile would show:
it would be _lese majeste_ of the most intolerable for any face,
however inconspicuous, to share the limelight with that of the Tyrant
of Thrale while his supremacy was addressing his subjects. Serenely and
assuredly enough, then, Kinnison as Tyrant Gannel spoke:

"My people! As you have already been told, my forces have won the
complete victory which my foresight and my leadership made inevitable.
This milestone of progress is merely a repetition upon a grander scale
of those which I have already accomplished upon a somewhat smaller; as
extension and a continuation of the carefully considered procedure by
virtue of which I shall see to it that My Great Plan succeeds.

"As one item in that scheduled procedure I removed the weakling
Alcon, and in the stead of his rule of oppression, short-sightedness,
corruption, favoritism, and greed, I substituted my beneficent regime
of fair play, of mutual co-operation for the good of all.

"I have now accomplished the next major step in my program; the
complete destruction of the armed forces which might be, which would be
employed to hamper and to nullify the development and the fruition of
My Plan.

"I shall take the next step immediately upon my return to my palace.
There is no need to inform you now as to the details of what I have
in mind. In broad, however, it pleases me to inform you that, having
crushed all opposition, I am now able to institute and shall proceed
at once to institute certain changes in policy, in administration,
and in jurisdiction. I assure you that all of these changes will be,
ultimately, for the best good of all, save the enemies of society.

"I caution you therefore to co-operate fully and willingly with my
officers who may shortly come among you with instructions; some of
these, perhaps, of a nature not hitherto promulgated upon Thrale. Those
of you who do so co-operate will live and will prosper; you who do
not will die in the slowest, most hideous fashions which hundreds of
generations of Thralian torturers have been able to devise."




                                 XXII.


Up to the present, Kinnison's revolution, his self-advancement into
the dictatorship, had been perfectly normal; in perfect accordance
with the best tenets of Boskonian etiquette. While it would be idle to
contend that any of the others of the High Command really approved of
it--each wanted intensely that high place for himself--none of them had
been strong enough at the moment to challenge the usurper effectively
and all of them knew that an ineffective challenge would mean certain
death. Wherefore each perforce bided his time. Gannel would slip,
Gannel would become lax or overconfident--and that would be the end of
Gannel.

They were, however, loyal in their way to Boskonia. They were very much
in favor of the rule of the strong and the ruthless. They believed
implicitly that might made right. They themselves bowed the knee to
anyone strong enough to command such servility from them; in turn they
enforced brutally an even more degrading slavishness from those over
whom they held in practice, if not at law, the power of life and death.

Thus Kinnison knew that he could handle his cabinet easily enough as
long as he could make them believe that he was a Boskonian. There
was, there could be, no real unity among them under those conditions;
each would be fighting his fellows as well as working to overthrow
His Supremacy the Tyrant. But they all hated the Patrol and all that
it stood for with a whole-hearted fervor which no one adherent to
Civilization can really appreciate. Hence at the first sign that Gannel
might be in league with the Patrol they would combine forces instantly
against him; automatically there would go into effect a tacit agreement
to kill him first and then, later, to fight it out among themselves for
the prize of the Tyrantcy.

And that combined opposition would be a formidable one indeed. Those
men were really able. They were as clever and as shrewd and as smart
and as subtle as they were hard. They were masters of intrigue; they
simply could not be fooled. And if their united word went down the line
that Traska Gannel was in fact a traitor to Boskonia, an upheaval would
ensue which would throw into the shade the bloodiest revolutions of all
history. Everything would be destroyed.

Nor could the Lensman hurl the metal of the Patrol against Thrale in
direct frontal attack. Not only was it immensely strong, but also there
were those priceless records, without which it might very well be the
work of generations for the Patrol to secure the information which it
must, for its own security, have.

No. Kinnison, having started near the bottom and worked up, must now
begin all over again at the top and work down; and he must be very,
_very_ sure that no alarm was given until at too late a time for
the alarmed ones to do anything of harm to the Lensman's cause. He
didn't know whether he had jets enough to swing the load or not--a lot
depended on whether or not he could civilize those twelve devils of
his--but the scheme that the psychologists had worked out was a honey
and he would certainly give it the good old college try.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus Grand Fleet slowed down, and, with the flagship just out of range
of the capital's terrific offensive weapons, it stopped. Half a dozen
maulers, towing a blackly indetectable, imperceptible object, came up
and stopped. The Tyrant called, from the safety of his control room, a
conference of his cabinet in the council chamber.

"While I have not been gone very long in point of days," he addressed
them smoothly, via plate, "and while I, of course, trust each and every
one of you, there are certain matters which must be made clear before
I attempt to land. None of you has, by any possible chance, made any
effort to lay a trap for me, or anything of the kind?" There may have
been a trace of irony in the speaker's voice.

They assured him, one and all, that they had not had the slightest idea
of even considering such a thing.

"It is well. None of you have discovered, then, that by changing locks
and combinations, and by destroying or removing certain inconspicuous
but essential mechanisms of an extremely complicated nature--and
perhaps substituting others--I made it quite definitely impossible for
any one or all of you to render this planet inertialess, I have brought
back with me a negasphere of planetary antimass, which no power at your
disposal can affect. It is here beside me in space; please study it
attentively. It should not be necessary for me to inform you that there
are countless other planets from which I can rule Boskonia quite as
effectively as from Thrale; or that, while I do not relish the idea of
destroying my home planet and everything upon it, I would not hesitate
to do so if it became a matter of choice between that action and the
loss of my life and my position."

