"So you see, beautiful," he concluded, "your wish is coming true... I couldn't keep you out of this if I wanted to. So check with the girls, put on your Lens, shed your clothes, and go to work."

 

"I'll do that." Clarrissa laughed and her soaring spirit flooded his mind. "Thanks, my dear."

 

Then and only then did Kimball Kinnison, master therapist, pay any further attention to that which lay contorted upon the floor. But when Whyte folded up his notebook and left the place, the derelict was resting quietly, and in a space of time long enough so that the putative writer of space-opera would not be connected with the cure, those fits would end. Moreover, Eddie would return, whole, to the void: he would become what he had never before been—a successful meteor-miner.

 

Lensmen pay their debts; even to spiders and to worms.

 

 

 

9. — AN ARISIAN EDUCATION

 

Her adventure in the hyper-spatial tube had taught Kathryn Kinnison much. Realizing her inadequacy and knowing what to do about it, she drove her speedster at high velocity to Arisia. Unlike the -Second-Stage Lensmen, she did not even slow down as she approached the planet's barrier; but, as one sure of her welcome, merely threw out ahead of her an identifying thought.

 

"Ah, daughter Kathryn, again you are in time." Was there, or was there not, a trace of emotion—of welcome, even of affection?—in that usually utterly emotionless thought? "Land as usual."

 

She neutralized her controls as she felt the mighty beams of the landing- engine take hold of her little ship. During previous visits she had questioned nothing—this time she was questioning everything. Was she landing, or not? Directing her every force inwardly, she probed her own mind to its profoundest depths. Definitely, she was her own mistress throughout—no conceivable mind could take hers over so tracelessly. As definitely, then, she was actually landing.

 

She landed. The ground on which she stepped was real. So was the automatic flyer—neither plane nor helicopter—which whisked her from the spaceport to her familiar destination, an unpretentious residence in the grounds of the immense hospital. The graveled walk, the flowering shrubs, and the indescribably sweet and pungent perfume were real; as were the tiny pain and the drop of blood which resulted when a needle-sharp thorn pierced her incautious finger.

 

Through automatically-opening doors she made her way into the familiar, comfortable, book-lined room which was Mentor's study. And there, at his big desk, unchanged, sat Mentor. A lot like her father, but older—much older. About ninety, she had always thought, even though he didn't look over sixty. This time, however, she drove a probe—and got the shock of her life. Her thought was stopped—cold—not by superior mental force, which she could have taken unmoved, but by a seemingly ordinary thought-screen, and her fast- disintegrating morale began visibly to crack. "Is all this—are you—real, or not?" she burst out, finally. "If it isn't, I'll go mad!"

 

"That which you have tested—and I—are real, for the moment and as you understand reality. Your mind in its present state of advancement cannot be deceived concerning such elementary matters."

 

"But it all wasn't, before? Or don't you want to answer that?"

 

"Since the knowledge will affect your growth, I will answer. It was not. This is the first time that your speedster has landed physically upon Arisia."

 

The girl shrank, appalled. "You told me to come back when I found out that I didn't know it all," she finally forced herself to say. "I learned that in the tube; but I didn't realize until just now that I don't know anything. Is there any use, Mentor, in going on with me?" she concluded, bitterly.

 

"Much," he assured her. "Your development has been eminently satisfactory, and your present mental condition is both necessary and sufficient."

 

"Well, I'll be a spr..." Kathryn bit off the expletive and frowned. "What were you doing to me before, then, when I thought I got everything?"

 

"Power of mind," he informed her. "Sheer power, and penetration, and control. Depth, and speed, and all the other factors with which you are already familiar."

 

"But what was left? I know there is—lots of it—but I can't imagine what."

 

"Scope," Mentor replied, gravely. "Each of those qualities and characteristics must be expanded to encompass the full sphere of thought. Neither words nor thoughts can give any adequate concept of what it means; a practically wide-open two-way will be necessary. This cannot be accomplished, daughter, in the adolescent confines of your present mind; therefore enter fully into mine."

 

She did so: and after less than a minute of that awful contact slumped, inert and boneless, to the floor.

 

The Arisian, unchanged, unmoved, unmoving, gazed at her until finally she began to stir.

 

"That... father Mentor, that was..." She blinked, shook her head savagely, fought her way back to full consciousness. "That was a shock."

 

"It was," he agreed. "More so than you realize. Of all the entities of your Civilization, your brother and now you are the only ones it would not kill instantly. You now know what the word 'scope' means, and are ready for your last treatment, in the course of which I shall take your mind as far along the road of knowledge as mine is capable of going."

 

"But that would mean... you're implying... But my mind can't be superior to yours, Mentor! Nothing could be, possibly—it's sheerly, starkly unthinkable!"

 

"But true, daughter, nevertheless. While you are recovering your strength from that which was but the beginning of your education, I will explain certain matters previously obscure. You have long known, of course, that you five children are not like any others. You have always known many things without having learned them. You think upon all possible bands of thought. Your senses of perception, of sight, of hearing, of touch, are so perfectly merged into one sense that you perceive at will any possible manifestation upon any possible plane or dimension of vibration. Also, although this may not have occurred to you as extraordinary, since it is not obvious, you differ physically from your fellows in some important respects. You have never experienced the slightest symptom of physical illness; not even a headache or a decayed tooth. You do not really require sleep. Vaccinations and inoculations do not 'take*. No pathogenic organism, however virulent; no poison, however potent..."

 

"Stop, Mentor!" Kathryn gasped, turning white. "I can't take it—you really mean, then, that we aren't human at all?"

 

"Before going into that I should give you something of background. Our Arisian visualizations foretold the rise and fall of galactic civilizations long before any such civilizations came into being. That of Atlantis, for instance. I was personally concerned in that, and could not stop its fall." Mentor was showing emotion now; his thought was bleak and bitter.

 

"Not that I expected to stop it," he resumed. "It had been known for many cycles of time .that the final abatement of the opposing force would necessitate the development of a race superior to ours in every respect.

 

"Blood lines were selected in each of the four strongest races of this that you know as the First Galaxy. Breeding programs were set up, to eliminate as many as possible of their weaknesses and to concentrate all of their strengths. ' From your knowledge of genetics you realize the magnitude of the task; you know that it would take much time uselessly to go into the details of its accomplishment. Your father and your mother were the penultimates of long—very long—lines of mating; their reproductive cells were such that in their fusion practically every gene carrying any trait of weakness was rejected. Conversely, you carry the genes of every trait of strength ever known to any member of your human race. Therefore, while in outward seeming you are human, in every factor of importance you are not; you are even less human than am I myself."

 

"And just how human is that?" Kathryn flared, and again her most penetrant probe of force flattened out against the Arisian's screen.

 

"Later, daughter, not now. That knowledge will come at the end of your education, not at its beginning."

 

"I was afraid so." She stared at the Arisian, her eyes wide and hopeless; brimming, in spite of her efforts at control, with tears. "You're a monster, and I am... or am going to be—a worse one. A monster... and I'll have to live a million years... alone... why? Why, Mentor, did you have to do this to me?"

 

"Calm yourself, daughter. The shock, while severe, will pass. You have lost nothing, have gained much."

 

"Gained? Bah!" The girl's thought was loaded with bitterness and scorn. "I've lost my parents—I'll still be a girl long after they have died. I've lost every possibility of ever really living. I want love—and a husband—and children—and I can't have any of them, ever. Even without this, I've never seen a man I wanted, and now I can't ever love anybody. I don't want to live a million years, Mentor—especially alone!" The thought was a veritable wail of despair.

 

"The time has come to stop this muddy, childish thinking." Mentor's thought, however, was only mildly reproving. "Such a reaction is only natural, but your conclusions are entirely erroneous. One single clear thought will show you that you have no present psychic, intellectual, emotional, or physical need of a complement."

 

"That's true..." wonderingly. "But other girls of my age..."

 

"Exactly," came Mentor's dry rejoinder. "Thinking of yourself as an adult of Homo Sapiens, you were judging yourself by false standards. As a matter of fact, you are an adolescent, not an adult. In due time you will come to love a man, and he you, with a fervor and depth which you at present cannot even dimly understand."

 

"But that still leaves my parents," Kathryn felt much better. "I can apparently age, of course, as easily as I can put on a hat... but I really do love them, you know, and it will simply break mother's heart to have all her daughters turn out to be—as she thinks—spinsters."

 

"On that point, too, you may rest at ease. I am taking care of that Kimball and Clarrissa both know, without knowing how they know it, that your life cycle is tremendously longer than theirs. They both know that they will not live to see their grandchildren. Be assured, daughter, that before they pass from this cycle of existence into the next—about which I know nothing— they shall know that all is to be supremely well with their line; even though, to Civilization at large, it shall apparently end with you Five."

 

"End with us? What do you mean?"

 

"You have a destiny, the nature of which your mind is not yet qualified to receive. In due time the knowledge shall be yours. Suffice it now to say that the next forty or fifty years will be but a fleeting hour in the span of life which is to be yours. But time, at the moment, presses. You are now fully recovered and we must get on with this, your last period of study with me, at the end of which you will be able to bear the fullest, closest impact of my mind as easily as you have heretofore borne full contact with your sisters'. Let us proceed with the work."

 

They did so. Kathryn took and survived those shattering treatments, one after another, emerging finally with a mind whose power and scope can no more be explained to any mind below the third level than can the general theory of relativity be explained to a chimpanzee.

 

"It was forced, not natural, yes," the Arisian said, gravely, as the girl was about to leave. "You are many millions of your years ahead of your natural time. You realize, however, the necessity of that forcing. You also realize that I can give you no more formal instruction. I will be with you or on call at all times; I will be. of aid in crises; but in larger matters your further development is in your own hands."

 

Kathryn shivered. "I realize that, and it scares me clear through... especially this coming conflict, at which you hint so vaguely. I wish you'd tell me at least something about it, so I can get ready for it!"

 

"Daughter, I can't." For the first time in Kathryn's experience, Mentor the Arisian was unsure. "It is certain that we have been on time; but since the Eddorians have minds of power little if any inferior to our own, there are many details which we cannot derive with certainty, and to advise you wrongly would be to do you irreparable harm. All I can say is that sufficient warning will be given by your learning, with no specific effort on your part and from some source other than myself, that there does in fact exist a planet named Ploor—a name which to you is now only a meaningless symbol. Go now, daughter Kathryn, and work."

 

Kathryn went; knowing that the Arisian had said all that he would say. In truth, he had told her vastly more than she had expected him to divulge; and it chilled her to the marrow to think that she, who had always looked up to the Arisians as demigods of sorts, would from now on be expected to act as their equal—in some ways, perhaps, as their superior! As her speedster tore through space toward distant Klovia she wrestled with herself, trying to shake her new self down into a personality as well integrated as her old one had been. She had not quite succeeded when she felt a thought.

 

"Help! I am in difficulty with this, my ship. Will any entity receiving my call and possessing the tools of a mechanic please come to my assistance? Or, lacking such tools, possessing a vessel of power sufficient to tow mine to the place where I must immediately go?"

 

Kathryn was startled out of her introspective trance. That thought was on a terrifically high band; one so high that she knew of no race using it, so high that an ordinary human mind could not possibly have either sent or received it. Its phraseology, while peculiar, was utterly precise in definition—the mind behind it was certainly of precisionist grade. She, acknowledged upon the stranger's wave, and sent out a locator. Good—he wasn't far 'away. She flashed toward the derelict, matched intrinsics at a safe distance, and began scanning, only to encounter a spy-ray block around the whole vessel! To her it was porous enough—but if the creature thought that his screen was tight, let him keep on thinking so. It was his move.

 

"Well, what are you waiting for?" The thought fairly snapped. "Come close, so that I may bring you in."

 

"Not yet," Kathryn snapped back. "Cut your block so that I can see what you are like. I carry equipment for many environments, but I must know what yours is and equip for it before I can come aboard. You will note that my screens are down."

 

"Of course. Excuse me—I supposed that you were one of our own"—there came the thought of an unspellable and unpronounceable name—"since none of the lower orders can receive our thoughts direct. Can you equip yourself to come aboard with your tools?"

 

"Yes." The stranger's light was fierce stuff; ninety-eight percent of its energy being beyond the visible. His lamps were beam-held atomics, nothing less: but there was very little gamma and few neutrons. She could handle it easily enough, she decided, as she finished donning her heat-armor and a helmet of practically opaque, diamond-hard plastic.

 

As she was wafted gently across the intervening space upon a pencil of force, Kathryn took her first good look at the precisionist himself—or herself. She—it—looked something like a Dhilian, she thought at first. There was a squat, powerful, elephantine body with its four stocky legs; the tremendous double shoulders and enormous arms; the domed, almost immobile head. But there the resemblance ended. There was only one head—the thinking head, and that one had no eyes and was not covered with bone. There was no feeding head—the thing could neither eat nor breathe. There was no trunk. And what a skin!

 

It was worse than a hide, really—worse even than a Martian's. The girl had never seen anything like it. It was incredibly thick, dry, pliable; filled minutely with cells of a liquid-gaseous something which she knew to be a more perfect insulator even than the fibres of the integument itself.

 

"R-T-S-L-Q-P." She classified the creature readily enough to six places, then stopped and wrinkled her forehead. "Seventh place—that incredible skin—what? S? R? T? It would have to be R...

 

"You have the requisite tools, I perceive," the creature greeted Kathryn as she entered the central compartment of the strange speedster, no larger than her own. "I can tell you what to do, if..."

 

"I know what to do." She unbolted the cover, worked deftly with wrenches and cable and splicer and torch, and in ten minutes was done. "It doesn't make sense that a person of your obvious intelligence, manifestly knowing enough to make such minor repairs yourself, would go so far from home, alone in such a small ship, without any tools. Burnouts and shorts are apt to happen any time, you know."

 

"Not in the vessels of the..." Again Kathryn felt that unpronounceable symbol. She also felt the stranger stiffen in offended dignity. "We of the higher orders, you should know, do not perform labor. We think. We direct. Others work, and do their work well, or suffer accordingly. This is the first time in nine full four-cycle periods that such a thing has happened, and it will be the last. The punishment which I shall mete out to the guilty mechanic will ensure that. I shall, at end, have his life."

 

"Oh, come, now!" Kathryn protested. "Surely it's no life-and-death mat..."

 

"Silence!" came curt command. "It is intolerable that one of the lower orders should attempt to..."

