CHILDREN OF THE LENS

BY E. E. SMITH

Illustrated by Rogers

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction November, December 1947,
January, February 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

MESSAGE OF TRANSMITTAL

SUBJECT: The Conclusion of the Boskonian War; A Report:

BY: Christopher Kinnison, L3, of Klovia:

TO: The Entity Able to Obtain and to Read It.

To you, the third-level intellect who has been guided to this imperishable container and who is able to break the Seal and to read this tape, and to your fellows, greetings:

For reasons which will become obvious, this report will not be made available for an indefinite but very long time; perhaps ten million, perhaps ten million million Galactic-Standard years; my present visualization of the Cosmic All does not extend to the time at which such action will become necessary. Therefore it is desirable to review briefly the most pertinent facts of the earlier phases of Civilization's climatic conflict; information which, while widely known at present, will probably in that future time exist otherwise only in the memories of my descendants.

In early Civilization law enforcement lagged behind crime because the police were limited in their spheres of action, while criminals were not. Each technological advance made that condition worse until finally, when Bergenholm so perfected the crude inertialess space-drive of Rodebush and Cleveland that commerce throughout the Galaxy became an actuality, crime began to threaten Civilization's very existence.

Of course it was not then suspected that there was anything organized, coherent, or of large purpose about this crime. Centuries were to pass before my father, Kimball Kinnison of Tellus, now Galactic Co-ordinator, was to prove that Boskonia, an autocratic, dictatorial culture diametrically opposed to every ideal of Civilization—was, in fact, back of practically all of the pernicious activities of the First Galaxy. Even my father, however, has never had any inkling either of the existence and the doings of the Eddorians or of the fundamental raison d'etre of the Galactic Patrol—facts which can never be revealed to any mind not inherently stable at the third level of stress.

Virgil Samms, then Chief of the Secret Service of the Triplanetary League, perceived the general situation and foresaw the shape of the inevitable. He realized that unless and until his organization could secure an identifying symbol which could not be counterfeited, police work would remain relatively ineffectual. Tellurian science had done its best in the golden meteors of Triplanetary's Secret Service, and its best was not good enough.

Virgil Samms became the first wearer of Arisia's Lens, and during his life he began the rigid selection of those worthy of wearing it. For centuries the Patrol grew and spread. It became widely known that the Lens was a perfect telepath, that it glowed with colored light only when worn by the individual to whose ego it was attuned, that it killed any other living being who attempted to wear it. Whatever his race or shape, any wearer of the Lens was accepted as the embodiment of Civilization.

Kimball Kinnison was the first entity of Civilization to suspect that the Boskonian organization existed. He was the first Lensman to realize that the Lens was more than identification and a telepath. He was thus the first Lensman to return to Arisia to take the second stage of Lensmanship—their treatment which only an exceptional brain can withstand, but which gives the Second-Stage Lensman any mental power which he needs and which he can both visualize and control.

Aided by Lensman Worsel of Velantia and Tregonsee of Rigel IV—the former a winged reptile, the latter a four-legged, barrel-shaped creature with the sense of perception instead of sight—Kimball Kinnison traced and surveyed Boskone's military organization in the First Galaxy. He helped plan the attack upon Grand Base, the headquarters of Helmuth, who "spoke for Boskone." By flooding the control dome of Grand Base with thionite, that deadly drug native to the peculiar planet Trenco, he made it possible for Civilization's Grand Fleet, under the command of Port Admiral Haynes—now retired—to reduce that Base. He personally killed Helmuth in hand-to-hand combat.

He was instrumental in the almost-complete destruction of the Overlords; those sadistic, life-eating reptiles native to the planet Delgon of the Velantian solar system, who were the first to employ against humanity the hyperspatial tube.

He was wounded more than once; in one of his hospitalizations becoming acquainted with Surgeon General Lacy—now retired—and with Sector Chief Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall, who was later to become the widely-known "Red Lensman" and, still later, my mother.

In spite of the military defeat, however, Boskonia's real organization remained intact, and Kinnison's further search led into Lundmark's Nebula, thenceforth called the Second Galaxy. The planet Medon, being attacked by the Boskonians, was rescued from the enemy and was moved across intergalactic space to the First Galaxy. Medon made two notable contributions to Civilization: first, electrical insulation, conductors, and switches by whose means voltages and amperages theretofore undreamed-of could be handled; and, later, Phillips, a Posenian surgeon, was able there to complete the researches which made it possible for human bodies to grow anew any members or organs which had been lost.

Kinnison, deciding that the drug syndicate was the quickest and surest line to Boskone, became Wild Bill Williams the meteor miner, a hard-drinking, bentlam-eating, fast-shooting space-hellion. As Williams he traced the zwilnik line upward, step by step, to the planet Jarnevon in the Second Galaxy. Upon Jarnevon lived the Eich; frigid-blooded monsters more intelligent, more merciless, more truly Boskonian even than the Overlords of Delgon.

He and Worsel, Second-Stage Lensmen both, set out to investigate Jarnevon. He was captured, tortured, dismembered; but Worsel brought him back to Tellus with his mind and knowledge intact—the enormously important knowledge that Jarnevon was ruled by a Council of Nine of the Eich, a council named Boskone.

Kinnison was given a Phillips treatment, and again Clarrissa MacDougall nursed him back to health. They loved each other, but they could not marry until the Gray Lensman's job was done; until Civilization had triumphed over Boskonia.

The Galactic Patrol assembled its Grand Fleet, composed of millions of units, under the flagship Z9M9Z. It attacked. The planet of Jalte, Boskonia's Director of the First Galaxy, was consumed by a bomb of negative matter. Jarnevon was crushed between two colliding planets; positioned inertialess, then inerted especially for that crushing. Grand Fleet returned, triumphant.

But Boskonia struck back, sending an immense fleet against Tellus through a hyperspatial tube instead of through normal space. This method of approach was not, however, unexpected. Survey ships and detectors were out; the scientists of the Patrol had been for months hard at work upon the "sunbeam"—a device to concentrate all the energy of the sun into one frightful beam. With this weapon reinforcing the already vast powers of Grand Fleet, the invaders were wiped out.

Again Kinnison had to search for a high Boskonian; some authority higher than the Council of Boskone. Taking his personal superdreadnought, the Dauntless, which carried his indetectable, nonferrous speedster, he found a zwilnik trail and followed it to Dunstan's Region, an unexplored, virtually unknown, outlying spiral arm of the First Galaxy. It led to the planet Lyrane II, with its human matriarchy, ruled by Helen its queen.

There he found Illona Potter, the ex-Aldebaranian dancer; who, turning against her Boskonian kidnapers, told him all she knew of the Boskonian planet Lonabar, upon which she had spent most of her life. Lonabar was unknown to the Patrol and Illona knew nothing of its location in space. She did, however, know its unique jewelry—gems also completely unknown to Civilization.

Nadreck of Palain VII, a frigid-blooded Second-Stage Lensman, with one jewel as a clue, set out to find Lonabar; while Kinnison began to investigate Boskonian activities among the matriarchs.

The Lyranians, however, were fanatically nonco-operative. They hated all males; they despised and detested all nonhuman entities. Hence Kinnison, with the consent and assistance of Mentor of Arisia, made of Clarrissa MacDougall a Second-Stage Lensman and assigned to her the task of working Lyrane II.

Nadreck found and mapped Lonabar; and to build up an unimpeachable Boskonian identity Kinnison became Cartiff the jeweler; Cartiff the jewel thief and swindler; Cartiff the fence; Cartiff the murderer-outlaw; Cartiff the Boskonian Big Shot. He challenged and overthrew Menjo Bleeko, the dictator of Lonabar, and before killing him took from his mind everything he knew.

The Red Lensman secured information from which it was deduced that a cavern of the Overlords of Delgon existed upon Lyrane II. This cavern was raided and destroyed, the Patrolmen learning that the Eich themselves had a heavily-fortified base upon Lyrane III.

Nadreck, master psychologist, invaded that base tracelessly; learning that the Eich received orders from the Thrallian solar system in the Second Galaxy and that frigid-blooded Kandron of Onlo—Thrallis IX—was second in power only to human Alcon, the Tyrant of Thrale—Thrallis II.

Kinnison went to Thrale, Nadreck to Onlo; the operations of both being covered by the Patrol's invasion of the Second Galaxy. In that invasion Boskonia's Grand Fleet was defeated and the planet Klovia was taken and fortified.

Assuming the personality of Traska Gannel, a Thralian, Kinnison worked his way upward in Alcon's military organization. Trapped in a hyperspatial tube, ejected into an unknown one of the infinity of parallel, coexistent, three-dimensional spaces which comprise the Cosmic All, he was rescued by Mentor, working through the brain of Sir Austin Cardynge, the Tellurian mathematician.

Returning to Thrale, he fomented a revolution, in which he killed Alcon and took his place as the Tyrant of Thrale. He then discovered that his Prime Minister, Fossten, who concealed his true appearance by means of a zone of hypnosis, had been Alcon's superior instead of his adviser. Neither quite ready for an open break, but both supremely confident of victory when that break should come, subtle hostilities began.

