GRAY LENSMAN

By E. E. SMITH, Ph. D.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction
October, November, December 1939, January 1940.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

PROLOGUE

This is not, strictly speaking, a biography. It is not, it cannot be, comprehensive enough to be called that. Nor, since of necessity it must be limited, both in length and in scope, can it be called a history. It is, perhaps, best described as a record—the record of the activities of Galactic Co-ordinator Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, of Tellus, during the Boskonian War.

Nevertheless this record, what there is of it, is in essence biographical; and the biographer of such a man as Kinnison has a peculiar task. In one way it is easy, in two others it is difficult in the extreme.

"Nuts!" he is wont to exclaim in answer to a direct question as to some particular event or situation. "Why in all the nine hells of Valeria are you still wasting time writing about me?" But eventually I get the data I need, and thus it is comparatively easy to make this work completely authentic, as far as the Gray Lensman himself is concerned.

It may be objected that I have recorded as facts certain minutiae which, considering what happened to the planet of the Eich and in the light of other happenings elsewhere, cannot be known so exactly by any living entity. This objection is untenable; as profound research upon every debatable point has shown conclusively that something very similar to, if not in fact identical with, each such detail must have occurred.

Of the two great difficulties, one lies in the selection of material. The story of Kimball Kinnison easily could—and really should—fill a dozen encyclopedic spools; it is a Galactic shame and an almost impossible undertaking to compress it into one two-hour tape. The other sticking point is the diversity of my audience. For in the First Galaxy alone there are millions of planets, peopled by races as divergent in mentality and in physique as they are far apart in space. Some races will read this chronicle from printed pages; some will see it; some will hear it; some will both see it and hear it; some, unable either to see or to hear, will receive it telepathically. Still others, in other Galaxies, will undoubtedly acquire it in fashions starkly incomprehensible to me, its compiler.

Numberless races of intelligent beings already know Kinnison well, since his fame has spread north, south, east, west, zenith and nadir, to the six points of the three-dimensional galactic-inductor compasses of two galaxies. On the other hand, many know him not at all. Many have never even heard of Tellus, nor of Sol, our parent sun; even though it was upon that proud planet of this, our Solarian System, that the Galactic Patrol came into being. Indeed, it is inevitable that this biography will in days to come be of interest to races which, inhabiting planets not yet reached by the Cosmic Survey, have not even heard of the Galactic Patrol, to say nothing of knowing its origin and its history.

In view of the above inescapable facts, and after a great deal of thought and care, I have decided to write this Prologue, which will summarize very simply that which is already most widely known; namely, the happenings up to and including the first phase of the Boskonian War. Even that condensation, however, leaves me all too little space in which to do justice to the part that Kimball Kinnison played in enabling the civilization of the Galactic Council to triumph over the monstrous culture of Boskone.

With the understanding, then, that the more informed mentality may skip from here to Chapter I, I proceed.

Should I begin with Arisia? That forbidding, forbidden planet whose inhabitants, having achieved sheerly unimaginable heights of philosophical and mental power, withdrew almost completely into themselves, leaving traces only in Galaxy-wide folk tales and legends of supermen and gods? Probably not. I should, it seems to me, begin with Earth's almost prehistoric bandits and gangsters, gentry who flourished in the days when space flight was mentioned only in fantastic fiction.

Know, then, that for ages law enforcement lagged behind law violation because the minions of the law were limited in their spheres of action, while criminals were not. Thus, in the days following the invention of the automobile, State troopers could not cross State lines. Later, when what were then known as the "G-men" combined with the various State constabularies to form the National Police, they could not follow the stratosphere planes of the lawbreakers across national boundaries.

Still later, when interplanetary flight became commonplace, the Planetary Guards were at the same old disadvantage. They had no authority off their own worlds, while the public enemies flitted unhampered from planet to planet. And finally, with the development of the inertialess drive and the consequent traffic between hundreds of thousands of solar systems, crime became so rampant as to threaten the very foundations of civilization.

Then the Galactic Patrol came into being. At first it was a pitiful-enough organization. It was handicapped from within by the usual small, but utterly disastrous percentage of grafters and criminals; from without by the fact that there was then no emblem or credential which could not be counterfeited. No one could tell with certainty that the man in uniform was a Patrolman and not an outlaw in disguise.

The second difficulty was overcome first. One old-time Patrolman had heard of the Arisians. He visited their planet and—this should be a saga by itself—persuaded those Masters of Mentality that they should help right against wrong, at least to the extent of furnishing a positive means of identification. They did, and still do—The Lens.

Each being about to graduate as a Lensman is sent to Arisia; where, although the candidate does not then know it, a Lens—a lenticular jewel composed of thousands of tiny crystalloids—is built to match his individual life force. While no mind other than that of an Arisian can understand its functioning, thinking of the Lens as being synchronized with, or in exact resonance with the life principle—personality, ego, call it what you will—of its owner will give a rough idea of it. It is not really alive, as we understand the term. It is, however, endowed with a sort of pseudolife, by virtue of which it gives off its strong, characteristically changing, polychromatic light as long as it is in circuit with the living mentality for which it was designed. It is inimitable, unforgettable. Anyone who has ever seen a Lens, or even a picture of one, will never forget it; nor will he ever be deceived by any possible counterfeit or imitation of it.

The Lens cannot be removed by anyone except its wearer without actual dismemberment of that wearer; it shines as long as its rightful owner wears it, and in the instant of its owner's death, it ceases forever to shine. And not only does a Lens refuse to shine if any impostor attempts to wear it—any Lens not in circuit with its owner kills in a space of minutes any other who touches it, so strongly does its pseudolife interfere with any life to which it is not attuned.

Also by virtue of that pseudolife the Lens acts as a telepath through which its owner may communicate with any other intelligence, high or low; even though the other entity may possess no organs either of sight or of hearing, as we know these senses. The Lens has also many other highly important uses, which lack of space forbids even mentioning here.

Having the Lens, it was an easy matter for the Patrol to purify itself of its few unworthy members. Standards of entrance were raised higher and higher; and, as it became evident that it was to a man incorruptible, it was granted more and ever more authority.

Now its power is practically unlimited; the Lensman can follow the lawbreaker, wherever he may go. He can commandeer any material or assistance, whenever and wherever required. The Lens is so respected throughout the Galactic Union that any wearer of it may at any time be called upon to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Wherever he goes, throughout the Universe of Civilization, he not only carries the law with him—he is the law.

How are these Lensmen chosen? An Earthman myself, and proud of the fact that Tellus was the cradle of Galactic Civilization, I will describe only how Tellurian Lensmen are selected. Upon other planets the methods and means vary widely; but the results are the same: Wherever he may be found or however monstrous he may appear, a Lensman is always a Lensman.

Each year one million boys are picked, by competitive examination, from all the eighteen-year-olds of Earth. During the first year of training, before any of them set foot inside Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less than fifty thousand. Then, for four years more, they are put through the most poignantly searching, the most pitilessly rigid process of elimination possible to develop, during the course of which every man who can be made to reveal any sign of unworthiness or of weakness is dropped. Of each class, only about a hundred win through to the Lens; but each of those few has proven repeatedly, to the cold verge of death itself, that he is in every sense fit to wear it.

Of those who drop out alive, most are dismissed from the Patrol. There are many splendid men, however, who for some reason not involving moral turpitude are not quite what a Lensman must be. These men make up the organization, from grease monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the rank of Lensman. This fact explains what is already so widely known: that the Galactic Patrol is the finest body of intelligent beings yet to serve under one banner.

But even Lensmen are not all alike; some are more richly endowed than others. Most Lensmen work more or less under direction; that is, they have headquarters and, at the completion of one investigation or project, are assigned to another by the port admiral. Occasionally, however, a Lensman shows himself to be of such outstanding ability, even for a Lensman, that he is given his Release. Technically, he is now an "Unattached Lensman"; in popular parlance he is a "Gray Lensman," from the color of the leather he wears.

