life by virtue of which it gives off a strong, characteristically-changing, polychromatic
light as long as it is in circuit with the living mentality with which it is in synchronization.
Conversely, when worn by anyone except its owner, it not only remains dark, but it kills;
so strongly does its pseudo-life interfere with any life to which it is not attuned. It is also
a telepathic communicator of astounding power and range—and other things.
Back on Earth, Samms set out to find people of Lensman caliber to send to
Arisia. Kinnison’s son, Jack, Jack’s friend Mason Northrop, Conway Costigan, and
Samms’ daughter Virgilia—who had inherited her father’s hair and eyes and who was
the most accomplished muscle-reader of her time— went first. The boys got Lenses, but
Jill did not. Mentor, who was to her senses a woman seven feet tall—it should be
mentioned here that no two entities who ever saw Mentor ever saw the same
thing—told her that she did not then and never would need a Lens.
Frederick Rodebush, Lyman Cleveland, young Bergenholm and a couple of
commodores of the Patrol—Clayton of North America and Schweikert of Europe—just
about exhausted Earth’s resources. Nor were the other Solarian planets very helpful,
yielding only three Lensmen—Knobos of Mars, Del Nalten of Venus, and Rularion of
Jove. Lensman material was very scarce stuff.
Knowing that his proposed Galactic Council would have to be made up
exclusively of Lensmen, and that it should represent as many solar systems as
possible, Samms visited the various systems which had been colonized by humanity,
then went on: to Rigel Four, where he found Dronvire the Explorer, who was of
Lensman grade; and next to Pluto, where he found Pilinixi the Dexitroboper, who very
definitely was not; and finally to Palain Seven, an ultra-frigid world where he found
Tallick, who might—or might not—go to Arisia some day. And Virgil Samms, being
physically tough and mentally a real crusader, survived these various ordeals.
For some time the existence of the newly-formed Galactic Patrol was precarious
indeed. Archibald Isaacson, head of Interstellar Spaceways, wanting a monopoly of
interstellar trade, first tried bribery; then, joining forces with the machine of Senator
Morgan and Boss Towne, assassination. The other Lensmen and Jill saved Samms’ life;
after which Kinnison took him to the safest place on Earth—deep underground beneath
the Hill; the tremendously fortified, superlatively armed fortress which had been built to
be the headquarters of the Triplanetary Service.
But even there the First Lensman was attacked, this time by a fleet of space-
ships in full battle array. By that time, however, the Galactic Patrol had a fleet of its own,
and again the Lensmen won.
Knowing that the final and decisive struggle would of necessity be a political one,
the Patrol took over the Cosmocrat party and set out to gather detailed and
documentary evidence of corrupt and criminal activities of the Nationalists, the party
then in power. Roderick (“Rod the Rock”) Kinnison ran for President of North America
against the incumbent Witherspoon; and after a knock-down-and-drag-out political
battle with Senator Morgan, the voice of the Morgan-Towne-Isaacson machine, he was
elected.
And Morgan was murdered—supposedly by disgruntled gangsters; actually by
his Kalonian boss, who was in turn a minion of Eddore—simply because he had failed.
North America was the most powerful continent of Earth; Earth was the mother
planet, the leader and the boss. Hence, under the sponsorship of the Cosmocratic
government of North America, the Galactic Council and its arm, the Galactic Patrol,
came into their own. At the end of R. K. Kinnison’s term of office, at which time he
resumed his interrupted duties as Port Admiral of the Patrol, there were a hundred
planets adherent to Civilization. In ten years there were a thousand; in a hundred years
a million; and it is sufficient characterization of the government of the Galactic Council to
say that in the long history of Civilization no planet has ever withdrawn from it.
Time went on. The prodigiously long blood-lines, so carefully manipulated by
Mentor of Arisia, neared culmination. Lensman Kimball Kinnison was graduated Number
One of his class—as a matter of fact, although he did not know it, he was Number One
of his time. And his female counterpart and complement, Clarrissa MacDougall of the
red-bronze-auburn hair and the gold-flecked tawny eyes, was a nurse in the Patrol’s
Hospital at Prime Base.