Tyrant and Prime Minister planned and launched an attack upon Klovia, but just before engagement the hostilities between the two Boskonian leaders flared into an open fight for supremacy. After a terrific mental struggle, during the course of which the entire crew of the flagship died, leaving the Boskonian fleet at the mercy of the Patrol, Kinnison won. He did not know, of course, and never will know, either that Fossten was in fact an Eddorian or that it was Mentor who in fact overcame Fossten. Kinnison thought, and Mentor encouraged him to believe, that the Prime Minister was an Arisian who had been insane since youth, and that Kinnison himself killed Fossten without assistance. It is a mere formality to emphasize at this point that none of this information must ever become available to any mind below the third level; since to any entity able either to obtain or to read this report it will be obvious that such revealment would produce an inferiority complex which must inevitably destroy both the Galactic Patrol and the Civilization whose instrument it is.

With Fossten dead and with Kinnison already the Tyrant of Thrale, it was comparatively easy for the Patrol to take over. Nadreck drove the Onlonian garrisons insane, so that all fought to the death among themselves; thus rendering Onlo's mighty armament completely useless.

Then, thinking that the Boskonian War was over—encouraged, in fact, by Mentor so to think—Kinnison married Clarrissa MacDougall, established his headquarters upon Klovia and assumed his duties as Galactic Co-ordinator.

Kimball Kinnison, while not, strictly speaking, a mutant, was the penultimate product of a prodigiously long line of selective, controlled breeding. So was Clarrissa MacDougall. Just what course the science of Arisia took in making those two what they are I can deduce, but I do not as yet actually know. Nor, for the purpose of this record, does it matter. Port Admiral Haynes and Surgeon General Lacy thought that they brought them together and promoted their romance. Let them think so—as agents, they did. Whatever the method employed, the result was that the genes of those two uniquely complementary penultimates were precisely those necessary to produce the first, and at present the only Third-Stage Lensmen.

I was born upon Klovia, as were, three or four Galactic-Standard years later, my four sisters—two pairs of twins. I had little babyhood, no childhood. Fathered and mothered by Second-Stage Lensmen, accustomed from infancy to wide-open two-ways with such beings as Worsel of Velantia, Tregonsee of Rigel IV, and Nadreck of Palain VII, it would seem obvious that we did not go to school. We were not like other children of our age; but before I realized that it was anything unusual for a baby who could scarcely walk to be computing highly perturbed asteroidal orbits as "mental arithmetic," I knew that we would have to keep our abnormalities to ourselves, insofar as the bulk of mankind and of Civilization was concerned.

I traveled much; sometimes with my father or mother or both, sometimes alone. At least once each year I went to Arisia for treatment. I took the last two years of Lensmanship, for physical reasons only, at Wentworth Hall upon Tellus instead of upon my native Klovia—because upon Tellus the name Kinnison is not at all uncommon, while upon Klovia the fact that "Kit" Kinnison was the son of the Co-ordinator could not have been concealed.

I graduated, and with my formal enlensment this record properly begins. Much has been told elsewhere, notably in Smith's "History of Civilization"; but all such works are, and of necessity must be, pitifully incomplete.

I have recorded this material as impersonally as possible, realizing fully that my sisters and I did only the work for which we were specifically developed and trained; even as you who read this will do that for which you shall have been developed and are to be trained.

Respectfully submitted,
Christopher Kinnison, L3, Klovia.

I.

Galactic Co-ordinator Kimball Kinnison finished his second cup of Tellurian coffee, got up from the breakfast table, and prowled about in black abstraction. Twenty-odd years had changed him but little. He weighed the same, or a few pounds less; although a little of his mass had shifted downward from his mighty chest and shoulders. His hair was still brown, his stern face was only faintly lined. He was mature, with a conscious maturity which no young man can know.

"Since when, Kim, did you think that you could get away with blocking me out of your mind?" Clarrissa Kinnison directed the thought, quietly. The years had dealt as lightly with the Red Lensman as with the Gray. She had been gorgeous, she was now magnificent. "This room is shielded, you know, against even the girls."

"Sorry, Chris—I didn't mean it that way."

"I know," she laughed. "Automatic. But you've had that block up for two solid weeks, except when you force yourself to keep it down, and that means that you're 'way, 'way off the beam."

"I've been thinking, incredible as it may seem."

"I know it. Let's have it—cold."

"QX—you asked for it. Queer things have been going on all over. Inexplicable things ... no apparent reason."

"Such as?"

"Almost any kind of insidious deviltry you care to name. Disaffections, psychoses, mass hysterias, hallucinations; pointing toward a Civilization-wide epidemic of revolutions and uprisings for which there seems to be no basis or justification whatever."

"Why, Kim! How could there be? I haven't heard of anything like that!"

"It hasn't got around. Each solar system thinks that it's a purely local condition, but it isn't. As Galactic Co-ordinator, with a broad view of the entire picture, my office would, of course, see such a thing before anyone else could. We saw it, and set out to nip it in the bud ... but—" He shrugged his shoulders and grinned wryly.

"But what?" Clarrissa persisted.

"It didn't nip. We sent Lensmen to investigate, but none of them got to the first check-station. Then I asked our Second-Stage Lensmen—Worsel, Nadreck, and Tregonsee—to drop whatever they were doing and solve it for me. They struck it and bounced. They followed, and are still following, leads and clues galore, but they haven't got a millo's worth of results so far."

"What? You mean to say it's a problem they can't solve?"

"That they haven't, to date," he corrected, absently. "And that 'gives me furiously to think'."

"It would," she conceded, "and it also would make you itch to join them. Think at me, and it'll help you correlate. You should have gone over the data with me right at first."

"I had reasons not to, as you'll see. But I'm stumped now, so here goes. We'll have to go away back, to before we were married. First: Mentor told me, quote, only your descendants will be ready for that which you now so dimly grope, unquote. Second: you were the only being ever able to read my thoughts without the aid of the Lens. Third: Mentor told us, when we asked him if it was QX for us to go ahead that our marriage was necessary, a choice of phraseology which bothered you somewhat at the time, but which I then explained as being in accord with his visualization of the Cosmic All. Fourth: the Patrol formula is to send the man best fitted for any job to do that job, and if he can't swing it, to send the Number One graduate of the current class of Lensmen. Fifth: a Lensman has got to use everything and everybody available, no matter what or who it is. I used even you, you remember, in that Lyrane affair and others. Sixth: Sir Austin Cardynge believed to the day of his death that we were thrown out of that hyperspatial tube, and out of space, deliberately."

"Well, go on. I don't see much, if any connection."

"You will, if you think of those six points in connection with our present predicament. Kit graduates next month, and he'll rank Number One of all Civilization, for all the tea in China."

"Of course. But after all, he's a Lensman. He will insist upon being assigned to some problem; why not to that one?"

"You don't yet see what that problem is. I've been adding two and two together for weeks, and can't get any other answer than four. And if two and two are four, Kit has got to tackle Boskone—the real Boskone; the one that I never did and very probably never can reach."

"No, Kim—no!" she almost shrieked. "Not Kit, Kim—he's just a boy!"

Kinnison waited, wordless.

She got up, crossed the room to him. He put his arm around her in the old but ever new gesture.

"Lensman's load, Chris," he said, quietly.

"Of course," she replied then, as quietly. "It was a shock at first, coming after all these years, but ... if it has to be, it must. But he doesn't ... surely we can help him, Kim?"

"Surely." The man's arm tightened. "When he hits space I go back to work. So do Nadreck and Worsel and Tregonsee. So do you, if your kind of a job turns up. And with us Gray Lensmen to do the blocking, and with Kit to carry the ball—" His thought died away.

"I'll say so," she breathed. Then: "But you won't call me, I know, unless you absolutely have to ... and to give up you and Kit both ... why did we have to be Lensmen, Kim?" she protested, rebelliously. "Why couldn't we have been ground-grippers? You used to growl that thought at me before I knew what a Lens really meant—"

"Vell, some of us has got be der first violiners in der orchestra," Kinnison misquoted, in an attempt at lightness. "Ve can't all push vind t'rough der trombone."

"I suppose that's true." The Red Lensman's somber air deepened. "Well, we were going to start for Tellus today, anyway, to see Kit graduate. This doesn't change that."

And in a distant room four tall, shapely, auburn-haired, startlingly identical girls stared at each other briefly, then went en rapport; for their mother had erred greatly in saying that the breakfast room was screened against their minds. Nothing was or could be screened against them: they could think above, below, or, by sufficient effort, straight through any thought-screen that had ever been designed. Nothing in which they were interested was safe from them, and they were interested in practically everything.

"Kay, we've got ourselves a job!" Kathryn, older by minutes than Karen, excluded pointedly the younger twins, Camilla and Constance—"Cam" and "Con".

"At last!" Karen exclaimed. "I've been wondering what we were born for, with nine-tenths of our minds so deep down that nobody except Kit even knows they're there and so heavily blocked that we can't let even each other in without a conscious effort. This is it. We'll go places now, Kat, and really do things."

"What do you mean you'll go places and do things?" Con demanded indignantly. "Do you think for a second that you've got jets enough to blast us out of all the fun?"

"Certainly," Kat said, equably. "You're too young."

"We'll let you know what we're doing, though," Kay conceded, magnanimously. "You might even conceivably contribute an idea that we could use."

"Ideas—phooey!" Con jeered. "A real idea would crack both of your skulls. You haven't any more plan than a—"

"Hush—shut up, everybody!" Kat commanded. "This is too new for any of us to have any worth-while ideas on, yet. Tell you what let's do—we'll all think this over until we're aboard the Dauntless, halfway to Tellus; then we'll compare notes and work out parts for all of us."