The Release! The goal toward which all Lensmen strive, but which so relatively few attain, even after years of work! The Gray Lensman is as nearly absolutely free an agent as it is possible for any flesh-and-blood being to be. He is responsible to no one and to nothing save his own conscience. He is no longer of Earth, nor of the Solarian System, but of the Universe as a whole. He is no longer a cog in the immense machine of the Galactic Patrol; wherever he may go throughout the reaches of unbounded space, he is the Galactic Patrol:

He goes anywhere he pleases and does anything he pleases, for as long as he pleases. He takes what he wants, when he wants it, with or without giving reasons or anything except a thumb-printed credit slip in return—if he chooses to do so. He reports when, where, and to whom he pleases—or not, as he pleases. He has no headquarters, no address; he can be reached only through his Lens. He no longer gets even a formal salary; he takes that, too, as he goes, whatever he finds needful.

To the man on the street that would seem to be a condition of perfect bliss. It is not. All Lensmen strive mightily for the Release, even though they realize dimly what it will mean—but only an Unattached Lensman really understands what a frightful, what a man-killing load the Release brings with it. However, Gray Lensmen being what they must be, it is a load which they are glad and proud to bear.

Hence, to say that Kimball Kinnison ranked Number One in his graduating class is to say a great deal—but even more revealing of his quality is to add that he was the first to perceive that what was known as Boskonia was not merely an organization of outlaws and pirates, but was in fact a Galaxy-wide culture diametrically opposed in fundamental philosophy to that of Galactic Civilization. The most illuminating thing I can say of him in a few words, however, is this:

Of all the millions of entities who through the years had worn the symbol of the Lens, Kinnison was the first to perceive that the Arisians had endowed the Lens with powers theretofore undreamed of, powers which no brain without special training could either evoke or control. Thus, he was the first Lensman to return to Arisia for that advanced training; and during that instruction he learned why no other Lensman had been so trained before. It was such an ordeal that only a mind of power sufficient to perceive of itself the real need of such treatment could endure it without becoming starkly insane.

Shortly after Kinnison won his Lens, he was called to Prime Base by Port Admiral Haynes, the Patrol's chief of staff. There, in a room sealed against spy rays, an appalling situation was bared. Space piracy, always rife enough, had become an organized force; and, under the leadership of a half-mythical entity about whom nothing was known save the name "Boskone," had risen to such heights of power as to threaten seriously the Galactic Patrol itself. Indeed, in one respect, Boskonia was ahead of the Patrol, its scientists having developed a source of power vastly greater than any known to Galactic Civilization. It had fighting ships of a new and extraordinary type, from which even convoyed shipping was no longer safe. Being faster than the Patrol's fast cruisers, and more heavily armed than its heaviest battleships, they had been doing practically as they pleased in space.

For one particular purpose, the engineers of the Patrol had designed and built one ship—the Brittania. She was the fastest thing in space, but for offensive armament she had only one weapon, the "Q-gun." This depended upon chemical explosives, which, in warfare at least, had been obsolete for centuries. Nevertheless, Kinnison was put in command of the Brittania and was told to take her out, capture a pirate war vessel of late model, learn her secrets of power, and transmit the information to Prime Base with the least possible delay.

He was successful in finding and in defeating such a vessel. Peter van Buskirk led the storming party of Valerians—men of remote Earth-human ancestry, but of extraordinary size, strength and agility because of the enormous gravitation of generations of life on the planet Valeria—in wiping out those of the pirate crew not killed in the combat between the two vessels.

The Brittania's scientists secured the required data, but were unable to report immediately to Prime Base, as the pirates were blanketing all available channels of communication. Boskonian ships were gathering for the kill, and the crippled Patrol ship could neither run nor fight. Therefore each man was given a spool of tape bearing a complete record of everything that had occurred; and, after setting up a director-by-chance to make the empty ship pursue an unpredictable course in space, and after rigging bombs to explode her at the first touch of a ray, the Patrolmen paired off by lot and took to the lifeboats.

The erratic course of the cruiser brought her near the lifeboat in which Kinnison and Van Buskirk were, and there the pirates attempted to stop her. The ensuing explosion was so violent that flying wreckage disabled practically the entire personnel of one of the attacking ships, which did not have time to go free—inertialess—before the crash. The two Patrolmen captured the pirate vessel and drove her toward Earth. They reached the solar system of Velantia before the Boskonians blocked them off, thus compelling them again to take to their lifeboat. They landed upon the planet Delgon, where they were rescued from a horde of Catlats by Worsel, a highly intelligent winged reptile, a native of the neighboring planet of Velantia.

By means of improvements upon Velantian thought-screens the three destroyed most of the Overlords of Delgon, a sadistic race of monsters who had been preying upon the other people of the system by sheer power of mind. Worsel then accompanied the two Patrolmen to Velantia, where all the resources of the planet were devoted to the preparation of defense against the expected attack of the Boskonians. Several other of the Brittania's lifeboats reached Velantia, guided by Worsel's mind working through Kinnison's mind and Lens.

Kinnison intercepted a message from Helmuth, who "spoke for Boskone," and traced his communicator beam, thus getting his first line upon Boskonia's Grand Base. The pirates attacked Velantia, and six of their vessels were captured. In these six ships, manned by Velantian crews and blanketing ether and subether against the pirates' own communicators, the Patrolmen again set out toward Earth and the Prime Base of the Galactic Patrol.

Then Kinnison's Bergenholm broke down. The Bergenholm, the generator of the force that neutralizes inertia—the sine qua non of interstellar speed. For, while any mass in the free condition can assume an almost unlimited velocity, inert matter cannot equal even that of light—the veriest crawl, as space speeds go. Also, there is no magic, no getting of something for nothing, in the operation of a Bergenholm. It takes power, plenty of power, to run one, and whenever one goes out, the ship dependent upon it is, to all intents and purposes, anchored in space.

Therefore the Patrolmen were forced to land upon Trenco—which, as almost everyone knows, is the planet upon which is produced thionite, perhaps the deadliest of all habit-forming drugs—for repairs.

Meanwhile Helmuth, the Boskonian, had deduced that it was a Lensman who had been giving him so much trouble. He had already connected the Lens with Arisia; therefore he set out for Arisia to find out for himself just what it was that made the Lens such a powerful thing. He discovered that he was no match at all for an Arisian. He was given terrific mental punishment, but was allowed to return to his Grand Base alive and sane; being informed that he was spared because his destruction would not be good for the budding Civilization to which Boskonian culture was opposed. He was told further that the Arisians had given Civilization the Lens; that by its intelligent use, Civilization should be able to conquer Boskone's alien, abhorrent culture; that if it could not learn to use the Lens, it was not yet ready to become a Civilization, and Boskonia would be allowed to flourish for a time.

After various adventures upon Trenco—a peculiar planet indeed—Kinnison secured a new Bergenholm and went on. This time he managed to reach Tellus, and, after a spectacular battle in the stratosphere with a blockading fleet of the enemy, got down to Prime Base with his precious data. There he first revealed his conviction that the Boskonians were not ordinary pirates, but in fact composed a culture almost, if not quite, as strong as Civilization itself; and asked that certain scientists of the Patrol should try to develop a detector nullifier. He predicted a stalemate, and intimated that such a nullifier might well prove to be the deciding factor in the entire war.

By building ultrapowerful battleships, called "maulers," the Patrol gained a temporary advantage, but the stalemate soon ensued. Kinnison thought out a plan of action, in the pursuit of which he scouted a pirate base upon Aldebaran I. The personnel of this base, however, instead of being human or near-human beings, were Wheelmen, beings possessed of a sense of perception unknown to man. The Lensman was discovered before he could accomplish anything, and in the fight which followed he was very seriously wounded.

