Smith,E E 'Doc' - Lensman 5 - Second Stage Lensman

SECOND STAGE LENSMAN

First serialized in "ASTOUNDING," Nov '41 - Feb '42;

Fist book, Fantasy Press hardbound, 1953

BY E. E. "DOC" SMITH

FOREWORD

A couple of billion years ago, when the first and Second Galaxies were

passing

through each other and when myriads of planets were coming into being where only

a

handful had existed before, two races of beings were already ancient. Each had

become independent of the chance formation of planets upon which to live. Each

had

won a large measure of power over its environment; the Arisians by force of mind

alone,

the Eddorians by employing both mind and mechanism.

The Arisians were native to this, our normal space-time continuum. They had

lived in it since the unthinkably remote time of their origin. The original

Arisia was very

much like Earth. Thus all our normal space was permeated by Arisian life-spores,

and

thus upon all Earth-like planets there came into being races more or less like

what the

Arisians had been in the days of their racial youth.

The Eddorians, on the other hand, were interlopers. They came to our space-

time continuum from some horribly different plenum. For eons they had been

exploring

the Macrocosmic All; moving their planets from plenum to plenum; seeking that

which at

last they found—one in which there were enough planets, soon to be inhabited by

intelligent life, to sate even the Eddorian lust for dominance. Here, in our own

universe,

they would stay; and here supreme they would rule.

The Elders of Arisia, however, the ablest thinkers of the race, had known

of and

had studied the Eddorians for many cycles of time. Their integrated

Visualization of the

Cosmic All showed what was to happen. No more than the Arisians themselves could

the Eddorians be slain by any physical means; nor could the Arisians, unaided,

kill all

the invaders by mental force. Eddore's All-Highest and his Innermost Circle, in

their

ultrashielded citadel, could be destroyed only by a mental bolt of such nature

and

magnitude that its generator, which was to become known as the Galactic Patrol,

would

require several long Arisian lifetimes for its building.

Nor would that building be easy. The Eddorians must be kept in ignorance,

both

of Arisia and of the proposed generator, until too late to take effective

counter-

measures. Also, no entity below the third level of intelligence could ever be

allowed to

learn the truth, for that knowledge would set up an inferiority complex that

would rob the

generator of its ability to do the work.

On the four most promising planets of the First Galaxy —our Earth or Sol

Three,

Velantia, Rigel Four, and Palain Seven—breeding programs, to develop the highest

mentality of which each race was capable, were begun as soon as intelligent life

appeared.

On our Earth there were only two blood lines, since humanity has only two

sexes.

One was a straight male line of descent, and was always named Kinnison or its

equivalent. Civilizations rose and fell; Arisia surreptitiously lifting them up,

Eddore

callously knocking them down. Pestilences raged, and wars, and famines, and

holocausts and disasters that decimated entire populations again and again; but

the

direct male line of descent of the Kinnisons was never broken.

The other line, sometimes male and sometimes female, which was to culminate

in the female penultimate of the Arisian program, was equally persistent and was

characterized throughout its prodigious length by a peculiarly spectacular shade

of red-

bronze-auburn hair and equally striking gold-flecked, tawny eyes. Atlantis fell,

but the

red-headed, yellow-eyed child of red-haired Captain Phryges had been sent to

North

Maya, and lived. Patroclus, the red-headed gladiator, begot a red-haired

daughter

before he was cut down. And so it went.

World Wars One, Two, and Three, occupying as they did only a few moments of

Arisian-Eddorian time, formed merely one incident in the eons-long game.

Immediately

after that incident, Gharlane of Eddore made what proved to be an error. Knowing

nothing of the Arisians, he assumed that the then completely ruined Tellus would

not

require his personal attention again for many hundreds of Tellurian years, and

went

elsewhere; to Rigel Four, to Palain Seven, and to Velantia Two, or Delgon, where

he

found that his creatures, the Overlords, were not progressing satisfactorily. He

spent

quite a little time there; during which the men of Earth, aided by the Arisians,

made a

rapid recovery from the ravages of atomic warfare and very rapid advances in

both

sociology and technology.

Virgil Samms, the auburn-haired, tawny-eyed Crusader who was to become the

first wearer of Arisia's Lens, took advantage of the demoralization to institute

an

effective planetary police force. Then, with the advent of interplanetary

flight, he was

instrumental in forming the Interplanetary League. As head of the Triplanetary

Service

he took a leading part in the brief war with the Nevians, a race of highly

intelligent

amphibians who used allotropic iron as a source of atomic power.

