GALACTIC PATROL
Fist serialized in “ASTOUNDING,” Sep ’37 – Feb ’38;
BY E. E. “DOC” SMITH
CHAPTER 1
Graduation
Dominating twice a hundred square miles of campus, parade-ground, Airport, and
spaceport, a ninety-story edifice of chromium and glass sparkled dazzlingly in the bright
sunlight of a June morning. This monumental pile was Wentworth Hall, in which the
Tellurian candidates for the Lens of the Galactic Patrol live and move and have their
being. One wing of its topmost floor seethed with tense activity, for that wing was the
habitat of the lordly FiveYear Men, this was Graduation Day, and in a few minutes
Class Five was due to report in Room A.
Room A, the private office of the Commandant himself, the dreadful lair into
which an undergraduate was summoned only to disappear from the Hall and from the
Cadet Corps, the portentous chamber into which each year the handful of graduates
marched and from which they emerged, each man in some subtle fashion changed.
In their cubicles of steel the graduates scanned each other narrowly, making
sure that no wrinkle or speck of dust marred the space-black and silver perfection of the
dress uniform of the Patrol, that not even the tiniest spot of tarnish or dullness violated
the glittering golden meteors upon their collars or the resplendently polished ray-pistols
and other equipment at their belts. The microscopic mutual inspection over, the kit-
boxes were snapped shut and racked, and the embryonic Lensmen made their way out
into the assembly hall.
In the wardroom Kimball Kinnison, Captain of the Class by virtue of graduating at
its head, and his three lieutenants, Clifford Maitland, Raoul LaForge, and Widel
Holmberg, had inspected each other minutely and were now simply awaiting, in ever-
increasing tension, the zero minute.
“Now, fellows, remember that drop!” the young Captain jerked out. “We’re
dropping the shaft free, at higher velocity and in tighter formation than any class ever
tried before. If anybody hashes the formation – our last show and with the whole Corps
looking on . . . . .”
“Don’t worry about the drop, Kim,” advised Maitland. “All three platoons will take
that like clockwork. What’s got me all of a dither is what is really going to happen in
Room A.”
“Uh-huh!” exclaimed LaForge and Holmberg as one, and
“You can play that across the board for the whole Class,” Kinnison agreed.
“Well, we’ll soon know – it’s time to get going,” and the four officers stepped out into the
assembly hall, the Class springing to attention at their approach.
Kinnison, now all brisk Captain, stared along the mathematically exact lines and
snapped.
“Report!”
“Class Five present in full, sir!” The sergeant-major touched a stud at his belt and
all vast Wentworth Hall fairly trembled under the impact of an all-pervading, lilting,
throbbing melody as the world’s finest military band crashed into “Our Patrol.”
“Squads left-March !” Although no possible human voice could have been heard
in that gale of soul-stirring sound and although Kinnison’s lips scarcely moved, his
command was carried to the very bones of those for whom it was intended – and to no
one else-by the tight-beam ultra-communicators strapped upon their chests. “Close
formation – forward – March !”
In perfect alignment and cadence the little column marched down the hall. In
their path yawned the shaft – a vertical pit some twenty feet square extending from
main floor to roof of the Hall, more than a thousand sheer feet of unobstructed air,
cleared now of all traffic by flaring red lights. Five left heels clicked sharply,
simultaneously upon the lip of the stupendous abyss. Five right legs swept out into
emptiness. Five right hands snapped to belts and five bodies, rigidly erect, arrowed
downward at such an appalling velocity that to unpractised vision they simply vanished.
Six-tenths of a second later, precisely upon a beat of the stirring march, those
ten heels struck the main floor of Wentworth Hall, but not with a click. Dropping with a
velocity of almost two thousand feet per second though they were at the instant of
impact, yet those five husky bodies came from full speed to an instantaneous,
shockless, effortless halt at contact, for the drop had been made under complete
neutralization of inertia – “free,” in space parlance. Inertia restored, the march was
resumed — or rather continued — in perfect time with the band. Five left feet swung out,
and as the right toes left the floor the second rank, with only bare inches to spare,
plunged down into the space its predecessor had occupied a moment before.