However, he managed to get back to his speedster and sent a thought to Port Admiral Haynes, who forthwith sent ships to his aid. In the hospital, Chief Surgeon Lacy put him together without the use of artificial members; and, during a long and quarrelsome convalescence, Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall held him together.

As soon as he could leave the hospital he went to Arisia in the hope that he might be permitted to take advanced training—an unheard-of idea. Much to his surprise, he learned that he had been expected to return for exactly such training. Getting it almost killed him, but he emerged from the ordeal infinitely stronger of mind than any man had ever been before; and possessed of a new sense of perception as well—a sense somewhat analogous to sight, but of vastly greater power, depth, and scope, and not dependent upon light, a sense only vaguely forecast by ancient experiments with clairvoyance.

After trying out his new mental equipment by solving a murder mystery upon Radelix, he succeeded in entering an enemy base upon Boyssia II. There he took over the mind of the communications officer and waited for the opportunity of getting the second, all-important line upon Boskonia's Grand Base. An enemy ship of this base captured a hospital ship of the Patrol and brought it in. Nurse MacDougall, head nurse of the captured ship, working under Kinnison's instructions, stirred up trouble which soon became mutiny. Helmuth, from Grand Base, took a hand, thus enabling Kinnison to get his second line.

The hospital ship, undetectable by virtue of the Lensman's nullifier, escaped from Boyssia II and headed for Earth at full blast. Kinnison, convinced that Helmuth was really Boskone himself, found that the intersection of his two lines—and therefore the pirates' Grand Base—lay in a star cluster AG 257-4736, well outside the Galaxy. Pausing only long enough to destroy the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I, the project in which his first attempt had failed so dismally, he set out to investigate Helmuth's headquarters. He found a stronghold impregnable to any massed attack the Patrol could throw against it, manned by beings each wearing a thought-screen. His sense of perception was suddenly cut off—the pirates had thrown a thought-screen around the entire planet. He then returned to Prime Base, deciding en route that boring from within was the only possible way in which that stupendous fortress could be taken.

In consultation with Port Admiral Haynes, the zero hour was set, at which time the massed Grand Fleet of Patrol was to begin raying Helmuth's base with every projector that could be brought to bear.

Pursuant to his plan, Kinnison again visited Trenco, where the Patrol forces extracted for him fifty kilograms of thionite, the noxious drug which, in microgram inhalations, makes the addict experience all the sensations of doing whatever it is that he wishes most ardently to do. The larger the dose, the more intense the sensations; the slightest overdose resulting in an ecstatic death. Thence to Helmuth's planet; where, finding a dog whose brain was unshielded, he let himself into the central dome. Here, just before the zero minute, he released his thionite into the air stream, thus wiping out all the pirate personnel except Helmuth, who, in his inner sanctum, could not be affected.

The Grand Fleet of the Patrol attacked, but Helmuth would not leave his retreat, even to try to save his Base. Therefore Kinnison would have to go in after him. Poised in the air of Helmuth's inner sphere there was an enigmatic, sparkling ball of force which the Lensman could not understand, and of which he was in consequence extremely suspicious.

But the storming of that quadruply-defended inner stronghold was precisely the task for which Kinnison's new and ultracumbersome armor had been designed; and in the Gray Lensman went.

I.

Among the world-girdling fortifications of a planet distant indeed from star cluster AG 257-4736 there squatted sullenly a fortress quite similar to Helmuth's own. Indeed, in some respects it was even superior to the base of him who spoke for Boskone. It was larger and stronger. Instead of one dome, it had many. It was dark and cold withal, for its occupants had practically nothing in common with humanity save the possession of high intelligence.

In the central sphere of one of the domes there sparkled several of the peculiarly radiant globes whose counterpart had given Kinnison so seriously to think, and near them there crouched or huddled or lay at ease a many-tentacled creature indescribable to man. It was not exactly like an octopus. Though spiny, it did not resemble at all closely a sea-cucumber. Nor, although it was scaly and toothy and wingy, was it, save in the vaguest possible way, similar to a lizard, a sea serpent, or a vulture. Such a description by negatives is, of course, pitifully inadequate; but, unfortunately, it is the best that can be done.

The entire attention of this being was focused within one of the globes, the obscure mechanism of which was relaying to his sense of perception from Helmuth's globe and mind a clear picture of everything which was happening within Grand Base. The corpse-littered dome was clear to his sight; he knew that the Patrol was attacking from without; knew that that ubiquitous Lensman, who had already unmanned the citadel, was about to attack from within.

"You have erred seriously," the entity was thinking coldly, emotionlessly, into the globe, "in not deducing until after it was too late to save your base that the Lensman had perfected a nullifier of subethereal detection. Your contention that I am equally culpable is, I think, untenable. It was your problem, not mine; I had, and still have, other things to concern me. Your base is of course lost; whether or not you yourself survive will depend entirely upon the adequacy of your protective devices."

"But, Eichlan, you yourself pronounced them adequate!"

There followed an interval of silence, as though those conferring were separated by such a gulf of space that even thought, with its immeasurable velocity of propagation, required finite time to traverse it.

"Pardon me—I said that they seemed adequate."

Through inter-Galactic space Helmuth's thought drove.

"You said the defenses were adequate!"

"I said they seemed adequate," said the Eichlan coldly.

"If I survive—or, rather, after I have destroyed this Lensman—what are your orders?" Another interval.

"Go to the nearest communicator and concentrate our forces; half of them to engage this Patrol fleet, the remainder to wipe out all the life of Sol III. I have not tried to give those orders direct, since all the beams are keyed to your board and, even if I could reach them, no commander in that Galaxy knows that I speak for Boskone. After you have done that, report to me here."

"Instructions received and understood. Helmuth, ending message."

"Set your controls as instructed. I will observe and record. Prepare yourself, the Lensman comes. Eichlan, speaking for Boskone, ending message."

The Lensman rushed. Even before he crashed the pirate's screens his own defensive zone flamed white in the beam of semiportable projectors, and through that blaze came tearing the metallic slugs of a high-caliber machine rifle. But the Lensman's screens were almost those of a battleship, his armor relatively as strong; he had at his command projectors scarcely inferior to those opposing his advance. Therefore, with every faculty of his newly enlarged mind concentrated upon that thought-screened, armored head behind the bellowing gun and the flaring projectors, Kinnison held his line and forged ahead.

Attentive as he was to Helmuth's thought-screens, the Patrolman was ready when it weakened slightly and a thought began to seep through, directed at that peculiar ball of force. He blanketed it savagely, before it could even begin to take form, and attacked the screen so viciously that the Boskonian had either to restore full coverage instantly or else die there and then.

Kinnison feared that force-ball no longer. He still did not know what it was; but he had learned that, whatever its nature might be, it was operated or controlled by thought. Therefore it was and would remain harmless. If the pirate chief softened his screen enough to emit a thought he would never think again.

Doggedly the Lensman drove in, closer and closer. Magnetic clamps locked and held. Two steel-clad, warring figures rolled into the line of fire of the ravening automatic rifle. Kinnison's armor, designed and tested to withstand even heavier stuff, held; wherefore he came through that storm of metal unscathed. Helmuth's, however, even though stronger far than the ordinary personal armor of space, failed; and thus the Boskonian died.

Blasting himself upright, the Patrolman shot across the inner dome to the control panel and paused, momentarily baffled. He could not throw the switches controlling the defensive screens of the gigantic outer dome! His armor, designed for the ultimate of defensive strength, could not and did not bear any of the small and delicate external mechanisms so characteristic of the ordinary spacesuit. To leave his personal tank at that time and in that environment was unthinkable; yet he was fast running out of time. A scant fifteen seconds was all that remained before zero, the moment at which the hellish output of every watt generable by the massed fleet of the Galactic Patrol would be hurled against those screens in their furiously raging destructive might. To release the screens after that zero moment would mean his own death, instantaneous and inevitable.

