Helmuth, and Crowninshield. Beth, as our best linguist, you can do us the most good by
sensitizing a tech to the sound of Kalonia in each of all the languages you know or that
the rest of us can find, and running and re-running all the transcripts we have of
Boskonian meetings. How many of us are left? Not enough . . . we’ll have to spread
ourselves thin on this list of Boskonian planets . . .”
Thus Principal Librarian Ernley organized a search beside which the proverbial
one of finding a needle in a haystack would have been as simple as locating a football in
a bushel basket. And she and her girls worked. How they worked! And thus, in four days
and three hours, Kinnison’s crash-priority person-to-person call came through. Kalonia
was no longer a planet of mystery.
“Fine work, girls! Put it on a tape and I’ll pick it up.” He then left
Klovia—precipitately. Since Kit was not within rendezvous distance, he instructed his
son—after giving him the high points of what he had learned—to forward one one-cento
piece to Brenleer of Thrale, personal delivery. He told Brenleer what to do with it upon
arrival. He landed. He bestowed the star-drop; one of Cartiff’s collection of fine gems.
He met the girls, and gave each one her self-chosen reward. He departed.
Out in open space, he ran the tape, and sat still, scowling blackly. It was no
wonder that Kalonia had remained unknown to Civilization for over twenty years. There
was a lot of information on that tape—and all of it stunk—but it had been assembled,
one unimportant bit at a time, from the more than eight hundred million cards of Thrale’s
Boskonian Archives; and all the really significant items had been found on vocal
transcriptions which had never before been played.
Civilization in general had assumed that Thrale had housed the top echelons of
the Boskonian Empire, and that the continuing inimical activity had been due solely to
momentum. Kinnison and his friends had had their doubts, but they had not been able
to find any iota of evidence that any higher authority had ever issued any orders to
Thrale. The Gray Lensman now knew, however, that Thrale had never been the top.
Nor was Kalonia. The information on this tape, by its paucity, its brevity, its incidental
and casual nature, made that fact startlingly clear. Thrale and Kalonia were not in the
same ladder. Neither gave the other any orders— in fact, they had surprisingly little to
do with each other. While Thrale formerly directed the activities of a half-million or so
planets—and Kalonia apparently still did much the same—their fields of action had not
overlapped at any point.
His conquest of Thrale, hailed so widely as such a triumph, had got him precisely
nowhere in the solution of the real problem. It might be possible for him to conquer
Kalonia in a similar fashion, but what would it get him? Nothing. There would be no
more leads upward from Kalonia than there had been from Thrale. How in all of
Noshabkeming’s variegated and iridescent hells was he going to work this out?
A complete analysis revealed only one possible method of procedure. In one of
the transcriptions—made twenty-one years ago and unsealed for the first time by Beth,
the librarian-linguist—one of the speakers had mentioned casually that the new
Kalonian Lensmen seemed to be doing a good job, and a couple of the others had
agreed with him. That was all. It might, however, be enough; since it made it highly
probable that Eddie’s Lensman was in fact a Kalonian, and since even a Black Lensman
would certainly know where he got his Lens. At the thought of trying to visit the
Boskonian equivalent of Arisia he flinched, but only momentarily. Invasion, or even
physical approach, would of course be impossible; but any planet, even Arisia itself,
could be destroyed. If it could be found, that planet would be destroyed. He had to find
it—that was probably what Mentor had been wanting him to do all the time! But how?
In his various previous enterprises against Boskonia he had been a gentleman of
leisure, a dock-walloper, a meteor-miner, and many other things. None of his already
established aliases would fit on Kalonia; and besides, it was very poor technique to
repeat himself, especially at this high level of opposition. To warrant appearance on
Kalonia at all, he would have to be an operator of some kind—not too small, but not big
enough so that an adequate background could not be synthesized in not too long a
time. A zwilnik—an actual drug-runner with a really worth-while cargo—would be the
best bet.
His course of action decided, the Gray Lensman started making calls. He first
called Kit, with whom he held a long conversation. He called the captain of his
battleship-yacht, the Dauntless, and gave him many and explicit orders. He called Vice-
Coordinator Maitland, and various other Unattached Lensmen who had plenty of weight
m Narcotics, Public Relations, Criminal Investigation, Navigation, Homicide, and many
other apparently totally unrelated establishments of the Galactic Patrol. Finally, after ten
solid hours of mind-racking labor, he ate a tremendous meal and told Clarrissa—he
called her last of all—that he was going to go to bed and sleep for one whole G-P week.
Thus it was that the name of Bradlow Thyron began to obtrude itself above the
threshold of Galactic consciousness. For seven or eight years that name had been
below the middle of the Patrol’s long, black list of the wanted; now it was well up toward
the top. That notorious zwilnik and his villainous crew had been chased from one side of
the First Galaxy to the other. For a few months it had been supposed that they had
been blown out of the ether. Now, however, it was known definitely that he was
operating in the Second Galaxy, and he and every one of his cutthroat gang—fiends
who had blasted thousands of lives with noxious wares—were wanted for piracy, drug-
mongering, and first-degree murder. From the Patrol’s standpoint, the hunting was very
poor. G-P planetographers have charted only a small percentage of the planets of the
Second Galaxy; and only a few of those are peopled by the adherents of Civilization.
Therefore it required some time, but finally there came the message for which
Kinnison was so impatiently waiting. A Boskonian pretty-big-shot and drug-master
named Harkleroy, on the planet Phlestyn II, city, Nelto, coordinates so-and-so, fitted his
specifications to a “T”; a middle-sized operator neither too close to nor too far away
from Kalonia. And Kinnison, having long since learned the lingua franca of the region
from a local meteor-miner, was ready to act. First, he made sure that the mighty
Dauntless would be where he wanted her when he needed her. Then, seated at his
speedster’s communicator, he put through regular channels to call to the Boskonian.
“Harkleroy? I’ve got a proposition you’ll be interested in. Where and when do you
want to see me?”
“What makes you think I want to see you at all?” a voice snarled, and the plate
showed a gross, vicious face. “Who are you, scum?”
“Who I am is nobody’s business—and if you don’t clamp a baffle on that damn
mouth of yours I’ll come down there and shove a glop-skinner’s glove so far down your
throat you can sit on it.”
At the first defiant word the zwilnik began visibly to swell; but in a matter of
seconds he recognized Bradlow Thyron, and Kinnison knew that he did. That pirate
could, and would be expected to, talk back to anybody.
“I didn’t recognize you at first.” Harkleroy almost apologized. “We might do some
business, at that. What have you got?”
“Cocaine, heroin, bentlam, hashish, nitrolabe—most anything a warm-blooded
oxygen-breather would want. The prize, though, is two kilograms of clear-quill thionite.”
“Thionite—two kilograms!” The Phlestan’s eyes gleamed. “Where and how did
you get it?”
“I asked the Lensman on Trenco to make it for me, special, and he did.”
“So you won’t talk, huh?” Kinnison could see Harkleroy’s brain work. Thyron
could be made to talk, later. “We can maybe do business at that. Come down here right
away.” “I’ll do that, but listen!” and the Lensman’s eyes burned into the zwilnik’s. “I know
what you’re figuring on, and I’m telling you right now not to try it if you want to keep on
living. You know this ain’t the first planet I ever landed on, and if you’ve got a brain you
know that a lot of smarter guys than you are have tried monkey business on me— and
I’m still here. So watch your step!”
The Lensman landed, and made his way to Harkleroy’s inner office in what
seemed to be an ordinary enough, if somewhat over-size, suit of light space-armor. But
it was no more ordinary than it was light. It was a power-house, built of dureum a