They believed the statement. That was the eminently sensible thing to
do. Any one of them would have done the same; hence they knew that
Gannel would do exactly what he threatened--if he could. And as they
studied Gannel's abysmally black ace of trumps they knew starkly that
Gannel could. For they had found out, individually, that the Tyrant
had so effectively sabotaged Thrale's Bergenholms that they could not
possibly be made operative until after his return. Consequently repairs
had not been started--any such activity, they knew, would be a fatal
mistake.

By outguessing and outmaneuvering the members of his cabinet Gannel
had once more shown his fitness to rule. They accepted that fact with
a good enough grace; indeed, they admired him all the more for the
ability thus shown. No one of them had given himself away by any overt
moves; they could wait. Gannel would slip yet--quite possibly even
before he got back into his palace. So they thought, not knowing that
the Tyrant could read at will their most deeply hidden plans; and, so
thinking, each one pledged anew in unreserved terms his fealty and his
loyalty.

"I thank you, gentlemen." The boss did not, and the officers were
pretty sure that he did not, believe a word of their protestations.
"As loyal cabinet members, I will give you the honor of sitting in the
front of those who welcome me home. You men and your guards will occupy
the front boxes in the Royal Stand. With you and around you will be the
entire palace personnel--I want no person, except the usual guards,
inside the buildings or even within the grounds when I land. Back of
these you will have arranged the Personal Troops and the Royal Guards.
The remaining stands and all of the usual open ground will be for the
common people--first come, first served.

"But one word of caution. You may wear your side arms, as usual. Bear
in mind, however, that armor is neither usual nor a part of your
full-dress uniform, and that any armored man or men in or near the
concourse will be blasted by a needle ray before I land. Be advised
also that I myself shall be wearing full armor. Furthermore, no vessel
of the fleet will land until I, personally, from my private sanctum,
order them to do so."

This situation was another poser; but it, too, they had to take. There
was no way out of it, and it was still perfect Boskonian generalship.
The welcoming arrangements were therefore made precisely as the Tyrant
had directed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The flagship settled toward ground, her under jets blasting unusually
viciously because of her tremendous load; and as she descended Kinnison
glanced briefly down at the familiar terrain. There was the immense
space field, a dock-studded expanse of burned, scarred, pock-marked
concrete and steel. Midway of its extreme northern end, that nearest
the palace, was the berth of the flagship, Dock No. 1. An eighth of
a mile straight north from the dock--the minimum distance possible
because of the terrific fury of the under jets--was the entrance to the
palace grounds. At the northern end of the western side of the field,
a good three-quarters of a mile from Dock No. 1 and somewhat more than
that distance from the palace gates, were the Stands of Ceremony. That
made the Lensman completely the master of the situation.

The flagship landed, her madly blasting jets died out. A car of state
rolled grandly up. Air locks opened. Kinnison and his bodyguards seated
themselves in the car. Helicopters appeared above the stands and above
the massed crowds thronging the western approaches to the field;
hovering, flitting slowly and watchfully about.

Then from the flagship there emerged an incredible number of armed and
armored soldiers. One small column of these marched behind the slowly
moving car of state, but by far the greater number went directly to
and through the imposing portals of the palace grounds. The people
in general, gathered there to see a major spectacle, thought nothing
of these circumstances--who were they to wonder at what the Tyrant
of Thrale might choose to do?--but to Gannel's Council of Advisers
they were extremely disquieting departures from the norm. There was,
however, nothing that they could do about them, away out there in the
grandstand; and they knew with a stark certainty what those helicopters
had orders to do in case of any uprising or commotion anywhere in the
crowd.

The car rolled slowly along before the fenced-back, wildly cheering
multitudes, with blaring bands and the columns of armored spacemen
marching crisply, swingingly behind it. There was nothing to indicate
that those selected men were not Thralians; nothing whatever to hint
that over a thousand of them were in fact Lensmen of the Galactic
Patrol. And Kinnison, standing stiffly erect in his car, acknowledged
gravely, with upraised right arm, the plaudits of his subjects.

The triumphal bus stopped in front of the most outthrust, the most
ornate stand, and through loud-voiced amplifiers the Tyrant invited,
as a signal honor, the twelve members of his Advisory Cabinet to ride
with him in state to the palace. There were exactly twelve vacant seats
in the great coach. The advisers would have to leave their bodyguards
and ride alone with the Tyrant: even had there been room, it was
unthinkable that any one else's personal killers could ride with the
Presence. This was no honor, they knew chillingly, no matter what the
mob might think--it looked much more like a death sentence. But what
could they do? They glanced at their unarmored henchmen; then at the
armor and the semiportables of Gannel's own heelers; then at the ranks
of heavily armed and armored troopers; and finally at the 'copters
now clustering thickly overhead, with the narrow snouts of needle-ray
projectors very much in evidence.

They accepted.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was in no quiet frame of mind, then, that they rode into the
pretentious grounds of the palace. They felt no better when, as they
entered the council chamber, they were seized and disarmed without a
word having been spoken. And the world fairly dropped out from beneath
them when Tyrant Gannel emerged from his armor with a Lens glowing upon
his wrist.

"Yes, I am a Lensman," he gravely informed the stupefied but
unshrinking Boskonians. "That is why I know that all twelve of you
tried while I was gone to cut me down, in spite of all that I told you
and all that you have seen me do. If it were still necessary for me to
pose as Traska Gannel, I would have to kill you here and now for your
treachery. That phase is, however, past.

