By E. E. Smith, Ph.D.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Stories September, October, November,
December 1937, January, February 1938.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Dominating twice a hundred square miles of campus, parade ground,
airport, and space port, a ninety-story edifice of chromium and glass
sparkled dazzlingly in the bright sunlight of a June morning. This
monumental pile was Wentworth Hall, in which the Tellurian candidates
for the Lens of the Galactic Patrol live and move and have their being.
One wing of its topmost floor seethed with tense activity, for that
wing was the habitat of the lordly five-year men, this was graduation
day, and in a few minutes Class 5 was due to report in Room A.
Room A, the private office of the commandant himself; the dreadful lair
into which an undergraduate was summoned only to disappear from the
Hall and from the cadet corps; the portentous chamber into which each
year the handful of graduates marched and from which they emerged, each
man in some subtle fashion changed.
In their cubicles of steel the graduates scanned each other
narrowly, making sure that no wrinkle or speck of dust marred the
black-and-silver perfection of the dress uniform of the patrol;
that not even the tiniest spot of tarnish or dullness violated the
glittering golden meteors upon their collars or the resplendently
polished ray pistols and other equipment at their belts. The
microscopic mutual inspection over, the kit boxes were snapped shut and
racked, and the embryonic Lensmen made their way out into the assembly
hall.
In the wardroom Kimball Kinnison, captain of the class by virtue of
graduating at its head, and his three lieutenants, Clifford Maitland,
Raoul LaForge, and Widel Holmberg, had inspected each other minutely
and were now simply awaiting, in ever-increasing tension, the zero
minute.
"Now, fellows, remember that drop!" the young captain jerked out.
"We're dropping the shaft free, at higher velocity and in tighter
formation than any class ever tried before. If anybody hashes the
formation--our last show and with the whole corps looking on----"
"Don't worry about the drop, Kim," advised Maitland. "All three
platoons will take that like clockwork. What's got me all of a dither
is what is really going to happen in Room A."
"Uh-_huh_!" exclaimed LaForge and Holmberg as one.
"You can play that across the board for the whole class," Kinnison
agreed. "Well, we'll soon know. It's time to get going."
The four officers stepped out into the assembly hall, the class
springing to attention at their approach.
Kinnison, now all brisk captain, stared along the mathematically exact
lines and snapped: "Report!"
"Class 5 present in full, sir!" The sergeant major touched a stud at
his belt and all vast Wentworth Hall fairly trembled under the impact
of an all-pervading, lilting, throbbing melody as the world's finest
military band crashed into "Our Patrol."
"Squads left--march!" Although no possible human voice could have
been heard in that gale of soul-stirring sound, and although
Kinnison's lips did not move, his command was carried to the very
bones of those for whom it was intended--and to no one else--by the
tight-beam ultra-communicators strapped upon their chests. "Close
formation--forward--march!"
* * * * *
In perfect alignment and cadence, the little column marched down the
hall. In their path yawned the shaft--a vertical pit some twenty feet
square extending from main floor to roof of the Hall; more than a
thousand sheer feet of unobstructed air, cleared now of all traffic
by flaring red lights. Five left heels clicked sharply, simultaneously
upon the lip of the stupendous abyss. Five right legs swept out
into emptiness. Five right hands snapped to belts and five bodies,
rigidly erect, arrowed downward at such an appalling velocity that to
unpracticed vision they simply vanished.
Six tenths of a second later, precisely upon a beat of the stirring
march, those ten heels struck the main floor of Wentworth Hall, but not
with a click. Dropping with a velocity of almost two thousand feet per
second though they were at the instant of impact, yet those five husky
bodies came from full speed to an instantaneous, shockless, effortless
halt at contact. The drop had been made under complete neutralization
of inertia--"free," in space parlance. Inertia restored, the march
was resumed--or rather continued--in perfect time with the band. Five
left feet swung out, and as the right toes left the floor the second
rank, with only bare inches to spare, plunged down into the space its
predecessor had occupied a moment before.
Rank after rank landed and marched away with machinelike precision. The
dread door of Room A opened automatically at the approach of the cadets
and closed behind them.
"Column right--march!" Kinnison commanded inaudibly, and the
class obeyed in clockwork perfection. "Column left--march! Squads
right--march! Company--halt! Salute!"