They left Klovia that afternoon. Kinnison's personal superdreadnought, the mighty Dauntless—the fourth to bear that name—bored through intergalactic space. Time passed. The four young redheads convened.

"I've got it all worked out!" Kat burst out enthusiastically, forestalling the other three. "There will be four Second-Stage Lensmen at work and there are four of us. We'll circulate—percolate, you might say—around and throughout the Universe. We'll pick up ideas and facts and feed 'em to our Gray Lensmen; surreptitiously, sort of, so they'll think they got them themselves. I'll take Dad for my partner. Kay can have—"

"You'll do no such thing!" A general clamor rose, Con's thought being the most insistent. "If we aren't going to work with all, indiscriminately, we'll draw lots or throw dice to see who gets him, so there!"

"Seal it, snake-hips, please," Kat requested, sweetly. "It is trite but true to say that infants should be seen, but not heard. This is serious business—"

"Snake-hips! Infant!" Con interrupted, venomously. "Listen, my steatopygous and senile friend!" Constance measured perhaps a quarter of an inch less in gluteal circumference than did her oldest sister; she tipped the beam at one scant pound below her weight. "You and Kay are a year older than Cam and me, of course; a year ago your minds were stronger than ours. That condition, however, no longer exists. We, too are grown up. And to put that statement to test, what can you do that I can't?"

"This." Kathryn extended a bare arm, narrowed her eyes in concentration. A Lens materialized about her wrist; not attached to it by a metallic bracelet, but a bracelet in itself, clinging sentiently to the smooth, bronzed skin. "I felt that in this work there would be a need. I learned to satisfy it. Can you match that?"

They could. In a matter of seconds the three others were similarly enlensed. They had not previously perceived the need, but after Kat had pointed it out to them by demonstrating the manner of its satisfaction, their acquisition of full knowledge had been virtually instantaneous.

"Or this, then." Kat's Lens disappeared.

So did the other three. Each knew that no hint of this knowledge or of this power should ever be revealed; each knew that in any moment of stress the Lens of Civilization could be and would be hers.

"Logic, then, and by reason, not by chance." Kat changed her tactics. "I still get Dad. Everybody knows who works best with whom. You, Con, have tagged around after Worsel all your life. You used to ride him instead of a horse—"

"She still does," Kay snickered. "He pretty nearly split her in two a while ago in a seven-gravity pull-out, and she almost broke a toe when she kicked him for it."

"Worsel is nice," Con defended herself vigorously. "He's more human than most people, and more fun, as well as having infinitely more brains. And you can't talk, Kay—what anyone can see in that Nadreck, so cold-blooded that he freezes you even through armor at twenty feet—you'll get as cold and hard as he is if you don't—"

"And every time Cam gets within five hundred parsecs of Tregonsee she goes into silences with him, contemplating raptly the whichnesses of the why," Kathryn interrupted, forestalling recriminations. "So you see, by the process of elimination, Dad has got to be mine."

Since they could not all have him it was finally agreed that Kathryn's claim would be allowed and, after a great deal of discussion and argument, a tentative plan of action was developed. In due course, the Dauntless landed upon Tellus. The Kinnisons went to Wentworth Hall, the towering, chromium-and-glass home of the Tellurian cadets of the Galactic Patrol. They watched the impressive ceremonies of graduation. Then, as the new Lensmen marched out to the magnificent cadences of "Our Patrol," the Gray Lensman, leaving his wife and daughters to their own devices, made his way to his Tellurian office in Prime Base.

"Lensman Kinnison, sir, by appointment," his secretary announced, and as Kit strode in Kinnison stood up and came to attention.

"Christopher Kinnison of Klovia, sir, reporting for duty." Kit saluted crisply.

The Co-ordinator returned the salute punctiliously. Then: "At rest, Kit. I'm proud of you, mighty proud. We all are. The women want to heroize you, but I had to see you first, to clear up a few things. An explanation, an apology, and, in a sense, commiseration."

"An apology, sir?" Kit was dumfounded. "Why, that's unthinkable—"

"For not graduating you in Gray. It has never been done, but that was not the reason. Your commandant, the Board of Examiners, and Port Admiral LaForge, all recommended it, agreeing that none of us is qualified to give you either orders or directions. I blocked it."

"Of course. For the son of the Co-ordinator to be the first Lensman to graduate Unattached would smell—especially since the fewer who know of my peculiar characteristics the better. That can wait, sir."

"Not too long, sir." Kinnison's smile was a trifle forced. "Here's your Release and your kit, and a request signed by the whole Galactic Council that you go to work on whatever it is that is going on. We rather think that it heads up somewhere in the Second Galaxy, but that is little more than a guess."

"I can start out from Klovia, then? Good—I can go home with you."

"That's the idea, and on the way there you can study the situation. For your information we have made up a series of tapes, carrying not only all the available data, but also our attempts at analysis and interpretation. Complete and up to date, except for one item which came in this morning.... I can't figure out whether it means anything or not, but it should be inserted—" Kinnison paced the room, scowling.

"Might as well tell me. I'll insert it when I scan the tape."

"QX. I don't suppose that you have heard much about the unusual shipping trouble we have been having, particularly in the Second Galaxy?"

"Rumor—gossip only. I'd rather have it straight."

"It's all on the tapes, so I'll give you the barest possible background. Losses are twenty-five percent above normal. A few highly peculiar derelicts have been found—peculiar in that they seem to have been wrecked by madmen. Not only wrecked, but gutted, and with every mark of identification obliterated. We can't determine even origin or destination, since the normal disappearances outnumber the abnormal ones by four to one. On the tapes this is lumped in with the other psychoses you'll learn about. But this morning they found another derelict, in which the chief pilot had scrawled 'WARE HELL HOLE IN SP' across a plate. Connection with the other derelicts, if any, is obscure. If the pilot was sane when he wrote that message, it means something—but nobody knows what. If he wasn't, it doesn't, any more than the dozens of obviously senseless—excuse me, I should say apparently senseless—messages which we have already recorded."

"Hm-m-m. Interesting. I'll bear it in mind and tape it in its place. But speaking of peculiar things, I've got one I wanted to discuss with you—getting my Release was such a shock that I almost forgot it. Reported it, but nobody thought it was anything important. Maybe ... probably ... it isn't. Tune your mind up to the top of the range ... there, did you ever hear of a race that thinks upon that band?"

"I never did—it's practically unreachable. Why—have you?"

"Yes and no. Only once, and that only a touch. Or, rather, a burst; as though a hard-held mind-block had exploded, or the creature had just died a violent, instantaneous death. Not enough of it to trace, and I never found any more of it."

"Any characteristics? Bursts can be quite revealing at times."

"A few. It was on my last break-in trip in the Second Galaxy, out beyond Thrale—about here." Kit marked the spot upon a mental chart. "Mentality very high—precisionist grade—possibly beyond social needs, as the planet was a bare desert. No thought of cities. Nor of water, although both may have existed without appearing in that burst of thought. The thing's bodily structure was RTSL, to four places. No gross digestive tract—atmosphere-nourished or an energy-converter, perhaps. The sun was a blue giant. No spectral data, of course, but at a rough guess I'd say somewhere around class B5 or A0. Although the temperature was normal for him, it was quite evident that the planet would be unbearably hot for us. That's all I could get."

"That's a lot to get from one burst. It doesn't mean a thing to me right now—but I'll watch for a chance to fit it in somewhere."

How casually they dismissed as unimportant that cryptic burst of thought! But if they both, right then, together, had been authoritatively informed that the description fitted exactly the physical form forced upon its denizens in its summer by the accurately-described, simply hellish climatic conditions obtaining during that season on noxious planet Ploor, the information would still not have seemed important to either of them—then.

"Anything else we ought to discuss before night?" The older Lensman went on without a break.

"Not that I know of."

"You said your Release was a shock. Ready for another one?"

"I can't think of a harder one. I'm braced—blast!"

"I have turned the office over to Vice Co-ordinator Maitland for the duration. I am authorized to tell you that Worsel, Nadreck, Tregonsee, and I have resumed our Unattached status and, while conducting our own various investigations, will be holding ourselves ready at all times for your call."

"That is a shock, sir. Thanks. I hadn't expected ... it's really overwhelming. And you said something about commiserating me?" Kit lifted his red-thatched head—all of Clarrissa's children had inherited her startling hair—and gray eyes stared level into eyes of gray.

"In a sense, yes. You'll understand later. Well, you'd better go hunt up Chris and the kids. After the festivities are over—"

"I'd better cut them, hadn't I?" Kit asked, eagerly. "Don't you think it'd be better for me to get started right away?"

"Not on your life!" Kinnison demurred, positively. "Do you think that I want that mob of strawberry blondes to snatch me bald-headed? You're in for a large day and evening of lionization, so take it like a man. As I was about to say, as soon as the brawl is over tonight we'll all board the Dauntless and do a flit for Klovia, where I'll fit you out with everything you want. Until then, son—" Two big hands gripped.

"But I'll be seeing you around the Hall!" Kit exclaimed. "You can't—"

"No, I can't dodge the lionizing, either," Kinnison grinned, "but we won't be in a sealed and shielded room. So, son ... I'm proud of you."

"Right back at you, big fellow—and thanks a million." Kit strode out and, a few minutes later, the Co-ordinator did likewise.

The "brawl," which was the gala event of the Tellurian social year, was duly enjoyed by all the Kinnisons. The Dauntless made an uneventful flight to Klovia. Arrangements were made. Plans, necessarily sketchy and elastic, were laid.