 

"Silence yourself!" At the fierce power of the riposte the creature winced, physically and mentally. "I did this bit of dirty work for you because you apparently couldn't do it for yourself. I did not object to the matter-of- course way you accepted it, because some races are made that way and can't help it. But if you insist on keeping yourself placed five rungs above me on any ladder you can think of, I'll stop being a lady—or even a good Girl Scout—and start doing things about it, and I'll start at any signal you care to call. Get ready, and say when!"

 

The stranger, taken fully aback, threw out a lightning tentacle of thought; a feeler which was stopped cold a full foot from the girl's radiant armor. This was a human female—or was it? It was not. No human being had ever had, or ever would have, a mind like that. Therefore:

 

"I have made a grave error," the thing apologized handsomely, "in thinking that you are not at least my equal. Will you grant me pardon, please?"

 

"Certainly—if you don't repeat it. But I still don't like the idea of your torturing a mechanic for a thing..." She thought intensely, lip caught between white teeth. "Perhaps there's a way. Where are you going, and when do you want to get there?"

 

'To my home planet," pointing out mentally its location in the galaxy. "I must be there in two hundred G-P hours."

 

"I see." Kathryn nodded her head. "You can—if you promise not to harm him. And I can tell whether you really mean it or not."

 

"As I promise, so I do. But in case I do not promise?"

 

"In that case you'll get there in about a hundred thousand G-P years, frozen stiff. For I shall fuse your Bergenholm down into a lump; then, after welding your ports to the shell, I'll mount a thought-screen generator outside, powered for seven hundred years.

 

Promise, or that. Which?"

 

"I promise not to harm the mechanic in any way." He surrendered stiffly, and made no protest at Kathryn's entrance into his mind to make sure that the promise would be kept.

 

Flushed by her easy conquest of a mind she would previously have been unable to touch, and engrossed in the problem of setting her own tremendously enlarged mind to rights, why should it have occurred to the girl that there was anything worthy of investigation concealed in the depths of that chance-met stranger's mentality?

 

Returning to her own speedster, she shed her armor and shot away; and it was just as well for her peace of mind that she was not aware of the tight beamed thought even then speeding from the flitter so far behind her to dread and distant Ploor.

 

"...but it was very definitely not a human female. I could not touch it. It may very well have been one of the accursed Arisians themselves. But since I did nothing to arouse its suspicions, I got rid of it easily enough. Spread the warning!"

 

 

 

10. — CONSTANCE OUT-WORSELS WORSEL

 

While Kathryn Kinnison was working with her father in the hyperspatial tube and with Mentor of Arisia, and while Camilla and Tregonsee were sleuthing the inscrutable "X", Constance was also at work. Although she lay flat on her back, not moving a muscle, she was working as she had never worked before. Long since she had put her indetectable speedster into the control of a director-by- chance. Now, knowing nothing and caring less of where she and her vessel might be or might go, physically completely relaxed, she drove her "sensories" out to the full limit of their prodigious range and held them there for hour after hour. Worsel-like, she was not consciously listening for any particular thing; she was merely increasing her already incredibly vast store of knowledge. One hundred percent receptive, attached to and concerned with only the brain of her physical body, her mind sped at large; sampling, testing, analyzing, cataloguing every item with which its most tenuous fringe came in contact. Through thousands of solar systems that mind went; millions upon millions of entities either did or did not contribute something worthwhile.

 

Suddenly there came something that jarred her into physical movement: a burst of thought upon a band so high that it was practically always vacant. She shook herself, got up, lighted an Alaskanite cigarette, and made herself a pot of coffee.

 

"This is important, I think," she mused. "I'd better get to work on it while it's fresh."

 

She sent out a thought tuned to Worsel, and was surprised when it went unanswered. She investigated: finding that the Velantian's screens were full up and held hard—he was fighting Overlords so savagely that he had not felt her thought. Should she take a hand in this brawl? She should not, she decided, and grinned fleetingly. Her erstwhile tutor would need no help in that comparatively minor chore. She'd wait until he wasn't quite so busy.

 

"Worsel! Con calling. What goes on mere, fellow old snake?" She finally launched her thought.

 

"As though you didn't know!" Worsel sent back. "Been quite a while since I saw you—how about coming aboard?"

 

"Coming at max," and she did.

 

Before entering the Velan, however, she put on a gravity damper, set at 980 centimeters. Strong, tough, and supple as she was she did not relish the thought of the atrocious accelerations used and enjoyed by Velantians everywhere.

 

"What did you make of that burst of thought?" she asked by way of greeting. "Or were you having so much fun you missed it?"

 

"What burst?" Then, after Constance had explained, "I was busy; but not having fun."

 

"Somebody who didn't know you might believe that," the girl derided. "This thought was important, I think—much more so than dilly-dallying with Overlords, as you were doing. It was 'way up—on this band here." She illustrated.

 

"So?" Worsel came as near to whistling as one of his inarticulate race could come. "What are they like?"

 

"VWZY, to four places." Con concentrated. "Multi-legged. Not exactly carapaceous, but pretty nearly. Spiny, too, I believe. The world was cold, dismal, barren; but not frigid, but he—it—didn't seem exactly like an oxygen breather—more like what a warm-blooded Palainian would perhaps look like, if you can imagine such a thing. Mentality very high—precisionist grade—no thought of cities as such. The sun was a typical yellow dwarf. Does any of this ring a bell in your mind?"

 

"No." Worsel thought intensely for minutes. So did Constance. Neither had any idea—then—that the girl was describing the form assumed in their autumn by the dread inhabitants of the planet Ploor!

 

"This may indeed be important," Worsel broke the mental silence. "Shall we explore together?"

 

"We shall." They tuned to the desired band. "Give it plenty of shove, too- -Go!"

 

Out and out and out the twinned receptors sped; to encounter a tenuous, weak, and utterly cryptic vibration. One touch—the merest possible contact— and it disappeared. It vanished before even Con's almost- instantaneous reactions could get more than a hint of directional alignment; and neither of the observers could read any part of it.

 

Both of these developments were starkly incredible, and Worsel's long body tightened convulsively, rock-hard, in the violence of the mental force now driving his exploring mind. Finding nothing, he finally relaxed.

 

"Any Lensmen, anywhere, can read and understand any thought, however garbled or scrambled, or however expressed," he thought at Constance. "Also, I have always been able to get an exact line on anything I could perceive, but all I know about this one is that it seemed to come mostly from somewhere over that way. Did you do any better?"

 

"Not much, if any." If the thing was surprising to Worsel, it was sheerly astounding to his companion. She, knowing the measure of her power, thought to herself—not to the Velantian—"Girl, file this one carefully away in the big black book!"

 

Slight as were the directional leads, the Velan tore along the indicated line at maximum blast. Day after day she sped, a wide-flung mental net out far ahead and out farther still on all sides. They did not find what they sought, but they did find—something.

 

"What is it?" Worsel demanded of the quivering telepath who had made the report.

 

"I don't know, sir. Not on that ultra-band, but well below it... there. Not an Overlord, certainly, but something perhaps equally unfriendly."

 

"An Eich!" Both Worsel and Con exclaimed the thought, and the girl went on, "It was practically certain that we couldn't get them all on Jarnevon, of course, but none have been reported before... where are they, anyway? Get me a chart, somebody... It's Novena IX... QX—tune up your heavy artillery, Worsel—it'd be nice if we could take the head man alive, but that's a little too much luck to expect."

 

The Velantian, even though he had issued instantaneously the order to drive at full blast toward the indicated planet, was momentarily at a loss. Kinnison's daughter entertained no doubts as to the outcome of the encounter she was proposing—but she had never seen an Eich close up. He had. So had her father. Kinnison had come out a very poor second in that affair, and Worsel knew that he could have done no better, if as well. However, that had been upon Jarnevon, actually inside one of its strongest citadels, and neither he nor Kinnison had been prepared.

 

"What's the plan, Worsel?" Con demanded, vibrantly. "How're you figuring on taking "em?"

 

"Depends on how strong they are. If it's a long-established base, we'll simply have to report it to LaForge and go on about our business. If, as seems more probable because it hasn't been reported before, it's a new establishment—or possibly only a grounded space-ship so far—we'll go to work on them ourselves. We'll soon be close enough to find out."

 

"QX", and a fleeting grin passed over Con's vivacious face. For a long time she had been working with Mentor the Arisian, specifically to develop the ability to "out-Worsel Worsel," and now was the best time she ever would have to put her hard schooling to test.

 

Hence, Master of Hallucination though he was, the Velantian had no hint of realization when his Klovian companion, working through a channel which he did not even know existed, took control of every compartment of his mind. Nor did the crew, in particular or en masse, suspect anything amiss when she performed the infinitely easier task of taking over theirs. Nor did the unlucky Eich, when the flying Velan had approached their planet closely enough to make it clear that their establishment was indeed a new one, being built around the nucleus of a Boskonian battleship. Except for their commanding officer they died then and there—and Con was to regret bitterly, later, that she had made this engagement such a one-girl affair.

 

The grounded battleship was a formidable fortress indeed. Under the fierce impact of its offensive beams the Velantians saw their very wallshields flame violet. In return they saw their mighty secondary beams stopped cold by the Boskonian's inner screens, and had to bring into play the inconceivable energies of their primaries before the enemy's space-ship-fortress could be knocked out. And this much of the battle was real. Instrument- and recorder- tapes could be and were being doctored to fit; but spent primary shells could not be simulated. Nor was it thinkable that this superdreadnought and its incipient base should be allowed to survive.

 

Hence, after the dreadful primaries had quieted the Eich's main batteries and had reduced the ground-works to flaming pools of lava, needle- beamers went to work on every minor and secondary control board. Then, the great vessel definitely helpless as a fighting unit, Worsel and his hard-bitten crew thought that they went—thought-screened, full-armored, armed with semi- portables and DeLameters—joyously into the hand-to-hand combat which each craved. Worsel and two of his strongest henchmen attacked the armed and armored Boskonian captain. After a satisfyingly terrific struggle, in the course of which all three of the Velantians—and some others—were appropriately burned and wounded, they overpowered him and carried him bodily into the controlroom of the Velan. This part of the episode, too, was real; as was the complete melting down of the Boskonian vessel which occurred while the transfer was being made.

 

Then, while Con was engaged in the exceedingly delicate task of withdrawing her mind from Worsel's without leaving any detectable trace that she had ever been in it, there happened the completely unexpected; the one thing for which she was utterly unprepared. The mind of the captive captain was wrenched from her control as palpably as a loosely-held stick is snatched from a physical hand; and at the same time there was hurled against her impenetrable barriers an attack which could not possibly have stemmed from any Eichian mind!

 

If her mind had been free, she could have coped with the situation, but it was not. She had to hold Worsel—she knew with cold certainty what would ensue if she did not. The crew? They could be blocked out temporarily—unlike the Velantian Lensman, no one of them could even suspect that he had been in a stasis unless it were long enough to be noticeable upon such timepieces as clocks. The procedure, however, occupied a millisecond or so of precious time; and a considerably longer interval was required to withdraw with the required tracelessness from Worsel's mind. Thus, before she could do anything except protect herself and the Velantian from that surprisingly powerful invading intelligence, all trace of it disappeared and all that remained of their captive was a dead body.

 

Worsel and Constance stared at each other, wordless, for seconds. The Velantian had a completely and accurately detailed memory of everything that had happened up to that instant, the only matter not quite clear being the fact that their hard won captive was dead; the girl's mind was racing to fabricate a bulletproof explanation of that startling fact. Worsel saved her the trouble.

 

"It is of course true," he thought at her finally, "that any mind of sufficient power can destroy by force of will alone the entity of flesh in which it resides. I never thought about this matter before in connection with the Eich, but no detail of the experience your father and I had with them on Jarnevon would support any contention that they do not have minds of the requisite power... and today's battle, being purely physical, would not throw any light on the subject... I wonder if a thing like that could be stopped? That is, if we had been on time...?"

 

"That's it, I think." Con put on her most disarming, most engaging grin in preparation for the most outrageous series of lies of her long career. "And I don't think it can be stopped—at least I couldn't stop him. You see, I got into him a fraction of a second before you did, and in that instant, just like that," in spite of the fact that Worsel could not hear, she snapped her fingers ringingly, "faster even than that, he was gone. I didn't think of it until you brought it up, but you're right as can be—he killed himself to keep us from finding out whatever he knew."

 

Worsel stared at her with six eyes now instead of one, gimlet probes which glanced imperceptibly off her shield. He was not consciously trying to break down her barriers—to his fullest perception they were already down; no barriers were there. He was not consciously trying to integrate or reintegrate any detail or phase of the episode just past—no iota of falsity had appeared at any point or instant. Nevertheless, deep down within those extra reaches that made Worsel of Velantia what he was, a vague disquiet refused to down. It was too... too... Worsel's consciousness could not supply the adjective.

 

Had it been too easy? Very decidedly it had not His utterly worn out, battered and wounded crew refuted that thought. So did his own body, slashed and burned, as well as did the litter of shells and the heaps of smoking slag which had once been an enemy stronghold.

 

Also, even though he had not theretofore thought that he and his crew possessed enough force to do what had just been done, it was starkly unthinkable that anyone, even an Arisian, could have helped him do anything without his knowledge. Particularly how could this girl, daughter of Kimball Kinnison although she was, possibly have stuff enough to play unperceived the part of guardian angel to him, Worsel of Velantia?

 

Least able of all the five Second-Stage Lensmen to appreciate what the Children of the Lens really were, he did not, then or ever, have any inkling of the real truth. But Constance, far behind her cheerfully innocent mask, shivered as she read exactly his disturbed and disturbing thoughts. For, conversely, an unresolved enigma would affect him more than it would any of his fellow L2's. He would work on it until he did resolve it, one way or another. This thing had to be settled, now. And there was a way—a good way.

 

"But I did help you, you big lug!" she stormed, stamping her booted foot in emphasis. "I was in there every second, slugging away with everything I had. Didn't you even feel me, you dope?" She allowed a thought to become evident; widened her eyes in startled incredulity. "You didn't!" she accused, hotly. "You were reveling so repulsively in the thrill of body-to-body fighting, just like you were back there in that cavern of Overlords, that you couldn't have felt a thought if it was driven into you with a D2P pressor! Of course I helped you, you wigglesome clunker! If I hadn't been in there pitching, dulling their edges here and there at critical moments, you'd've had a hell of a time getting them at all! I'm going to flit right now, and I hope I never see you again as long as I live!"