In company front, in a huge, square room devoid of furniture, the class
faced the ogre--Inspector General Fritz von Hohendorff, commandant of
cadets. Martinet, tyrant, dictator--he was known throughout the system
as the embodiment of soullessness; and, insofar as he had ever been
known to show emotion or feeling before any undergraduate, he seemed to
glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly rigid disciplinarian
that Earth had ever known. His thick, white hair was roached fiercely
upward into a stiff pompadour. His left eye was of glass and his face
bore dozens of tiny, thread-like scars; for not even the marvelous
plastic surgery of that age could repair entirely the havoc wrought
by the lethal rays of space combat. Also, his right leg and left arm,
although practically normal to all outward seeming, were in reality
largely products of science and art instead of nature.
Kinnison faced, then, this reconstructed potentate, saluted crisply,
and snapped: "Sir, Class 5 reports to the commandant."
"Take your post, sir." The veteran saluted as punctiliously; and as
he did so a semicircular desk rose around him from the floor--a desk
whose most striking feature was an intricate mechanism surrounding a
splintlike form so shaped as to receive a man's left arm.
"No. 1, Kimball Kinnison!" Von Hohendorff barked. "Front and
center--march! The oath, sir."
"Before the omnipotent witness I promise never to lower the standard of
the Galactic Patrol," Kinnison said reverently; and, baring his left
arm, thrust it into the hollow form.
* * * * *
From a small container labeled: "No. 1, Kimball Kinnison," the
commandant shook out what was apparently an ornament--a lenticular
jewel fabricated of hundreds of tiny, dead-white gems. Taking it up
with a pair of insulated forceps, he touched it momentarily to the
bronzed skin of the arm before him, and at that fleeting contact a
flash as of many-colored fire swept over the stones. Satisfied, he
dropped the jewel into a recess provided for it in the mechanism, which
at once burst into activity.
The forearm was wrapped in thick insulation; molds and shields snapped
into place, and there flared out an instantly suppressed flash of
brilliance intolerable. Then the molds fell apart; the insulation was
removed; there was revealed the Lens. Clamped to Kinnison's brawny
wrist by a massive bracelet of imperishable, almost unbreakable, metal
in which it was embedded it shone in all its lambent splendor--no
longer a whitely inert piece of jewelry, but a lenticular polychrome of
writhing, almost fluid radiance, which proclaimed to all observers in
symbols of ever-changing flame that here was a Lensman of the Galactic
Patrol.
In similar fashion each man of the class was invested with the symbol
of his rank. Then the stern-faced inspector general touched a button
and from the bare metal floor there arose deeply upholstered chairs,
one for each graduate.
"Fall out!" he commanded, then smiled almost boyishly--the first
intimation any of the class had ever had that the hard-boiled old
tyrant _could_ smile--and went on in a strangely altered voice: "Sit
down, men, and smoke up. We have an hour in which to talk things over,
and now I can tell you what it is all about. Each of you will find his
favorite refreshment in the arm of his chair.
"No, there's no catch to it," he continued, in answer to amazedly
doubtful stares, and lighted a huge black cigar of Venus-grown tobacco
as he spoke. "You are Lensmen now, and henceforth each of you is
accountable only to himself and to GHQ. Of course, you have yet to go
through the formalities of commencement, but they don't count. Each of
you really graduated when the Lens was welded around his arm.
"We know your individual preferences, and each of you has his favorite
weed, from Tillotson's Pittsburgh stogies up to Snowden's Alsakanite
cigarettes--even though Alsakan is just about as far away from here as
a planet can be and still lie within the galaxy.
"We also know that you are all immune to the lure of noxious drugs.
If you were not, you would not be here to-day. So smoke up and speak
up. Ask any questions you care to, and I will try to answer them.
Nothing is barred now. This room is shielded against any spy ray or
communicator beam operable upon any known frequency."
There was a brief and rather uncomfortable silence. Then Kinnison
suggested, diffidently: "Might it not be best, sir, to tell us all
about it, from the ground up? I imagine that most of us are in too
much of a daze to ask intelligent questions."
* * * * *
"Perhaps. While some of you undoubtedly have your suspicions, I
will begin by telling you what is behind what you have been put
through during the last five years. Feel perfectly free to break in
with questions at any time. You know that every year one million
eighteen-year-old boys of Earth are chosen as cadets by competitive
examinations. You know that during the first year, before any of them
see Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less than fifty thousand.
You know that by graduation day there are only, approximately, one
hundred left in the class. Now I am allowed to tell you that you
graduates are those who have come with flying colors through the most
brutally rigid, the most fiendishly thorough process of elimination
that it has been possible to develop.
"Every man who can be made to reveal any sign of weakness is dropped.
Most of these 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 our organization,
from grease monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the
rank of Lensman. This explains what you already know--that the Galactic
Patrol is the finest body of intelligent beings yet to serve under one
banner.
