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 space-port. 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 space-ship 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
inter-stellar space she flashed. Then, while Watson coaxed the sleek flyer to do even
better than her prodigious best, Kinnison went to his room and drilled a thought to Prime
Base and Port Admiral Haynes.
“Kinnison. Are you too busy to give me a couple of minutes?”
“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! Come in, Cris—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 chummy enough with Helen so she’d really ‘talk to me. The
death-rate from airplane crashes went up sharply a while ago and is still rising. I am
reporting that fact 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—somewhat too innocently. “But as to what it
means . . .”
“You know what it means, don’t you?” Kinnison snapped.
“I don’t know anything. I can do some guessing, of course, but for the present I’m
reporting a fact, not personal opinions.”
“QX. That fact 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 Haynes, 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 vanBuskirk 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?” Haynes demanded. “You’re ‘way ahead of me,
both of you. Give!”
“I don’t know anything, either,” Kinnison emphasized the verb very strongly.
“However, I suspect a lot. Everything, in fact, grading downward from the Eich. I’d say
Overlords, except that I don’t see how . . . what do you think, Cris?”
“What I think is too utterly fantastic for words—my visualization of the Cosmic All
calls for another Eich-Overlord alliance.”
“Could be, I guess. That would . . .”
“But they were all destroyed, weren’t they?” Haynes interrupted.
“Far from it.” This from the nurse. “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, I’m going to get in touch
with Nadreck of Palain Seven—I think I know his pattern well enough to Lens him from
here.”
“Nadreck? Your new playfellow? Why?” Clarrissa asked, curiously.
“Because he’s a frigid-blooded, 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
Palanian Lensman became en rapport with the group.
“An interesting development, truly,” his soft thought came in almost wistfully
when the situation 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.”
CHAPTER 11
Alcon of Thrale
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 hyper-spatial 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.
Civilization, however, 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 back-boning
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 co-workers, 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 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 Thrallian 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, sub-zero-blooded, non-oxygen-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 has been argued that sexual equality is the most important criterion of that