Two big, gray-clad Lensmen stood upon the deserted spacefield, between two blackly indetectable speedsters. Kinnison was massive, sure, calm with the poised calmness of maturity, experience, and power. Kit, with the broad shoulders and narrow waist of his years and training, was taut and tense, fiery, eager to come to grips with Civilization's foes.

"Remember, son," Kinnison said as the two gripped hands. "There are four of us old-timers, who have been through the mill, on call every second. If you can use any one of us or all of us, don't wait to be too sure—snap out a call."

"I know, Dad ... thanks. The four best, ablest Lensmen that ever lived. One of you may make a strike before I do. In fact, with the thousands of leads we have, and with no way of telling how many of them are false—deliberately or otherwise—and with your vastly greater experience and knowledge, you probably will. So remember that it cuts both ways. If any of you can use me at any time, I'll come at max."

"QX. We'll get in touch from time to time, anyway. Clear ether, Kit!"

"Clear ether, Dad!" What a wealth of meaning there was in that low-voiced, simple exchange of the standard bon voyage!

For minutes, as his speedster flashed through space, Kinnison thought only of the boy. He knew exactly how he felt; he relived in memory the supremely ecstatic moments of his own first launching into space as a Gray Lensman. But Kit had the stuff—stuff which he, Kinnison, knew that he could know nothing about—and he had his own job to do. Therefore, methodically, like the old campaigner he was, he set about it.

II.

Worsel the Velantian, hard and durable and long-lived as Velantians are, had in twenty Tellurian years changed scarcely at all. As the first Lensman and the only Second-Stage Lensman of his race, the twenty years had been very fully occupied indeed.

He had solved the varied technological and administrative problems incident to the welding of Velantia into the structure of Civilization. He had worked at the many tasks which, in the opinion of the Galactic Council, fitted his peculiarly individual talents. In his "spare" time he had sought out in various parts of two galaxies, and had ruthlessly slain, widely-scattered groups of the Overlords of Delgon.

Continuously, however, he had taken an intense sort of godfatherly interest in the Kinnison children, particularly in Kit and in the youngest daughter, Constance; finding in the girl a mentality surprisingly akin to his own.

When Kinnison's call came he answered it. He was now out in space; not in the Dauntless, but in a ship of his own, under his own command. And what a ship! The Velan was manned entirely by beings of his own race. It carried Velantian air, at Velantian temperature and pressure. Above all, it was built and powered for inert maneuvering at the atrocious accelerations employed by the Velantians in their daily lives; and Worsel loved it with enthusiasm and elan.

He had worked conscientiously and well with Kinnison and with other entities of Civilization. He and they had all known, however, that he could work more efficiently alone or with others of his own kind. Hence, except in emergencies, he had done so; and hence, except in similar emergencies, he would so continue to do.

Out in deep space, Worsel entwined himself, in a Velantian's idea of comfort, in an intricate series of figures-of-eight around a couple of parallel bars and relaxed in thought. There were insidious deviltries afoot, Kinnison had said. There were disaffections, psychoses, mass hysterias, and—Oh happy thought!—hallucinations. There were also certain revolutions and sundry uprisings, which might or might not be connected or associated with the disappearances of a considerable number of persons of note. In these latter, however, Worsel of Velantia was not interested. He knew without being told that Kinnison would pounce upon such blatant manifestations as those. He himself would work upon something much more to his taste.

Hallucination was Worsel's dish. He had been born among hallucinations, had been reared in an atmosphere of them. What he did not know about hallucinations could have been printed in pica upon the smallest one of his scales.

Therefore, isolating one section of his multicompartmented mind from all of the others and from any control over his physical self, he sensitized it to receive whatever hallucinatory influences might be abroad. Simultaneously he set two other parts of his mind to watch over the one to be victimized; to study and to analyze whatever figments of obtrusive mentality might be received and entertained.

Then, using all of his naturally tremendous sensitivity and reach, all of his Arisian supertraining, and the full power of his Lens, he sent his mental receptors out into space. And then, although the thought is staggeringly incomprehensible to any Tellurian or near-human mind, he relaxed. For day after day, as the Velan hurtled randomly through the void, he hung blissfully slack upon his bars, most of his mind a welter of the indescribable thoughts in which it is a Velantian's joy to revel.

Suddenly, after an unknown interval of time, a thought impinged: a thought under the impact of which Worsel's body tightened so convulsively as to pull the bars a foot out of true. Overlords! The unmistakable, the body- and mind-paralyzing hunting call of the Overlords of Delgon!

His crew had not felt it yet, of course; nor would they feel it. If they should, they would be worse than useless in the conflict to come; for they could not withstand that baneful influence. Worsel could. Worsel was the only Velantian who could.

"Thought-screens all!" his commanding thought snapped out. Then, even before the order could be obeyed: "As you were!"

For the impenetrably shielded chambers of his mind told him immediately that this was no ordinary Delgonian hunting call; or rather, that it was more than that. Much more.

Mixed with, superimposed upon the overwhelming compulsion which generations of Velantians had come to know so bitterly and so well, were the very things for which he had been searching—hallucinations! To shield his crew or, except in the subtlest possible fashion himself, simply would not do. Overlords everywhere knew that there was at least one Velantian Lensman who was mentally their master; and, while they hated this Lensman tremendously, they feared him even more. Therefore, even though a Velantian was any Overlord's choicest prey, at the first indication of an ability to disobey their commands the monsters would cease entirely to radiate; would withdraw at once every strand of their far-flung mental nets into the fastnesses of their superbly hidden and indetectably shielded cavern.

Therefore Worsel allowed the inimical influence to take over, not only the total minds of his crew, but the unshielded portion of his own as well. And stealthily, so insidiously that no mind affected could discern the change, values gradually grew vague and reality began to alter.

Loyalty dimmed, and esprit de corps. Family ties and pride of race waned into meaninglessness. All concepts of Civilization, of the Galactic Patrol, degenerated into strengthless gossamer, into oblivion. And to replace those hitherto mighty motivations there crept in an overmastering need for, and the exact method of obtainment of, whatever it was that was each Velantian's deepest, most primal desire. Each crewman stared into an individual visiplate whose substance was to him as real and as solid as the metal of his ship had ever been; each saw upon that plate whatever it was that, consciously or unconsciously, he wanted to see. Noble or base, lofty or low, intellectual or physical, spiritual or carnal, it made no difference to the Overlords. Whatever each victim most wanted was there.

No figment was, however, even to the Velantians, actual or tangible. It was a picture upon a plate, transmitted from a well-defined point in space. There, upon that planet, was the actuality, eagerly awaited; toward and to that planet must the Velan go at maximum blast. Into that line and at that blast, then, the pilots set their vessel without orders, and each of the crew saw upon his nonexistent plate that she had so been set. If she had not been, if the pilots had been able to offer any resistance, the crew would have slaughtered them out of hand. As it was, all was well.

And Worsel, watching the affected portion of his mind accept these hallucinations as truths and admiring unreservedly the consummate artistry with which the work was being done, was well content. He knew that only a hard, solidly-driven, individually probing beam could force him to reveal the fact that a portion of his mind and all of his bodily control were being withheld; he knew that unless he made a slip no such investigation was to be expected. He would not slip.

No human or near-human mind can really understand how the mind of a Velantian works. A Tellurian can, by dint of training, learn to do two or more unrelated things simultaneously. But neither is done very well and both must be more or less routine in nature. To perform any original or difficult operation successfully he must concentrate upon it, and he can concentrate upon only one thing at a time. A Velantian, however, can and does concentrate upon half-a-dozen totally unrelated things at once; and, with his multiplicity of arms, hands, and eyes, he can perform simultaneously an astonishing number of completely independent operations.

The Velantian is, however, in no sense such a multiple personality as would exist if six or eight human heads were mounted upon one body. There is no joint tenancy about it. There is only one ego permeating all those pseudoindependent compartments; no contradictory orders are, or ordinarily can be, sent along the bundled nerves of the spinal cord. While individual in thought and in the control of certain actions, the mind-compartments are basically, fundamentally, one mind.

Worsel had progressed beyond his fellows. He was different; unique. In fact, the perception of the need of the ability to isolate certain compartments of his mind, to separate them completely from his real ego, was one of the things which had enabled him to become the only Second-Stage Lensman of his race.

L2 Worsel, then, held himself aloof and observed appreciatively everything that went on. More, he did a little hallucinating of his own. Under the Overlords' compulsion he was supposed to remain motionless, staring raptly into an imaginary visiplate at an orgiastic saturnalia designed to make even his burly ego quail. Therefore, as far as the occupied portion of his mind and through it the Overlords were concerned, he did so. Actually, however, his body moved purposefully about, under the direction only of his own grim will; moved to make ready against the time of landing.

For Worsel knew that his opponents were not fools. He knew that they reduced their risks to the irreducible minimum. He knew that the mighty Velan, with her prodigious weaponry, would not be permitted to be within even extreme range of the cavern, if the Overlords could possibly prevent it, when that cavern's location was revealed. His was the task to see to it that she was not only within range, but was at the very portal.

The speeding spaceship approached the planet—went inert—matched the planetary intrinsic—landed. Her air locks opened. Her crew rushed out headlong, sprang into the air, and arrowed away en masse. Then Worsel, Grand Master of Hallucinations, went blithely but intensely to work.