Gharlane of Eddore came back to the Solarian System as Gray Roger, the

enigmatic and practically immortal scourge of space, only to find his every move

so

completely blocked that he could not kill two ordinary human beings, Conway

Costigan

and Clio Marsden. Nor were these two, in spite of some belief to the contrary,

anything

but what they seemed. Neither of them ever knew that they were being protected.

Gharlane's blocker was in fact an Arisian fusion; the four-ply mentality which

was to

become known to every Lensman of the Patrol as Mentor of Arisia.

The inertialess drive, which made an interstellar trip a matter of minutes

instead

of lifetimes, brought with it such an increase in crime, and made detection of

criminals

so difficult, that law enforcement broke down almost completely. As Samms

himself

expressed it:

"How can legal processes work efficiently—work at all, for that matter—when

a

man can commit a murder or a pirate can loot a space-ship and be a hundred

parsecs

away before the crime is even discovered? How can a Tellurian John Law find a

criminal on a strange world that knows nothing of our Patrol, with a completely

alien

language— maybe no language at all—when it takes months even to find out who and

where—if any—the native police officers are?"

Also there was the apparently insuperable difficulty of identification of

authorized

personnel. Triplanetary's best scientists had done their best in the way of a

non-

counterfeitable badge—the historic Golden Meteor, which upon touch impressed

upon

the toucher's consciousness an unpronounceable,—unspellable syllable—but that

best

was not enough. What physical science could devise and synthesize, physical

science

could analyze and duplicate; and that analysis and duplication had caused

trouble

indeed.

Triplanetary needed something vastly better than its meteor. In fact,

without a

better, its expansion into an inter-systemic organization would probably be

impossible. It

needed something to identify a Patrolman, anytime and anywhere. This something

must

be impossible of duplication or imitation—ideally, it should kill, painfully,

any entity

attempting imposture. It should operate as a telepath or endow its wearer with

telepathic

power—how else could a Tellurian converse with peoples such as the Rigellians,

who

could not talk, see, or hear?

Both Solarian Councillor Virgil Samms and his friend of old, Commissioner

of

Public Safety Roderick Kinnison, knew these things; but they also knew how

utterly

preposterous their thoughts were; how utterly and self-evidently impossible such

a

device was.

But Arisia again came to the rescue. The scientist working on the meteor

problem, one Dr. Nels Bergenholm—who, all unknown to even his closest

associates,

was a form of flesh energized at various times by various Arisians—reported to

Virgil

Samms that:

(1) Physical science could not then produce what was needed, and probably

could never do so. (2) Although it could not be explained by any symbology known

to

man, there was—there must be—a science of die mind; a science whose tangible

products physical science could neither analyze nor imitate. (3) Virgil Samms,

by going

to Arisia, could obtain exactly what was needed.

"Arisia! Of all the hells in space, why Arisia?" Kinnison demanded. "How?

Don't

you know that nobody can get anywhere near that damn planet?"

"I know that the Arisians are very well versed in that science. I know that

if Virgil

Samms goes to Arisia he will obtain the symbol he needs. I know that he will

never

obtain it otherwise. As to how I know these things—I can't—I just —I know them,

I tell

you!"

And since Bergenholm was already as well known for uncannily accurate

"hunches" as for a height of genius bordering on insanity, the two leaders of

Civilization

did not press him farther, but went immediately to the hitherto forbidden

planet. They

were—apparently—received hospitably enough, and were given Lenses by Mentor of

Arisia; Lenses which, it developed, were all that Bergenholm had indicated, and

more.

The Lens is a lenticular structure of hundreds of thousands of tiny

crystalloids,

built and tuned to match the individual life force—the ego, the personality—of

one

individual entity. While not, strictly speaking, alive, it is endowed with a

sort of pseudo-

life by virtue of which it gives off a strong, characteristically-changing,

polychromatic

light as long as it is in circuit with the living mentality with which it is in

synchronization.

Conversely, when worn by anyone except its owner, it not only remains dark, but

it kills;

so strongly does its pseudo-life interfere with any life to which it is not

attuned. It is also

a telepathic communicator of astounding power and range—and other things.

Back on Earth, Samms set out to find people of Lensman caliber to send to

Arisia. Kinnison's son, Jack, Jack's friend Mason Northrop, Conway Costigan, and

Samms' daughter Virgilia—who had inherited her father's hair and eyes and who

was

the most accomplished muscle-reader of her time— went first. The boys got

Lenses, but

Jill did not. Mentor, who was to her senses a woman seven feet tall—it should be

mentioned here that no two entities who ever saw Mentor ever saw the same

thing—told her that she did not then and never would need a Lens.