Nevertheless, he could open those circuits—the conservation of Boskonian property meant nothing to him. He flipped on his own projector and flashed its beam briefly across the banked panels in front of him. Insulation burst into flame, fairly exploding in its haste to disintegrate; copper and silver ran in brilliant streams or puffed away in clouds of sparkling vapor: high-tension arcs ripped, crashed, and cracked among the writhing, dripping, flaring bus-bar. The shorts burned themselves clear or blew their fuses, every circuit opened, every Boskonian defense came down; and then, and only then, could Kinnison get into communication with his friends.

"Haynes!" he thought crisply into his Lens. "Kinnison calling!"

"Haynes acknowledging!" a thought instantly snapped back. "Congrat—"

"Hold it! We're not done yet! Have every ship in the Fleet go free at once. Have them all, except yours, put out full-coverage screens, so that they can't look at or think into this Base."

A moment passed. "Done!"

"Don't come in any closer—I'm on my way out there to you. Have your ship block every band except your personal frequency, which you and I are now on, and caution all Lensmen aboard with you to stay off that channel until further notice. Now as to you, personally, I don't like to seem to be giving orders to the Admiral of the Fleet, but it may be quite essential that you concentrate upon me, and think of nothing else, for the next few minutes."

"Right! I don't mind taking orders from you."

"QX. Now we can take things a bit easier." Kinnison had so arranged matters that no one except himself could think into that stronghold, and he himself would not. He would not think into that tantalizing enigma, nor toward it, nor even of it, until he was completely ready to do so. And how many persons, I wonder, really realize just how much of a feat that was? Realize the sort of mental training that required?

"How many gamma-zeta tracers can you put out, chief?" Kinnison asked then, more conversationally.

A brief consultation; then, "Ten in regular use. By tuning in all our spares we can put out sixty."

"At two diameters' distance forty-eight fields will surround this planet at one-hundred-percent overlap. Please have that many set that way. Of the other twelve, set three to go well outside the first sphere—say at four diameters out—covering the line from this planet to Lundmark's Nebula. Set the last nine to be thrown out as far as you can read them accurately to only the first decimal on your screens, centering on the same line. Not much overlap is necessary on these backing fields—bare contact is enough. Release nothing, of course, until I get there. And while the boys are setting things up, you might go inert—it's safe enough now—so that I can match your intrinsic velocity and come aboard."

There followed the maneuvering necessary for one inert body to approach another in space, then Kinnison's incredible housing of steel was hauled into the airlock by means of space lines attached to magnetic clamps. The outer door of the lock closed behind him, the inner one opened, and the Lensman entered the flagship.

First to the armory, where he clambered stiffly out of his small battleship and gave orders concerning its storage. Then to the control room, stretching and bending hugely as he went, in vast relief at his freedom from the narrow and irksome confinement which he had endured so long.

Of all the men in that control room, only two knew Kinnison personally. All knew of him, however, and as the tall gray-clad figure entered there was a loud, quick cheer.

"Hi, fellows—thanks." Kinnison waved a salute to the room as a whole. "Hi, Port Admiral! Hi, Commandant!" He saluted Haynes and von Hohendorff as perfunctorily, and greeted them as casually, as though he had last seen them an hour, instead of ten weeks, before; as though the intervening time had been spent in the veriest idleness, instead of in the fashion in which it actually had been spent.

Old von Hohendorff greeted his erstwhile pupil cordially enough, but: "Out with it!" Haynes demanded. "What did you do? How did you do it? What does all this confounded rigmarole mean? Tell us all about it—all you can, I mean," he added, hastily.

"There's no need of secrecy now, I think," and in flashing thoughts the Gray Lensman went on to describe everything that had happened.

"So you see," he concluded, "I don't really know anything. It's all surmise, suspicion, and deduction. It may be that nothing at all will happen: in which case these precautions, while they will have been wasted effort, will have done us no harm. In case something does happen, however—and I'll bet all the tea in China that something will—we'll be ready for it."

"But if what you are beginning to suspect is really true, it means that Boskonia is inter-Galactic in scope—wider spread even than the Patrol!"

"Probably, but not necessarily—it may mean only that they have bases further outside. And remember that I'm arguing on a mighty slim thread of evidence. That screen was hard and tight, and I couldn't touch the external beam—if there was one—at all. I got just part of a thought, here and there. However, the thought was 'that' galaxy; not just 'galaxy,' or 'this' or 'the' galaxy—and why think that way if the guy was already in this galaxy?"

"But that's not the end, sir," said Kinnison. "They said not 'the' galaxy, or even 'this' galaxy—the thought was 'that' galaxy!"

"But nobody has ever—But skip it for now—the boys are ready for you. Take over!"

"QX. First we'll go free again. Don't think much, if any, of the stuff can come out here, but no use taking chances. Cut your screens. Now, all you gamma-zeta men, throw out your fields, and if any of you get a puncture, or even a flash, measure its position. You recording observers, step your scanners up to fifty thousand. QX?"

"QX!" the observers and recorders reported, almost as one, and the Gray Lensman sat down at a plate.

His mind, free at last to make the investigation from which it had been so long and so sternly barred, flew down into and through the dome, to and into that cryptic globe so tantalizingly poised in the air of the Center.

The reaction was practically instantaneous; so rapid that any ordinary mind could have perceived nothing at all; so rapid that even Kinnison's consciousness recorded only a confusedly blurred impression. But he did see something: in that fleeting millionth of a second he sensed a powerful, malignant mental force; a force backing multiplex scanners and subethereal stress-fields interlocked in peculiarly unidentifiable patterns.

For that ball was, as Kinnison had more than suspected, a potent agency indeed. It was, as he had thought that it must be, a communicator; but it was far more than that. Ordinarily harmless enough, it could be so set as to become an infernal machine at the vibrations of any thought not in a certain coded sequence; and Helmuth had so set it.

Therefore at the touch of the Patrolman's thought it exploded: liberating instantaneously the unimaginable forces with which it was charged. More, it sent out waves which, attuned to detonating receivers, touched off strategically placed stores of duodecaplylatomate. "Duodec," that concentrated essence of atomic violence than which science has even yet failed to develop a more devastating!

"Hell's—jingling—bells!" Port Admiral Haynes grunted in stunned amazement, then subsided into silence, eyes riveted upon his plate; for to the human eye dome, fortress, and planet had disappeared in one cataclysmically incandescent sphere of flame.

But the observers of the Galactic Patrol did not depend upon eyesight alone. Their scanners had been working at ultrafast speed; and, as soon as it became clear that none of the ships of the Fleet had been endangered, Kinnison asked that certain of the spools be run into a visitank at normal tempo.

There, slowed to a speed at which the eye could clearly discern sequences of events, the two old Lensmen and the young one studied with care the three-dimensional pictures of what had happened; pictures taken from points of projection close to and even within the doomed structure itself.

Deliberately, the ball of force opened up, followed an inappreciable instant later by the secondary centers of detonation; all expanding magically into spherical volumes of blindingly brilliant annihilation. There were as yet no flying fragments: no inert fragment can fly from duodec in the first few instants of its detonation. For the detonation of duodec is propagated at the velocity of light, so that the entire mass disintegrates in a period of time to be measured only in fractional trillionths of a second. Its detonation pressure and temperature have never been measured save indirectly, since nothing will hold it except a Q-type helix of pure force. And even those helices, which perforce must be practically open at both ends, have to be designed and powered to withstand pressures and temperatures obtaining only in the cores of suns.

Imagine, if you can, what would happen if some fifty thousand metric tons of material from the innermost core of Sirius B were to be taken to Grand Base, separated into twenty-five packages, each package placed at a strategic point, and all restraint instantaneously removed. What would have happened then, was what actually was happening!

As has been said, for moments nothing moved except the ever-expanding spheres of destruction. Nothing could move—the inertia of matter itself held it in place until it was too late—everything close to those centers of action simply flared into turgid incandescence and added its contribution to the already hellish whole.