Thus, although he stayed at the Velan's control board instead of joining the glamoured Velantians in their rush over the unfamiliar terrain, and although the huge spaceship lifted lightly into the air and followed them, neither the fiend-possessed part of Worsel's mind, nor any of his fellows, nor through them the many Overlords, knew that either of those two things was happening. To that part of his mind Worsel's body was, under full control, flying along upon tireless wings in the midst of the crowd; to it and to all of the other Velantians and hence to the Overlords the Velan lay motionless and deserted upon the rocks far below and behind them. They watched the vessel diminish in apparent size in the distance; they saw it vanish beyond the horizon!

This was eminently tricky work, necessitating as it did such nicety of synchronization with the Delgonian's own compulsions as to be indetectable even to the monsters themselves. Worsel was, however, an expert, one of the Universe's best; he went at the task not with any doubt whatever as to his ability to carry it through, but only with an uncontrollably shivering physical urge to come to grips with the hereditary enemies of his race.

The fliers shot downward, and as a boulder-camouflaged entrance yawned open in the mountain's side Worsel closed up and shot out a widely enveloping zone of thought-screen. The Overlords' control vanished. The Velantians, realizing instantaneously what had happened, flew madly back to their ship. They jammed through the air locks, flashed to their posts. The cavern's gates had closed by then, but the monsters had no screen fit to cope with the Velan's tremendous batteries. Down they went. Barriers, bastions, and a considerable portion of the mountain's face flamed away in fiery vapor or flowed away in molten streams. Through reeking atmosphere, over red-hot debris, the armored Velantians flew to the attack.

The Overlords had, however, learned. This cavern, as well as being hidden, was defended by physical, as well as mental, means. There were inner barriers of metal and of force, there were armed and armored defenders who, dominated completely by the monsters, fought with the callous fury of the robots which in effect they were. Nevertheless, against all opposition, the attackers bored relentlessly in. Heavy semiportables blazed, hand-to-hand combat raged in the narrow confines of that noisome tunnel. In the wavering, glaring light of the contending beams and screens, through the hot and rankly stinking steam billowing away from the reeking walls, the invaders fought their way. One by one and group by group the defenders died where they stood and the Velantians drove onward over their burned and dismembered bodies.

Into the cavern at last. To the Overlords. Overlords! They, who for ages had preyed upon generation after generation of helpless Velantians, torturing their bodies to the point of death and then devouring ghoulishly the life-forces which their mangled bodies could no longer retain!

Worsel and his crew threw away their DeLameters. Only when it is absolutely necessary does any Velantian use any artificial weapon against any Overlord of Delgon. He is too furious, too berserk, to do so. He is scared to the core of his being; the cold grue of a thousand fiendishly eaten ancestors has bred that fear into the innermost atoms of his chemistry. But against that fear, negating and surmounting it, is a hatred of such depth and violence as no human being has ever known; a starkly savage hatred which can be even partially assuaged only by the ultimate of violences—by rending his foe apart member by member; by actually feeling the Delgonian's life depart under gripping hands and tearing talons and constricting body and shearing tail.

It is best, then, not to go into too fine detail as to this conflict. Since there were almost a hundred of the Delgonians—insensately vicious fighters when cornered—and since their physical make-up was very similar to the Velantians' own, many of Worsel's troopers died. But since the Velan carried over fifteen hundred and since less than half of her personnel could even get into the cavern, there were plenty of them left to operate and to fight the spaceship.

Worsel took great care that the opposing commander was not killed with his minions. The fighting over, the Velantians chained this sole survivor into one of his own racks and stretched him out into immobility. Then, restraining by main strength the terrific urge to put the machine then and there to its fullest ghastly use, Worsel cut his screen, threw a couple of turns of tail around a convenient anchorage, and faced the Boskonian almost nose to nose. Eight weirdly stalked eyes curled out as he drove a probing thought-beam against the monster's shield.

"I could use this—or this—or this," Worsel gloated. As he touched various wheels and levers the chains hummed slightly, sparks flashed, the rigid body twitched. "I am not going to, however—yet. While you are still sane I want to take and I shall take your total knowledge."

And face to face, eye to eye, brain to brain, that silently and motionlessly cataclysmic battle was joined.

As has been said, Worsel had hunted down and had destroyed many Overlords. He had hunted them, however, like vermin. He had destroyed them with duodec bombs and with primary or secondary beams; or, at closest hand, with talons, teeth, and tail. He had not engaged an Overlord mind to mind for over twenty Tellurian years; not since he and Nadreck of Palain VII had captured alive the leaders of those who had been preying upon Helen's matriarchs and warring upon Civilization from their cavern upon Lyrane II. Nor had he ever dueled one mentally to death without powerful support; Kinnison or some other Lensman had always been near by.

But Worsel would need no help. He was not shivering in eagerness now. His body was as still as the solid rock upon which most of it lay; every chamber and every faculty of his mind was concentrated upon battering down or cutting through the Overlords' stubbornly-held shields.

Brighter and brighter glowed the Velantian's Lens, flooding the gloomy cave with pulsating polychromatic light. Alert for any possible trickery, guarding intently against any possibility of riposte or of counterthrust, Worsel leveled bolt after bolt of mental force. He surrounded the monster's mind with a searing, constricting field. He squeezed; relentlessly and with appalling power.

The Overlord was beaten. He, who had never before encountered a foreign mind or a vital force stronger than his own, knew that he was beaten. He knew that at long last he had met that half-fabulous Velantian Lensman with whom not one of his monstrous race could cope. He knew starkly, with the chilling, numbing terror possible only to such a being in such a position, that he was doomed to die the same hideous and long-drawn-out death which he had dealt out to so many others. He did not read into the mind of the bitterly vengeful, the implacably ferocious Velantian any more mercy or any more compunction than was actually there. He knew perfectly that of either there was no slightest trace. Knowing these things with the blackly appalling certainty that was his, he quailed.

There is an old but cogent saying that the brave man dies only once, the coward a thousand times. That Overlord, during that lethal combat, died more times than it is pleasant to contemplate. Nevertheless, he fought. A cornered rat will fight, and the Delgonian was not a rat—not exactly, that is, an ordinary rat. His mind was competent, keen, powerful, and utterly unscrupulous; and he brought to the defense of his beleaguered ego every resource of skill and of trickery and of sheer power at his command—in vain. Deeper and deeper, in spite of everything he could do, the relentless Lensman squeezed and smashed and cut and pried and bored; little by little the Overlord gave mental ground.

"This station is here ... this staff is here ... I am here, then ... to wreak damage ... all possible damage ... to the commerce ... and to the personnel of ... the Galactic Patrol ... and Civilization in every aspect—" the Overlord admitted haltingly as Worsel's pressure became intolerable; but such admissions, however unwillingly made or however revealing in substance, were not enough.

Worsel wanted, and would be satisfied with nothing less than, his enemy's total knowledge. Hence he maintained his assault until, unable longer to withstand the frightful battering, the Overlord's barriers went completely down; until every convolution of his brain and every track of his mind lay open, helplessly exposed to Worsel's poignant scrutiny. Then, scarcely taking time to gloat over his victim, Worsel did scrutinize.

Period.

Hurtling through space, toward a definite objective now, Worsel studied and analyzed some of the things which he had just learned. Worsel was not surprised that this Overlord had not known any of his superior officers in things or enterprises Boskonian; that he did not consciously know even that he had been obeying orders or that he had superiors. That technique, by this time, was familiar enough. The Boskonian psychologists were able operators; to attempt to unravel the unknowable complexities of their subconscious compulsions would be a sheer waste of time.

What the Overlords had been doing, however, was clear enough. That outpost had indeed been wreaking havoc with Civilization's commerce. Ship after ship had been lured from its course; had been compelled to land upon this barren planet. Some of those vessels had been destroyed; some of them had been stripped and rifled as though by pirates of old; some of them had been set upon new courses with hulls, mechanical equipment, and cargoes untouched. No crewman or passenger, however, escaped unscathed; even though only ten percent of them died in the Overlordish fashion which Worsel knew so well.

The Overlord himself had wondered why they had not been able to kill them all. He knew that such forbearance was unnatural, was against all instinct and training. He knew that they wanted, intensely enough, to kill every one of their victims; that their greedy lust for life-force simply could not be sated as long as life-force was to be had. He knew only that something, none of them knew what, limited their actual killing to ten percent of the bag.

Worsel grinned wolfishly at that thought, even while he was admiring the quality of the psychology which could impress such a compulsion as that upon such rapacious hellions as those. That was the work of the Boskonian higher-ups, who knew that ten percent was the limit above which the deaths would have been too revealing to the statisticians of the Galactic Patrol.

The other ninety percent, however, the Delgonians had "played with"—a procedure which, although less satisfying to the Overlords than the ultimate treatment, was not very different in so far as the victims' egos were concerned. For none of them emerged from the ordeal with any memory of what had happened, or of what or who he had ever been. They were not all completely mad; some were only partially so. All had, however, been—altered. Changed; shockingly transformed. No two were alike. Each Overlord, it appeared, had striven with all of his ultra-hellish ingenuity to excel his fellows in the manufacture of an outrageous something whose like had never been seen in or upon any land or sea or air or throughout any reach of space.

These and many other facts and items Worsel had studied carefully. He was now heading for the region in which the Patrol's computers had figured that the "Hell Hole in Space" must lie. The planet he had just left, the Overlords he had just slain, were not the original Hell Hole; could have had nothing to do with it. Too far apart—they were not in the same possible volume of space.