Frederick Rodebush, Lyman Cleveland, young Bergenholm and a couple of

commodores of the Patrol—Clayton of North America and Schweikert of Europe—just

about exhausted Earth's resources. Nor were the other Solarian planets very

helpful,

yielding only three Lensmen—Knobos of Mars, Del Nalten of Venus, and Rularion of

Jove. Lensman material was very scarce stuff.

Knowing that his proposed Galactic Council would have to be made up

exclusively of Lensmen, and that it should represent as many solar systems as

possible, Samms visited the various systems which had been colonized by

humanity,

then went on: to Rigel Four, where he found Dronvire the Explorer, who was of

Lensman grade; and next to Pluto, where he found Pilinixi the Dexitroboper, who

very

definitely was not; and finally to Palain Seven, an ultra-frigid world where he

found

Tallick, who might—or might not—go to Arisia some day. And Virgil Samms, being

physically tough and mentally a real crusader, survived these various ordeals.

For some time the existence of the newly-formed Galactic Patrol was

precarious

indeed. Archibald Isaacson, head of Interstellar Spaceways, wanting a monopoly

of

interstellar trade, first tried bribery; then, joining forces with the machine

of Senator

Morgan and Boss Towne, assassination. The other Lensmen and Jill saved Samms'

life;

after which Kinnison took him to the safest place on Earth—deep underground

beneath

the Hill; the tremendously fortified, superlatively armed fortress which had

been built to

be the headquarters of the Triplanetary Service.

But even there the First Lensman was attacked, this time by a fleet of

space-

ships in full battle array. By that time, however, the Galactic Patrol had a

fleet of its own,

and again the Lensmen won.

Knowing that the final and decisive struggle would of necessity be a

political one,

the Patrol took over the Cosmocrat party and set out to gather detailed and

documentary evidence of corrupt and criminal activities of the Nationalists, the

party

then in power. Roderick ("Rod the Rock") Kinnison ran for President of North

America

against the incumbent Witherspoon; and after a knock-down-and-drag-out political

battle with Senator Morgan, the voice of the Morgan-Towne-Isaacson machine, he

was

elected.

And Morgan was murdered—supposedly by disgruntled gangsters; actually by

his Kalonian boss, who was in turn a minion of Eddore—simply because he had

failed.

North America was the most powerful continent of Earth; Earth was the

mother

planet, the leader and the boss. Hence, under the sponsorship of the Cosmocratic

government of North America, the Galactic Council and its arm, the Galactic

Patrol,

came into their own. At the end of R. K. Kinnison's term of office, at which

time he

resumed his interrupted duties as Port Admiral of the Patrol, there were a

hundred

planets adherent to Civilization. In ten years there were a thousand; in a

hundred years

a million; and it is sufficient characterization of the government of the

Galactic Council to

say that in the long history of Civilization no planet has ever withdrawn from

it.

Time went on. The prodigiously long blood-lines, so carefully manipulated

by

Mentor of Arisia, neared culmination. Lensman Kimball Kinnison was graduated

Number

One of his class—as a matter of fact, although he did not know it, he was Number

One

of his time. And his female counterpart and complement, Clarrissa MacDougall of

the

red-bronze-auburn hair and the gold-flecked tawny eyes, was a nurse in the

Patrol's

Hospital at Prime Base.

Shortly after graduation Kinnison was called in by Port Admiral Haynes.

Space

piracy had become an organized force; and, under the leadership of someone or

something known as "Boskone", had risen to such heights of power as to threaten

seriously the Patrol itself. In one respect Boskonia was ahead of the Patrol;

its scientists

having developed a source of power vastly greater than any known to

Civilization. Pirate

ships, faster than the Patrol's fastest cruisers and yet more heavily armed than

its most

powerful battleships, had been doing as they pleased throughout all 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 offense she

had only

one weapon, the "Q-gun". Kinnison was put in command of this vessel, with orders

to:

(1) Capture a late-model pirate vessel; (2) Learn her secrets of power; and (3)

Transmit

the information to Prime Base.

He found and took such a ship. Sergeant Peter vanBuskirk led the storming

party

of Valerians—men of human ancestry, but of extraordinary size, strength, and

agility

because of the enormous gravitation of the planet Valeria—in wiping out those of

the

pirate crew not killed in the battle between the two vessels.

The Brittania's scientists secured the desired data. It could not be

transmitted to

Prime Base, however, as the pirates were blanketing all channels of

communication.

