Chapter I: Front Matter

CHILDREN OF THE LENS

BY E. E. SMITH

Illustrated by Rogers

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

MESSAGE OF TRANSMITTAL

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

BY: Christopher Kinnison, L3, of Klovia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Galactic Patrol assembled its Grand Fleet, composed of millions of units, under the flagship _Z9M9Z_. It attacked. The planet of Jalte, Boskonia's Director of the First Galaxy, was consumed by a bomb of negative matter. Jarnevon was crushed between two colliding planets; positioned inertialess, then inerted especially for that crushing. Grand Fleet returned, triumphant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully submitted,

Christopher Kinnison, L3, Klovia.