"I am one of the Lensmen whose collective activities you have ascribed
to 'the' Lensman or to Star A Star. All those others who came
with me into the palace are Lensmen. All those outside are either
Lensmen or tried and seasoned veterans of the Galactic Patrol. The
Fleet surrounding this world is the Grand Fleet of that Patrol. The
Boskonian force was destroyed _in toto_--every man and every ship
except your flagship--before it reached Klovia. In short, the power
of Boskonia is broken forever; Civilization is to rule henceforth
throughout both galaxies.

"You are the twelve strongest, the twelve ablest men of the planet,
perhaps of your whole dark culture. Will you help us to rule according
to the principles of Civilization that which has been the Boskonian
Empire, or will you die?"

The Thralians stiffened themselves rigidly against the expected blasts
of death, but only one spoke. "We are fortunate at least, Lensman, in
that you do not torture," he said coldly, his lips twisted into a hard,
defiant sneer.

"Good!" and the Lensman actually smiled. "I expected no less. With
that solid bottom, all that is necessary is to wipe away a few of your
misconceptions and misunderstandings, correct your viewpoints, and--"

"Do you think for a second that your therapists can fit us into the
pattern of your Civilization?" the Boskonian spokesman demanded
bitingly.

"I don't have to think, Lanion--I know," Kinnison assured him. "Take
them away, fellows, and lock them up--you know where. Everything will
go ahead as scheduled."

And it did.

       *       *       *       *       *

And while the mighty vessels of war landed upon the space-field
and while the thronging Lensmen took over post after post in an
ever-widening downward course, Kinnison led Worsel and Tregonsee to the
cell in which the outspoken Thralian chieftain was confined.

"I do not know whether I can prevent you from operating upon me or
not," Lanion of Thrale spoke harshly, "but I will certainly try. I have
seen the pitiful, distorted wrecks left after such operations and I do
not like them. Furthermore, I do not believe that any possible science
can eradicate from my subconscious the fixed determination to kill
myself the instant you release me. Therefore you had better kill me
now, Lensman, and save your time and trouble."

"You are right, and wrong," Kinnison replied quietly. "It may very well
be impossible to remove such a fixation." He knew that he could remove
any such, but Lanion must not know it. Civilization needed those twelve
hard, shrewd minds and he had no intention of allowing an inferiority
complex to weaken their powers. "We do not, however, intend to operate,
but only and simply to educate. You will not be unconscious at any
time. You will be in full control of your own mind and you will know
beyond peradventure that you are so in control. We shall engrave, in
parallel with your own present knowledges of the culture of Boskonia,
the equivalent or corresponding knowledges of Civilization."

They did so. It was not a short undertaking, nor an easy one; but it
was thorough and it was finally done. Then Kinnison spoke.

"You now have completely detailed knowledge both of Boskonia and of
Civilization, a combination possessed by but few intelligences indeed.
You know that we did not alter, did not even touch, any track of your
original mind. Being fully _en rapport_ with us, you know that
we gave you as unprejudiced a concept of Civilization as we possibly
could. Also, you have assimilated completely the new knowledge."

"That is all true," Lanion conceded. "Remarkable, but true. I was, and
remained throughout, myself; I checked constantly to be sure of that. I
can still kill myself at any moment I choose."

"Right." Kinnison did not smile, even mentally, at the unconscious
alteration of intent. "The whole proposition can now be boiled down
into one clear-cut question, to which you can formulate an equally
clear-cut reply. Would you, Lanion, personally, prefer to keep on as
you have been, working for personal power, or would you rather team up
with others to work for the good of all?"

The Thralian thought for moments, and as he pondered an expression
of consternation spread over his hard hewn face. "You mean
actually--personally--apart from all consideration of your so-called
altruism and your other sissyish weaknesses?" he demanded resistantly.

"Exactly," Kinnison assured him. "Which would you _rather_ do?
Which would you, personally, get the most good--the most fun--out of?"

The bitter conflict was plainly visible in Lanion's bronzed face; so
was the direction in which it was going.

"Well ... I'll ... be ... damned! You win, Lensman!" and the
ex-Boskonian big shot held out his hand. Those were not his words, of
course; but as nearly as Tellurian English can come to it, that is the
exact sense of his final decision. And the same, or approximately the
same, was the decision of each of his eleven fellows, each in his turn.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus it was, then, that Civilization won over the twelve recruits who
were so potently instrumental in the bloodless conquest of Thrale,
and who were later to be of such signal service throughout the Second
Galaxy. For they knew Boskonia with a sure knowledge, from top to
bottom and from side to side, in every aspect and ramification; they
knew precisely where and when and how to work to secure the desired
ends. And they worked--_how_ they worked!--but space is lacking to
go into any of their labors here.

Specialists gathered, of a hundred different sorts; and when, after
peace and security had been gained, they began to attack the stupendous
files of the Hall of Records, Kinnison finally yielded to Haynes'
insistences and moved out to the _Z9M9Z_.

"It's about time, young fellow!" the admiral snapped. "I've gnawed my
fingernails off just about to the elbow and I still haven't figured out
how to crack Onlo. Have you got any ideas?"

"Thrale first," Kinnison suggested. "Everything QX here, you sure?"