 

This vicious counter-attack, completely mendacious though it was, fitted the facts so exactly that Worsel's inchoate doubts vanished. Moreover, he was even less well equipped than are human men to cope with the peculiarly feminine weapons Constance was using so effectively. Wherefore the Velantian capitulated, almost abjectly, and the girl allowed herself to be coaxed down from her high horse and to become her usual sunny and impish self.

 

But when the Velan was once more on course and she had retired to her cabin, it was not to sleep. Instead, she thought. Was this intellect of the same race as the one whose burst of thought she had caught such a short time before, or not? She could not decide—not enough data. The first thought had been unconscious and quite revealing; this one simply a lethal weapon, driven with a power the memory of which made her gasp again. They could, however, be the same: the mind with which she^had been en rapport could very well be capable of generating the force she had felt. If they were the same, they were something that should be studied, intensively and at once; and she herself had kicked away her only chance to make that study. She had better tell somebody about this, even if it meant confessing her own bird-brained part, and get some competent advice. Who?

 

Kit? No. Not because he would smack her down—she ought to be smacked down!—but because his brain wasn't enough better than her own to do any good. In fact, it wasn't a bit better than hers.

 

Mentor? At the very thought she shuddered, mentally and physically. She would call him in, fast enough, regardless of consequences to herself, if it would do any good, but it wouldn't. She was starkly certain of that. He wouldn't smack her down, like Kit would, but he wouldn't help her, either. He'd just sit there and sneer at her while she stewed, hotter and hotter, in her own juice...

 

"In a childish, perverted, and grossly exaggerated way, daughter Constance, you are right," the Arisian's thought rolled sonorously into her astounded mind. "You got yourself into this: get yourself out. One promising fact, however, I perceive—although seldom and late, you at last begin really to think."

 

In that hour Constance Kinnison grew up.

 

 

 

11. — NADRECK TRAPS A TRAPPER

 

Any human or near-human lensman would have been appalled by the sheer loneliness of Nadreck's long vigil. Almost any one of them would have cursed, fluently and bitterly, when the time came at which he was forced to concede that the being for whom he lay in wait was not going to visit that particular planet.

 

But utterly unhuman Nadreck was not lonely. In fact, there was no word in the vocabulary of his race even remotely resembling the term in definition, connotation, or implication. From his galaxy-wide study he had a dim, imperfect idea of what such an emotion or feeling might be, but he could not begin to understand it. Nor was he in the least disturbed by the fact that Kandron did not appear. Instead, he held his orbit until the minute arrived at which the mathematical probability became point nine nine nine that his proposed quarry was not going to appear. Then, as matter-of-factly as though he had merely taken half an hour out for lunch, he -abandoned his position and set out upon the course so carefully planned for exactly this event.

 

The search for further clues was long and uneventful; but monstrously, unhumanly patient Nadreck stuck to it until he found one. True, it was so slight as to be practically non-existent—a mere fragment of a whisper of zwilnik instruction—but it bore Kandron's unmistakable imprint. The Palainian had expected no more. Kandron would not slip. Momentary leakages from faulty machines would have to occur from time to time, but Kandron's machines would not be at fault either often or long at a time.

 

Nadreck, however, had been ready. Course after course of the most delicate spotting screen ever devised had been out for weeks. So had tracers, radiation absorbers, and every other insidious locating device known to the science of the age. The standard detectors remained blank, of course—no more so than his own conveyance would that of the Onlonian be detectable by any ordinary instruments. And as the Palainian speedster shot away along the most probable course, some fifty delicate instruments in its bow began stabbing that entire region of space with a pattern of needles of force through which a Terrestrial barrel could not have floated untouched.

 

Thus the Boskonian craft—an inherently indetectable speedster—was located; and in that instant was speared by three modified CRX tracers. Nadreck then went inert and began to plot the other speedster's course. He soon learned that that course was unpredictable; that the vessel was being operated statistically, completely at random. This too, then, was a trap.

 

This knowledge disturbed Nadreck no more than had any more-or-less similar event of the previous twenty-odd years. He had realized fully that the leakage could as well have been deliberate as accidental. He had at no time underestimated Kandron's ability; the future alone would reveal whether or not Kandron would at any time underestimate his. He would follow through—there might be a way in which this particular trap could be used against its setter.

 

Leg after leg of meaningless course Nadreck followed, until there came about that which the Palainian knew would happen in time—the speedster held a straight course for more parsecs than six-sigma limits of probability could ascribe to pure randomness. Nadreck knew what that meant. The speedster was returning to its base for servicing, which was precisely the event for which he had been awaiting. It was the base he wanted, not the speedster; and that base would never, under any conceivable conditions, emit any detectable quantity of traceable radiation. To its base, then, Nadreck followed the little space-ship, and to say that he was on the alert as he approached that base is a gross understatement indeed. He expected to set off at least one, and probably many blasts of force. That would almost certainly be necessary in order to secure sufficient information concerning the enemy's defensive screens. It was necessary—but when those blasts arrived Nadreck was elsewhere, calmly analyzing the data secured by his instruments during the brief contact which had triggered the Boskonian projectors into action.

 

So light, so fleeting, and so unorthodox had been Nadreck's touch that the personnel of the now doomed base could not have known with any certainty that any visitor had actually been there. If there had been, the logical supposition would have been that he and his vessel had been resolved into their component atoms. Nevertheless Nadreck waited—as has been shown, he was good at waiting—until the burst of extra vigilance set up by the occurrence would have subsided into ordinary watchfulness. Then he began to act.

 

At first this action was in ultra-slow motion. One millimeter per hour his drill advanced. Drill was synchronized precisely with screen, and so guarded as to give an alarm at a level of interference far below that necessary to energize any probable detector at the generators of the screen being attacked.

 

Through defense after defense Nadreck. made his cautious, indetectable way into the dome. It was a small base, as such things go; manned, as expected, by escapees from Onlo. Scum, too, for the most part; creatures of even baser and more violent passions than those upon whom he had worked in Kandron's Onlonian stronghold. To keep those intractable entities in line during their brutally long tours of duty, a psychological therapist had been given authority second only to that of the base commander. That knowledge, and the fact that there was only one populated dome, made the Palainian come as close to grinning as one of his unsmiling race can.

 

The psychologist wore a multiplex thought-screen, of course, as did everyone else; but that did not bother Nadreck. Kinnison had opened such screens many times; not only by means of his own hands, but also at various times by the use of a dog's jaws, a spider's legs and mandibles, and even a worm's sinuous body. Wherefore, through the agency of a quasi-fourth- dimensional life form literally indescribable to three-dimensional man, Nadreck's ego was soon comfortably ensconced in the mind of the Onlonian.

 

That entity knew in detail every weakness of each of his personnel. It was his duty to watch those weaknesses, to keep them down, to condition each of his wards in such fashion that friction and strife would be minimized. Now, however, he proceeded to do exactly the opposite. One hated another. That hate became a searing obsession, requiring the concentration of every effort upon ways and means of destroying its objects. One feared another. That fear ate in, searing as it went, destroying every normality of outlook and of reason. Many were jealous of their superiors. This emotion, requiring as it does nothing except its own substance upon which to feed, became a fantastically spreading, caustically corrosive blight.

 

To name each ugly, noisome passion or trait resident in that dome is to call the complete roster of the vile; and calmly, mercilessly, unmovedly, ultraefficiently, Nadreck manipulated them all. As though he were playing a Satanic organ he touched a nerve here, a synapse there, a channel somewhere else, bringing the whole group, with the lone exception of the commander, simultaneously to the point of explosion. Nor was any sign of this perfect work evident externally; for everyone there, having lived so long under the iron code of Boskonia, knew exactly the consequences of any infraction of that code.

 

The moment came when passion overmastered sense. One of the monsters stumbled, jostling another. That nudge became, in its recipient's seething mind, a lethal attack by his bitterest enemy. A forbidden projector flamed viciously: the offended one was sating his lust so insensately that he scarcely noticed the blow that in turn rived away his own life. Detonated by this incident, the personnel of the base exploded as one. Blasters raved briefly; knives and swords bit and slashed; improvised bludgeons crashed against preselected targets; hard-taloned appendages gouged and tore. And Nadreck, who had long since withdrawn from the mind of the psychologist, timed with a stop- watch the duration of the whole grisly affair, from the instant of the first stumble to the death of the last Onlonian outside the commander's locked and armored sanctum. Ninety-eight and three-tenths seconds. Good—a nice job.

 

The commander, as soon as it was safe to do so, rushed out of his guarded room to investigate. Amazed, disgruntled, dismayed by the to him completely inexplicable phenomenon he had just witnessed, he fell an easy prey to the Palainian Lensman. Nadreck invaded his mind and explored it, channel by channel; finding—not entirely unexpectedly—that this Number One knew nothing whatever of interest.

 

Nadreck did not destroy the base. Instead, after setting up a small instrument in the commander's private office, he took that unfortunate wight aboard his speedster and drove off into space. He immobilized his captive, not by loading him with manacles, but by deftly severing a few essential nerve trunks. Then he really studied the Onlonian's mind—line by line, this time; almost cell by cell. A master—almost certainly Kandron himself—had operated here. There was not the slightest trace of tampering; no leads to or indications of what the activating stimulus would have to be; all that the fellow now knew was that it was his job to hold his base inviolate against any and every form of intrusion and to keep that speedster flitting around all over space on a director-by-chance as much as possible of the time, leaking slightly a certain signal now and then.

 

Even under this microscopic re-examination, he knew nothing whatever of Kandron; nothing of Onlo or of Thrale; nothing of any Boskonian organization, activity, or thing; and Nadreck, although baffled still, remained undisturbed. This trap, he thought, could almost certainly be used against the trapper. Until a certain call came through his relay in the base, he would investigate the planets of this system.

 

During the investigation a thought impinged upon his Lens from Karen Kinnison, one of the very few warm-blooded beings for whom he had any real liking or respect.

 

"Busy, Nadreck?" she asked, as casually as though she had just left him.

 

"In large, yes. In detail and at the moment, no. Is there any small problem in which I can be of assistance?"

 

"Not small—big. I just got the funniest distress call I ever heard or heard of. On a high band—way, "way up—there. Do you know of any race that thinks on that band?"

 

"I do not believe so." He thought for a moment. "Definitely, no."

 

"Neither do I. It wasn't broadcast, either, but was directed at any member of a special race or tribe—very special. Classification, straight Z's to ten or twelve places, she—or it—seemed to be trying to specify."

 

"A frigid race of extreme type, adapted to an environment having a temperature of approximately one degree absolute."

 

"Yes. Like you, only more so." Kay paused, trying to put into intelligible thought a picture inherently incapable of reception or recognition by her as yet strictly three dimensional intelligence. "Something like the Eich, too, but not much. Their visible aspect was obscure, fluid... amorphous... Indefinite?... skip it—I couldn't really perceive it, let alone describe it I wish you had caught that thought."

 

"I wish so, too—it is very interesting. But tell me—if the thought was directed, not broadcast, how could you have received it?"

 

"That's the funniest part of the whole thing." Nadreck could feel the girl frown in concentration. "It came at me from all sides at once—never felt anything like it. Naturally I started feeling around for the source— particularly since it was a distress signal—but before I could get—even a general direction of the origin it... it... well, it didn't really disappear or really weaken, but something happened to it. I couldn't read it any more—and that really did throw me for a loss." She paused, then went on. "It didn't so much go away as go down, some way or other. Then it vanished completely, without really going anywhere. I'm not making myself clear—I simply can't—but have I given you enough leads so that you can make any sense at all out of any part of it?"

 

"I'm very sorry to say that I can not."

 

Nor could he, ever, for excellent reasons. That girl had a mind whose power, scope, depth, and range she herself did not, could not even dimly understand; a mind to be fully comprehended only by an adult of her own third level. That mind had in fact received in toto a purely fourth-dimensional thought. If Nadreck had received it, he would have understood it and recognized it for what it was only because of his advanced Arisian training—no other Palainian could have done so—and it would have been sheerly unthinkable to him that any warm-blooded and therefore strictly three dimensional entity could by any possibility receive such a thought; or, having received it, could understand any part of it. Nevertheless, if he had really concentrated the full powers of his mind upon the girl's attempted description, he might very well have recognized in it the clearest possible three-dimensional delineation of such a thought; and from that point he could have gone on to a full understanding of the Children of the Lens.

 

However, he did not so concentrate. It was constitutionally impossible for him to devote real mental effort to any matter not immediately pertaining to the particular task in hand. Therefore neither he nor Karen Kinnison were to know until much later that she had been en rapport with one of Civilization's bitterest, most implacable foes; that she had seen with clairvoyant and telepathic accuracy the intrinsically three dimensionally indescribable form assumed in their winter by the horrid, the monstrous inhabitants of that viciously hostile world, the unspeakable planet Ploor!

 

"I was afraid you couldn't." Kay's thought came clear. "That makes it all the more important—important enough for you to drop whatever you're doing and join me in getting to the bottom of it, if you could be made to see it, which of course you can't."

 

"I am about to take Kandron, and nothing in the Universe can be as important as that," Nadreck stated quietly, as a simple matter of fact. "You have observed this that lies here?"

 

"Yes." Karen, en rapport with Nadreck, was of course cognizant of the captive, but it had not occurred to her to mention this monster. When dealing with Nadreck she, against all the tenets of her sex, exhibited as little curiosity as did the coldly emotionless Lensman himself. "Since you bid so obviously for the question, why are you keeping it alive—or rather, not dead?"

 

"Because he is my sure link to Kandron." If Nadreck of Palain ever was known to gloat, it was then. "He is Kandron's creature, placed by Kandron personally as an agency of my destruction. Kandron's brain alone holds the key compulsion which will restore his memories. At some future time—perhaps a second from now, perhaps a cycle of years—Kandron will use that key to learn how his minion fares.* Kandron's thought will energize my re-transmitter in the dome; the compulsion will be forwarded to this still-living brain. The brain, however, will be in my speedster, not in that undamaged fortress. You now understand why I cannot stray far from this being's base; you should see that you should join me instead of me joining you."

