all about the Lens. There he was punished to the verge of insanity, but was 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 reached Prime Base with the all-important data. By building super-
powerful 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 for
permission to follow it. In lieu of that, however, Haynes told 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 possible for the Galactic Patrol to give, for the Gray Lensman works
under no supervision or direction whatever. He is responsible to no one; to nothing save
his own conscience. He is no longer a cog in the immense machine of the Galactic
Patrol: wherever he may go he is the Patrol!
In quest of a second line to Grand Base, Kinnison scouted a pirate stronghold on
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 rushed ships to his aid. In
Base Hospital Surgeon-Marshal Lacy put him back together; and, during a long and
quarrelsome convalescence, Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall held him together. And 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 he given advanced training; something which had never before been attempted.
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 from the ordeal vastly stronger of
mind than any human being had ever been before; and possessed of a new sense as
well—the sense of perception, a sense somewhat analogous to sight, but of much
greater power, depth, and scope, and not dependent on light.
After trying out his new mental equipment by solving a murder mystery on
Radelix, he went to Boyssia II, where he succeeded in entering an enemy base. He took
over the mind of a communications officer and waited for a chance to get his second,
all-important line to Grand Base. An enemy ship captured a hospital ship of the Patrol
and brought it in to Boyssia. Nurse MacDougall, head nurse of the ship, working under
Kinnison’s instructions, stirred up trouble which soon became mutiny. Helmuth took a
hand from Grand Base, thus enabling the Lensman to get his second line.
The hospital ship, undetectable by virtue of Kinnison’s nullifier, escaped from
Boyssia II and headed for Earth at full blast. Kinnison, convinced that Helmuth was
really Boskone himself, found that the intersection of the two lines, and therefore the
pirates’ Grand Base, lay in Star Cluster AC 257-4736, well outside the galaxy. Pausing
only long enough to destroy the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I, he set out to investigate
Helmuth’s headquarters. He found a stronghold impregnable to any attack the Patrol
could throw against it; manned by thought-screened personnel. His sense of perception
was suddenly cut off—the pirates had erected a thought-screen around their whole
planet. He then returned to Prime Base, deciding en route that boring from within was
the only possible way to take that stupendous fortress.
In consultation with the Port Admiral the zero hour was set, at which time the
massed Grand Fleet of the Patrol was to attack Grand Base with every projector it could
bring to bear.
Pursuant to his plan, Kinnison again visited Trenco, where the Patrol forces
extracted for him some fifty kilograms of thionite; the noxious drug which, in microgram
inhalations, makes the addict experience all the sensations of doing whatever it is that
he wishes most ardently to do. The larger the dose, the more intense and exquisite the
sensations—resulting, sooner or later, in a super-ecstatic death.
Thence to Helmuth’s planet; where, working through the unshielded brain of a
dog, he let himself into the central dome. Here, just before the zero minute, he released
his thionite into the air-stream, thus wiping out all the pirates except Helmuth himself,
who, in his ultra-shielded inner bombproof, could not be affected.
The Patrol attacked precisely on schedule, but Helmuth would not leave his
retreat, even to try to save his base. Therefore Kinnison had to go in after him. Poised in
the air of the inner dome there was an enigmatic, sparkling ball of force which the
Lensman could not understand, and of which he was therefore very suspicious.
But the storming of that quadruply-defended inner stronghold was exactly the
task for which Kinnison’s new and ultra-cumbersome armor had been designed; so in
he went. He killed Helmuth in armor-to-armor combat.
Kinnison was pretty sure that that force-ball was keyed to some particular
pattern, and suspected—correctly—that it was in part an inter-galactic communicator.
Hence he did not think into it until he was in the flagship with Port Admiral Haynes; until
all kinds of recorders and analyzers had been set up. Then he did so—and Grand Base
was blasted out of existence by duodec bombs placed by the pirates themselves and
triggered by the force-ball. The detectors showed a hard, tight communications line
running straight out toward the Second Galaxy. Helmuth was not Boskone.
Scouting the Second Galaxy in his super-powerful battleship Dauntless, Kinnison
met and defeated a squadron of Boskonian war-vessels. He landed upon the planet
Medon, whose people had been fighting a losing war against Boskone. The Medonians,
electrical wizards who had already installed inertia-neutralizers and a space-drive,
moved their world across inter-galactic space to our First Galaxy.
With the cessation of military activity, however, the illicit traffic in habit-forming
drugs 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 managed to
escape.
Ordinary disguises having proved useless, Kinnison became Wild Bill Williams;
once a gentleman of Aldebaran II, now a space-rat meteor miner. He made of himself
an almost bottomless drinker of the hardest beverages known to space. He became a
drug fiend—a bentlam eater—discovering that his Arisian-trained mind could function at
full efficiency even while his physical body was completely stupefied. He became widely
known as the fastest, deadliest performer with twin DeLameters ever to strike the
asteroid belts.
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.
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 hyper-
spatial tube 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
counter-attacked through it, returning victorious.
Wild Bill Williams struck it rich at last. Abandoning the low dives in which he had
been wont to carouse, he 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 booze- and drug-soaked bum, wanted to get his
quarter-million credits.
In 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 a council. Jalte did not know
very much about it, but his superior, one Eichmil, who lived on the planet Jarnevon, in