"Absolutely," Haynes grunted. "As strongly held as Tellus or Klovia.
Primaries, helices, supertractors, Bergenholms, sunbeam--everything.
They don't need us here any longer, any more than a hen needs teeth.
Grand Fleet is all set to go, but we haven't been able to work out a
feasible plan of campaign. The best way would be not to use the Fleet
at all, but a sunbeam--but we can't move the Sun and Thorndyke has not
as yet succeeded in making it hold together that far. I don't suppose
that we could use a negasphere?"

"I don't see how," Kinnison pondered. "Ever since we used it first
they've been ready for it. I'd be inclined to wait and see what Nadreck
works out. He's a wise old owl, that bird--what does he tell you?"

"Nothing. Nothing, flat." Haynes' smile was grimly amused. "The fact
that he is still 'investigating'--whatever that means--is all that he
will tell me. Why don't you try him--you know him better than I do or
ever will."

"It wouldn't do any harm," Kinnison agreed. "Nor good, either,
probably. Funny egg, Nadreck. I'd tie fourteen of his arms into
lover's knots if it'd make him give, but it wouldn't--he's a plenty
tough number." Nevertheless he sent out a call, which was acknowledged
instantly.

"Ah, Kinnison, greetings. I am even now on my way to Thrale and the
_Directrix_ to report upon the investigation."

"You are? Fine!" Kinnison exclaimed. "How did you come out?"

"I did not--exactly--fail, but the work was very incompletely and very
poorly done," Nadreck submitted, the while the Tellurian's mind felt
very strongly the Palainian equivalent of a painful blush of shame.
"My report of the affair will be put and will forever remain under
Lensman's Seal."

"But what did you _do_?" both Tellurians demanded as one.

"I scarcely know how to confess to such blundering," and Nadreck
actually squirmed. "Will you not permit me to leave my shame to the
spool of record?"

They would not, they informed him definitely.

"If you must have it, then, I yield. The plan was to make all of the
armed forces upon Onlo destroy themselves. In theory it was sound and
simple, but my execution was pitifully imperfect. My work was so poorly
done that the commanding officer in each one of three of the domes
remained alive, making it necessary for me to slay them personally,
by the use of crude force. I regret exceedingly the lack of finish
of this undertaking, and I apologize profoundly for it. I trust that
you will not allow this information to become a matter of public
knowledge"--and the apologetic, mentally sweating, really humiliated
Palainian broke the connection.

       *       *       *       *       *

Haynes and Kinnison stared at each other, for moments completely at a
loss for words. The admiral first broke the silence.

"Hell's--jingling--bells!" he wrenched out, finally, and waved a hand
at the points of light crowding so thickly his tactical tank. "A thing
that the whole Grand Fleet couldn't do, and he does it alone, and then
he _apologizes_ for it as though he ought to be stood up in a
corner or sent to bed without any supper!"

"Uh-huh, that's the way he is," Kinnison breathed, in awe. "What a
brain!--what a man!"

Nadreck's black speedster arrived and a three-way conference was held.
Both Haynes and Kinnison pressed him for the details of his really
stupendous achievement, but he refused positively even to mention any
phase of it.

"The matter is closed--finished," he declared, in a mood of anger and
self-reproach which neither of the Tellurians had ever supposed that
the gently scientific monster could assume. "I practically failed. It
is the poorest piece of work of which I have been guilty since cubhood,
and I desire and I insist that it shall not be mentioned again. If you
wish to lay plans for the future, I will be very glad indeed to place
at your disposal my small ability--which has now been shown to be even
smaller than I had supposed--but if you insist upon discussing my
fiasco, I shall forthwith go home. I will _not_ discuss it. The
record of it will remain permanently under Lensman's Seal. That is my
last word."

And it was. Neither of the two Tellurians mentioned the subject, of
course, either then or ever, but many other persons--including your
historian--have done so, with no trace whatever of success. It is a
shame, it is positively outrageous, that no details are available of
the actual fall of Onlo. No human mind can understand why Nadreck will
not release his Seal, but the bitter fact of his refusal to do so has
been made all too plain.

Thus, in all probability, it never will become publicly known how those
monstrous Onlonians destroyed each other, nor how Nadreck penetrated
the defensive screens of Onlo's embattled domes, nor in what fashion
he warred upon the three surviving commanders. These matters, and many
others of perhaps equal interest and value, must have been of such an
epic nature that it is a cosmic crime that they cannot be recorded
here; that this, one of the most important incidents of the campaign,
must be mentioned merely and baldly as having happened. But, unless
Nadreck relents--and he apparently never does--that is the starkly
tragic fact.

       *       *       *       *       *

Other Lensmen were called in then, and admirals and generals and
other personages. It was decided to man the fortifications of Onlo
immediately, from the several fleets of frigid-blooded poison breathers
which made up a certain percentage of Civilization's forces. This
decision was influenced markedly by Nadreck, who said in part:

"Onlo is a beautiful planet. Its atmosphere is perfect, its climate
is ideal; not only for us of Palain VII, but also for the inhabitants
of many other planets, such as--" and he mentioned some twenty names.
"While I personally am not a fighter, there are many who are; and while
those of a more warlike disposition man Onlo's defenses and weapons, my
fellow researchers and I might very well be carrying on with the same
type of work, which you fire-blooded oxygen breathers are doing upon
Thrale and similar planets."

That was such an eminently sensible suggestion that it was adopted at
once. The conference broke up. The selected subfleets sailed. Kinnison
sought out the commander in chief.

"Well, sir, that's it--I hope. What do you think? Am I, or am I not,
due for a spot of free time?" The Gray Lensman's face was drawn and
grim.