Boskonian warships 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

destroy

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 manned by

Kinnison and vanBuskirk, and there the pirates tried 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 before the crash. The

two

Patrolmen boarded the pirate vessel and drove her toward Earth, reaching the

solar

system of Velantia before the Boskonians headed them off. Again taking to their

lifeboat, they landed on the planet Delgon, where they were rescued from a horde

of

Catlats by one Worsel—later to become Lensman Worsel of Velantia—a highly

intelligent winged reptile.

By means of improvements upon Velantian thought-screens the three destroyed

a group of the Overlords of Delgon, a sadistic race of monsters who had been

preying

upon the other peoples 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 defenses against the expected attack of the

Boskonians.

Several other lifeboats reached Velantia, guided by Worsel's mind working

through

Kinnison's ego and Lens.

Kinnison intercepted a message from Helmuth, who "spoke for Boskone", and

traced his communicator beam, thus getting his first line on Boskone's Grand

Base. The

pirates attacked Velantia, and six of their warships were captured. In these six

ships,

manned by Velantian crews, the Patrolmen again set out for Earth and Prime Base.

Then Kinnison's Bergenholm, the generator of the force which makes

inertialess

flight possible, broke down, so that he had to land upon Trenco for repairs.

Trenco, the

tempestuous, billiard-ball-smooth planet where it rains forty seven feet and

five inches

every night and where the wind blows at over eight hundred miles per hour—

Trenco,

the source of thionite, the deadliest of all deadly drugs—Trenco, whose weirdly-

charged

ether and atmosphere so distort beams and vision that it can be policed only by

such

beings as the Rigellians, who possess the sense of perception instead of those

of sight

and hearing!

Lensman Tregonsee, of Rigel Four, then in command of the Patrol's wandering

base on Trenco, supplied Kinnison with a new Bergenholm and he again set out for

Tellus.

Meanwhile Helmuth had decided that some one particular Lensman must be the

cause of all his set-backs; and that the Lens, a complete enigma to all

Boskonians, was

in some way connected with Arisia. That planet had always been dreaded and

shunned

by all spacemen. No Boskonian who had even approached that planet could be

compelled, even by the certainty of death, to go near it again.

Thinking himself secure by virtue of thought-screens "given him by a being

from

a higher-echelon planet named Floor, Helmuth went alone to Arisia, determined to

learn

all about the Lens. There he was punished to the verge of insanity, but was

permitted to

return to his Grand Base alive and sane: "Not for your own good, but for the

good of

that struggling young Civilization which you oppose."

Kinnison reached Prime Base with the all-important data. By building super-

powerful battleships, called "maulers", the Patrol gained a temporary advantage

over

Boskonia, but a stalemate soon ensued. Kinnison developed a plan of action

whereby

he hoped to locate Helmuth's Grand Base, and asked Port Admiral Haynes for

permission to follow it. In lieu of that, however, Haynes told him that he had

been given

his Release; that he was an Unattached Lensman—a "Gray" Lensman, popularly so-

called, from the color of the plain leather uniforms they wear. Thus he earned

the

highest honor possible for the Galactic Patrol to give, for the Gray Lensman

works

under no supervision or direction whatever. He is responsible to no one; to

nothing save

his own conscience. He is no longer a cog in the immense machine of the Galactic

Patrol: wherever he may go he is the Patrol!

In quest of a second line to Grand Base, Kinnison scouted a pirate

stronghold on

Aldebaran I. Its personnel, however, were not even near-human, but were

Wheelmen,

possessed of the sense of perception; hence Kinnison was discovered before he

could

accomplish anything and was very seriously wounded. He managed to get back to

his

speedster and to send a thought to Port Admiral Haynes, who rushed ships to his

aid. In

Base Hospital Surgeon-Marshal Lacy put him back together; and, during a long and

quarrelsome convalescence, Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall held him together. And

Lacy

and Haynes connived to promote a romance between nurse and Lensman.

As soon as he could leave the hospital he went to Arisia in the hope that

he

might he given advanced training; something which had never before been

attempted.

Much to his surprise he learned that he had been expected to return for exactly

such

training. Getting it almost killed him, but he emerged from the ordeal vastly

stronger of

mind than any human being had ever been before; and possessed of a new sense as

well—the sense of perception, a sense somewhat analogous to sight, but of much

greater power, depth, and scope, and not dependent on light.