 

"No; not definite enough," Karen countered decisively, "I can't see myself passing up a thing like this for the opportunity of spending the next ten years .floating around in an orbit, doing nothing. However, I check you to a certain extent—when and if anything really happens, shoot me a thought and I'll rally "round."

 

The linkage broke without formal adieus. Nadreck went his way. Karen went hers. She did not, however, go far along the way she had had in mind. She was still precisely nowhere in her quest when she felt a thought, of a type that only her brother or an Arisian could send. It was Kit.

 

"Hi, Kay!" A warm, brotherly contact. "How'r'ya doing, sis—are you growing up?"

 

"Of course I'm grown up! What a question!"

 

"Don't get stiff, Kay, there's method in this. Got to be sure."

 

All trace of levity gone, he probed her unmercifully. "Not too bad, at that, for a kid. As dad would express it, if he could feel you this way, you're twenty-nine numbers Brinnell harder than a diamond drill. Plenty of jets for this job, and by the time the real one comes, you'll probably be ready."

 

"Cut the rigmarole, Kit!" she" snapped, and hurled a vicious bolt of her own. If Kit did not counter it as easily as he had handled her earlier efforts, he did not reveal the fact. "What job? What d'you think you're talking about? I'm on a job now that I wouldn't drop for Nadreck, and I don't think I'll drop it for you."

 

"You'll have to." Kit's thought was grim. "Mother is going to have to go to work on Lyrane II. The probability is pretty bad that there is or will be something there that she can't handle. Remote control is out, or I'd do it myself, but I can't work on Lyrane II in person. Here's the whole picture—look it over. You can see, sis, that you're elected, so hop to it."

 

"I won't!" she stormed. "I can't—I'm too busy. How about asking Con, or Kat, or Cam?"

 

"They don't fit the picture," he explained patiently—for him. "In this case hardness is indicated, as you can see for yourself."

 

"Hardness, phooey!" she jeered. "To handle Ladora of Lyrane? She thinks she's a hard-boiled egg, I know, but..."

 

"Listen, you bird-brained knot-head!" Kit cut in, venomously. "You're fogging the issue deliberately—stop it! I spread you the whole picture—you know as well as I do that while there's nothing definite as yet, the thing needs covering and you're the one to cover it. But no—just because I'm the one to suggest to or ask anything of you, you've always got to go into that damned mulish act of yours..."

 

"Be silent, children, and attend!" Both flushed violently as Mentor came between them. "Some of the weaker thinkers here are beginning to despair of you, but my visualization of your development is still clear. To mold such characters as yours sufficiently, and yet not too much, is a delicate task indeed; but one which must and shall be done. Christopher, come to me at once, in person. Karen, I would suggest that you go to Lyrane and do there whatever you find necessary to do."

 

"I won't—I've still got this job here to do!" Karen defied even the ancient Arisian sage.

 

"That, daughter, can and should wait. I tell you solemnly, as a fact, that if you do not go to Lyrane you will never get the faintest clue to that which you now seek."

 

 

 

12. — KALONIA BECOMES OF INTEREST

 

Christopher Kinnison drove toward Arisia, seething.

 

Why couldn't those damned sisters of his have sense to match their brains- -or why couldn't he have had some brothers? Especially—right now—Kay. If she had the sense of a Zabriskan fontema she'd know that this job was important and would snap into it, instead of wild-goose-chasing all over space. If he were Mentor he'd straighten her out. He had decided to straighten her out once himself, and he grinned wryly to himself at the memory of what had happened. What Mentor had done to him, before he even got started, was really rugged. What he would like to do, next time he got within reach of her, was to shake her until her teeth rattled.

 

Or would he? Uh-uh. By no stretch of the imagination could he picture himself hurting any one of them. They were swell kids—in fact, the finest people he had ever known. He had rough-housed and wrestled with them plenty of times, of course—he liked it, and so did they. He could handle any one of them—he surveyed without his usual complacence his two-hundred-plus pounds of meat, bone, and gristle—he ought to be able to, since he outweighed them by fifty or sixty pounds; but it wasn't easy. Worse than Valerians—just like taking on a combination of boa constrictor and cateagle—and when Kat and Con ganged up on him that time they mauled him to a pulp in nothing flat.

 

But jet back! Weight wasn't it, except maybe among themselves. He had never met a Valerian yet whose shoulders he couldn't pin flat to the mat in a hundred seconds, and the smallest of them outweighed him two to one. Conversely, although he had never thought of it before, what his sisters had taken from him, without even a bruise, would have broken any ordinary women up into masses of compound fractures. They were—they must be—made of different stuff. His thoughts took a new tack. The kids were special in another way, too, he had noticed lately, without paying it any particular attention. It might tie in. They didn't feel like other girls. After dancing with one of them, other girls felt like robots made out of putty. Their flesh was different. It was firmer, finer, infinitely more responsive. Each individual cell seemed to be endowed with a flashing, sparkling life; a life which, interlinking with that of one of his own cells, made their bodies as intimately one as were their perfectly synchronized minds.

 

But what did all this have to do with their lack of sense? QX, they were nice people. QX, he couldn't beat their brains out, either physically or mentally. But damn it all, there ought to be some way of driving some ordinary common sense through their fine-grained, thick, hard, tough skulls!

 

Thus it was that Kit approached Arisia in a decidedly mixed frame of mind. He shot through the barrier without slowing down and without notification. Inciting his ship, he fought her into an orbit around the planet. The shape of the orbit was immaterial, as long as its every inch was inside Arisia's innermost screen. For young Kinnison knew precisely what those screens were and exactly what they were for. He knew that distance of itself meant nothing—Mentor could give anyone either basic or advanced treatments just as well from a distance of a thousand million parsecs as at hand to hand. The reason for the screens and for the personal visits was the existence of the Eddorians, who had minds probably as capable as the Arisians' own. And throughout all the infinite reaches of the macro-cosmic Universe, only within these highly special screens was there certainty of privacy from the spying senses of the ultimate foe.

 

"The time has come, Christopher, for the last treatment I am able to give you," Mentor announced without preamble, as soon as Kit had checked his orbit.

 

"Oh—so soon? I thought you were pulling me in to pin my ears back for fighting with Kay—the dim-wit!"

 

"That, while a minor matter, is worthy of passing mention, since it is illustrative of the difficulties inherent in the project of developing, without overcontrolling, such minds as yours. En route here, you made a masterly summation of the situation, with one outstanding omission."

 

"Huh? What omission? I covered it like a blanket!"

 

"You assumed throughout, and still assume, as you always do in dealing with your sisters, that you are unassailably right; that your conclusion is the only tenable one; that they are always wrong."

 

"But damn it, they are! That's why you sent Kay to Lyrane!"

 

"In these conflicts with your sisters, you have been right in approximately half of the cases," Mentor informed him.

 

"But how about their fights with each other?"

 

"Do you know of any such?"

 

"Why... uh... can't say that I do." Kit's surprise was plain. "But since they fight with me so much, they must..."

 

"That does not follow, and for a very good reason. We may as well discuss that reason now, as it is a necessary part of the education which you are about to receive. You already know that your sisters are very different, each from the other. Know now, youth, that each was specifically developed to be so completely different that there is no possible " point which could be made an issue between any two of them."

 

"Ungh... um..." It took some time for Kit to digest that news. "Then where do I come in that they all fight with me at the drop of a hat?"

 

"That, too, while regrettable, is inevitable. Each of your sisters, as you may have suspected, is to play a tremendous part in that which is to come. The Lensmen, we of Arisia, all will contribute, but upon you Children of the Lens—especially upon the girls—will fall the greater share of the load. Your individual task will be that of coordinating the whole; a duty which no Arisian is or ever can be qualified to perform. You will have to direct the efforts of your sisters; re-enforcing every heavily-attacked point with your own incomparable force and drive; keeping them smoothly in mesh and in place. As a side issue, you will also have to coordinate the feebler efforts of us of Arisia, the Lensmen, the Patrol, and whatever other minor forces we may be able to employ."

 

"Holy—Klono's—claws!" Kit was gasping like a fish. "Just where, Mentor, do, you figure I'm going to pick up the jets to swing that load? And as to coordinating the kids—that's out. I'd make just one suggestion to any one of them and she'd forget all about the battle and tear into me—no, I'll take that back. The stickier the going, the closer they rally 'round."

 

"Right. It will always be so. Now, youth, that you have these facts, explain these matters to me, as a sort of preliminary exercise."

 

"I think I see." Kit thought intensely. "The kids don't fight with each other because they don't overlap. They fight with me because my central field overlaps them all. They have no occasion to fight with anybody else, nor have I, because with anybody else our viewpoint is always right and the other fellow knows it—except for Palainians and such, who think along different lines than we do. Thus, Kay never fights with Nadreck. When he goes off the beam, she simply ignores him and goes on about her business. But with them and me... we'll have to learn to arbitrate, or something, I suppose..." his thought trailed off.

 

"Manifestations of adolescence; with adulthood, now coming fast, they will pass. Let us get on with the work."

 

"But wait a minute!" Kit protested. "About this coordinator thing. I can't do it. I'm too much of a kid—I won't be ready for a job like that for a thousand years!"

 

"You must be ready," Mentor's thought was inexorable. "And, when the time comes, you shall be. Now, youth, come fully into my mind."

 

There is no use repeating in detail the progress of an Arisian super- education, especially since the most accurate possible description of the most important of those details would be intrinsically meaningless. When, finally, Kit was ready to leave Arisia, he looked much older and more mature than before; he felt immensely older than he looked. The concluding conversation of that visit, however, is worth recording.

 

"You now know, Christopher," Mentor mused, "What you children are and how you came to be. You are the accomplishment of long lifetimes of work. It is with profound satisfaction that I now perceive clearly that those lifetimes have not been spent in vain."

 

"Yours, you mean." Kit was embarrassed, but one point still bothered him. "Dad met and married mother, yes, but how about the others? Tregonsee, Worsel, and Nadreck? They and the corresponding females—-don't take that literally for Nadreck, of course—were also penultimates, of lines as long as ours. You Arisians decided that the human stock was best, so none of the other Second-Stage Lensmen ever met their complements. Not that it could make any difference to them, of course, but I should think that three of your fellow students wouldn't feel so good."

 

"Ah, youth, I am very glad indeed that you mention the point." The Arisian's thought was positively gleeful. "You have at no time, then, detected anything peculiar about this that you know as Mentor of Arisia?"

 

"Why, of course not. How could I? Or, rather, why should I?"

 

"Any lapse on our part, however slight, from practically perfect synchronization would have revealed to such a mentality as yours that I whom you know as Mentor am not an individual, but four. While we each worked as individuals upon all of the experimental lines, whenever we dealt with any one of the penultimates or ultimates we did so as a fusion. This was necessary, not only for your fullest possible development, but also to be sure that each of us had complete data upon every minute facet of the truth. While it was in no sense important to the work itself to keep you in ignorance of Mentor's plurality, the fact that we could keep you ignorant of it, particularly now that you have become adult, showed that our work was being done in a really workman-like fashion."

 

Kit whistled; a long, low whistle which was tribute enough to those who knew what it meant. He knew what he meant, but there were not enough words or thoughts to express it.

 

"But you're going to keep on being Mentor, aren't you?",he asked. "I am. The real task, as you know, lies ahead."

 

"QX. You say I'm adult. I'm not. You imply that I'm more than several notches above you in qualifications. I could laugh myself silly about that one, if it wasn't so serious. Why, any one of you Arisians has forgotten more than I know, and could tie me up into bow-knots!"

 

"There are elements of truth in your thought. That you can now be called adult, however, does not mean that you have attained your full power; only that you are able to use effectively the powers you have and are able to acquire other and larger powers."

 

"But what are those powers?" Kit demanded. "You've hinted on that same theme a thousand times, and I don't know what you mean any better than I did before!"

 

"You must develop your own powers." Mentor's thought was as final as Fate. "Your mind is potentially far abler than mine. You will in time come to know my mind in full; I never will be able to know yours. For the lesser, but full mind to attempt to instruct in methodology the greater, although emptier one, is to set that greater mind in an undersized mold and thus to do it irreparable harm. You have the abilities and the powers. You will have to develop them yourself, by the perfection of techniques concerning which I can give you no instructions whatever."

 

"But surely you can give me some kind of a hint!" Kit pleaded. "I'm just a kid, I tell you—I don't even know how or where to begin!"

 

Under Kit's startled mental gaze, Mentor split suddenly into four parts, laced together by a pattern of thoughts so intricate and so rapid as to be unrecognizable. The parts fused and again Mentor spoke.

 

"I can point the way in only the broadest, most general terms. It has been decided, however, that I can give you one hint—or, more properly, one illustration. The surest test of knowledge known to us is the visualization of the Cosmic All. All science is, as you know, one. The true key to power lies in the knowledge of the underlying reasons for the succession of events. If it is pure causation—that is, if any given state of things follows as an inevitable consequence because of the state existing an infinitesimal instant before—then the entire course of the macrocosmic universe was set for the duration of all eternity in the instant of its coming into being. This well-known concept, the stumbling-block upon which many early thinkers came to grief, we now know to be false. On the other hand, if pure randomness were to govern, natural laws as we know them could not exist. Thus neither pure causation nor pure randomness alone can govern the succession of events.

 

"The truth, then, must lie somewhere in between. In the macrocosmos, causation prevails; in the micro-, randomness; both in accord with the mathematical laws of probability. It is in the region between them—the intermediate zone, or the interface, so to speak—that the greatest problems lie. The test of validity of any theory, as you know, is the accuracy of the predictions which are made possible by its use, and our greatest thinkers have shown that the completeness and fidelity of any visualization of the Cosmic All are linear functions of the clarity of definition of the components of that interface... Full knowledge of that indeterminate zone would mean infinite power and a statistically perfect visualization. None of these things, however, will ever be realized; for the acquirement of that full knowledge would require infinite time.

 

"That is all I can tell you. It will, properly studied, be enough. I have built within you a solid foundation; yours alone is the task of erecting upon that foundation a structure strong enough to withstand the forces which will be thrown against it.

 

"It is perhaps natural, in view of what you have recently gone through, that you should regard the problem of the Eddorians as one of insuperable difficulty. Actually, however, it is not, as you will perceive when you have spent a few weeks in reintegrating yourself. You must not, you shall not, and in my clear visualization you do not, fail."