"I wish I knew, son--but I don't." Eyes and voice were deeply troubled.
"You ought to be ... I hope you are ... but you're the only judge of
that, you know."

"Uh-huh ... that is, I know how to find out ... but I'm afraid
to--afraid he'll say no. However, I'm going to see Chris first--talk it
over with her. How about having a gig drop me down to the hospital?"

For he did not have to travel very far to find his fiancée. From the
time of leaving Lyrane until the taking over of Thrale she had as a
matter of course been chief nurse of the hospital ship _Pasteur_,
and with the civilizing of that planet she had as automatically become
chief nurse of the Patrol's Base Hospital there.

"Certainly, Kim--anything you want, whenever you please."

"Thanks, chief. Now that this fracas is finally over--if it is--I
suppose that you'll have to take over as president of the Galactic
Council?"

"I suppose so--after we clean Lyrane VIII, that you've been holding
me away from so long--but I don't relish the thought. And you'll be
Co-ordinator Kinnison."

"Uh-huh"--gloomily. "By Klono, I hate to put my Grays away! I'm not
going to do it, either, until after we're married and really settled
down onto the job."

"Of course not. You'll be wearing them for some time yet, I'm
thinking." Haynes' tone was distinctly envious. "Getting _your_
job settled down into a routine one will take a long, long time. It
will take years even to find out what it is really going to be."

"That's so, too," Kinnison brightened visibly. "Well, clear ether,
President Haynes!" and he turned away, whistling unmelodiously--in
fact, somewhat raucously--through his teeth.




                                XXIII.


At Base Hospital it was midnight. The two largest of Thrale's four
major moons were visible, close together in the zenith, almost at the
full; shining brilliantly from a cloudless, star-besprinkled sky upon
the magnificent grounds.

Fountains splashed and tinkled musically. Masses of flowering shrubs,
bordering meandering walks, flooded the still air with a perfume almost
cloying in its intensity. No one who has once smelled the fragrance
of Thralian thorn flower at midnight will ever forget it--it is as
though the poignant sweetness of the mountain syringa has been blended
harmoniously with the heavy, entrancing scent of the jasmine and the
appealing pungency of the lily of the valley. Statues of gleaming white
stone and of glinting metal were spaced infrequently over acres and
acres of springy, close-clipped turf. Trees, not overhigh but massive
of bole and of tremendous spread and thickness of foliage, cast shadows
of impenetrable black.

"QX, Chris?" Kinnison Lensed the thought as he arrived on the grounds.
She had known that he was coming. "Kinda late, I know, but I wanted to
see you, and I know that you don't have to punch the clock."

"Surely, Kim"--and her low, infectious chuckle welled out. "What's the
use of being a Red Lensman, else? This is just right--you couldn't make
it any sooner, and tomorrow would have been too late--much too late."

They met at the door and with each an arm around the other strolled
wordless down a walk. Across the resilient sward they made their way
and to a bench beneath one of the spreading trees.

Kinnison swept her into both arms, hers went eagerly around his neck.
How long, how unutterably long it had been since they had stood thus,
nurse's white crushed against Lensman's Gray!

"Chris ... _my_ Chris. _How_ I love you!" he whispered,
tense. "And now that I've got you again, by Klono's crimson claws, I'll
_never_ let you go!"

"Oh ... oh, Kim, dear. I've missed you so terribly, Kim. If they
separate us again, it will simply break my heart," she breathed, her
low, rich voice pure music. Then womanlike, she faced the facts and
made the man face them, too. "Let's sit down, Kim, and have this out.
You know as well as I do that we can't go on if ... if we can't ...
that's all."

They sat down upon the bench, arms still around each other. They had no
need, these Lensmen, of sight. No need of language, either, although
upon this page their thoughts must be put into words. They did,
however, have need--a profound need--of physical contact.

"I do not," the man declared vigorously. "We've got a right to
_some_ happiness, Chris, you and I. They can't keep us apart
forever, sweetheart--we're going straight through with it this time."

"Uh-uh, Kim," she denied gently, shaking her spectacular head. "What
would have happened if we'd have gone ahead before, leaving these
horrible Thralians free to ruin Civilization?"

"But Mentor stopped us then," Kinnison argued. Deep down, he knew
that if the Arisian called he would have to answer, but he argued
nevertheless. "If the job wasn't done, he would have stopped us before
we got this far--I think."

"You hope, you mean," the girl contradicted. "What makes you think--if
you really do--that he might not wait until the ceremony has actually
begun?"

"Not a thing in the universe. He might, at that," Kinnison confessed,
bleakly.

"You've been afraid to ask him, haven't you?" Clarrissa pursued.

       *       *       *       *       *

"But the job must be done!" Kinnison insisted, avoiding the question.
"The prime minister--that Fossten--_must_ have been the top;
you know very well that there couldn't possibly be anything bigger
than an Arisian to be back of Boskone. It's unthinkable! They've
got no military organization left--not a beam hot enough to light a
cigarette or a screen that would stop a firecracker. We have all their
records--everything. Why, it's just a matter of routine now for the
boys to uproot them completely; system by system, planet by planet."

"Uh-huh." Chris eyed him shrewdly, there in the dark. "Cogent. Really
pellucid. As clear as so much crystal--and twice as fragile. If you're
so sure, why not call Mentor and ask him, right now? You're not afraid
of just the calling part, like I am; you're afraid of what he will say."