As the spheres expanded, their temperatures and pressures decreased and the action became somewhat less violent. Matter no longer simply disappeared. Instead, plates and girders, even gigantic structural members, bent, buckled, and crumbled. Walls blew outward and upward. Huge chunks of metal and of masonry, many with fused and dripping edges, began to fly in all directions.

And not only, or principally, upward was directed the force of those inconceivable explosions. Downward the effect was, if possible, even more catastrophic, since conditions there approximated closely the oft-argued meeting between the irresistible force and the immovable object. The planet was to all intents and purposes immovable, the duodec to the same degree irresistible. The result was that the entire planet was momentarily blown apart. A vast chasm was blasted deep into its interior, and, gravity temporarily overcome, stupendous cracks and fissures began to yawn. Then, as the pressure decreased, the core-stuff of the planet became molten and began to wreak its volcanic havoc.

Gravity, once more master of the situation, took hold. The cracks and chasms closed, extruding uncounted cubic miles of fiery lava and metal. The entire world shivered and shuddered in a Gargantuan cosmic ague.

The explosion blew itself out. The hot gases and vapors cooled. The steam condensed. The volcanic dust disappeared. There lay the planet; but changed—hideously and awfully changed. Where Grand Base had been there remained nothing whatever to indicate that anything wrought by man had ever been there. Mountains were leveled, valleys were filled. Continents and oceans had shifted, and were still shifting; visibly. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and other seismic disturbances, instead of decreasing, were increasing in violence, minute by minute.

Helmuth's planet was, and would for years remain, a barren and uninhabitable world.

"Well!" Haynes, who had been holding his breath unconsciously, released it in an almost explosive sigh. "That is inescapably and incontrovertibly that. I was going to use that base, but it looks as though we'll have to get along without it."

Without comment Kinnison turned to the gamma-zeta observers. "Any traces?" he asked.

It developed that three of the fields had shown activity. Not merely traces or flashes, but solid punctures showing the presence of a hard, tight beam. And those three punctures were in the same line; a line running straight out into inter-Galactic space.

Kinnison took careful readings on the line, then stood motionless. Feet wide apart, hands jammed into pockets, head slightly bent, eyes distant, he stood there unmoving; thinking with all the power of his brain.

"I want to ask three questions," the old Commandant of Cadets interrupted his cogitations finally. "Was Helmuth Boskone, or not? Have we got them licked, or not? What do we do next, besides the mopping up of those eighteen super-maulers?"

"To all three the answer is 'I don't know'." Kinnison's face was stern and hard. "You know as much about the whole thing as I do—I haven't held back a thing that I even suspect. I did not tell you that Helmuth was Boskone; I said that everyone in any position to judge, including myself, was as sure that he was as one could be about anything that could not be proved. I firmly believed that he was. The presence of this communicator line, and the other stuff I have told you about, has destroyed that belief in my mind. However, we do not actually know any more than we did before. It is no more certain now that Helmuth was not Boskone than it was before that he was Boskone. The second question ties in with the first, and so does the third—but I see that the mopping up has started."

While von Hohendorff and Kinnison had been talking, Haynes had issued orders and the Grand Fleet, divided roughly and with difficulty into eighteen parts, went raggedly outward to surround the eighteen outlying fortresses. But, and surprisingly enough to the Patrol forces, the reduction of those hulking monsters was to prove no easy task.

The Boskonians had witnessed the destruction of Helmuth's Grand Base. Their master plates were dead. Try as they would, they could get in touch with no one with authority to give them orders, with no one to whom they could report their present plight. Nor could they escape: the slowest mauler in the Patrol Fleet could have caught any one of them in space of minutes.

To surrender was not even thought of—better far to die a clean death in the blazing holocaust of space battle than to be thrown ignominiously into the lethal chambers of the Patrol. There was not, there could not be, any question of pardon or of sentence to any mere imprisonment, for the strife between Civilization and Boskonia in no respect resembled the wars between two fundamentally similar and friendly nations which small, green Terra knew so frequently of old. It was a Galaxy-wide struggle for survival between two diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive, and absolutely incompatible cultures; a duel to the death in which quarter was neither asked nor given; a conflict which, except for the single instance which Kinnison himself had engineered, was, and of stern necessity had to be, one of ruthless, complete, and utter extinction.

Die, then, the pirates knew they must; and, although adherents to a scheme of existence monstrous indeed to our way of thinking, they were in no sense cowards. Not like cornered rats did they conduct themselves, but fought like what they were; courageous beings hopelessly outnumbered and outpowered, unable either to escape or to choose the field of operations, grimly resolved that in their passing they would take full toll of the minions of that detested and despised Galactic Civilization. Therefore, in suicidal glee, Boskonian engineers rigged up a fantastically potent weapon of offense, tuned in their defensive screens and hung poised in space, awaiting calmly the massed attack so sure to come.

Up flashed the heavy cruisers of the Patrol, serenely confident. Although of little offensive strength, these vessels mounted tractors and pressors of prodigious power, as well as defensive screens which—theoretically—no projector-driven beam of force could puncture. They had engaged mauler after mauler of Boskonia's mightiest, and never yet had one of those screens gone down. Theirs the task of immobilizing the opponent; since, as is of course well known, it is under any ordinary conditions impossible to wreak any hurt upon an object which is both inertialess and at liberty to move in space. It simply darts away from the touch of the harmful agent, whether it be immaterial beam or material substance.

Formerly the attachment of two or three tractors was all that was necessary to insure immobility, and thus vulnerability; but with the Velantian development of a shear-plane to cut tractor beams, a new technique became necessary. This was englobement, in which a dozen or more vessels surrounded the proposed victim in space and held it motionless at the center of a sphere by means of pressors, which could not be cut or evaded. Serene, then, and confident, the heavy cruisers rushed out to englobe the Boskonian fortress.

Flash! Flash! Flash! Three points of light, as unbearably brilliant as atomic vortices, sprang into being upon the fortress' side. Three needle rays of inconceivable energy lashed out, hurtling through the cruisers' outer screens as though they had been so much inactive webbing. Through the second and through the first. Through the wall shield, even that ultrapowerful field scarcely flashing as it went down. Through the armor, violating the prime tenet then held and which has just been referred to, that no object free in space can be damaged—in this case, so unthinkably vehement was the thrust, the few atoms of substances in the space surrounding the doomed cruisers afforded resistance enough. Through the ship itself, a ravening cylinder of annihilation.

For perhaps a second—certainly no longer—those incredible, those undreamed-of beams persisted before winking out into blackness; but that second had been long enough. Three riddled hulks lay dead in space, and as the three original projectors went black three more flared out. Then three more. Nine of the mightiest of Civilization's ships of war were riddled before the others could hurl themselves backward out of range!

Most of the officers of the flagship were stunned into temporary inactivity by that shocking development, but two reacted almost instantly.

"Thorndyke!" the Admiral snapped. "What did they do, and how?"

And Kinnison, not speaking at all, leaped to a certain panel, to read for himself the analysis of those incredible beams of force.

"They made superneedle rays out of their main projectors," Master Technician Laverne Thorndyke reported, crisply. "They must have shorted everything they've got onto them to burn them out that fast."

"Those beams were hot—plenty hot," Kinnison corroborated the findings. "These recorders go to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn't anywhere nearly enough—everything in the recorder circuits blew."

"But how could they handle them—" von Hohendorff began to ask.

"They didn't. They pointed them and died," Thorndyke explained, grimly. "They traded one projector and its crew for one cruiser and its crew—a good trade from their viewpoint."

"There will be no more such trades," Haynes declared.

Nor were there. The Patrol had maulers enough to englobe the enemy craft at a distance greater even than the effective range of those suicidal beams, and it did so.