 

Communication ceased. Kit made his way groggily to his control board, went free, and lined out for Klovia. For a guy whose education was supposed to be complete, he felt remarkably like a total loss with no insurance. He had asked for advice and had got—what? A dissertation on philosophy, mathematics, and physics—good enough stuff, probably, if he could see what Mentor was driving at, but not of much immediate use. He did have a brainful of new stuff, though—didn't know yet what half of it was—he'd better be getting it licked into shape. He'd "sleep" on it.

 

He did so, and as he lay quiescent in his bunk the tiny pieces of an incredibly complex jig-saw puzzle began to click into place. The ordinary zwilniks—all the small fry fitted in well enough. The Overlords of Delgon. The Kalonians... hm... he'd better check with dad on that angle. The Eich— under control. Kandron of Onlo, ditto. "X" was in safe hands; Cam had already been alerted to watch her step. Some planet named Ploor—what in all the purple hells of Palain had Mentor meant by that crack? Anyway, that piece didn't fit anywhere—yet. That left Eddore—and at the thought a series of cold waves raced up and down the young Lensman's spine. Nevertheless, Eddore was his oyster—his, and nobody else's. Mentor had made that plain enough. Everything the Arisians had done for umpteen skillions of years had been aimed at the Eddorians. They had picked him out to emcee the show—and how could a man coordinate an attack against something he knew nothing about? And the only way to get acquainted with Eddore and its denizens was to go there. Should he call in the kids? He should not. Each of them had her hands full of her own job; that of developing her own full self. He had his; and the more he studied the question, the clearer it became that the first number on the program of his self-development was—would have to be—a singlehanded expedition against the key planet of Civilization's top-ranking foes.

 

He sprang out of his bunk, changed his vessel's course, and lined out a thought to his father.

 

"Dad? Kit. Been flitting around out Arisia way, and picked up an idea I want to pass along to you. It's about Kalonians. What do you know about them?"

 

"They're blue..."

 

"I don't mean that." "I know you don't. There were Helmuth, Jalte, Prellin, Crowninshield... all I can think of at the moment. Big operators, son, and smart hombres, if I do say so myself as shouldn't; but they're all ancient history... hold it! Maybe I know of a modern one, too—Eddie's Lensman. The only part of that picture that was sharp was the Lens, since Eddie was never analytically interested in any of the hundreds of types of people he met, but there was something about that Lensman... I'll bring him back and focus him as sharply as I can... there." Both men studied the blurred statue posed in the Gray Lensman's mind. "Wouldn't you say he could be a Kalonian?"

 

"Check. I wouldn't want to say much more than that. But about that Lens— did you really examine it? It is sharp—under the circumstances, of course, it would be."

 

"Certainly! Wrong in every respect—rhythm, chroma, context, and aura. Definitely not Arisian; therefore Boskonian. That's the point—that's what I was afraid of, you know."

 

"Double check. And that point ties in tight with the one that made me call you just now, that everybody, including you and me, seems to have missed. I've been searching my memory for five hours—you know what my memory is like—and I have heard of exactly two other Kalonians. They were big operators, too. I have never heard of the planet itself. To me it is a startling fact that the sum total of my information on Kalonia, reliable or otherwise, is that it produced seven big-shot zwilniks; six of them before I was born. Period."

 

Kit felt his father's jaw drop.

 

"No, I don't remember of hearing anything about the planet, either," the older man finally replied. "But I'll bet I can get you all the information you want in fifteen minutes."

 

"Credits to millos it'll be a lot nearer fifteen days. You can find it sometime, though, if anybody can—that's why I'm taking it up with you. While I don't want to seem to be giving a Gray Lensman orders"—that jocular introduction had come to be a sort of ritual in the Kinnison family—"I would very diffidently suggest that there might be some connection between that completely unnoticed planet and some of the things we don't know about Boskonia."

 

"Diffident! You?" The Gray Lensman laughed deeply. "Like a hydride bomb! I'll start a search of Kalonia right away. As to your credits-to-millos- fifteen-days thing, I'd be ashamed to take your money. You don't know our librarians or our system. Ten millos, even money, that we get operational data in less than five G-P days from right now. Want it?"

 

"I'll say so. I'll wear that cento on my tunic as a medal of victory over the Gray Lensman. I do know the size of these here two galaxies!"

 

"QX—it's a bet. I'll Lens you when we get the dope. In the meantime, Kit, remember that you're my favorite son."

 

"Well, you're not so bad, yourself. Any time I want mother to divorce you so as to change fathers for me I'll suggest it to her." What a terrific, what a tremendous meaning was heterodyned upon that seemingly light exchange! "Clear ether, dad!"

 

"Clear ether, son!"

 

 

 

13. — CLARRISSA TAKES HER L-2 WORK

 

Thousands of years were to pass before Christopher Kinnison could develop the ability to visualize, from the contemplation of one fact or artifact, the entire Universe to which it belonged. He could not even plan in detail his one-man invasion of Eddore until he could integrate all available data concerning the planet Kalonia into his visualization of the Boskonian Empire. One unknown, Ploor, blurred his picture badly enough; two such completely unknown factors made visualization, even in broad, impossible. Anyway, he decided, he had one more job to do before he tackled the key planet of the enemy; and now, while he was waiting for the dope on Kalonia, would be the best time to do it. Wherefore he sent out a thought to his mother. "Hi, First Lady of the Universe! 'Tis thy first-born who wouldst fain converse with thee. Art pressly engaged in matters of moment or import?" "Art not, Kit." Clarrissa's characteristic chuckle was as infectious, as full of the joy of life, as ever. "Not that it would make any difference—but methinks I detect an undertone of seriosity beneath thy persiflage. Spill it."

 

"Let's make it a rendezvous, instead," he suggested. "We're fairly close, I think—closer than we've been for a long time. Where are you, exactly?" "Oh! Can we? Wonderful!" She marked her location and velocity in his mind. She made no effort to conceal her joy at the idea of a personal meeting. She never had tried and she never would try to make him put first matters other than first. She had not expected to see him again, physically, until this war was over. But if she could... ! "QX. Hold your course and speed; I'll be seeing you in eighty-three minutes. In the meantime, it'll be just as well if we don't communicate, even by Lens..." "Why, son?" "Nothing definite—just a hunch, is all. 'Bye, gorgeous!" The two speedsters approached each other—incited—matched intrinsics—went free—flashed into contact—sped away together upon Clarrissa's original course. "Hi, mums!" Kit spoke into a visiphone. "I should of course come to you, but it might be better if you come in here—I've got some special rigs set up here that I don't want to leave. QX?" He snapped on one of the special rigs as he spoke—a device which he himself had built and installed; the generator of the most efficient thought-screen then known. "Why, of course!" She came, and was swept off her feet in the exuberance of her tall son's embrace; a greeting which she returned with equal fervor. "It's nice, mother, seeing you again." Words, or thoughts even, were so inadequate! Kit's voice was a trifle rough; his eyes were not completely dry. "Uh-huh. It is nice," she agreed, snuggling her spectacular head even more firmly into the curve of his shoulder. "Mental contact is better than nothing, of course, but this is perfect!"

 

"Just as much a menace to navigation as ever, aren't you?" He held her at arm's length and shook his head in mock disapproval. "Do you think it's quite right for one woman to have so much of everything when all the others have so little of anything?"

 

"Honestly, I don't." She and Kit had always been exceptionally close; now her love for and her pride in this splendid creature, her son and her first- born, simply would not be denied. "You're joking, I know, but that strikes too deep for comfort. I wake up in the night to wonder why, of all the women in existence, I should be so lucky, especially in my husband and children... QX, skip it." Kit was shying away—she should have known better than to try in words even to skirt the profound depths of sentiment which both she and he knew so well were there.

 

"Get back onto the beam, gorgeous, you know what I meant. Look at yourself in the mirror some day—or do you, perchance?"

 

"Once in a while—maybe twice." She giggled unaffectedly. "You don't think all this charm and glamor conies without effort, do you? But maybe you'd better get back onto the beam yourself—you didn't come all these parsecs out of your way to say pretty things to your mother—even though I admit they've built up my ego no end."

 

"On target, dead center." Kit had been grinning, but he sobered quickly. "I wanted to talk to you about Lyrane and the job you're figuring on doing out there."

 

"Why?" she demanded. "Do you know anything about "Unfortunately, I don't." Kit's black frown of concentration reminded her forcibly of his father's characteristic scowl. "Guesses—suspicions—theories—not even good hunches. But I thought... I wondered..." He paused, embarrassed as a schoolboy, then went on with a rush: "Would you mind it too much if I went into something pretty personal?"

 

"You know I wouldn't, son." In contrast to Kit's usual clarity and precision of thought, the question was highly ambiguous, but Clarrissa covered both angles. "I can conceive of no subject, event, action, or thing, in either my life or yours, too intimate or too personal to discuss with you in full. Can you?"

 

"No, I can't—but this is different. As a woman, you're tops—the finest and best that ever lived." This statement, made with all the matter-of-factness of stating that a triangle had three corners, thrilled Clarrissa through and through. "As a Gray Lensman you're over the rest of them like a cirrus cloud. But you should rate full Second Stage, and... well, you may run up against something too hot to handle, some day, and I... that is, you..."

 

"You mean that I don't measure up?" she asked, quietly. "I know very well I don't, and admitting an evident fact should not hurt my feelings a bit. Don't interrupt, please," as Kit began to protest. "In fact, it is sheerest effrontery—it has always bothered me terribly, Kit—to be classed as a Lensman at all, considering what splendid men they all are and what each one of them had to go through to earn his Lens, to say nothing of a Release. You know as well as I do that I've never done a single thing to earn or to deserve it. It was handed to me on a silver platter. I'm not worthy of it, Kit, and all the real Lensmen know I'm not. They must know it, Kit—they must feel that way!"

 

"Did you ever express yourself in exactly that way before, to anybody? You didn't, I know." Kit stopped sweating; this was going to be easier than he had feared.

 

"I couldn't, Kit, it was too deep; but as I said, I can talk anything over with you."

 

"QX. We can settle that fast enough if you'll answer just one question. Do you honestly believe that you would have been given the Lens if you were not absolutely worthy of it? Perfectly—in every minute particular?"

 

"Why, I never thought of it that way... probably not... no, certainly pot." Clarrissa's somber mien lightened markedly. "But I still don't see how or why..."

 

"Clear enough," Kit interrupted. "You were born with what the rest of them had to work so hard for—with stuff that no other woman, anywhere, ever had."

 

"Except the girls, of course," Clarrissa corrected, half absently.

 

"Except the kids," he concurred. It could do no harm to agree with his mother's statement of a self-evident fact. "You can take it from me, as one who knows that the other Lensmen know you've got plenty of jets. They know very well that the Arisians wouldn't make a Lens for anybody who hasn't got what it takes. And so, very neatly, we've stripped ship for the action I came over here to see you about. It isn't a case of you not measuring up, because you do, in every respect. It's simply that you're short a few jets that you ought by rights to have. You really are a Second-Stage Lensman—you know that, mums—but you never went to Arisia for your L2 work. I hate to see you blast off without full equipment into what may prove to be a big-time job; especially when you're so eminently able to take it. Mentor could give you the works in a few hours. Why don't you flit for Arisia right now, or let me take you there?"

 

"No—NO!" Clarrissa backed away, shaking her head emphatically. "Never! I couldn't, Kit, ever—not possibly!" "Why not?" Kit was amazed. "Why, mother, you're actually shaking!"

 

"I know I am—I can't help it. That's why. He's the only thing in the entire Universe that I'm really afraid of. I can talk about him without quite getting goose-bumps all over me, but the mere thought of actually being with him simply scares me into shivering, quivering fits—no less."

 

"I see... it might very well work that way, at that Does dad know it?"

 

"Yes—or, that is, he knows I'm afraid of him, but he doesn't know it the way you do—it simply doesn't register in true color. Kim can't conceive of me being either a coward or a cry-baby. And I don't want him to, either, Kit, so please don't tell him, ever."

 

"I won't—he'd fry me to a cinder in my own grease if I did. Frankly, I can't see any part of your self-portrait, either. As a matter of cold fact, you are so obviously neither a coward nor a cry-baby... well, that's about the silliest crack you ever made. What you've really got, mums, is a fixation, and if it can't be removed..."

 

"It can't," she declared flatly. "I've tried that, now and then, ever since before you were born. Whatever it is, it's a permanent installation and it's really deep. I've known all along that Kim didn't give me the whole business—he couldn't—and I've tried again and again to make myself go to Arisia, or at least to call Mentor about it, but I can't do it, Kit—I simply can't!"

 

"I understand." Kit nodded. He did understand, now. What she felt was not, in essence and at bottom, fear at all. It was worse than fear, and deeper. It was true revulsion; the basic, fundamental, sub-conscious, sex-based reaction of an intensely vital human female against a mental monstrosity who had not had a sexual thought for countless thousands of her years. She could neither analyze nor understand her feeling; but it was as immutable, as ineradicable, and as old as the surging tide of life itself.

 

"But there's another way, just as good—probably better, as far as you're concerned. You aren't afraid of me, are you?"

 

"What a question! Of course I'm not... why, do you mean you..." Her expressive eyes widened. "You children—especially you—are far beyond us... as of course you should be... but can you, Kit? Really?"

 

Kit keyed a part of his mind to an ultra-high level. "I know the techniques, Mentor, but the first question is, should I do it?"

 

"You should, youth. The time has come when it is necessary."

 

"Second—I've never done anything like this before, and she's my own mother. If I make one slip I'll never forgive myself. Will you stand by and see that I don't slip? And stand guard?"

 

"I will stand by and stand guard."

 

"I really can, mums." Kit answered her question with no perceptible pause. "That is, if you're willing to put everything you've got into it. Just letting me into your mind isn't enough. You'll have to sweat blood—you'll think you've been run through a hammer-mill and spread out on a Delgonian torture screen to dry."

 

"Don't worry about that, Kit." All the passionate intensity of Clarrissa's being was in her vibrant voice. "If you just knew how utterly I've been longing for it—I'll work; and whatever you give me I can take."

 

"I'm sure of that. And, not to work under false pretenses, I'd better tell you how I know. Mentor showed me what to do and told me to do it."

 

"Mentor!"