"I'm going to marry you before I do another lick of work of any kind,
anywhere," he insisted doggedly.

"I just love to hear you say that, even if I do know that you're just
blasting off!" She giggled sunnily and snuggled deeper into the curve
of his arm. "I feel that way, too, but both of us know very well that
if Mentor stops us ... even at the altar--" Her thought slowed, became
intense, solemn. "We're Lensmen, Kim, you and I. We both realize to
the full just what that means. We'll have to muster jets enough, some
way or other, to swing the load. Let's call him now, Kim, together.
I just simply can't stand this not knowing ... I can't, Kim ... I
_can't_!" Tears come hard and seldom to such a woman as Clarrissa
MacDougall; but they came then--and they hurt.

"QX, ace." Kinnison patted her back and her gorgeous head. "Let's
go--but I tell you now that if he says 'no' I'll tell him to go hunt up
an asteroid out on the Rim and take a swan dive off into intergalactic
space."

She linked her mind with his, thinking in affectionate half reproach,
"I'd like to, too, Kim, but that's pure baloney. You couldn't--" she
broke off as he hurled their joint thought to Arisia the Old, going on
frantically:

"You think at him, Kim, and I'll just listen. He scares me into a
shrinking, quivering pulp!"

"QX, ace," he said again. Then: "Is it permissible that we do what we
are about to do?" he asked crisply of Arisia's ancient sage.

"Ah, 'tis Kinnison and MacDougall; once of Tellus, henceforth of
Klovia," the calmly unsurprised thought rolled in. "I was expecting
you at this time. Any mind, however far from competent, could have
visualized this event in its entirety. That which you contemplate is
not merely permissible; it has now become necessary." And as usual,
without tapering off or leave-taking, Mentor broke the line of thought.

The two clung together rapturously then for minutes, but something was
obtruding itself disquietingly upon the nurse's mind.

"But his thought was 'necessary,' Kim?" she asked, rather than said.
"Isn't there sort of a sinister connotation in that, somewhere? What
did he mean?"

"Nothing--exactly nothing," Kinnison assured her, comfortably. "He's
got a complete picture of the macrocosmic universe in his mind--his
'visualization of the Cosmic All,' he calls it--and in it we get
married now, just as I've been telling you we are going to. Since it
gripes him no end to have even the tiniest thing not to conform to his
visualization, our marriage is NECESSARY, in capital letters. See?"

"Uh-huh.... Oh, I'm _glad_!" she exclaimed. "That shows you
how scared of him I am." And thoughts and actions became such that,
although they were no doubt of much personal pleasure and satisfaction,
they do not require detailed treatment here.

       *       *       *       *       *

Clarrissa MacDougall resigned the next day, without formality or
fanfare. That is, she thought that she did so then, and rather wondered
at the frictionless ease with which it went through; it had simply not
occurred to her that in the instant of being made an Unattached Lensman
she had been freed automatically from every man-made restraint. That
was one of the few lessons hard for her to learn; it was the only one
which she refused consistently even to try to learn.

Nothing was said or done about the ten thousand credits which had been
promised her upon the occasion of her fifteen-minutes-long separation
from the Patrol following the fall of Jarnevon. She thought about it
briefly, but with no real sense of loss. Some way or other, money did
not seem important. Anyway, she had some--enough for a fairly nice, if
limited, trousseau--in the bank upon Tellus. She could undoubtedly get
it through the Disbursing Office here.

She took off her Lens and stuffed it into a pocket. That wasn't so
good, she reflected. It bulged, and besides, it might fall out; and
anyone who touched it would die. She didn't have a bag; in fact, she
had with her no civilian clothes at all. Wherefore she put it back
upon her wrist, pausing as she did so to admire the Manarkan star drop
flashing pale fire from the third finger of her left hand. Of all his
gems, Cartiff had retained only this one, the loveliest. It was a
beauty.

It was not far to the Disbursing Office, so she walked;
window-shopping as she went. It was a peculiar sensation, this being
out of harness--it felt good, though, at that--and upon arriving
at the bank she found to her surprise that she was both well known
and expected. An officer whom she had never seen before greeted her
cordially and led her into his private office.

"We have been wondering why you didn't pick up your kit, Lensman
MacDougall," he went on, briskly. "Sign here, please, and press your
right thumb in this box here, after peeling off this plastic strip,
so." She wrote in her boldly flowing script, and peeled, and pressed;
and watched fascinatedly as her thumbprint developed itself sharply
black against the bluish off-white of the Patrol's stationery. "That
transfers your balance upon Tellus to the Patrol's general fund. Now
sign and print this, in quadruplicate. Thank you. Here's your kit.
When this book of slips is gone you can get another one at any bank
or Patrol station anywhere. It has been a real pleasure to have met
you, Lensman MacDougall; come in again whenever you happen to be upon
Thrale." And he escorted her to the street as briskly as he had ushered
her in.

Clarrissa felt slightly dazed. She had gone in there to get the couple
of hundred credits which represented her total wealth; but instead of
getting it she had meekly surrendered her savings to the Patrol and
had been given--what? She leafed through the little book. One hundred
blue-white slips; small things, smaller than currency bills. A little
printing, two lines for description, a blank for figures, a space for
signature, and a plastic-covered oblong area for thumbprint. That
was all--but what an all! Any one of those slips, she knew, would
be honored without hesitation or question for any amount of cash
money she pleased to draw; for any object or thing she chose to buy.
Anything--absolutely _anything_--from a pair of half-credit
stockings up to and beyond a hundred-million-credit spaceship.
ANYTHING! The thought chilled her buoyant spirit, took away her zest
for shopping.

