the Second Galaxy, would know who and what Boskone really was.
Therefore Kinnison and Worsel went to Jarnevon. Kinnison was captured and
tortured—there was at least one Overlord there—but Worsel rescued him before his
mind was damaged and brought him back with his knowledge intact. Jarnevon was
peopled by the Eich, a race almost as monstrous as the Overlords. The Council of Nine
which ruled the planet was in fact the long-sought Boskone.
The greatest surgeons of the age—Phillips of Posenia and Wise of
Medon—demonstrated that they could grow new nervous tissue; even new limbs and
organs if necessary. Again Clarrissa MacDougall nursed Kinnison back to health, and
this time the love between them could not be concealed.
The Grand Fleet of the Patrol was assembled, and with Kinnison in charge of
Operations, swept outward from the First Galaxy. Jalte’s planet was destroyed by
means of the negasphere—the negative-matter bomb—4hen on to the Second Galaxy.
Jarnevon, the planet of the Eich, was destroyed by smashing it between two
barren planets which had been driven there in the “free” (inertialess) condition. These
planets, having exactly opposite intrinsic velocities, were inerted, one upon each side of
the doomed world; and when that frightful collision was over a minor star had come into
being.
Grand Fleet returned to our galaxy. Galactic Civilization rejoiced. Prime Base
was a center of celebration. Kinnison, supposing that the war was over and that his
problem was solved, threw off Lensman’s Load. Marrying his Cris, he declared, was the
most important thing in the universe.
But how wrong he was! For even as Lensman and nurse were walking down a
corridor of Base Hospital after a conference with Haynes and Lacy regarding that
marriage—
CHAPTER 1
Recalled
Stop, youth!” the voice of Mentor the Arisian thundered silently, deep within the
Lensman’s brain.
He stopped convulsively, almost in mid-stride, and at the rigid, absent awareness
in his eyes Nurse MacDougall’s face went white.
“This is not merely the loose and muddy thinking of which you have all too
frequently been guilty in the past,” the deeply resonant, soundless voice went on, “it is
simply not thinking at all. At times, Kinnison of Tellus, we almost despair of you. Think,
youth, think! For know, Lensman, that upon the clarity of your thought and upon the
trueness of your perception depends the whole future of your Patrol and of your
Civilization; more so now by far than at any time in the past.”
“What’dy’mean, ‘think’?” Kinnison snapped back thoughtlessly. His mind was a
seething turmoil, his emotions an indescribable blend of surprise, puzzlement, and
incredulity.
For moments, as Mentor did not reply, the Gray Lensman’s mind raced.
Incredulity . . . becoming tinged with apprehension . . . turning rapidly into rebellion.
“Oh, Kim!” Clarrissa choked. A queer enough tableau they made, these two, had
any been there to see; the two uniformed figures standing there so strainedly, the
nurse’s two hands gripping those of the Lensman. She, completely en rapport with him,
had understood his every fleeting thought. “Oh, Kim! They can’t do that to us . . .”
“I’ll say they cant!” Kinnison flared. “By Klono’s tungsten teeth, I won’t do it! We
have a right to happiness, you and I, and we’ll. . .”
“We’ll what?” she asked, quietly. She knew what they had to face; and, strong-
souled woman that she was, she was quicker to face it squarely than was he. “You were
just blasting off, Kim, and so was I.”
“I suppose so,” glumly. “Why in all the nine hells of Valeria did I have to be a
Lensman? Why couldn’t I have stayed a . . . ?”
“Because you are you,” the girl interrupted, gently. “Kimball Kinnison, the man I
love. You couldn’t do anything else.” Chin up, she was fighting gamely. “And if I rate
Lensman’s Mate I can’t be a sissy, either. It won’t last forever, Kim. Just a little longer to
wait, that’s all.”
Eyes, steel-gray now, stared down into eyes of tawny, gold-flecked bronze. “QX,
Cris? Really QX?” What a world of meaning there was in that cryptic question!
“Really, Kim.” She met his stare unfalteringly. If not entirely unafraid, at least with
whole-hearted determination. “On the beam and on the green, Gray Lensman, all the
way. Every long, last millimeter. There, wherever it is—to the very end of whatever road
it has to be—and back again. Until it’s over. I’ll be here. Or somewhere, Kim. Waiting.”
