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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

utterly

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

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

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

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

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摘要：

SECONDSTAGELENSMANFirstserializedin"ASTOUNDING,"Nov'41-Feb'42;Fistbook,FantasyPresshardbound,1953BYE.E."DOC"SMITHFOREWORDAcoupleofbillionyearsago,whenthefirstandSecondGalaxieswerepassingthrougheachotherandwhenmyriadsofplanetswerecomingintobeingwhereonlyahandfulhadexistedbefore,tworacesofbeingswereal...

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