"Kim, I can't!" she wailed through her Lens. "Why didn't they give me
my own money and let me spend it the way I please?"

"Hold everything, ace--I'll be with you in a sec." He
wasn't--quite--but it was not long. "You can get all the money you
want, you know--just give them a chit."

"I know, but all I wanted was my own money. I didn't ask for this
stuff!"

"None of that, Chris--when you get to be a Lensman, you've got to take
what goes with it. Besides, if you spend money foolishly all the rest
of your life, the Patrol knows that it will still owe you plenty for
what you did on Lyrane II. Where do you want to begin?"

"Brenleer's," she decided, after she had been partially convinced.
"They aren't the largest, but they give real quality at a fair price."

At the shop the two Lensmen were recognized at sight and Brenleer
himself did the honors.

"Clothes," the girl said succinctly, with an all-inclusive wave of her
hand. "All kinds of clothes, except nurse's uniforms."

They were ushered into a private room and Kinnison wriggled as
mannequins began to appear before them in various degrees of
enclothement.

"This is no place for me," he declared. "I'll see you later, Chris. How
long--half an hour or so?"

"Half an hour!" The nurse giggled, and:

"She will be here all the rest of today, and most of the time for a
week," the couturier informed him severely--and she was.

"Oh, Kim, I'm having the most _marvelous_ time!" she told him
excitedly, a few days later. "But it makes me feel sick to think of how
much of the Patrol's money I'm spending."

"You may think that you're spending money, but you aren't," he informed
her, cryptically.

"Huh? What do you mean?" she demanded, but he would not talk.

She found out, however, after the long-drawn-out business of selecting
and matching and designing and fitting was over.

"You have seen me in civvies only a couple of times, and I got myself
all prettied up in the beauty shop." She posed provocatively. "Do you
like me, Kim?"

"_Like_ you!" The man could scarcely speak. She had been a
seven-sector call-out in faded moleskin breeches and a patched shirt.
She had been a thionite dream in uniform. But now--radiantly, vibrantly
beautiful, a symphony in her favorite dark green. "Words fail, ace.
Thoughts, too. They fold up and quit. The universe's best, is all I can
say--"

And--later--they sought out Brenleer.

"I would like to ask you to do me a tremendous favor," the merchant
said hesitantly, without filling any of the blanks upon the credit slip
the girl had proffered. "If, instead of paying for these things, you
would write upon this voucher the date and 'my fall outfit and much of
my trousseau were made by Brenleer of Thrale--'?" His voice expired
upon a wistful note.

"Why ... I never even thought of such a thing. Would it be quite
ethical, do you think, Kim?"

"You said that he gives value for price, so I don't see why not. Lots
of things they never let any of us pay for--" Then, to Brenleer, "Never
thought of that angle, of what a terrific draw she would be. I suppose
that this business of yours is worth fifty thousand credits more right
now than it was before she cut loose here, and that it'll be worth
twice that much when you have this chit unobtrusively displayed in a
gold-and-platinum frame four feet square."

The man nodded. "Twice that already, but there isn't money enough upon
Thrale to buy it."

"I'm not surprised," Kinnison grinned understandingly. "But you might
as well give him a break, Chris. What tore it was your buying the stuff
here, not admitting the fact over your signature and thumbprint."

She did so and they went out.

"Do you mean to tell me that I'm so ... so--"

"Famous? Notorious?" he helped out.

"Uh-huh. Or words to that effect." A touch of fear darkened her
glorious eyes.

"All of that, and then some," he declared. "I never thought of what
your buying so much plunder in one store would do, but it'd have
the pulling power of a planetary tractor. It's bad enough with us
regulars--half the chits we sign are never cashed--but you are
absolutely unique. The first Lady Lensman--the only Red Lensman--and
_what_ a Lensman! Wow! As I think it over one gets you a hundred
if any chit you ever sign ever will get cashed. There have been
collectors, you know, ever since Civilization began--maybe before."

"But I don't like it!" she stormed.

"That won't change the facts," he countered, philosophically. "Are you
ready to flit? The _Dauntless_ is hot, they tell me."

"Uh-huh, all my stuff is aboard." And soon they were en route to Klovia.

       *       *       *       *       *

The trip was uneventful, and even before they reached that transformed
planet it became evident that it was theirs from pole to pole. Their
cruiser was met by a horde of spaceships of all types and sizes, which
formed a turbulent and demonstrative escort of honor. The seething
crowd at the spaceport could scarcely be kept out of range of the
dreadnought's searing landing blasts. Half the brass bands of the
world, it seemed, burst into "Our Patrol" as the Lensmen disembarked,
and their ground car and the street along which it slowly rolled were
decorated lavishly with deep-blue flowers.

"Thorn flowers!" Clarrissa choked. "Thralian thorn flowers, Kim--how
could they?"

"They grow here as well as there, and when they found out that you
liked them so well they imported them by the shipload"--and Kinnison
himself swallowed a lump.

Their brief stay upon Klovia was a hectic one indeed. Parties and
balls, informal and formal, and at least a dozen telenews poses every
day. Receptions, at which there were presented the personages and the
potentates of a thousand planets; at which the uniforms and robes and
gowns put the solar spectrum to shame.

