The Project Gutenberg eBook of Second stage lensmen, by E.E. Smith This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Second stage lensmen Author: E.E. Smith Release Date: April 7, 2023 [eBook #70494] Language: English Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SECOND STAGE LENSMEN *** 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--_]