 

"Mentor," Kit agreed. "He knew that it was a psychological impossibility for you to work with him, and that you could and would work with me. So he appointed me a committee of one." Clarrissa was reacting to this news as it was inevitable that she should react; and to give her time to steady down he went on:

 

"Mentor also knew, and so do you and I, that even though you are afraid of him, you know what he is and what he means to Civilization. I had to tell you this so you'd know, without any tinge of doubt, that I'm not a half- baked kid setting out to do a man's job of work."

 

"Jet back, Kit! I may have thought a lot of different things about you at times, but 'half-baked' was never one of them. That's your own thinking, not mine."

 

"I wouldn't wonder." Kit grinned wryly. "My ego could stand some stiffening right now. This isn't going to be funny. You're too fine a woman, and I think too much of you, to enjoy the prospect of mauling you around so unmercifully."

 

"Why, Kit!" Her mood was changing fast. Her old-time, impish smile came back in force. "You aren't weakening, surely? Shall I hold your hand?"

 

"Uh-huh—cold feet," he admitted. "It might be a smart idea, at that, holding hands. Physical linkage. Well, I'm as ready as I ever will be, I guess—whenever you are, say so. And you'd better sit down before you fall down."

 

"QX, Kit—come in."

 

Kit came; and at the first terrific surge of his mind within hers the Red Lensman caught her breath, stiffened in every muscle, and all but screamed in agony. Kit's fingers needed their strength as her hands clutched his and closed in a veritable spasm. She had thought that she knew what to expect; but the reality was different—much different. She had suffered before. On Lyrane II, although she had never told anyone of it, she had been burned and wounded and beaten. She had borne five children. This was as though every poignant experience of her past had been rolled into one, raised to the nth power, and stabbed relentlessly into the deepest, tenderest, most sensitive centers of her being.

 

And Kit, boring in and in and in, knew exactly what to do; and, now that he had started, he proceeded unflinchingly and with exact precision to do what had to be done. He opened up her mind as she had never dreamed it possible for a mind to open. He separated the tiny, jammed compartments, each completely from every other. He showed her how to make room for this tremendous expansion and watched her do it, against the shrieking protests of every cell and fiber of her body and of her brain. He drilled new channels everywhere, establishing an inconceivably complex system of communication lines of infinite conductivity. He knew just what he was doing to her, since the same thing had been done to him so recently, but he kept on relentlessly until the job was done. Completely done.

 

Then, working together, they sorted and labeled and classified and catalogued. They checked and double checked. Finally she knew, and Kit knew that she knew, every hitherto unplumbed recess of her mind and every individual cell of her brain. Every iota of every quality and characteristic, every scrap of knowledge she had ever acquired or ever would acquire, would be at her command instantaneously and effortlessly. Then, and only then, did Kit withdraw his mind from hers.

 

"Did you say that I was short just a few jets, Kit?" She got up groggily and mopped her face; upon which her few freckles stood out surprisingly dark upon a background of white. "I'm a wreck—I'd better go and..."

 

"As you were for just a sec—I'll break out a bottle of fayalin. This rates a celebration of sorts, don't you think?"

 

"Very much so." As she sipped the pungently aromatic red liquid her color began to come back. "No wonder I felt as though I were missing something all these years. Thanks, Kit. I really appreciate it. You're a..."

 

"Seal it, mums." He picked her up and squeezed her, hard. He scarcely noticed her sweat-streaked face and disheveled hair, but she did.

 

"Good Heavens, Kit, I'm a perfect hag!" she exclaimed. "I've got to go and put on a new face!"

 

"QX. I don't feel quite so fresh, myself. What I need, though, is a good, thick steak. Join me?"

 

"Uh-uh. How can you even think of eating, at a time like this?"

 

"Same way you can think of war-paint and feathers, I suppose. Different people, different reactions. QX, I'll be in there and see you in fifteen or twenty minutes. Flit!"

 

She left, and Kit heaved an almost explosive sigh of relief. Mighty good thing she hadn't asked too many questions—if she had become really curious, he would have had a horrible time keeping her away from the fact that that kind of work never had been done and never would be done outside of solid Arisian screen. He ate, cleaned up, ran a comb through his hair, and, when his mother was ready, crossed over into her speedster.

 

"Whee—whee-yu!" Kit whistled descriptively. "What a seven-sector call- out! Just who do you think you're going to knock out of the ether on Lyrane Two?"

 

"Nobody at all." Clarrissa laughed. "This is all for you, son—and maybe a little bit for me, too."

 

"I'm stunned. You're a blinding flash and a deafening report. But I've got to do a flit, gorgeous. So clear..."

 

"Wait a minute—you can't go yet! I've got questions to ask you about these new networks and things. How do I handle them?"

 

"Sorry—you've got to develop your own techniques. You know that already."

 

"In a way. I thought maybe, though, I could wheedle you into helping me a little. I should have known better—but tell me, all Lensmen don't have minds like this, do they?"

 

"I'll say they don't. They're all like yours was before, but not as good. Except the other L2's, of course—dad, Worsel, Tregonsee, and Nadreck. Theirs are more or less like yours is now; but you've got a lot of stuff they haven't."

 

"Huh?" she demanded. "Such as?"

 

"'Way down—there." He showed her. "You worked all that stuff yourself. I only showed you how, without getting in too close."

 

"Why? Oh, I see—you would. Life force. I would have lots of that, of course." She did not blush, but Kit did.

 

"Life force" was a pitifully inadequate term indeed for that which Civilization's only Lensman-mother had in such measure, but they both knew what it was. Kit ducked.

 

"You can always tell all about a Lensman by looking at his Lens; it's the wiring diagram of his total mind. You've studied dad's of course."

 

"Yes. Three times as big as the ordinary, ones—or mine—and much finer and brighter. But mine isn't, Kit?"

 

"It wasn't, you mean. Look at it now."

 

She opened a drawer, reached in, and stared; her eyes and mouth becoming three round O's of astonishment. She had never seen that Lens before, or anything like it. It was three times as big as hers, seven times as fine and as intricate, and ten times as bright.

 

"Why, this isn't mine!" she gasped. "But it must be..."

 

"Sneeze, beautiful," Kit advised. "Cobwebs. You aren't thinking a lick. Your mind changed, so your Lens had to. See?"

 

"Of course—I wasn't thinking; that's a fact. Let me look at your Lens, Kit—you never seem to wear it—I haven't seen it since you graduated."

 

"Sure. Why not?" He reached into a pocket. "I take after you, that way; neither of us gets any kick out of throwing his weight around."

 

His Lens flamed upon his wrist. It was larger in diameter than Clarrissa's, and thicker. Its texture was finer; its colors were brighter, harsher, and seemed, somehow, solider. Both studied both Lenses for a moment, then Kit seized his mother's hand, brought their wrists together, and stared.

 

"That's it," he breathed. "That's it... That's IT, just as sure as Klono has got teeth and claws."

 

"What's it? What do you seer she demanded.

 

"I see how and why I got the way I am—and if the kids had Lenses theirs would be the same. Remember dad's? Look at your dominants—notice that every one of them is duplicated in mine. Blank them out of mine, and see what you've got left—pure Kimball Kinnison, with just enough extras thrown in to make me an individual instead of a carbon copy. Hm... hm... credits to millos this is what comes of having Lensmen on both sides of the family. No wonder we're freaks! Don't know whether I'm in favor of it or not—I don't think they should produce any more Lady Lensmen, do you? Maybe that's why they never did."

 

"Don't try to be funny," she reproved; but her dimples were again in evidence. "If it would result in more people like you and your sisters, I'd be very much in favor of it; but, some way or other,-! doubt it. I know you're squirming to go, so I won't hold you any longer. What you just found out about Lenses is fascinating. For the rest of it... well... thanks, son, and clear ether."

 

"Clear ether, mother. This is the worst part of being together, leaving so quick. I'll see you again, though, soon and often. It you get stuck, yell, and one of the kids or I—or all of us—will be with you in a split second."

 

He gave her a quick, hard hug; kissed her enthusiastically, and left. He did not tell her, and she never did find out, that his "discovery" of one of the secrets of the Lens was made to keep her from asking questions which he could not answer.

 

The Red Lensman was afraid that she would not have time to put her new mind in order before reaching Lyrane II; but, being naturally a good housekeeper, she did. More, so rapidly and easily did her mind now work, she had time to review and to analyze every phase of her previous activities upon that planet and to lay out in broad her first lines of action. She wouldn't put on the screws at first, she decided. She would let them think that she didn't have any more jets than before. Helen was nice, but a good many of the others, especially that airport manager, were simply quadruply distilled vixens. She'd take it easy at first, but she'd be very sure that she didn't get into any such jams as last time.

 

She coasted down through Lyrane's stratosphere and poised high above the city she remembered so well.

 

"Helen of Lyrane!" she sent out a sharp, clear thought. "That is not your name, I know, but we did not learn any other..."

 

She broke off, every nerve taut. Was that, or was it not, Helen's thought; cut off, wiped out by a guardian block before it could take shape?

 

"Who are you stranger, and what do you want?" the thought came, almost instantly, from a person seated at the desk which had been Helen's.

 

Clarrissa glanced at the sender and thought that she recognized the face. Her new channels functioned instantaneously; she remembered every detail.

 

"Lensman Clarrissa, formerly of Sol III. Unattached. I remember you, Ladora, although you were only a child when I was here. Do you remember me?

 

"Yes, I repeat, what do you want?" The memory did not decrease Ladora's hostility.

 

"I would like to speak to the former Elder Person, if I may."

 

"You may not. It is no longer with us. Leave at once, or we will shoot you down."

 

'Think again, Ladora." Clarrissa held -her tone even and calm. "Surely your memory is not so short that you have forgotten the-Dauntless and its capabilities."

 

"I remember. You may take up with me whatever it is that you wish to discuss with my predecessor."

 

"You are familiar with the Boskonian invasion of years ago. It is suspected that they are planning new and galaxy-wide outrages, and that this planet is in some way involved. I have come here to investigate the situation."

 

"We will conduct our own investigations," Ladora declared, curtly. "We insist that you and all other foreigners stay away from this planet."

 

"You investigate a galactic condition?" In spite of herself, Clarrissa almost let the connotations of that question become perceptible. "If you give me permission I will land alone. If you do not, I shall call the Dauntless and we will land in force. Take your choice."

 

"Land alone, then, if you must land." Ladora yielded seemingly. "Land at City Airport"

 

"Under those guns? No, thanks; I am neither invulnerable nor immortal. I land where I please."

 

She landed. During her previous visit she had had a hard enough time getting any help from these pig-headed matriarchs, but this time she encountered a noncooperation so utterly fanatical that it put her completely at a loss. None of them tried to harm her in any way; but not one of them would have anything to do with her. Every thought, even the friendliest, was stopped by a full-coverage block; no acknowledgment, even, was ever made.

 

"I can crack those blocks easily enough, if I want to," she declared, one bad evening, to her mirror, "and if they keep this up very much longer, by Klono's emerald filled gizzard, I will!"

 

 

 

14. — KINNISON-THYRON, DRUG RUNNER

 

When Kimball Kinnison received his son's call he was in Ultra Prime, the Patrol's stupendous Klovian base, about to enter his ship. He stopped for a moment; practically in mid-stride. While nothing was to be read in his expression or in his eyes, the lieutenant to whom he had been talking had been an interested, if completely uninformed, witness to many such Lensed conferences and knew that they were usually important. He was therefore not surprised when the Lensman turned around and headed for an exit.

 

"Put her back, please. I won't be going out for a while, after all," Kinnison explained, briefly. "Don't know exactly how long."

 

A fast flitter took him to the hundred-story pile of stainless steel and glass which was the coordinator's office. He strode along a corridor, through an unmarked door.

 

"Hi, Phyllis—the boss in?"

 

"Why, Coordinator Kinnison! Yes, sir... no, I mean..." His startled secretary touched a button and a door opened; the door of his private office.

 

"Hi, Kim—back so soon?" Vice-Coordinator Maitland also showed surprise as he got up from the massive desk and shook hands cordially. "Good! Taking over?"

 

"Emphatically no. Hardly started yet. Just dropped in to use your plate, if you've got a free high-power wave. QX?"

 

"Certainly. If not, you can free one fast enough."

 

"Communications." Kinnison touched a stud. "Will you please get me Thrale? Library One; Principal Librarian Nadine Ernley. Plate to plate."

 

This request was surprising enough to the informed. Since the coordinator practically never dealt personally with anyone except Lensmen, and usually Unattached Lensmen at that, it was a rare event indeed for him to use any ordinary channels of communication. And as the linkage was completed, subdued murmurs and sundry squeals gave evidence of the intense excitement at the other end of the line.

 

"Mrs. Ernley will be on in one moment, sir." The operator's business was done. Her crisp, clear-cut voice ceased, but the background noise increased markedly.

 

"Sh... sh... sh! It's the Gray Lensman, himself!" Everywhere upon Klovia, Tellus, and Thrale, and in many localities of many other planets, the words "Gray Lensman", without surname, had only one meaning.

 

"Not the Gray Lensman."

 

"It can't be!" "It is, really—I know him—I actually met him once!"

 

"Let me look—just a peek!"

 

"Sh . ,. sh! He'll hear you!"

 

"Switch on the vision. If we've got a moment, let's get acquainted," Kinnison suggested, and upon his plate there burst into view a bevy of excitedly embarrassed blondes, brunettes, and redheads. "Hi, Madge! Sorry I don't know the rest of you, but I'll make it a point to meet you all—before long, I think. Don't go away." The head of the library was coming on the run. "You're all in on this. Hi, Nadine! Long time no see. Remember that bunch of squirrel food you rounded up for me?"

 

"I remember, sir." What a question! As though Nadine Ernley, nee Hostetter, could ever forget her share in that famous meeting of the fifty- three greatest scientific minds of all Civilization! "I'm sorry that I was out in the stacks when you called."

 

"QX—we all have to work sometime, I suppose. What I'm calling about is that I've got a mighty big job for you and those smart girls of yours. Something like that other one, only a lot more so. I want all the information you can dig up about a planet named Kalonia, just as fast as you can possibly get it. What makes it extra tough is that I have never even heard of the planet itself and don't know of anyone who has. There may be a million other names for it, on a million other planets, but we don't know any of them. Here's all I know." He summarized; concluding: "If you can get it for me in less than four point nine five G-P days from now I'll bring you, Nadine, a Manarkan star-drop; and you can have each of your girls go down to Brenleer's and pick out a wristwatch, or whatever else she likes, and I'll have it engraved to her 'In appreciation, Kimball Kinnison'. This job is important—my son Kit bet me ten millos that we can't do it that fast."