Worsel knew now, though, what the Hell Hole in Space really was. It was a cavern of Overlords. It simply couldn't be anything else. And, in himself and his crew and his mighty Velan he, Worsel of Velantia, Overlord-slayer par excellence of two galaxies, had in ample measure everything it took to extirpate any number of Overlords. With what he had just learned and with what he was so calmly certain he could do, the Hell Hole in Space would take no more toll. Wherefore Worsel, coiled loosely around his hard bars, relaxed in happily planful thought. And in a couple of hours a solid, clear-cut thought impinged upon his Lens.

"Worsel! Con calling. What goes on there, fellow old snake? You've stuck that sharp tail of yours into some of my business—I hope!"

III.

Each of the Second-Stage Lensmen had exactly the same facts, the same data, upon which to theorize and from which to draw conclusions. Each had shared his experiences, his findings, and his deductions and inductions with all of the others. They had discussed minutely, in wide-open four-ways, every phase of the Boskonian problem. Nevertheless the approach of each to that problem and the point of attack chosen by each was individual and characteristic.

Kimball Kinnison was by nature forthright; direct. As has been seen, he could use the approach circuitous if necessary, but he much preferred and upon every possible occasion employed the approach direct. He liked plain, unambiguous clues much better than obscure ones; the more obvious and factual the clue was, the better he liked it.

He was now, therefore, heading for Antigan IV, the scene of the latest and apparently the most outrageous of a long series of crimes of violence. He didn't know much about it; the request had come in through regular channels, not via Lens, that he visit Antigan and take personal charge of the investigation of the supposed murder of the Planetary President.

As his speedster flashed through space the Gray Lensman mulled over in his mind the broad aspects of this crime wave. It was spreading far and wide, and the wider it spread and the intenser it became the more vividly one salient fact stuck out. Selectivity—distribution. The solar systems of Thrale, Velantia, Tellus, Klovia, and Palain had not been affected. Thrale, Tellus, and Klovia were full of Lensmen. Velantia, Rigel, Palain, and a good part of the time Klovia, were the working headquarters of Second-Stage Lensmen. It seemed, then, that the trouble was roughly in inverse ratio to the numbers or the abilities of the Lensmen in the neighborhood. Something, therefore, that Lensmen—particularly Second-Stage Lensmen—were bad for. That was true, of course, for all crime. Nevertheless, this seemed to be a special case.

And when he reached his destination he found out that it was. The planet was seething. Its business and its everyday activities seemed to be almost paralyzed. Martial law had been declared; the streets were practically deserted except for thick-clustered groups of heavily-armed guards. What few people were abroad were furtive and sly; slinking hastily along with their fear-filled eyes trying to look in all directions at once.

"QX, Wainwright, go ahead," Kinnison directed brusquely when, alone with the escorting Patrol officers in a shielded car, he was being taken to the Capitol grounds. "There's been too much secrecy—pussyfooting—about the whole affair. Spill it, please."

"Very well, sir," and Wainwright told his tale. Things had been happening for months. Little things, but disturbing. Then murders and kidnapings and unexplained disappearances had begun to increase. The police forces had been falling farther and farther behind. The usual cries of incompetence and corruption had been raised, only further to confuse the issue. Circulars—dodgers—hand-bills appeared all over the planet; from where nobody knew. The keenest detectives could find no clue to papermakers, printers, or distributors. The usual inflammatory, subversive propaganda—"Down with the Patrol!" "Give us back our freedom!" and so on—but, because of the high tension already prevailing, the stuff had been unusually effective in breaking down the morale of the citizenry as a whole.

"Then this last thing. For two solid weeks the whole world was literally plastered with the announcement that at midnight on the thirty-fourth of Dreel—you're familiar with our calendar, I think?—President Renwood would disappear. Two weeks warning—daring us." Wainwright got that far and stopped.

"Well, go on. He disappeared, I know. How? What did you fellows do to prevent it? Why all the secrecy?"

"If you insist, I'll have to tell you, of course, but I'd rather not." Wainwright flushed uncomfortably. "You wouldn't believe it. Nobody could. I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't been there. I'd rather you'd wait, sir, and let the Vice President tell you, in the presence of the Treasurer and the others who were on duty that night."

"Um-m-m ... I see ... maybe." Kinnison's mind raced. "That's why nobody would give me details? Afraid I wouldn't believe it ... that I'd think they'd been—" He stopped. "Hypnotized" would have been the next word, but that would have been jumping at conclusions. Even if true, there was no sense in airing that hypothesis—yet.

"Not afraid, sir. They knew that you wouldn't believe it."

After entering Government Reservation they went, not to the president's private quarters, but into the Treasury and down into the subbasement housing the most massive, the most utterly impregnable vault of the planet. There the nation's most responsible officers told Kinnison, with their entire minds as well as their tongues, what had happened.

Upon that black day business had been suspended. No visitors of any sort had been permitted to enter the Reservation. No one had been allowed to approach the president except old and trusted officers about whose loyalty there could be no question. Airships and spaceships had filled the sky. Troops, armed with semiportables or manning fixed-mount heavy stuff, had covered the grounds. At five minutes before midnight Renwood, accompanied by four secret service men, had entered the vault, which was thereupon locked by the treasurer. All the cabinet members saw them go in, as did the attendant corps of specially-selected guards. Nevertheless, when the treasurer opened the vault at five minutes after midnight, the five men were gone. No trace of any one of them had been found from that time on.

"And that—every word of it—is TRUE!" the assembled minds yelled as one, all unconsciously, into the mind of the Lensman.

During all this telling Kinnison had been searching mind after mind; inspecting each minutely for the telltale marks of mental surgery. He found none. No hypnosis. This thing had happened, exactly as they told it. Now, convinced of that fact, his eyes clouded with foreboding, he sent out his sense of perception and studied the vault itself. Millimeter by cubic millimeter he scanned the innermost details of its massive structure—the concrete, the neo-carballoy, the steel, the heat-conductors and the closely-spaced gas cells. He traced the intricate wiring of the networks of alarms. Everything was sound. Everything functioned. Nothing had been disturbed.

The sun of this system, although rather on the small side, was intensely hot; this planet, Four, was a long way out. Pretty close to Cardynge's limit ... or the Boskonians had improved their technique—tightened up their controls. A tube, of course ... for all the tea in China it had to be a tube. Kinnison sagged; for the first time in his life the indomitable Gray Lensman showed his years and more.

"I know that it happened." His voice was grim, quiet, as he spoke to the still protesting men. "I also know how it was done, but that's all."

"HOW?" they demanded, practically in one voice.

"A hyperspatial tube," and Kinnison went on to explain, as well as he could, the functioning of a thing which could not be grasped intrinsically by any nonmathematical three-dimensional mind.

"But what can we or you or anybody else do about it?" the treasurer asked, numbly.

"Nothing whatever." Kinnison's voice was flat. "When it's gone, it's gone. Where does the light go when a lamp goes out? No more trace. No more way—no way whatever—of tracing it. Hundreds of millions of planets in this galaxy, as many in the Second. Millions and millions of galaxies. All that in one Universe—our own universe. And there are an infinite number—too many to be expressed, let alone to be grasped—of universes, side by side, like pages in a book except thinner, in the hyperdimension. So you can figure out for yourselves the chances of ever finding either President Renwood or the Boskonians who took him—so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from zero absolute."

The treasurer was crushed. "Do you mean to say that there is no protection at all from this thing? That they can keep on doing away with us just as they please? The nation is going mad, sir, day by day—one more such occurrence and we will be a planet of maniacs."

"Oh, no—I didn't say that." The tension lightened. "Just that we can't do anything about the president and his aides. The tube can be detected while it is in place, and anyone coming through it can be shot as soon as he can be seen. What you need is a couple of Rigellian Lensmen, or Ordoviks. I'll see to it that you get them. I don't think, with them here, that they will even try to repeat." He did not add what he knew somberly to be a fact, that the enemy would go elsewhere, to some other planet not protected by a Lensman able to perceive the intangible structure of a sphere of pure force.

Frustrated, the Lensman again took to space. It was terrible, this thing of having everything happening where he wasn't, and when he got there having nothing left to work on. Hit-and-run—stab-in-the-back—how could a man fight something that he couldn't see or sense or feel or find? But this chewing his fingernails to the elbow wasn't getting him anywhere, either; he'd have to find something that he could stick a tooth into. What?

All former avenues of approach were blocked; he was sure of that. The Boskonians, who were now in charge of things, could really think. No underling would know anything about any one of them except at such times and places as the directors chose, and those conferences would be as nearly detection-proof as they could be made. What to do?

Easy. Catch a big operator in the act. He grinned wryly to himself. Easy to say, but not—However, it wasn't impossible. The Boskonians were not supermen—they didn't have any more jets than he did. Put himself in the other fellow's place—what would he do if he were a Boskonian big shot? He had had quite a lot of experience in the role. Were there any specific groups of crimes which revealed techniques similar to those which he himself would use in like case?

He, personally, preferred to work direct and to attack in force. At need, however, he had done a smooth job of boring from within. In the face of the Patrol's overwhelming superiority of armament, especially in the First Galaxy, they would have to bore from within. How? By what means? He was a Lensman; they were not. Jet back! Or were they, perhaps? How did he know that they weren't? Maybe they were, by this time. Fossten the renegade Arisian—No use kidding himself; Fossten might have known as much about the Lens as Mentor himself, and might have developed an organization that even Mentor didn't know anything about. Or Mentor might be figuring that it would be good for what ailed a certain fat-headed Gray Lensman to have to dope this out for himself. QX.