Shielding screens cut off the Boskonians' intake of cosmic power and the relentless beaming of the bulldog maulers began. For hour after hour it continued, the cordon ever tightening as the victims' power lessened. And finally even the Gargantuan accumulators of the immense fortresses were drained. Their screens went down under the hellish fury of the maulers' incessant attack, and in a space of minutes thereafter the structures and their contents ceased to exist save as atomic detritus.

The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a fashion and set off toward the Galaxy at touring blast.

And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very serious conference to a close.

"You saw what happened to Helmuth's planet," Kinnison's voice was oddly hard, "and I gave you all I could get of the thought about the destruction of all life upon Sol III. A big-enough duodec bomb in the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don't really know anything except that we hadn't better let them catch us asleep at the switch again—we've got to be up on our toes every second."

And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters.

II.

During practically all of the long trip back to Earth, Kinnison kept pretty much to his cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And at Prime Base, through week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think. Finally, however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no less a personage than Surgeon General Lacy.

"Snap out of it, lad," that worthy advised, smilingly. "When you concentrate on one thing too long, you know, the vortices of thought occupy narrower and narrow loci, until finally the effective volume becomes infinitesimal. Or, mathematically, the then range of cogitation, integrated between the limits of plus and minus infinity, approaches zero as a limit—"

"Huh? What are you talking about?" the Lensman demanded.

"Poor mathematics, perhaps, but sound psychology," Lacy grinned. "It got your undivided attention, didn't it? That was what I was after. In plain English, if you keep on thinking around in circles you'll soon be biting yourself in the small of the back. Come on, you and I are going places."

"Where?"

"To the Grand Ball in honor of the Grand Fleet, my boy—old Dr. Lacy prescribes it for you as a complete and radical change of atmosphere. Let's go!"

The city's largest ballroom was a blaze of light and color. A thousand polychromic lamps flooded their radiance downward through draped bunting upon an even more colorful throng. Two thousand items of feminine loveliness were there, in raiment whose fabrics were the boast of hundreds of planets, whose hues and shades put the spectrum itself to shame. There were over two thousand men, clad in plain or beribboned or bemedaled full civilian dress, or in the variously panoplied dress uniforms of the many Services.

"You're dancing with Miss Forrester first, Kinnison," the surgeon introduced them informally, and the Lensman found himself gliding away with a stunning blonde, ravishingly and revealingly dressed in a dazzlingly blue wisp of Manarkan glamorette—fashion's dernier cri.

To the uninformed, Kinnison's garb of plain gray leather might have seemed incongruous indeed in that brilliantly and fastidiously dressed assemblage. But to those people, as to us of today, the drab, starkly utilitarian uniform of the Unattached Lensman transcended far any other, however resplendent, worn by men: and literally hundreds of eyes followed the strikingly handsome couple as they slid rhythmically out upon the polished floor. But a measure of the tall beauty's customary poise had deserted her. She was slimly taut in the circle of the Lensman's arm, her eyes were downcast, and suddenly she missed a step.

"'Scuse me for stepping on your feet," he apologized. "A fellow gets out of practice, flitting around in a speedster so much."

"Thanks for taking the blame, but it's my fault entirely—I know it as well as you do," she replied, flushing uncomfortably. "I do know how to dance, too, but—Well, you're a Gray Lensman, you know."

"Huh?" he ejaculated, in honest surprise, and she looked up at him for the first time. "What has that fact got to do with the price of Venerian orchids in Chicago—or with my clumsy walking all over your slippers?"

"Everything in the world," she assured him. Nevertheless, her stiff young body relaxed and she fell into the graceful, accurate dancing which she really knew so well how to do. "You see, I don't suppose that any of us has ever seen a Gray Lensman before, except in pictures, and actually to be dancing with one is so thrilling that it is really a shock—I have to get used to it gradually, so to speak. Why, I don't even know how to talk to you! One couldn't possibly call you plain mister, as one would any ord—"

"It'll be QX if you just call me 'say'!" he informed her. "Maybe you'd rather not dance with a dub? What say we go get us a sandwich and a bottle of fayalin or something?"

"No—never!" she exclaimed. "I didn't mean it that way at all. I'm going to have this full dance with you, and enjoy every second of it. And later I am going to pack this dance card—which I hope you will sign for me—away in lavender, so it will go down in history that in my youth I really did dance with Gray Lensman Kinnison. I see that I have recovered enough so that I can talk and dance at the same time. Do you mind if I ask you some silly questions about space?"

"Go ahead. They won't be silly, if I'm any judge. Elementary, perhaps, but not silly."

"I hope so, but I think you're being charitable again. Like most of the girls here, I suppose, I have never been out in deep space at all. Besides a few hops to the Moon, I have taken only two flits, and they were both only interplanetary. One to Mars and one to Venus. I never could see how you deep-space men can really understand what you're doing—either the frightful speeds at which you travel, the distance you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, a professor told us that no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes at all. But you must understand them, I should think ... oh, perhaps—"

"Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. "No, your professor was right. We can't understand the figures, but we don't have to—all we have to do is to work with them. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are Gladys Forrester, it is quite clear that you are in that same boat."

"Me? How?" she exclaimed.

"The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear title to a million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that really produces results—the hard way of actual experience. You lost a lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take it away from you. The fact that your brain cannot envisage a million credits has not interfered with your manipulation of that amount, has it?"

"No, but that's entirely different!" she protested.

"Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best, perhaps, by analogy. You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North America, either, yet that fact does not bother you in the least while you are driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?"

"A De Khotinsky sporter."

"Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles per hour, and I suppose you cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you will tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere on Tellus—"

"I can get tight-beam short-wave programs from the Moon," the girl broke in. "I've heard them lots of times."

"Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen to be any interference."

"Static is pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed.

"Well, change 'miles' to 'parsecs' and you've got the picture of deep-space speeds and operations," Kinnison informed her. "Our speed varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the average—say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters in space—we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about ninety. And our ultra-wave communicators, working below the level of the ether, in the subether—"

"Whatever that is," she interrupted.

"That's as good a description or definition of it as any," he grinned at her. "We don't know what even the ether is, or whether or not it exists as an objective reality; to say nothing of what we so nonchalantly call the subether. We do not understand gravity, although we can make it to order. No scientist yet has been able to say how it is propagated, or even whether or not it is propagated. No one has been able to devise any kind of an apparatus or meter or method by which its nature, period, or velocity can be determined. Neither do we know anything about time or space. In fact, fundamentally, we don't really know much of anything at all," he concluded.

"Says you. But that makes me feel better, anyway," she confided, snuggling a little closer. "Go on about the communicators."

"Ultra-waves are faster than ordinary radio waves, which of course travel through the ether with the velocity of light, in just about the same ratio as that of the speed of our ships to the speed of slow automobiles—that is, the ratio of a parsec to a mile. Roughly nineteen billion to one. Range, of course, is proportional to the square of the speed."

"Nineteen billion!" she exclaimed. "And you just said that nobody could understand even a million!"

"That's the point exactly," he went on, undisturbed. "You don't have to understand or to visualize it. All you have to do is to remember that deep-space vessels and communicators can cover distance in parsecs at practically the same rate that Tellurian automobiles can cover miles. So, when some space-flea talks to you about parsecs, just think of miles in terms of an automobile and a radio and you won't be far off."

"I never heard it explained that way before—it does make it ever so much simpler. Will you sign this, please?"

"Just one more point." The music had ceased and he was signing her card, preparatory to escorting her back to her place. "Like your supposedly tight-beam Luna-Tellus hookups, our long range, equally tight-beam communicators are very sensitive to interference, either natural or artificial. So, while under perfect conditions we can communicate clear across the Galaxy, there are times—particularly when the pirates are scrambling the channels—that we can't drive a beam from here to Alpha Centauri. Thanks a lot for the dance."

The other girls did not quite come to blows as to which of them was to get him next; and shortly—he never did know exactly how it came about—he found himself dancing with a luscious, cuddly little brunette, clad—partially clad, at least—in a high-slitted, flame-colored sheath of some new fabric which the Lensman had never seen before. It looked like solidified, tightly woven electricity!

