E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 4 - Gray Lensman

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GRAY LENSMAN

serialized in "ASTOUNDING," Oct '39 - Jan '40;

First book, Fantasy Press hardbound, 1951;

BY E. E. "DOC" SMITH

FOREWORD

Two thousand million or so years ago, at the time of the Coalescence, when the

First and Second

Galaxies were passing through each other and when myriads of planets were coming

into

existence where only a handful had existed before, two races of beings were

already old; so old

that each had behind it many millions of years of recorded history. Both were so

old that each

had perforce become independent of the chance formation of planets upon which to

live. Each

had, in its own way, gained a measure of control over its environment; the

Arisians by power of

mind alone, the Eddorians by employing both mind and mechanism.

The Arisians were indigenous to this, our normal space-time continuum; they

had lived

in it since the unthinkably remote time of their origin; and the original Arisia

was very Earth-like

in mass, composition, size, atmosphere, and climate. Thus all normal space was

permeated by

Arisian life-spores, and thus upon all Earth-like or Tellurian planets there

came into being races

of creatures more or less resembling Arisians in the days of their racial youth.

None except

Tellurians are Homo Sapiens, of course; few can actually be placed in Genus

Homo; but many

millions of planets are peopled by races distantly recognizable or belonging to

the great class of

MAN.

The Eddorians, on the other hand, were interlopers—intruders. They were not

native to

our normal space-time system, but came to it from some other, some alien and

horribly different

other, plenum. For eons, in fact, they had been exploring the macrocosmic All;

moving their

planets from continuum to continuum; seeking that which at last they found—a

space and a time

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 space-time, they would stay; and

here supreme

they would rule.

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

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, however applied; nor could the Arisians, unaided, kill all of

the invaders by

mental force. Eddore's All-Highest and his Innermost Circle, in their ultra-

shielded citadel, could

be destroyed only by a mental bolt of such nature and magnitude that its

generator, which was to

become known throughout two galaxies 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, even—or especially?—of the Patrol, could

ever learn the

truth; for that knowledge would set up an inferiority complex and thus rob the

generator of all

ability to do the work for which it was designed.

Nevertheless the Arisians began building. On the four most promising

planets of the First

Galaxy—our Earth or Sol Three, Velantia, Rigel Four, and Palain Seven—breeding

programs,

aiming toward the highest mentality of which each race was capable, were begun

as soon as

intelligent life developed.

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 and unobtrusively lifting

them up, Eddore

callously knocking them down as soon as it became evident that they were not

what Eddore

wanted. 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

Captain Phryges had been sent to North Maya, and lived. Patroclus, the red-

headed gladiator,

begot a red-headed 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. That incident

was important,

however, because immediately after it Gharlane of Eddore made what proved to be

an error.

Knowing nothing of the Arisians, or of what they had done to raise the level of

intelligence of

mankind, he assumed that the then completely ruined Earth 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; time

during which the men

of Earth, aided almost openly by the Arisians, made a phenomenally rapid

recovery from the

ravages of atomic warfare and fantastically 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 general demoralization to

institute a really

effective planetary police force. Then, with the advent of inter-planetary

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 blocked—

blocked so

savagely and so completely that he could not even 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;

but Gharlane's

blocker was in fact an Arisian fusion—the four-ply mentality which was to become

known to

every Lensman of the Galactic 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 whatever 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 the identification

of authorized

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

non-counter-feitable

badge—the historic Golden Meteor, which upon touch impressed upon the toucher's

consciousness an unpronounceable, unspellable symbol—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 intersystemic organization would be impossible. It needed

something to

identify a Patrolman, anytime and anywhere. It must be impossible of duplication

or imitation. In

fact, 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 who had been assigned

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 Samms

and Kinnison

that:

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

never could

do so. 2) Although it could not be explained in any symbology or language known

to man, there

was—there must be—a science of the mind; a science whose tangible products

physical science

could neither analyze nor imitate. 3) Virgil Samms, by going in person 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 Councillor

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 perilously closely on insanity, the two leaders

of Civilization did

not press him further, 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, and his friend Mason Northrop, Conway Costigan, and Samms's

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, told her that she did not then and never

would need a

Lens—and it should be mentioned here in passing that no two entities who ever

saw Mentor ever

saw the same thing.

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, Dal-Nalten of Venus, and Rularion of Jove. Lensman

material was

extremely 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,

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摘要：

GRAYLENSMANserializedin"ASTOUNDING,"Oct'39-Jan'40;Firstbook,FantasyPresshardbound,1951;BYE.E."DOC"SMITHFOREWORDTwothousandmillionorsoyearsago,atthetimeoftheCoalescence,whentheFirstandSecondGalaxieswerepassingthrougheachotherandwhenmyriadsofplanetswerecomingintoexistencewhereonlyahandfulhadexistedbef...

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E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 4 - Gray Lensman

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