"Of the million who started, you few are left. As must every being who
has ever worn or who ever will wear the Lens, each of you has proven
repeatedly, to the cold verge of death itself, that he is in every
possible respect worthy to wear it. For instance, Kinnison here once
had a highly adventurous interview with a lady of Aldebaran II and her
friends. He did not know that we knew all about it, but we did."
Kinnison's very ears burned scarlet, but the commandant went
imperturbably on: "So it was with Voelker and the hypnotist of
Karalon; with LaForge and the bentlam eaters; with Flewelling when the
Ganymede-Venus thionite smugglers tried to bribe him with ten million
in gold."
"Good Heavens, commandant!" broke in one outraged youth. "Didn't we do
any real work at all?"
"Plenty of it; but at the same time each of you underwent enough
testing to prove definitely that you could not be cracked. And none of
you need be ashamed, for you have passed every test. Those who did not
pass them were those who were dropped.
"Nor is it any disgrace to have been dismissed from the service before
graduation into the patrol. The million who started with you were
the pick of the planet, yet we knew in advance that of that selected
million scarcely one in ten thousand would measure up in every
essential. Therefore, it would be manifestly unfair to stigmatize the
rest of them because they were not born with that extra something, that
ultimate quality of fiber which does, and of stern necessity _must_,
characterize the wearers of the Lens. For that reason not even the man
himself knows why he was dismissed, and no one save those who wear the
Lens knows why they were selected--and a member of the patrol does not
talk.
"It is necessary to consider the history and background of the patrol
in order to bring out clearly the necessity for such care in the
selection of its personnel. You are all familiar with it, but probably
very few of you have thought of it in that connection. The patrol is,
of course, an outgrowth of the old planetary police systems; and, until
its development, law enforcement always lagged behind law violation.
Thus, in the old days following the invention of the automobile,
State troopers could not cross State lines. Then, when the national
police finally took charge, they could not follow the rocket-equipped
criminals across national boundaries.
* * * * *
"Still later, when interplanetary flight became a commonplace, the
planetary police 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 invention of
the inertialess drive and the consequent traffic between the worlds
of hundreds of thousands of solar systems, crime became so rampant,
so utterly uncontrollable, that it threatened the very foundations of
civilization. A man could perpetrate any crime imaginable without fear
of consequences, for in an hour he could be thousands of light years
away from the scene and safely beyond the reach of the law.
"And helping powerfully toward utter chaos were the new vices, which
were spreading from world to world; among others the taking of new and
horrible drugs. Thionite, for instance; occurring only upon Trenco; a
drug as much deadlier than heroin as that compound is than coffee, and
which even now commands such a fabulous price that a man can carry a
fortune in one hollow boot heel.
"Thus our patrol came into being. At first it was a pitiful enough
organization. It was handicapped from without by politics and
politicians, and at the same time it was honeycombed from within by the
usual small but utterly poisonous percentage of the unfit--grafters,
corruptionists, bribe takers, and out-and-out criminals. It was also
hampered 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 a criminal in disguise.
"Slowly the patrol perfected itself. One of its greatest advances
came with the invention of the Lens; which, being proof against
counterfeiting or imitation, renders identification of all Lensmen
automatic. The patrol then set up its own military courts and executed
the few of its members guilty of misconduct. Standards of entrance were
raised ever higher, and when it had become evident that the patrol was,
to a man, incorruptible, it was granted more and ever more authority.
"Now its power is practically absolute. Its armament and equipment are
the ultimate; its members can follow the lawbreaker wherever he may
go. Furthermore, a Lensman can commandeer any material or assistance,
wherever and whenever required; and the Lens is so respected throughout
the galaxy that any wearer of it may be called upon at any time to be
judge, jury, and executioner. Wherever he goes, upon, in, or through
any land, water, air, or space, anywhere within the confines of our
Island Universe, his word is _law_.
"That, I think, explains what you have been forced to undergo. The
only excuse for its severity is that it produces results. In the last
hundred years no wearer of the Lens has disgraced it. Any questions?
About the Lens, for instance?"
"We have all wondered about the Lens, sir, of course," Maitland
ventured. "The outlaws apparently keep up with us in science. Boskone
himself is supposed to be a genius, and to have surrounded himself with
a scientific staff second to none in the known universe. I have always
supposed that what science can build, science can duplicate. Surely
more than one Lens has fallen into the hands of the outlaws?"