"Oh, Mr. Kinnison!" his new partner cooed, ecstatically. "I think that all spacemen, and you Lensmen particularly, are just too perfectly darn heroic for anything! Why, I think that space is just terrible! I simply can't cope with it at all!"

"Ever been out, miss?" he grinned. He had never known many social butterflies, and temporarily he had forgotten that such girls as this one really existed.

"Why, of course!" The young woman kept on being exclamatory.

"Clear out to the Moon, perhaps?" he hazarded.

"Don't be ridic! Ever so much farther than that! Why, I went clear to Mars! And it gave me the screaming meamies, no less. I thought I would collapse!"

That dance ended ultimately, and other dances with other girls followed; but Kinnison could not throw himself into the gaiety surrounding him. During his cadet days he had enjoyed such revels to the full, but now the whole thing left him cold. His mind insisted upon reverting to its problem. Finally, in the throng of young people on the floor, he saw a girl with a mass of red-bronze hair and a supple, superbly molded figure. He did not need to await her turning to recognize his erstwhile nurse and later assistant, whom he had last seen just this side of far-distant Boyssia II.

"Mac!" To her mind alone he sent out a thought through his Lens. "For the love of Klono, lend a hand—rescue me! How many dances have you got ahead?"

"None at all—I'm not dating ahead." She jumped as though someone had jabbed her with a needle, then paused in panic; eyes wide, breath coming fast, breast pounding. She had felt Lensed thoughts before, but this was something else, something entirely different. Every cell of her brain was open to that Lensman's mind—and what was she seeing! She blanketed her thoughts desperately, tried with all her might not to think at all!

She froze suddenly, a gasp of horror half suppressed. She was seeing things—sensing things beyond comprehension—

"QX, Mac," the thought went quietly on within her mind, quite as though nothing unusual were occurring. "No intrusion meant. You didn't think it; I already knew that if you started dating ahead you'd be tied up until day after tomorrow. Can I have the next one?"

"Sure, Kim."

"Thanks—the Lens is off for the rest of the evening."

She sighed in relief as he snapped the telepathic line as though he were hanging up the receiver of a telephone.

"I'd like to dance with you all, kids," he addressed a large group of buds surrounding him and eying him hungrily, "but I've got this next one. See you later, perhaps," and he was gone.

"Sorry, fellows," he remarked casually, as he made his way through the circle of men around the gorgeous redhead. "Sorry, but this dance is mine, isn't it, Miss MacDougall?"

She nodded, flashing the radiant smile which had so aroused his ire during his hospitalization. "I heard you invoke your spaceman's god, but I was beginning to be afraid that you had forgotten this dance."

"And she said she wasn't dating ahead—the diplomat!" murmured an ambassador, aside.

"Don't be a dope," a captain of Marines muttered in reply. "She meant with us. That's a Gray Lensman!"

Although the nurse, as has been said, was anything but small, she appeared almost petite against the Lensman's mighty frame as they took off. Silently the two circled the great hall once; lustrous, goldenly green gown—of Earthly nylon, this one, and less revealing than most—swishing in perfect cadence against deftly and softly stepping high-laced boots.

"This is better, Mac," Kinnison sighed, finally, "but I lack just seven thousand kilocycles of being in tune with this. Don't know what's the matter, but it's clogging my jets. I must be getting to be a space-louse."

"A space-louse—you? Uh-uh!" She shook her head. "You know very well what the matter is. You're just too much of a man to mention it."

"Huh?" he demanded.

"Uh-huh," she asserted, positively if obliquely. "Of course you're not in tune with this crowd. How could you be? I don't fit into it any more myself, and what I'm doing isn't even a muffled flare compared to your job. Not one in ten of these fluffs here tonight has ever been beyond the stratosphere; not one in a hundred has ever been out as far as Jupiter, or has ever had a serious thought in her head except about clothes or men; not one of them all has any more idea of what a Lensman really is than I have of hyperspace or of non-Euclidean geometry!"

"Kitty, kitty!" he laughed. "Sheathe the little claws, before you scratch somebody!"

"That isn't cattishness; it's the barefaced truth. Or perhaps," she amended, honestly, "it's both true and cattish, but it's certainly true. And that isn't half of it. No one in the Universe except yourself really knows what you are doing, and I'm pretty sure that only two others even suspect. And Dr. Lacy is not one of them," she concluded, surprisingly.

Though shocked, Kinnison did not miss a step. "You don't fit into this matrix, any more than I do," he agreed, quietly. "S'pose you and I could do a little flit somewhere?"

"Surely, Kim," and, breaking out of the crowd, they strolled out into the grounds. Not a word was said until they were seated upon a broad, low bench beneath the spreading foliage of a tree.

Then: "What did you come here for tonight, Mac—the real reason?" he demanded, abruptly.

"I ... me ... you ... I mean—Oh, skip it!" the girl stammered, a wave of scarlet flooding her face and down even to her superb, bare shoulders. Then she steadied herself and went on: "You see, I agree with you—as you say, I check you to nineteen decimals. Even Dr. Lacy, with all his knowledge, can be slightly screwy at times, I think."

"Oh, so that's it!" It was not, it was only a very minor part of her reason; but the nurse would have bitten her tongue off rather than admit that she had come to that dance solely and only because Kimball Kinnison was to be there. "You knew, then, that this was old Lacy's idea?"

"Of course. You would never have come, else. He thinks that you may begin wobbling on the beam pretty soon unless you put out a few braking jets."

"And you?"

"Not in a million, Kim. Lacy is as cockeyed as Trenco's ether, and I as good as told him so. He may wobble a bit, but you won't. You've got a job to do, and you're doing it. You'll finish it, too, in spite of all the vermin infesting all the galaxies of the macro-cosmic Universe!" she finished, passionately.

"Klono's brazen whiskers, Mac!" He turned suddenly and stared intently down into her wide, gold-flecked, tawny eyes. She stared back for a moment, then looked away.

"Don't look at me like that!" she almost screamed. "I can't stand it—you make me feel stark naked! I know that your Lens is off—I'd simply die if it wasn't—but I think that you're a mind-reader, even without it!"

She did know that that powerful telepath was off and would remain off, and she was glad indeed of that fact; for her mind was seething with thoughts which that Lensman must not know, then or ever. And for his part, the Lensman knew what she did not even suspect; that had he chosen to exert the powers at his command she would have been naked, mentally and physically, to his perception; but he did not exert those powers—then. The amenities of human relationship demanded that some fastnesses of reserve remain inviolate, but he had to know what this woman knew. If necessary, he would take the knowledge away from her by force, so completely that she would never know that she had ever known it. Therefore:

"Just what do you know, Mac, and how did you find it out?" he demanded; quietly, but with a stern finality of inflection that made a quick chill run up and down the nurse's back.

"I know a lot, Kim." The girl shivered slightly, even though the evening was warm and balmy. "I learned it from your own mind. When you called me, back there on the floor, you didn't send just a single, sharp thought, just as though you were speaking to me, as you always did before. Instead, it seemed as though I was actually inside your own mind—the whole of it. I have heard Lensman speak of a wide-open two-way, but I never had even the faintest inkling of what it would be like—no one could who has never experienced it. Of course I didn't—I couldn't—understand a millionth of what I saw, or seemed to see. It was too vast, too incredibly immense. I never dreamed any mortal could have a mind like that, Kim! But it was ghastly, too. It gave me the creepy jitters. It sent me down completely out of control for a second. And you didn't even know it—I know you didn't! I didn't want to look, really, but I couldn't help seeing, and I'm glad I did—I wouldn't have missed it for the world!" she finished, almost incoherently.