After trying out his new mental equipment by solving a murder mystery on

Radelix, he went to Boyssia II, where he succeeded in entering an enemy base. He

took

over the mind of a communications officer and waited for a chance to get his

second,

all-important line to Grand Base. An enemy ship captured a hospital ship of the

Patrol

and brought it in to Boyssia. Nurse MacDougall, head nurse of the ship, working

under

Kinnison's instructions, stirred up trouble which soon became mutiny. Helmuth

took a

hand from Grand Base, thus enabling the Lensman to get his second line.

The hospital ship, undetectable by virtue of Kinnison's nullifier, escaped

from

Boyssia II and headed for Earth at full blast. Kinnison, convinced that Helmuth

was

really Boskone himself, found that the intersection of the two lines, and

therefore the

pirates' Grand Base, lay in Star Cluster AC 257-4736, well outside the galaxy.

Pausing

only long enough to destroy the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I, he set out to

investigate

Helmuth's headquarters. He found a stronghold impregnable to any attack the

Patrol

could throw against it; manned by thought-screened personnel. His sense of

perception

was suddenly cut off—the pirates had erected a thought-screen around their whole

planet. He then returned to Prime Base, deciding en route that boring from

within was

the only possible way to take that stupendous fortress.

In consultation with the Port Admiral the zero hour was set, at which time

the

massed Grand Fleet of the Patrol was to attack Grand Base with every projector

it could

bring to bear.

Pursuant to his plan, Kinnison again visited Trenco, where the Patrol

forces

extracted for him some fifty kilograms of thionite; the noxious drug which, in

microgram

inhalations, makes the addict experience all the sensations of doing whatever it

is that

he wishes most ardently to do. The larger the dose, the more intense and

exquisite the

sensations—resulting, sooner or later, in a super-ecstatic death.

Thence to Helmuth's planet; where, working through the unshielded brain of

a

dog, he let himself into the central dome. Here, just before the zero minute, he

released

his thionite into the air-stream, thus wiping out all the pirates except Helmuth

himself,

who, in his ultra-shielded inner bombproof, could not be affected.

The Patrol attacked precisely on schedule, but Helmuth would not leave his

retreat, even to try to save his base. Therefore Kinnison had to go in after

him. Poised in

the air of the inner dome there was an enigmatic, sparkling ball of force which

the

Lensman could not understand, and of which he was therefore very suspicious.

But the storming of that quadruply-defended inner stronghold was exactly

the

task for which Kinnison's new and ultra-cumbersome armor had been designed; so

in

he went. He killed Helmuth in armor-to-armor combat.

Kinnison was pretty sure that that force-ball was keyed to some particular

pattern, and suspected—correctly—that it was in part an inter-galactic

communicator.

Hence he did not think into it until he was in the flagship with Port Admiral

Haynes; until

all kinds of recorders and analyzers had been set up. Then he did so—and Grand

Base

was blasted out of existence by duodec bombs placed by the pirates themselves

and

triggered by the force-ball. The detectors showed a hard, tight communications

line

running straight out toward the Second Galaxy. Helmuth was not Boskone.

Scouting the Second Galaxy in his super-powerful battleship Dauntless,

Kinnison

met and defeated a squadron of Boskonian war-vessels. He landed upon the planet

Medon, whose people had been fighting a losing war against Boskone. The

Medonians,

electrical wizards who had already installed inertia-neutralizers and a space-

drive,

moved their world across inter-galactic space to our First Galaxy.

With the cessation of military activity, however, the illicit traffic in

habit-forming

drugs had increased tremendously, and Kinnison, deducing that Boskone was back

of

the drug syndicate, decided that the best way to find the real leader of the

enemy was to

work upward through the drug ring.

Disguised as a dock walloper, he frequented the saloon of a drug baron, and

helped to raid it; but, although he secured much information, his disguise was

penetrated.

He called a Conference of Scientists to devise means of building a gigantic

bomb

of negative matter. Then, impersonating a Tellurian secret-service agent who

lent

himself to the deception, he tried to investigate the stronghold of Prellin of

Bronseca,

one of Boskone's regional directors. This disguise also failed and he barely

managed to

escape.

Ordinary disguises having proved useless, Kinnison became Wild Bill

Williams;

once a gentleman of Aldebaran II, now a space-rat meteor miner. He made of

himself

an almost bottomless drinker of the hardest beverages known to space. He became

a

drug fiend—a bentlam eater—discovering that his Arisian-trained mind could

function at

full efficiency even while his physical body was completely stupefied. He became

widely

known as the fastest, deadliest performer with twin DeLameters ever to strike

the

asteroid belts.

Smith, E E 'Doc' - Lensman 5 - Second Stage Lensman

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