He shot a call to Vice Co-ordinator Maitland, who was now in complete charge of the office which Kinnison had temporarily abandoned.

"Cliff? Kim. Just gave birth to an idea." He explained rapidly what the idea was. "Maybe nothing to it, but we'd better get up on our toes and find out. You might suggest to the boys that they check up here and there, particularly around the rough spots. If any of them find any trace anywhere of off-color, sour, or even slightly rancid Lensmanship, with or without a Lens appearing in the picture, burn a hole in space getting it to me. QX?... Thanks."

Viewed in this new perspective, Renwood of Antigan IV might have been neither a patriot nor a victim, but a saboteur. The tube could have been a prop, used deliberately to cap the mysterious climax. The four honest and devoted guards were the real casualties. Renwood—or whoever he was—having accomplished his object of undermining and destroying the whole planet's morale, might simply have gone elsewhere to continue his nefarious activities. It was fiendishly clever. That spectacularly theatrical finale was certainly one for the book. The whole thing, though, was very much of a piece in quality of workmanship with what he had done in becoming the Tyrant of Thrale. Farfetched? No. He had already denied in his thoughts that the Boskonian operators were supermen. Conversely, he wasn't, either. He would have to admit that they might very well be as good as he was; to deny them the ability to do anything which he himself could do would be sheer stupidity.

Where did that put him? On Radelix, by Klono's golden gills! A good-sized planet. Important enough, but not too much so. People human. Comparatively little hell being raised there—yet. Very few Lensmen, and Gerrond the top. Hm-m-m. Gerrond. Not too bright, as Lensmen went, and inclined to be a bit brass-hattish. To Radelix, by all means, next.

He went to Radelix, but not in the Dauntless and not in gray. He was a passenger upon a luxury liner, a writer in search of local color for another saga of the spaceways. Sybly Whyte—one of the Patrol's most carefully-established figments—had a bulletproof past. His omnivorous interest and his uninhibited nosiness were the natural attributes of his profession—everything is grist which comes to an author's mill.

Sybly Whyte then prowled about Radelix. Industriously and, to some observers, pointlessly. He and his red-leather notebook were apt to be seen anywhere at any time, day or night. He visited spaceports, he climbed through freighters, he lost small sums in playing various games of so-called chance in spacemen's dives. Upon the other hand, he truckled assiduously to the social elite and attended all functions into which he could wangle or could force his way. He made a pest of himself in the offices of politicians, bankers, merchant princes, tycoons of business and manufacture, and all other sorts of greats.

He was stopped one day in the outer office of an industrial potentate. "Get out and stay out," a peg-legged guard told him. "The boss hasn't read any of your stuff, but I have, and neither of us wants to talk to you. Data, huh? What do you need of data on atomic cats and bulldozers to write them space operas of yours? Why don't you get a roustabout job on a freighter and learn something about what you're trying to write about? Get yourself a real space tan instead of that imitation you got under a lamp; work some of that lard off of your carcass!" Whyte was definitely fatter than Kinnison had been; and, somehow, softer; he peered owlishly through heavy lenses which, fortunately, did not interfere with his sense of perception. "Then maybe some of your tripe will be half-fit to read—beat it!"

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir; very much, sir." Kinnison bobbed obsequiously and scurried out, writing industriously in his notebook the while. He had, however, found out what he wanted to know. The boss was nobody he was looking for.

Nor was an eminent statesman whom he buttonholed at a reception. "I fail to see, sir, entirely, any point in your interviewing me," that worthy informed him, frigidly. "I am not, I am ... uh ... sure, suitable material for any opus upon which you may be at work."

"Oh, you can't ever tell, sir," Kinnison said. "You see, I never know who or what is going to get into any of my stories until after I start to write it, and sometimes not even then." The statesman glared and Kinnison retreated in disorder.

To stay in character Kinnison actually wrote a story while upon Radelix; a story which was later acclaimed as one of Sybly Whyte's best.

"Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmexlike snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship's plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall—" Kinnison was tapping merrily and verbosely along, at a cento a word, when his first real clue developed.

A yellow "attention" light gleamed upon his visiphone panel, a subdued chime gave notice that a message of importance was about to be broadcast to the world. Kinnison-Whyte flipped his switch and the stern face of the Provost Marshal appeared upon the screen.

"Attention, please," the image spoke. "Every citizen of Radelix is urged to be upon the lookout for the source of certain inflammatory and subversive literature which is beginning to appear in various cities of this planet. Our officers cannot be everywhere at once; you citizens are. It is hoped that by the aid of your vigilance this threat to our planetary peace and security can be removed before it becomes really serious; that we can avoid the imposition of martial law."

This message, while not of extreme or urgent import to most Radeligians, held for Kinnison a profound and unique meaning. He was right. He had deduced the thing one hundred percent. He knew what was going to happen next, and how; he knew that neither the law-enforcement officers of Radelix nor its massed citizenry could stop it. They could not even impede it. A force of Lensmen could stop it—but that would not get the Patrol anywhere unless they could capture or kill the beings really responsible for what was done. To alarm them would not do.

Whether or not he could do much of anything before the grand climax depended upon a lot of factors. Upon what that climax was; upon who was threatened with what; upon whether or not the threatened one was actually a Boskonian. A great deal of investigation was indicated.

If the enemy were going to repeat, as seemed probable, the president would be the victim. If he, Kinnison, could not get a line upon the higher-ups before the plot came to a head, he would have to let it develop right up to the point of disappearance; and for Whyte to appear upon the scene at that time would be to attract undesirable attention. No—by that time he must already have been kicking around underfoot long enough to have become an unnoticeable fixture.

Wherefore he moved into quarters as close to the Executive Offices as he could possibly get; and in those quarters he worked openly and wordily at the bringing of the affair of Qadgop and the beautiful-but-dumb Cynthia to a satisfactory conclusion.

IV.

In order to understand these and subsequent events it is necessary to cut back briefly some twenty-odd years, to the momentous interview upon chill, dark Onlo between monstrous Kandron and his superior in affairs Boskonian, the unspeakable Alcon, Tyrant of Thrale. At almost the end of that interview, when Kandron had suggested the possibility that his own base had perhaps been vulnerable to Star A Star's insidious manipulations:

"Do you mean to admit that you may have been invaded and searched—tracelessly?" Alcon fairly shrieked the thought.

"Certainly," Kandron replied, coldly. "While I do not believe that it has been done, the possibility must be conceded. What we could do we have done, but what science can do science can circumvent. It is a virtual certainty that it is not Onlo and I who are their prime objectives, but Thrale and you. Especially you."

"You may be right. With no data whatever upon who or what Star A Star really is, with no tenable theory as to how he could have done what actually has been done, speculation is idle." Thus Alcon ended the conversation and, almost immediately, went back to Thrale.

After the Tyrant's departure Kandron continued to think, and the more he thought the more uneasy he became. It was undoubtedly true that Alcon and Thrale were the Patrol's prime objectives. But, those objectives attained, was it reasonable to suppose that he and Onlo would be spared? It was not. Should he warn Alcon further? He should not. If the Tyrant, after all that had been said, could not see the danger he was in, he was not worth saving. If he preferred to stay and fight it out, that was his lookout. Kandron would take no chances with his own extremely valuable life.

Should he warn his own men? How could he? They were able and hardened fighters all; no possible warning could make them defend their fortresses and their lives any more efficiently than they were already prepared to do; nothing he could say would be of any use in preparing them for a threat whose basic nature, even, was completely unknown. Furthermore, this hypothetical invasion probably had not happened and very well might not happen at all, and to flee from an imaginary foe would not rebound to his credit.

No. As a personage of large affairs, not limited to Onlo, he would be called elsewhere. He would stay elsewhere until after whatever was going to happen had happened. If nothing happened during the ensuing few weeks, he would return from his official trip and all would be well.

He inspected Onlo thoroughly, he cautioned his officers repeatedly and insistently to keep alert against every conceivable emergency while he was so unavoidably absent. Then he departed, with a fleet of vessels manned by hand-picked crews, to a long-prepared and hitherto secret retreat.

From that safe place he watched, through the eyes and the instruments of his skilled observers, everything that occurred. Thrale fell, and Onlo. The Patrol triumphed. Then, knowing the full measure of the disaster and accepting it with the grim passivity so characteristic of his breed, Kandron broadcast certain signals and one of his—and Alcon's—superiors got in touch with him. He reported concisely. They conferred. He was given orders which were to keep him busy for over twenty Tellurian years.

He knew now that Onlo had been invaded, tracelessly, by some feat of mentality beyond comprehension and almost beyond belief. He knew that Onlo had fallen without any of its defenders having energized a single one of their gigantic engines of war. The fall of Thrale, and the manner of that fall's accomplishment, were plain enough. Human stuff. The work, undoubtedly, of human Lensmen; perhaps the work of the human Lensman who was so frequently associated with Star A Star.

But Onlo! Kandron himself had set those snares along those intricately zigzagged communications lines; he knew their capabilities. Kandron himself had installed Onlo's blocking and shielding screens; he knew their might. He knew, since no other path existed leading to Thrale, that those lines had been followed and those screens had been penetrated, and all without setting off a single alarm. Those things had actually happened. Hence Kandron set his stupendous mind to the task of envisaging what the being must be, mentally, who could do them; what the mind of this Star A Star—it could have been no one else—must in actuality be.