The man shook himself and breathed deep. Hands dropped apart—both knew
consciously as well as subconsciously that the less of physical demonstration the better
for two such natures as theirs—and Kimball Kinnison, Unattached Lensman, came to
grips with his problem.
He began really to think; to think with the full power of his prodigious mind; and
as he did so he began to see what the Arisian could have—what he must have—meant.
He, Kinnison, had gummed up the works. He had made a colossal blunder in the
Boskonian campaign. He knew that Mentor, although silent, was still en rapport with
him; and as he coldly, grimly, thought the thing through to its logical conclusion he
knew, with a dull, sick certainty, what was coming next. It came:
“Ah, you perceive at last some portion of the truth. You see that your confused,
superficial thinking has brought about almost irreparable harm. I grant that, in
specimens so young of such a youthful race, emotion has its place and its function; but I
tell you now in all solemnity that for you the time of emotional relaxation has not yet
come. Think, youth— THINK!” and the ancient Arisian snapped the telepathic line.
As one, without a word, nurse and Lensman retraced their way to the room they
had left so shortly before. Port Admiral Haynes and Surgeon-Marshal Lacy still sat upon
the nurse’s davenport, scheming roseate schemes having to do with the wedding they
had so subtly engineered.
“Back so soon? Forget something, MacDougall?” Lacy asked, amiably. Then, as
both men noticed the couple’s utterly untranslatable expression:
“What happened? Break it out, Kim!” Haynes commanded.
“Plenty, chief,” Kinnison answered, quietly. “Mentor .stopped us before we got to
the elevator. Told me I’d put my foot in it up to my neck on that Boskonian thing. That
instead of being all buttoned up, my fool blundering has put us farther back than we
were when we started.”
“Mentor!”
“Told you!”
“Put us back!”
It was an entirely unpremeditated, unconscious duet. The two old officers were
completely dumbfounded. Arisians never had come out of their shells, they never would.
Infinitely less disturbing would have been the authentic tidings that a brick house had
fallen upstairs. They had nursed this romance along so carefully, had timed it so
exactly, and now it had gone p-f-f-f-t—it had been taken out of their hands entirely. That
thought flashed through their minds first. Then, as catastrophe follows lightning’s flash,
the real knowledge exploded within their consciousnesses that, in some unguessable
fashion or other, the whole Boskonian campaign had gone p-f-f-f-t, too.
Port Admiral Haynes, master tactician, reviewed in his keen strategist’s mind
every phase of the recent struggle, without being able to find a flaw in it.
“There wasn’t a loop-hole anywhere,” he said aloud. “Where do they figure we
slipped up?”
“We didn’t slip—7 slipped,” Kinnison stated, flatly. “When we took Bominger—the
fat Chief Zwilnik of Radelix, you know—I took a bop on the head to learn that Boskone
had more than one string per bow. Observers, independent, for every station at all
important. I learned that fact thoroughly then, I thought. At least, we figured on
Boskone’s having lines of communication past, not through, his Regional Directors,
such as Prellin of Bronseca. Since I changed my line of attack at that point, I did not
need to consider whether or not Crowninshield of Tressilia III was by-passed in the
same way; and when I had worked my way up through Jalte in his star-cluster to
Boskone itself, on Jarnevon, I had forgotten the concept completely. Its possibility didn’t
even occur to me. That’s where I fell down.”
“I still don’t see it!” Haynes protested. “Boskone was the top!”
“Yeah?” Kinnison asked, pointedly. “That’s what I thought —but prove it.”
“Oh.” The Port Admiral hesitated. “We had no reason to think otherwise . . .
looked at in that light, this intervention would seem to be conclusive . . . but before that
there was no . . .”
“There were so,” Kinnison contradicted, “but I didn’t see them then. That’s where
my brain went sour; I should have seen them. Little things, mostly, but significant. Not
so much positive as negative indices. Above all, there was nothing whatever to indicate
that Boskone actually was the top. That idea was the product of my own-wishful and
very low-grade thinking, with no basis or foundation in fact or in theory. And now,” he
concluded bitterly, “because my skull is so thick that it takes an idea a hundred years to