 

"Ten millos!" Four or five of the girls gasped as one. "Fact," he assured them, gravely. "So whenever you get the dope, tell Communications—no, you listen while I tell them myself. Communications, all along the line, come in!" They came. "I expect one of these librarians to call me, plate to plate, within the next few days. When she does, no matter what time of day or night it is, and no matter what I or anyone else happen to be doing, that call will have the right-of-way over any other business in the Universe. Cut!" The plates went dead, and in Library One: "But he was joking, surely!"

 

"Ten millos—and a star-drop—why, there aren't more than a dozen of them on all Thrale!"

 

"Wrist-watches—or something—from the Gray Lensman!" "Be quiet, everybody!" Madge exclaimed, "I see now. That's the way Nadine got her watch, that she always brags about so insufferably and that makes everybody's eyes turn green. But I don't understand that silly ten-millo bet... do you, Nadine?"

 

"I think so. He does the nicest things—things that nobody else would think of. You've all seen Red Lensman's Chit, in Brenleer's." This was a statement, not a question. They all had, with what emotions they all knew. "How would you like to have that one cento piece, 'in a thousand-credit frame, here in our main hall, with die legend 'won from Christopher Kinnison for Kimball Kinnison by...' and our names? He's got something like that in mind, I'm sure."

 

The ensuing clamor indicated that they liked the idea. "He knew we would; and he knew that doing it this way would make us dig like we never dug before. He'll give us the watches and things anyway, of course, but we won't get that one cento piece unless we win it. So let's get to work. Take everything out of the machines, finished or not. Madge, you might start by interviewing Lanion and the other—no, I'd better do that myself, since you are more familiar with the encyclopedia than I am. Run the whole English block, starting with K, and follow up any leads, however slight, that you can find. Betty, you can analyze for synonyms, starting with the Thralian equivalent of Kalonia and spreading out to the other Boskonian planets. Put half a dozen techs on it, with transformers. Frances, you can study Prellin and Bronseca. Joan, Leona, Edna—Jalte, Helmuth, and Crowninshield. Beth, as our best linguist, you can do us the most good by sensitizing a tech to the sound of Kalonia in each of all the languages you know or that the rest of us can find, and running and re-running all the transcripts we have of Boskonian meetings. How many of us are left? Not enough... we'll have to spread ourselves thin on this list of Boskonian planets..."

 

Thus Principal Librarian Ernley organized a search beside which the proverbial one of finding a needle in a haystack would have been as simple as locating a football in a bushel basket. And she and her girls worked. How they worked! And thus, in four days and three hours, Kinnison's crash-priority person-to-person call came through. Kalonia was no longer a planet of mystery.

 

"Fine work, girls! Put it on a tape and I'll pick it up." He then left Klovia—precipitately. Since Kit was not within rendezvous distance, he instructed his son—after giving him the high points of what he had learned—to forward one one cento piece to Brenleer of Thrale, personal delivery. He told Brenleer what to do with it upon arrival. He landed. He bestowed the star-drop; one of Cartiff's collection of fine gems. He met the girls, and gave each one her self-chosen reward. He departed.

 

Out in open space, he ran the tape, and sat still, scowling blackly. It was no wonder that Kalonia had remained unknown to Civilization for over twenty years. There was a lot of information on that tape—and all of it stunk—but it had been assembled, one unimportant bit at a time, from the more than eight hundred million cards of Thrale's Boskonian Archives; and all the really significant items had been found on vocal transcriptions which had never before been played.

 

Civilization in general had assumed that Thrale had housed the top echelons of the Boskonian Empire, and that the continuing inimical activity had been due solely to momentum. Kinnison and his friends had had their doubts, but they had not been able to find any iota of evidence that any higher authority had ever issued any orders to Thrale. The Gray Lensman now knew, however, that Thrale had never been the top. Nor was Kalonia. The information on this tape, by its paucity, its brevity, its incidental and casual nature, made that fact startlingly clear. Thrale and Kalonia were not in the same ladder. Neither gave the other any orders—in fact, they had surprisingly little to do with each other. While Thrale formerly directed the activities of a half-million or so planets—and Kalonia apparently still did much the same—their fields of action had not overlapped at any point.

 

His conquest of Thrale, hailed so widely as such a triumph, had got him precisely nowhere in the solution of the real problem. It might be possible for him to conquer Kalonia in a similar fashion, but what would it get him? Nothing. There would be no more leads upward from Kalonia than there had been from Thrale. How in all of Noshabkeming's variegated and iridescent hells was he going to work this out?

 

A complete analysis revealed only one possible method of procedure. In one of the transcriptions—made twenty-one years ago and unsealed for the first time by Beth, the librarian-linguist—one of the speakers had mentioned casually that the new Kalonian Lensmen seemed to be doing a good job, and a couple of the others had agreed with him. That was all. It might, however, be enough; since it made it highly probable that Eddie's Lensman was in fact a Kalonian, and since even a Black Lensman would certainly know where he got his Lens. At the thought of trying to visit the Boskonian equivalent of Arisia he flinched, but only momentarily. Invasion, or even physical approach, would of course be impossible; but any planet, even Arisia itself, could be destroyed. If it could be found, that planet would be destroyed. He had to find it—that was probably what Mentor had been wanting him to do all the time! But how?

 

In his various previous enterprises against Boskonia he had been a gentleman of leisure, a dock-walloper, a meteor-miner, and many other things. None of his already established aliases would fit on Kalonia; and besides, it was very poor technique to repeat himself, especially at this high level of opposition. To warrant appearance on Kalonia at all, he would have to be an operator of some kind—not too small, but not big enough so that an adequate background could not be synthesized in not too long a time. A zwilnik—an actual drug-runner with a really worth-while cargo—would be the best bet.

 

His course of action decided, the Gray Lensman started making calls. He first called Kit, with whom he held a long conversation. He called the captain of his battleship-yacht, the Dauntless, and gave him many and explicit orders. He called Vice-Coordinator Maitland, and various other Unattached Lensmen who had plenty of weight m Narcotics, Public Relations, Criminal Investigation, Navigation, Homicide, and many other apparently totally unrelated establishments of the Galactic Patrol. Finally, after ten solid hours of mind-racking labor, he ate a tremendous meal and told Clarrissa—he called her last of all—that he was going to go to bed and sleep for one whole G-P week.

 

Thus it was that the name of Bradlow Thyron began to obtrude itself above the threshold of Galactic consciousness. For seven or eight years that name had been below the middle of the Patrol's long, black list of the wanted; now it was well up toward the top. That notorious zwilnik and his villainous crew had been chased from one side of the First Galaxy to the other. For a few months it had been supposed that they had been blown out of the ether. Now, however, it was known definitely that he was operating in the Second Galaxy, and he and every one of his cutthroat gang—fiends who had blasted thousands of lives with noxious wares—were wanted for piracy, drugmongering, and first- degree murder. From the Patrol's standpoint, the hunting was very poor. G-P planetographers have charted only a small percentage of the planets of the Second Galaxy; and only a few of those are peopled by the adherents of Civilization.

 

Therefore it required some time, but finally there came the message for which Kinnison was so impatiently waiting. A Boskonian pretty-big-shot and drug-master named Harkleroy, on the planet Phlestyn II, city, Nelto, coordinates so-and-so, fitted his specifications to a "T"; a middle-sized operator neither too close to nor too far away from Kalonia. And Kinnison, having long since learned the lingua franca of the region from a local meteor- miner, was ready to act. First, he made sure that the mighty Dauntless would be where he wanted her when he needed her. Then, seated at his speedster's communicator, he put through regular channels to call to the Boskonian.

 

"Harkleroy? I've got a proposition you'll be interested in. Where and when do you want to see me?"

 

"What makes you think I want to see you at all?" a voice snarled, and the plate showed a gross, vicious face. "Who are you, scum?"

 

"Who I am is nobody's business—and if you don't clamp a baffle on that damn mouth of yours I'll come down there and shove a glop-skinner's glove so far down your throat you can sit on it."

 

At the first defiant word the zwilnik began visibly to swell; but in a matter of seconds he recognized Bradlow Thyron, and Kinnison knew that he did. That pirate could, and would be expected to, talk back to anybody.

 

"I didn't recognize you at first." Harkleroy almost apologized. "We might do some business, at that. What have you got?"

 

"Cocaine, heroin, bentlam, hashish, nitrolabe—most anything a warm- blooded oxygen-breather would want. The prize, though, is two kilograms of clear-quill thionite."

 

"Thionite—two kilograms!" The Phlestan's eyes gleamed. "Where and how did you get it?"

 

"I asked the Lensman on Trenco to make it for me, special, and he did."

 

"So you won't talk, huh?" Kinnison could see Harkleroy's brain work. Thyron could be made to talk, later. "We can maybe do business at that. Come down here right away." "I'll do that, but listen!" and the Lensman's eyes burned into the zwilnik's. "I know what you're figuring on, and I'm telling you right now not to try it if you want to keep on living. You know this ain't the first planet I ever landed on, and if you've got a brain you know that a lot of smarter guys than you are have tried monkey business on me—and I'm still here. So watch your step!"

 

The Lensman landed, and made his way to Harkleroy's inner office in what seemed to be an ordinary enough, if somewhat over-size, suit of light space- armor. But it was no more ordinary than it was light. It was a power- house, built of dureum a quarter of an inch thick. Kinnison was not walking in it; he was merely the engineer of a battery of two-thousand-horsepower motors. Unaided, he could not have lifted one leg of that armor off the ground.

 

As he had expected, everyone he encountered wore a thought-screen; nor was he surprised at being halted by a blaring loud-speaker in the hall, since the zwilnik's search-beams were being stopped four feet away from his armor.

 

"Halt! Cut your screens or we'll blast you where you stand!"

 

"Yeah? Act your age, Harkleroy. I told you I had something up my sleeve besides my arm, and I meant it. Either I come as I am or I flit somewhere else, to do business with somebody who wants this stuff bad enough to act like half a man. 'Smatter—afraid you ain't got blasters enough in there to handle me?"

 

This taunt bit deep, and the visitor was allowed to proceed. As he entered the private office, however, he saw that Harkleroy's hand was poised near a switch, whose closing would signal a score or more of concealed gunners to burn him down. They supposed that the stuff was either on his person or in his speedster just outside. Time was short.

 

"I abase myself—that's the formula you insist on, ain't it?" Kinnison sneered, without bending his head a millimeter.

 

Harkleroy's finger touched the stud. "Dauntless! Come down!" Kinnison snapped out the order. Hand, stud, and a part of the desk disappeared in the flare of Kinnison's beam. Wall-ports opened; projectors and machine rifles erupted vibratory and solid destruction. Kinnison leaped toward the desk; the attack slowing down and stopping as he neared and seized the Boskonian. One fierce, short blast reduced the thought screen generator to blobs of fused metal. Harkleroy screamed to his gunners to resume fire, but before bullet or beam took the zwilnik's life, Kinnison learned what he most wanted to know.

 

The ape did know something about Black Lensmen. He didn't know where the Lenses came from, but he did know how the men were chosen. More, he knew a Lensman personally—one Melasnikov, who had his office in Cadsil, on Kalonia III itself.

 

Kinnison turned and ran—the alarm had been given and they were bringing up stuff too heavy for even his armor to handle. But the Dauntless was landing already; smashing to rubble five city blocks in the process. She settled; and as the dureum-clad Gray Lensman began to fight his way out of Harkleroy's fortress, Major Peter vanBuskirk and a full battalion of Valerians, armed with space-axes and semi-portables, began to hew and to blast their way in.

 

 

 

15. — THYRON FOLLOWS A LEAD

 

Inch by inch, foot by foot, Kinnison fought his way back along the corpse-littered corridor. Under the ravening force of the attackers' beams his defensive screens flared into pyrotechnic splendor, but they did not go down. Fierce-driven metallic slugs spanged and whanged against the unyielding dureum of his armor; but that, too, held. Dureum is incredibly massive, unbelievably tough, unimaginably hard—against these qualities and against the thousands of horsepower driving that veritable tank and energizing its screens the zwilniks might just as well have been shining flashlights at him and throwing confetti. His immediate opponents could not touch him, but the Boskonians were bringing up reserves that he didn't like a little bit; mobile projectors with whose energies even those screens could not cope.

 

He had, however, one great advantage over his enemies. He had the sense of perception; they did not. He could see them, but they could not see him. All he had to do was to keep at least one opaque wall between them until he was securely behind the mobile screens, powered by the stupendous generators of the Dauntless, which vanBuskirk and his Valerians were so earnestly urging toward him. If a door was handy in the moment of need, he used it. If not he went through a wall.

 

The Valerians were fighting furiously and were coming fast. Those two words, when applied to members of that race, mean something starkly incredible to anyone who has never seen Valerians in action. They average something less than seven feet in height;—something over four hundred pounds in weight; and are muscled, boned, and sinewed against a normal gravitational force of almost three times that of Earth. VanBuskirk's weakest warrior could do, in full armor, a standing high jump of fourteen feet against one Tellurian gravity; he could handle himself and the thirty-pound monstrosity which was his space-axe with a blinding speed and a devastating efficiency literally appalling to contemplate. They are the deadliest hand-to-hand fighters ever known; and, unbelievable as it may seem to any really highly advanced intelligence, they did and still do fairly revel in that form of combat.

 

The Valerian tide reached the battling Gray Lensman; closed around him.

 

"Hi... you little... Tellurian... wart!" Major Peter vanBuskirk boomed this friendly thought, a yell of pure joy, in cadence with the blows of his utterly irresistible weapon. His rhythm broke—his frightful axe was stuck. Not even dureumin-inlaid armor could bar the inward course of those furiously-driven beaks; but sometimes it made it fairly difficult to get them out. The giant pulled, twisted—put one red-splashed boot on a battered breastplate—bent his mighty back—heaved viciously. The weapon came free with a snap that would have broken any ordinary man's arms, but the Valerian's thought rolled smoothly on: "Ain't we got fun?"

 

"Ho, Bus, you big Valerian baboon!" Kinnison thought back in kind. "Thought maybe we'd need you and your gang—thanks a million. But back now,, and fast!"