He succeeded. He deduced Nadreck of Palain VII, practically in toto; and for the Star A Star thus envisaged he set traps throughout both galaxies. They might or might not kill him. Killing him immediately, however, was not really of the essence; that matter could wait until he could give it his personal attention. The important thing was to see to it that Star A Star could never, by any possible chance, discover a true lead to any high Boskonian.

Sneeringly, gloatingly, Kandron issued orders; then flung himself with all his zeal and ability into the task of reorganizing the shattered fragments of the Boskonian Empire into a force capable of wrecking Civilization.

Thus it is not strange that for more than twenty years Nadreck of Palain VII made very little progress indeed. Time after time he grazed the hot edge of death. Indeed, it was only by the exertion of his every iota of skill, power, and callous efficiency that he managed to survive. He struck a few telling blows for Civilization, but most of the time he was strictly upon the defensive. Every clue that he followed, it seemed, led subtly into a trap; every course he pursued ended, always figuratively and all too often literally, in a cul-de-sac filled with semiportable projectors all agog to blast him out of the ether.

Year by year he became more conscious of some imperceptible, indetectable, but potent foe, an individual enemy obstructing his every move and determined to make an end of him. And year by year, as material accumulated, it became more and more certain that the inimical entity was in fact Kandron, once of Onlo.

When Kit went into space, then, and Kinnison called Nadreck into consultation the usually reticent and unloquacious Palainian was ready to talk. He told the Gray Lensman everything he knew, everything he deduced or suspected about the ex-Onlonian chieftain.

"Kandron of Onlo!" Kinnison exploded, so violently as to sear the subether through which the thought passed. "Holy Klono's brazen bowels! And you can sit there on your spiny tokus and tell me that Kandron got away from you back there? And that you knew it, and not only didn't do a thing about it yourself, but didn't even tell me or anybody else about it, so that we could take steps?"

"Certainly. Why take steps before they become necessary?" Nadreck was entirely unmoved by the Tellurian's passion. "My powers are admittedly small, my intellect feeble. However, even to me it was clear then and it is clear now that Kandron was then of no importance. My assignment was to reduce Onlo. I reduced it. Whether or not Kandron was there at the time did not then have and cannot now have anything to do with that task. Kandron, personally, is another, an entirely distinct problem."

Kinnison swore a blistering deep-space oath; then, by main strength, shut himself up. Nadreck wasn't human; there was no use even trying to judge him by human or near-human standards. He was fundamentally, incomprehensibly, and radically different. And it was just as well for humanity that he was. For if his hellishly able race had possessed the characteristically human abilities, in addition to their own, Civilization would of necessity have been basically Palainian instead of basically human, as it now is. "QX, ace," he growled, finally. "Skip it."

"But Kandron has been hampering my activities for years, and, now that you also have become interested in his operations against us, he has become a factor of which cognizance should be taken," Nadreck went imperturbably on. He could no more understand Kinnison's viewpoint than the Tellurian could understand his. "With your permission, therefore, I shall find—and slay—this Kandron."

"Go to it, little chum," Kinnison sighed, bitingly and uselessly. "Clear ether."

While this conference was taking place, Kandron reclined in a bitterly cold, completely unlighted room of his headquarters and indulged in a little gloating concerning the predicament in which he was keeping Nadreck of Palain VII, who was, in all probability, the once-dreaded Star A Star of the Galactic Patrol. It was true that THE Lensman was still alive. He would probably, Kandron mused quite pleasurably, remain alive until he himself could find the time to attend to him in person. He was an able operator, but one presenting no real menace, now that he was known and understood. There were other things more pressing, just as there had been ever since the fall of Thrale. The revised Plan was going nicely, and as soon as he had resolved that human thing—The Ploorans had suggested ... could it be possible, after all, that Nadreck of Palain was not he who had been known so long only as Star A Star? That the human factor was actually—

Through the operation of some unknowable sense Kandron knew that it was time for his aide to be at hand to report upon those human affairs. He sent out a signal and another Onlonian scuttled in.

"That unknown human element," Kandron radiated harshly. "I assume that you are not reporting that it has been resolved?"

"Sorry, Supremacy, but your assumption is correct," the creature radiated back, in no very conciliatory fashion. "The trap at Antigan IV was set particularly for him; specifically to match the man whose mentality you computed and diagramed for us. Was it too obvious, think you, Supremacy? Or perhaps not quite obvious enough? Or, the Galaxy being large, is it perhaps that he simply did not learn of it in time? In the next attempt, what degree of obviousness should I employ and what degree of repetition is desirable?"

"The technique of the Antigan affair was flawless," Kandron decided. "He did not learn of it, as you suggest, or we should have caught him. He is a master workman, always concealed by his very obviousness until after he has done his work. Thus we can never, save by merest chance, catch him before the act; we must make him come to us. We must keep on trying until he does come to us. It is of no great moment, really, whether we catch him now or five years hence. This work must be done in any event—it is simply a fortunate coincidence that the necessary destruction of Civilization upon its own planets presents such a fine opportunity of trapping him.

"As to repeating the Antigan technique, we should not repeat it exactly ... or, hold! It might be best to do just that. To repeat a process is, of course, the mark of an inferior mind; but if that human can be made to believe that our minds are inferior, so much the better. Keep on trying; report as instructed. Remember that he must be taken alive, so that we can take from his living brain the secrets we have not yet been able to learn. Forget, in the instant of leaving this room, everything about me and about any connections between us until I force recollection upon you. Go."

The minion went, and Kandron set out to do more of the things which he could best do. He would have liked to take Nadreck's trail himself; he could catch and he could kill that evasive entity and the task would have been a pleasant one. He would have liked to supervise the trapping of that enigmatic human Lensman who might—or might not—be that frequently and copiously damned Star A Star. That, too, would be an eminently pleasant chore. There were, however, other matters more pressing by far. If the Great Plan were to succeed, and it absolutely must and would, every Boskonian must perform his assigned duties. Nadreck and his putative accomplice were side issues. Kandron's task was to set up and to direct certain psychoses and disorders; a ghastly train of mental ills of which he possessed such supreme mastery, and which were surely and safely helping to destroy the foundation upon which Galactic Civilization rested. That part was his, and he would do it to the best of his ability. The other things, the personal and nonessential matters, could wait.

Kandron set out then, and traveled fast and far; and wherever he went there spread still further abroad the already widespread blight. A disgusting, a horrible blight with which no human physician or psychiatrist, apparently, could cope; one of, perhaps the worst of, the corrosive blights which had been eating so long at Civilization's vitals.

And L2 Nadreck, having decided to find and slay the ex-ruler of Onlo, went about it in his usual unhurried but eminently thorough fashion. He made no effort to locate him or to trace him personally. That would be bad—foolish. Worse, it would be inefficient. Worst, it would probably be impossible. No, he would find out where Kandron would be at some suitable future time, and wait for him in that place.

To that end Nadreck collected a vast mass of data concerning the occurrences and phenomena which the Big Four had discussed so thoroughly. He analyzed each item, sorting out those which bore the characteristic stamp of the arch-foe whom by now he had come to know so well. The internal evidence of Kandron's craftsmanship was unmistakable; and, not now to his surprise, Nadreck discerned that the number of the Onlonian's dark deeds was legion.

There was the affair of the Prime Minister of DeSilva III, who at a cabinet meeting shot and killed his sovereign and eleven chiefs of state before committing suicide. The President of Viridon, who at his press conference, ran amuck with a scimitar snatched from a wall, hewed unsuspecting reporters to gory bits until he was overpowered, and then swallowed poison.

A variant of the theme, but still plainly Kandron's doing, was the interesting episode in which Galactic Counselor Edmundson, while upon an ocean voyage, threw fifteen women passengers overboard, then leaped after them dressed only in a life jacket stuffed with lead. Another out of the same whimsical mold was that of Dillway, the highly respected Operations Chief of Central Spaceways. That potentate called his secretaries one by one into his sixtieth floor office and unconcernedly tossed them, one by one, out of the window. He danced a jig upon a coping before diving after them to the street.

A particularly juicy and entertaining bit, Nadreck thought, was the case of Narkor Base Hospital, in which four of the planet's most eminent surgeons decapitated every other person in the place—patients, nurses, orderlies, and all, with a fine disregard of age, sex, or condition—arranged the several heads, each upright and each facing due north, upon the tiled floor to spell the word "Revenge," and then hacked each other to death with scalpels.

These, and a thousand or more other events of similar technique, Nadreck tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis. Scattered so widely throughout such a vast volume of space, they had created little or no general disturbance; indeed, they had scarcely been noticed by Civilization as a whole. Collected, they made a truly staggering, a revolting and appalling total. Nadreck, however, was inherently incapable of being staggered, revolted, or appalled. That repulsive summation, a thing which in its massed horror would have shaken to the core—shocked almost into paralysis—any being possessing any shred of sympathy or tenderness, was to Nadreck simply an interesting and not too difficult problem in psychology and mathematics.

He placed each episode in space and in time, correlating each with all of its fellows in a space-time matrix. He determined the locus of centers and derived the equations of its most probable motion. He extended it by extrapolation in accordance with that equation. Then, assuring himself that his margin of error was as small as he could make it, he set out for a planet which Kandron would most probably visit at a time far enough in the future to enable him to receive the Onlonian.