Rank after rank landed and marched away with machinelike precision. The dread
door of Room A opened automatically at the approach of the cadets and closed behind
them.
“Column right — March!” Kinnison commanded inaudibly, and the Class obeyed
in clockwork perfection. “Column left — March! Squad right — March! Company — Halt!
Salute!”
In company front, in a huge, square room devoid of furniture, the Class faced the
Ogre — Lieutenant-Marshal Fritz von Hohendorff, Commandant of Cadets. Martinet,
tyrant, dictator — he was known throughout the System as the embodiment of
soullessness, and, insofar as he had ever been known to show emotion or feeling
before any undergraduate, he seemed to glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly
rigid disciplinarian that Earth had ever known. His thick, white hair was roached fiercely
upward into a stiff pompadour. His left eye was artificial and his face bore dozens of
tiny, threadlike scars, for not even the marvelous plastic surgery of that age could repair
entirely the ravages of space-combat. Also, his right leg and left arm, although
practically normal to all outward seeming, were in reality largely products of science and
art instead of nature.
Kinnison faced, then, this reconstructed potentate, saluted crisply, and snapped.
“Sir, Class Five reports to the Commandant.”
“Take your post, sir.” The veteran saluted as punctiliously, and as he did so a
semi-circular desk rose around him from the floor — a desk whose most striking feature
was an intricate mechanism surrounding a splint-like form.
“Number One, Kimball Kinnison !” von Hohendorff barked. “Front and center —
March ! . . . . . The oath, sir.”
“Before the Omnipotent Witness I promise never to lower the standard of the
Galactic Patrol,” Kinnison said reverently, and, baring his arm, thrust it into the hollow
form.
From a small container labelled “#1, Kimball Kinnison,” the Commandant shook
out what was apparently an ornament — a lenticular jewel fabricated of hundreds of tiny,
dead-white gems. Taking it up with a pair of insulated forceps he touched it
momentarily to the bronzed skin of the arm before him, and at that fleeting contact a
flash as of many-colored fire swept over the stones. Satisfied, he dropped the jewel into
a recess provided for it in the mechanism, which at once burst into activity.
The forearm was wrapped in thick insulation, molds and shields snapped into
place, and there flared out an instantly-suppressed flash of brilliance intolerable. Then
the molds fell apart, the insulation was removed, and there was revealed the LENS.
Clasped to Kinnison’s brawny wrist by a bracelet of imperishable, almost unbreakable,
metal in which it was imbedded it shone in all its lambent splendor – no longer a whitely
inert piece of jewelry, but a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance
which proclaimed to all observers in symbols of ever-changing flame that here was a
Lensman of the GALACTIC PATROL.
In similar fashion each man of the Class was invested with the symbol of his
rank. Then the stern-faced Commandant touched a button and from the bare metal
floor there arose deeply-upholstered chairs, one for each graduate.
“Fall out,” he commanded, then smiled almost boyishly — the first intimation any
of the Class ever had that the hard-boiled old tyrant could smile — and went on in a
strangely altered voice.
“Sit down men, and smoke up. We have an hour in which to talk things over, and
now I can tell you what it is all about. Each of you will find his favorite refreshment in the
arm of his chair.
“No, there’s no catch to it,” he continued in answer to amazedly doubtful stares,
and lighted a huge black cigar of Venerian tobacco as he spoke. “You are Lensmen
now. Of course you have yet to go through the formalities of Commencement, but they
don’t count. Each of you really graduated when his Lens came to life.
“We know your individual preferences, and each of you has his favorite weed,
from Tilotson’ s Pittsburgh stogies up to Snowden’s Alsakanite cigarettes — even though
Alsakan is just about as far away from here as a planet can be and still lie within the
galaxy.
“We also know that you are all immune to the lure of noxious drugs. If you were
not, you would not be here today. So smoke up and break up — ask any questions you