"Hm-m-m. That changes the picture entirely." Much to her surprise, the man's voice was calm and thoughtful; not at all incensed. Not even disturbed. "So I spilled the beans myself, on a wide-open two-way, and didn't even realize it. I knew that you were back-firing about something, but thought it was because I might think you guilty of petty vanity. And I called you a dumbbell once!" he marveled.

"Twice," she corrected him, "and the second time I was never so glad to be called names in my whole life."

"Now I know that I was getting to be a space-louse."

"Uh-uh, Kim," she denied again, gently. "And you aren't a brat or a lug or a clunker, either, even though I have thought at times that you were all of those things. But, now that I've actually got all this stuff, what can you—what can we—do about it?"

"Perhaps ... probably ... I think, since I gave it to you myself, I'll let you keep it," Kinnison decided, slowly.

"Keep it!" she exclaimed. "Of course, I'll keep it! Why, it's in my mind—I'll have to keep it—nobody can take knowledge away from anyone!"

"Oh, sure—of course," he murmured, absently. There were a lot of things that Mac didn't know, and probably no good end would be served my enlightening her further. "You see, there's a lot of stuff in my mind that I don't know much about myself, yet. Since I gave you an open channel, there must have been a good reason for it, even though, consciously, I don't know myself what it was." He thought intensely for moments, then went on: "Undoubtedly the subconscious. Probably it recognized the necessity of discussing the whole situation with someone having a fresh viewpoint, someone whose ideas can help me develop a fresh angle of attack. Haynes and I think too much alike for him to be of much help."

"You trust me that much?" the girl asked, dumfounded.

"Certainly," he replied without hesitation. "I know enough about you to know that you can keep your mouth shut."

Thus unromantically did Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, acknowledge the first glimmerings of the dawning perception of a vast fact—that this nurse and he were two between whom there never would nor could exist any iota of doubt or of question.

Then they sat and talked. Not idly, as is the fashion of lovers, of the minutiae of their own romantic affairs, did these two converse, but cosmically, of the entire Universe and of the already existent conflict between the culture of Civilization and Boskonia.

They sat there, romantically enough to all outward seeming; their privacy assured by Kinnison's Lens and by his ever-watchful sense of perception. Time after time, completely unconsciously, that sense reached out to other couples who approached, to touch and to affect their minds so insidiously that they did not know that they were being steered away from the tree in whose black moon-shadow sat the Lensman and the nurse.

Finally the long conversation came to an end and Kinnison assisted his companion to her feet. His frame was straighter, his eyes held a new and brighter light.

"By the way, Kim," she asked idly as they strolled back toward the ballroom, "who is this Klono, by whom you were swearing a while ago? Another spaceman's god, like Noshabkeming, of the Valerians?"

"Something like him, only more so," he laughed. "A combination of Noshabkeming, some of the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, all three of the Fates, and quite a few other things as well. I think, originally, from Corvina, but fairly widespread through certain sections of the Galaxy now. He's got so much stuff—teeth and horns, claws and whiskers, tail and everything—that he's much more satisfactory to swear by than any other space-god I know of."

"But why do men have to swear at all, Kim?" she queried, curiously. "It's so silly."

"For the same reason that women cry," he countered. "A man swears to keep from crying, a woman cries to keep from swearing. Both are sound psychology. Safety valves—means of blowing off excess pressure that would otherwise blow fuses or burn out tubes."

III.

In the library of the Port Admiral's richly comfortable home, a room as heavily guarded against all forms of intrusion as was his private office, two old but active Lensmen sat and grinned at each other like the two conspirators which in fact they were. One took a squat, red bottle of fayalin from a cabinet and filled two small glasses. The glasses clinked, rim to rim.

"Here's to love!" Haynes gave the toast.

"Ain't it grand!" Surgeon General Lacy responded.

"Down the hatch!" they chanted in unison, and action followed word.

"You aren't asking if everything stayed on the beam." This from Lacy.

"No need. I had a spy ray on the whole performance."

"You would—you're the type. However, I would have, too, if I had a panel full of them in my office. Well, say it, you old space-hellion!" Lacy grinned again, albeit a trifle wryly.

"Nothing to say, sawbones. You did a grand job, and you've got nothing to blow a jet about."

"No? How would you like to have a red-headed spitfire who's scarcely dry behind the ears yet tell you to your teeth that you've got softening of the brain? That you had the mental capacity of a gnat, the intellect of a Zabriskan fontema? And to have to take it, without even heaving the insubordinate young jade into the can for about twenty-five well-earned black spots?"

"Oh, come, now, you're just blasting. It wasn't that bad."

"Perhaps not quite—but it was bad enough."

"She'll grow up, some day, and realize that you were foxing her six ways from the origin."

"Probably. In the meantime, it's all part of the bigger job. Thank God I'm not young any more. They suffer so."

"Check. How they suffer!"

"But you saw the ending and I didn't. How did it turn out?" Lacy asked.

"Partly good, partly bad." Haynes slowly poured two more drinks and thoughtfully swirled the crimson, pungently aromatic liquid around and around in his glass before he spoke again. "Hooked—but she knows it, and I'm afraid she'll do something about it."

"She's a smart girl—I told you she was. She doesn't fox herself about anything. Hm-m-m. And separation is indicated, it would seem."

"Check. Can you send out a hospital ship somewhere, so as to get rid of her for two or three weeks?"

"Can do. Three weeks be enough? We can't send him anywhere, you know."

"Plenty. He'll be gone in two." Then, as Lacy glanced at him questioningly, Haynes continued: "Ready for a shock? He's going to Lundmark's Nebula."

"But he can't! That would take years! Nobody has ever got back from there yet, and there's this new job of his. Besides, this separation is only supposed to last until you can spare him for a while!"

"If it takes very long he's coming back. The idea has always been, you know, that intergalactic matter may be so thin—one atom per liter or so—that such a flit won't take one tenth the time supposed. We recognize the danger. He's going well heeled."

"How well?"

"The best that we can give him."

"I hate to clog their jets this way, but it's got to be done. We'll give her a raise when I send her out—make her sector chief. Huh?"

"Did I hear any such words lately as 'spitfire,' 'hussy,' and 'jade,' or did I dream them?" Haynes asked, quizzically.

"She's all of them, and more—but she's one of the best nurses and one of the finest women this side of Hades, too!"

"QX, Lacy, give her her raise. Of course she's good, or she wouldn't be in on this deal at all. In fact, they're about as fine a couple of youngsters as old Tellus has produced."

"They are that. Man, what a pair of skeletons!"

And in the Nurses' Quarters a young woman with a wealth of red-bronze-auburn hair and tawny eyes was staring at her own reflection in a mirror.

"You half-wit, you ninny, you lug!" she stormed, bitterly if almost inaudibly, at that reflection. "You lame-brained moron, you red-headed, idiotic imbecile, you microcephalic dumbbell, you clunker! Of all the men in this whole cockeyed galaxy, you would have to make a dive at Kimball Kinnison, the one man who never has realized that you are even alive. At a Gray Lensman—" Her expression changed and she whispered softly: "A ... Gray ... Lensman. He can't love any woman as long as he's carrying that load. They can't let themselves be human—quite; perhaps loving him will be enough—"

She straightened up, shrugged, and smiled; but even that pitiful travesty of a smile could not long endure. Shortly it was buried in waves of pain and the girl threw herself down upon her bed.

"Oh Kim, Kim!" she sobbed. "I wish ... why can't you—Oh, why did I ever have to be born!"

Three weeks later, far out in space, Kimball Kinnison was thinking thoughts entirely foreign to his usual pattern. He was in his bunk, smoking dreamily, staring unseeing at the metallic ceiling. He was not thinking of Boskone.

When he had thought of Mac, back there at that dance, he had, for the first time in his life, failed to narrow down his beam to the exact thought being sent. Why? The explanation he had given the girl was totally inadequate. For that matter, why had he been so glad to see her there? And why, at every odd moment, did visions of her keep coming into his mind—her form and features, her eyes, her lips, her startling hair?