And from tens of thousands of planets came Lensmen, to make or to renew
acquaintance with the Galactic Co-ordinator and to welcome into their
ranks the Lensman-bride. From Tellus, of course, they came in greatest
number and enthusiasm, but other planets were not too far behind.
They came from Manark and Velantia and Chickladoria and Alsakan and
Vandemar, from the worlds of Canopus and Vega and Antares, from all
over the Galaxy. Human, near-human, nonhuman, monstrous; there even
appeared briefly quite large numbers of frigid-blooded Lensmen, whose
fiercely laboring refrigerators chilled the atmosphere for yards around
their insulated and impervious suits. All those various beings came
with a united purpose, with a common thought--to congratulate Kinnison
of Tellus and to wish his Lensman-mate all the luck and all the
happiness of the universe.

Kinnison was surprised at the sincerity with which they acclaimed him;
he was amazed at the genuineness and the intensity of their adoption
of his Chris as their own. He had been afraid that some of them would
think that he was throwing his weight around when he violated precedent
by making her a Lensman. He had been afraid of animosity and ill will.
He had been afraid that outraged masculine pride would set up a sex
antagonism. But if any of these things existed, the keenest use of his
every penetrant sense could not discover them.

Instead, the human Lensmen literally mobbed her as, en masse, they
took her to their collective bosom. No party, wherever or for what
reason held, was complete without her. If she ever had less than ten
escorts at once, she was slighted. They ran her ragged, they danced her
slippers off, they stuffed her to repletion, they would not let her
sleep, they granted her the privacy of a goldfish--and she loved every
tumultuous second of it.

She had wanted, as she had told Haynes and Lacy so long ago, a big
wedding; but this one was already out of hand and was growing more so
by the minute. The idea of holding it in a church had been abandoned
long since; now it became clear that the biggest armory of Klovia would
not hold even half of the Lensmen, to say nothing of the notables
and dignitaries who had come so far. It would simply have to be the
Stadium; a bowl so vast that no previous crowd had filled one tenth
of its seats. Seeing and hearing there were excellent, however, as
the spectators did not look at the scene itself, but into visiplates
comfortably close.

Even the Stadium could not accommodate that throng, hence speakers
and plates were run outside, clear up to the space-field fence. And,
although neither of the principals knew it, this marriage had so
fired public interest that Universal Telenews men had already arranged
the hookup which was to carry it to every planet of Civilization.
The number of entities who thus saw and heard that wedding has been
estimated, but the figures are too fantastic to be repeated here.

But it was in no sense a circus. No ceremony ever held, in home or in
church or in cathedral, was ever more solemn. For when half a million
Lensmen concentrate upon solemnity, it prevails--no levity is possible
within a radius of miles.

The whole vast bowl was gay with flowers--it seemed as though a state
must have been stripped of blooms to furnish so many--and ferns and
white ribbons were everywhere. There was a mighty organ, which pealed
out triumphal melody as the bridal parties marched down the aisles,
subsiding into a lilting accompaniment as the betrothed couple ascended
the white-brocaded stairway and faced the Lensman-chaplain in the
heavily garlanded little open-air chapel. The minister raised both
hands. The massed Patrolmen and nurses stood at attention. A profound
silence fell.

"Dearly beloved--" The grand old service--short and simple, but utterly
impressive--was soon over. Then, as Kinnison kissed his wife, half a
million Lensed members were thrust upward in silent salute.

Through a double lane of flowing Lenses the wedding party made its
way up to the locked and guarded gate of the space-field, upon which
lay the _Dauntless_--the superdreadnought "yacht" in which the
Kinnisons were to take a honeymoon voyage to distant Tellus. The gate
opened. The couple, accompanied by the port admiral and the surgeon
general, stepped into the car, which sped out to the battleship; and
as it did so the crowd loosed its pent-up feelings in a prolonged
outburst of cheering.

And as the newlyweds walked up the gangplank, Kinnison turned his head
and shouted to Haynes:

"You've been griping so long about Lyrane VIII, chief--I forgot to say
that you can go mop up on it now!"




                            ACKNOWLEDGMENT


Your historian, not wishing to take credit which is not rightfully
his, wishes to say here that without the fine co-operation of many
persons and entities this history must have been of much less value and
importance than it now is.

First, of course, there were the Lensmen. It is unfortunate that
Nadreck of Palain VII could not be induced either to release his spool
of the Fall of Onlo or to enlarge upon his other undertakings.

Co-ordinator Kinnison, Worsel of Velantia, and Tregonsee of Rigel
IV, however, were splendidly co-operative, giving in personal
conversations much highly useful material which is not heretofore of
public record. The gracious and queenly Red Lensman also was of great
assistance.

Dr. James R. Enright was both prolific and masterly in deducing that
certain otherwise necessarily obscure events and sequences must have in
fact occurred, and it is gratefully admitted here that the author has
drawn heavily upon "Dr. Jim's" profound knowledge of the mind.

The Galactic Roamers, those intrepid spacemen, assisted no little: E.
Everett Evans, their chief communications officer, Paul Leavy, Jr.,
Alfred Ashley, F. Edwin Counts; to name only a few who aided in the
selection, arrangement, and presentation of material.

Verna Trestrail, the exquisite connoisseuse, was of help, not only
by virtue of her knowledge of the jewels of Lonabar, but also in her
interpretations of many things concerning Illona Potter of which Illona
Henderson--characteristically--will not speak.

To all these, and to many others whose help was only slightly less, the
writer extends his sincere thanks.

                                                       Edward E. Smith.


                               THE END.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 70494 ***