Shortly after graduation Kinnison was called in by Port Admiral Haynes. Space
piracy had become an organized force; and, under the leadership of someone or
something known as “Boskone”, had risen to such heights of power as to threaten
seriously the Patrol itself. In one respect Boskonia was ahead of the Patrol; its scientists
having developed a source of power vastly greater than any known to Civilization. Pirate
ships, faster than the Patrol’s fastest cruisers and yet more heavily armed than its most
powerful battleships, had been doing as they pleased throughout all space.
For one particular purpose the engineers of the Patrol had designed and built
one ship—the Brittania. She was the fastest thing in space, but for offense she had only
one weapon, the “Q-gun”. Kinnison was put in command of this vessel, with orders to:
(1) Capture a late-model pirate vessel; (2) Learn her secrets of power; and (3) Transmit
the information to Prime Base.
He found and took such a ship. Sergeant Peter vanBuskirk led the storming party
of Valerians—men of human ancestry, but of extraordinary size, strength, and agility
because of the enormous gravitation of the planet Valeria—in wiping out those of the
pirate crew not killed in the battle between the two vessels.
The Brittania’s scientists secured the desired data. It could not be transmitted to
Prime Base, however, as the pirates were blanketing all channels of communication.
Boskonian warships were gathering for the kill, and the crippled Patrol ship could neither
run nor fight. Therefore each man was given a spool of tape bearing a complete record
of everything that had occurred; and, after setting up a director-by-chance to make the
empty ship pursue an unpredictable course in space, and after rigging bombs to destroy
her at the first touch of a ray, the Patrolmen paired off by lot and took to the lifeboats.
The erratic course of the cruiser brought her near the lifeboat manned by
Kinnison and vanBuskirk, and there the pirates tried to stop her. The ensuing explosion
was so violent that flying wreckage disabled practically the entire personnel of one of
the attacking ships, which did not have time to go free before the crash. The two
Patrolmen boarded the pirate vessel and drove her toward Earth, reaching the solar
system of Velantia before the Boskonians headed them off. Again taking to their
lifeboat, they landed on the planet Delgon, where they were rescued from a horde of
Catlats by one Worsel—later to become Lensman Worsel of Velantia—a highly
intelligent winged reptile.
By means of improvements upon Velantian thought-screens the three destroyed
a group of the Overlords of Delgon, a sadistic race of monsters who had been preying
upon the other peoples of the system by sheer power of mind. Worsel then
accompanied the two Patrolmen to Velantia, where all the resources of the planet were
devoted to the preparation of defenses against the expected attack of the Boskonians.
Several other lifeboats reached Velantia, guided by Worsel’s mind working through
Kinnison’s ego and Lens.
Kinnison intercepted a message from Helmuth, who “spoke for Boskone”, and
traced his communicator beam, thus getting his first line on Boskone’s Grand Base. The
pirates attacked Velantia, and six of their warships were captured. In these six ships,
manned by Velantian crews, the Patrolmen again set out for Earth and Prime Base.
Then Kinnison’s Bergenholm, the generator of the force which makes inertialess
flight possible, broke down, so that he had to land upon Trenco for repairs. Trenco, the
tempestuous, billiard-ball-smooth planet where it rains forty seven feet and five inches
every night and where the wind blows at over eight hundred miles per hour—Trenco,
the source of thionite, the deadliest of all deadly drugs—Trenco, whose weirdly-charged
ether and atmosphere so distort beams and vision that it can be policed only by such
beings as the Rigellians, who possess the sense of perception instead of those of sight
and hearing!
Lensman Tregonsee, of Rigel Four, then in command of the Patrol’s wandering
base on Trenco, supplied Kinnison with a new Bergenholm and he again set out for
Tellus.
Meanwhile Helmuth had decided that some one particular Lensman must be the
cause of all his set-backs; and that the Lens, a complete enigma to all Boskonians, was
in some way connected with Arisia. That planet had always been dreaded and shunned
by all spacemen. No Boskonian who had even approached that planet could be
compelled, even by the certainty of death, to go near it again.
Thinking himself secure by virtue of thought-screens “given him by a being from
a higher-echelon planet named Floor, Helmuth went alone to Arisia, determined to learn