"If it had been a scientific invention it would have been duplicated
long ago," the commandant made surprising answer. "It is, however, not
essentially scientific in nature. It is almost entirely philosophical,
and was developed for us by the Arisians.
"Yes, each of you was sent to Arisia quite recently," Von Hohendorff
went on, as the newly commissioned officers glanced at each other in
dawning understanding. "What did you think of them, Murphy?"
"At first, sir, I thought that they were some new kind of dragon; but
dragons with brains that you could actually _feel_. I was glad to get
away, sir. They fairly gave me the creeps, even though I never did see
one of them so much as move."
* * * * *
"They are a peculiar race," the commandant went on. "Essentially
antisocial--or rather, supremely indifferent to all material things.
For hundreds of thousands of generations they have devoted themselves
to thinking; mainly of the essence of life. They say that they know
scarcely anything fundamental concerning it; but even so they know more
about it than does any other known race. While ordinarily they will
have no intercourse whatever with outsiders, they did consent to help
the patrol, for the good of all intelligence.
"Thus, each being about to graduate into the patrol is sent to Arisia,
where a Lens is built to match its individual life force. While no mind
other than that of an Arisian can understand its operation, thinking of
your Lens as being synchronized with, or in exact resonance with your
own vital principle or ego will give you a rough idea of it. The Lens
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 light as long as it is in metal-to-flesh
circuit with the living mentality for which it was designed. Also, by
virtue of that pseudolife, it acts as a telepath through which you may
converse with other intelligences, even though they may possess no
organs either of sight or of hearing as we know those senses. It also
has other highly important uses.
"The Lens cannot be removed by any one except its wearer without
dismemberment; it glows as long as its rightful owner wears it; and it
ceases to glow in the instant of its owner's death. Also--and here is
the thing that renders impossible the impersonation of a Lensman--not
only does the Lens not glow if worn by an impostor; but if a patrolman
be dismembered and his Lens removed, that Lens kills, in a space of
minutes, any living being who attempts to wear it. Its pseudolife
interferes so strongly with any life to which it is not attuned that
that life force cannot exist in this plane."
* * * * *
A brief silence fell, during which the young men absorbed the stunning
import of what their commandant had been saying. More, there was
striking into each young consciousness a realization of the stark
heroism of the grand old Lensman before them; a man of such fiber that
although physically incapacitated and long past the retirement age, he
had conquered his human emotions sufficiently to accept deliberately
his ogre's rôle, because in that way he could best further the progress
of his patrol!
"I have scarcely broken the ground," Von Hohendorff continued. "I have
merely given you an introduction to your new status. During the next
few weeks, before you are assigned to duty, other officers will make
clear to you the many things about which you are still in the dark. Our
time is growing short, but perhaps we have time for one more question."
"Not a question, sir, but something more important," Kinnison spoke
up. "I speak for the class when I say that we have misjudged you
grievously, and we wish to apologize."
"I thank you sincerely for the thought, although it is unnecessary.
You could not have thought otherwise of me than as you did. It is not
a particularly pleasant task that we old men have--that of weeding
out the unfit. But we are too old for active duty in space--we no
longer have the instantaneous nervous responses that are for that duty
imperative--so we do what we can. However, the work has its brighter
side, since each year there are about a hundred found worthy of the
Lens. This, my one hour with the graduates, more than makes up for the
year that precedes it; and the other oldsters have somewhat similar
compensations.
"In conclusion, you are now able to understand fully what kind of
mentalities compose our patrol. You know that any creature wearing the
Lens is in every sense a Lensman, whether he be human or, hailing from
some strange and distant planet, a monstrosity of a shape you have as
yet not even imagined. Whatever his form, you may rest assured that he
has been tested even as you have been; that he is as worthy of trust as
are you yourselves. My last word is this--men of the Galactic Patrol
die, but they do not fold up; individuals come and go, but the patrol
goes on!"
Then, again all martinet: "Class 5, attention!" he barked. "Report upon
the stage of the main auditorium!"
The class, again a rigidly military unit, marched out of Room A and
down the long corridor toward the great theater in which, before the
massed cadet corps and a throng of civilians, they were to be formally
graduated.
As they marched along the graduates realized in what way the wearers
of the Lens who emerged from Room A were different from the candidates
who had entered it such a short time before. They had gone in as
boys--nervous, apprehensive, and still somewhat unsure of themselves,
in spite of their survival through the five long years of grueling
tests which now lay behind them. They emerged from Room A as men; men
knowing for the first time the real meaning of the physical and mental
tortures they had undergone; men able to wield justly the vast powers
whose scope and scale they could even now but dimly comprehend.