 

Although the Valerians did not like to retreat, after even a successful operation, they knew how to do it. Hence in a matter of minutes all the survivors—and the losses had been surprisingly small—were back inside the Dauntless.

 

"You picked up my speedster, Frank." It was a statement, not a question, directed at the young Lensman sitting at the "big board."

 

"Of course, sir. They're massing fast, but without any hostile demonstration, as you said they would." He nodded unconcernedly at a plate, which showed the sky dotted with warlike shapes.

 

"No maulers?" "None detectable as yet, sir."

 

"QX. Original orders stand. At detection of one mauler, execute Operation Able. Tell everybody that while the announcement of Operation Able will put me out of control instantly and automatically, until such announcement I will give instructions. What they'll be like I haven't the foggiest notion. It depends on what his nibs upstairs decides to do—it's his move next."

 

As though the last phrase were a cue, a burst of noise rattled from the speaker—of which only the words "Bradlow Thyron" were intelligible to the un-Lensed members of the crew. That name, however, explained why they were not being attacked—yet. Kalonia had heard much of that intransigent and obdurate pirate and of the fabulous prowess of his ship; and Kinnison was pretty sure that they were much more interested in his ship than in him.

 

"I can't understand you!" The Gray Lensman barked, in the polyglot language he had so lately learned. "Talk pidgin!"

 

"Very well. I see that you are indeed Bradlow Thyron, as we were informed. What do you mean by this outrageous attack? Surrender! Disarm your men, take off their armor, and march them out of your vessel, or we will blast you as you lie there—Vice-Admiral Mendonai speaking!"

 

"I abase myself." Kinnison-Thyron did not sneer—exactly—and he did incline his stubborn head perhaps the sixteenth part of an inch; but he made no move to comply with the orders so summarily issued. Instead:

 

"What the hell kind of planet is this, anyway?" he demanded, hotly. "I come here to see this louse Harkleroy because a friend of mine tells me he's a big shot and interested enough in my line so we can do a lot of business. I give the lug fair warning, too—tell him plain I've been around plenty and if he tries to give me the works I'll rub him out like a pencil mark. So what happens? In spite of what I just tell him he tries dirty work and I knock hell out of him, which he certainly has got coming to him. Then you and your flock of little tin boats come barging in like I'd busted a law or something. Who do you think you are, anyway? What license you got to stick your beak into private business?"

 

"Ah, I had not heard that version." Vision came on; the face upon the plate was typically Kalonian—blue, cold, cruel, and keen. "Harkleroy was warned, you say? Definitely?"

 

"Plenty definitely. Ask any of the zwilniks in that private office of his. They're mostly alive and they all must of heard it."

 

The plate fogged, the speaker again gave out gibberish. The Lensman knew, however, that the commander of the forces above them was indeed questioning the dead zwilnik's guards. They knew that Kinnison's story was being corroborated in full.

 

"You interest me." The Boskonian's language again became intelligible to the group at large. "We will forget Harkleroy—stupidity brings its own reward and the property damage is of no present concern. From what I have been able to learn of you, you have never belonged to that so-called Civilization. I know for a fact that you are not, and never have been, one of us. How have you been able to survive? And why do you work alone?"

 

"'How' is easy enough—by keeping one jump ahead of the other guy, like I did with your pal here, and by being smart enough to have good engineers put into my ship everything that any other one ever had and everything they could dream up besides. As to 'why', that's simple, too. I don't trust nobody. If nobody knows what I'm going to do, nobody's going to stick a knife into me when I ain't looking—see? So far, it's paid off big. I'm still around and still healthy. Them that trusted other guys ain't."

 

"I see. Crude, but graphic. The more I study you, the more convinced I become that you make a worth-while addition to our force..."

 

"No deal, Mendonai," Kinnison interrupted, shaking his unkempt head positively. "I never yet took no orders from no damn boss, and I ain't going to."

 

"You misunderstand me, Thyron." The zwilnik was queerly patient and much too forbearing. Kinnison's insulting omission of his title should have touched him off like a rocket. "I was not thinking of you in any minor capacity, but as an ally. An entirely independent ally, working with us in certain mutually advantageous undertakings."

 

"Such as? Kinnison allowed himself to betray. his first sign of interest. "You may be talking sense now, brother, but what's in it for me? Believe me, there's got to be plenty."

 

"There will be plenty. With the ability you have already shown, and with our vast resources back of you, you will take more every week than you have been taking in a year."

 

"Yeah? People like you just love to do things like that for people like me. What do you figure on getting out of it?" Kinnison wondered, and Lensed a sharp thought to his junior at the board.

 

"On your toes, Frank. He's stalling for something, and I'm betting it's maulers." "None detectable yet, sir." "We stand to gain, of course," the pirate admitted, smoothly. "For instance, there are certain features of your vessel which might—just possibly, you will observe, and speaking only to mention an example—be of interest to our naval designers. Also, we have heard that you have an unusually hot battery of primary beams. You might tell me about some of those things now; or at least re-focus your plate so that I can see something besides your not unattractive face."

 

"I might not, too. What I've got here is my own business, and stays mine."

 

"Is that what we are to expect from you in the way of cooperation?" The commander's voice was still low and level, but now bore a chill of deadly menace.

 

"Cooperation, hell!" The cutthroat chief was unimpressed. "I'll maybe tell you a thing or two—eat out of your dish—after I get good and sold on your proposition, whatever it is, but not one damn second sooner!"

 

The commander glared. "I weary of this. You probably are not worth the trouble, after all. I might as well blast you out now as later. You know that I can, of course, as well as I do."

 

"Do I?" Kinnison did sneer, this time. "Act your age, pal. As I told that fool Harkleroy, this ain't the first planet I ever sat down on, and it won't be the last. And don't call no maulers," as the Boskonian officer's hand moved almost imperceptibly toward a row of buttons. "If you do, I start blasting as soon as we spot one on our plates, and they're full out right now."

 

"You would start blasting?" The zwilnik's surprise was plain, but the hand stopped its motion.

 

"Yeah—me. Them heaps you got up there don't bother me a bit, but maulers I can't handle, and I ain't afraid to tell you so because you probably know it already. I can't stop you from calling 'em, if you want to, but bend both ears to this—I can out-run 'em and I'll guarantee that you personally won't be alive to see me run. Why? Because your ship will be the first one I'll whiff on the way out. And if the rest of your junkers stick around long enough to try to stop me I'll whiff twenty-five or thirty more before your maulers get close enough so I'll have to do a flit. Now, if your brains are made out of the same kind of thick, blue mud as Harkleroy's, start something!"

 

This was an impasse. Kinnison knew what he wanted the other to do, but he could not give him a suggestion, or even a hint, without tipping his hand. The officer, quite evidently, was in a quandary. He did not want to open fire upon this tremendous, this fabulous ship. Even if he could destroy it, such a course would be unthinkable—unless, indeed, the very act of destruction would brand as false rumor the tales of invincibility and invulnerability which had heralded its coming, and thus would operate in his favor at the court-martial so sure to be called. He was very much afraid, however, that those rumors were not false—a view which was supported very strongly both by Thyron's undisguised contempt for the Boskonian warships threatening him and by his equally frank declaration of his intention to avoid engagement with any craft of really superior force. Finally, however, the Boskonian perceived one thing that did not quite fit.

 

"If you are as good as you claim to be, why aren't you blasting right now?" he asked, skeptically.

 

"Because I don't want to, that's why. Use your head, pal." This was better. Mendonai had shifted the conversation into a line upon which the Lensman could do a bit of steering. "I had to leave the First Galaxy because it got too hot for me, and I got no connections at all, yet, here in the Second. You folks need certain kinds of stuff that I've got and I need other kinds, that you've got. So we could do a nice business, if you wanted to. Like I told you, that's why I come to see Harkleroy. I'd like to do business with some of you people, but I just got bit pretty bad, and I've got to have some kind of solid guarantee that you mean business, and no monkey business, before I take a chance again. See?"

 

"I see. The idea is good, but the execution may prove difficult. I could give you my word, which I assure you has never been broken."

 

"Don't make me laugh," Kinnison snorted. "Would you take mine?"

 

"The case is different. I would not. Your point, however, is well taken. How about the protection of a high court of law? I will bring you an unalterable writ from any court you say."

 

"Uh-uh," the Gray Lensman dissented. "There never was no court yet that didn't take orders from the big shots who keep the fat cats fat,_and lawyers are the crookedest 'damn crooks in the universe. You'll have to do better than that, pal."

 

"Well, then, how about a Lensman? You know about Lensmen, don't you?"

 

"A Lensman!" Kinnison gasped. He shook his head violently. "Are you completely nuts, or do you think I am? I do know Lensmen, cully—a Lensman chased me from Alaskan to Vandemar once, and if I hadn't had a dose of hell's own luck he'd of got me. Lensmen chased me out of the First Galaxy—why the hell else do you think I'm here? Use your brain, mister; use your brain!"

 

"You're thinking of Civilization's Lensmen; particularly of Gray Lensmen." Mendonai was enjoying Thyron's passion. "Ours are different—entirely different. They have as much power, or more, but don't use it the same way. They work with us right along. In fact, they've been bumping Gray Lensmen off right and left lately."

 

"You mean he could open up, for instance, your mind and mine, so we could see the other guy wasn't figuring on running in no stacked decks? And he'd sort of referee this business we got on the fire? Do you know one yourself, personally?"

 

"He could, and would, do all that. Yes, I know one personally. His name is Melasnikov, and his office is on Three, just a short flit from here. He may not be there at the moment, but he'll come in if I call. How about it—shall I call him now?"

 

"Don't work up a sweat. Sounds like it might work, if we can figure the approach. I don't suppose you and him would come out to me in space?"

 

"Hardly. You wouldn't expect us to, would you?" "It wouldn't be very bright of you to. And since I want to do business, I guess I got to meet you part way. How'd this be? You pull your ships out of range. My ship takes station right over your Lensman's office. I go down in my speedster, like I did here, and go inside to meet him and you. I wear my armor—and when I say it's real armor I ain't just snapping my choppers, neither."

 

"I can see only one slight flaw." The Boskonian was really trying to work out a mutually satisfactory solution. "The Lensman will open our minds to you in proof, however, that we will have no intention of bringing up our maulers or other heavy stuff while we're in conference."

 

"Right men you'll find out you hadn't better, too." Kinnison grinned wolfishly.

 

"What do you mean?" Mendonai demanded. "I've got enough superatomic bombs aboard to blow this planet to hell and gone and the boys'll drop 'em all the second you make a queer move. I've got to take a little chance to start doing business, but it's a damn small one, 'cause if I go you go too, pal. You and your Lensman and your fleet and everything alive on your whole damn planet. And your bosses still won't get any dope on what makes this ship of mine tick the way she does. So I'm betting you won't make that kind of a swap."

 

"I certainly would not." Hard as he was, Mendonai was shaken. "Your suggested method of procedure is satisfactory."

 

"QX. Are you ready to flit?"

 

"We are ready."

 

"Call your Lensman, then, and lead the way. Boys, take her upstairs!"

 

 

 

16. — RED LENSMAN IN GRAY

 

Karen Kinnison was worried. she, who had always been so sure of herself, had for weeks been conscious of a gradually increasing—what was it, anyway? Not exactly a loss of control... a change... a something that manifested itself in increasingly numerous fits of senseless—sheerly idiotic—stubbornness. And always and only it was directed at—of all the people in the universe!—her brother. She got along with her sisters perfectly, their tiny tiffs barely rippled the surface of any of their minds. But any time her path of action crossed Kit's, it seemed, the profoundest depths of her being flared into opposition like exploding duodec. Worse than senseless and idiotic, it was inexplicable, for the feeling which the Five had for each other was much deeper than that felt by ordinary brothers and sisters.

 

She didn't want to fight with Kit. She liked the guy! She liked to feel his mind en rapport with hers, just as she liked to dance with him; their bodies as completely in accord as were their minds. No change of step or motion, however suddenly conceived and executed or however bizarre, had ever succeeded in taking the other by surprise or in marring by a millimeter the effortless precision of their performance. She could do things with Kit that would tie any other man into knots and break half his bones. All other men were lumps. Kit was so far ahead of any other man in existence that there was simply no comparison. If she were Kit she would give her a going-over that would... or could even he...

 

At the thought she turned cold inside. He could not. Even Kit, with all his tremendous power, would hit that solid wall and bounce. Well, there was one— not a man, but an entity—who could. He might kill her, but even that would be better than to allow the continued growth within her mind of this monstrosity which she could neither control nor understand. Where was she, and where was Lyrane, and where was Arisia? Good—not too far off line. She would stop off at Arisia en route.

 

She did so, and made her way to Mentor's office on the hospital grounds. She told her story.

 

"Fighting with Kit was bad enough," she concluded, "but when I start defying you, Mentor, it's high time that something was done about it. Why didn't Kit ever knock me into a logarithmic spiral? Why didn't you work me over? You called Kit in, with the distinct implication that he needed more education—why didn't you pull me in here, too, and pound some sense into me?"

 

"Concerning you, Christopher had definite instructions, which he obeyed. I did "not touch you for the same reason that I did not order you to come to me; neither course would have been of any use. Your mind, daughter Karen, is unique. One of its prime characteristics—the one, in fact, which is to make you an all important player in the drama which is to come—is a yieldlessness very nearly absolute. Your mind might, just conceivably, he broken; but it cannot be coerced by any imaginable external force, however applied. Thus it was inevitable from the first that nothing could be done about the untoward manifestations of this characteristic until you yourself should recognize the fact that your development was not complete. It would be idle for me to say that during adolescence you have not been more than a trifle trying. I was not speaking idly when I said that the development of you Five has been a tremendous task. It is with equal seriousness, however, that I now tell you that the reward is commensurate with the magnitude of the undertaking. It is impossible to express the satisfaction I feel—the fulfillment, the completion, the justification—as you children come, one by one, each in his proper time, for final instruction."

 

"Oh—you mean, then, that there's nothing really the matter with me?" Hard as she was, Karen trembled as her awful tension eased. "That I was supposed to act that way? And I can tell Kit, right away?"

 

"No need. Your brother has known that it was a passing phase; he shall know very shortly that it has passed. It is not that you were 'supposed' to act as you acted. You could not help it. Nor could your brother, nor I. From now on, however, you shall be completely the mistress of your own mind. Come fully, daughter Karen, into mine."

 

She did so, and in a matter of time her "formal education" was complete.