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In the library of the Port Admiral’s richly comfortable home, a room as heavily guarded against all forms of intrusion as was his private office, two old but active Gray Lensmen sat and grinned at each other like the two conspirators which in fact they were. One took a squat, red bottle of fayalin^[2] from a cabinet and filled two small glasses. The glasses clinked, rim to rim.

“Here’s to love!” Haynes gave the toast.

“Ain’t it grand!” Surgeon-Marshal Lacy responded.

“Down the hatch!” they chanted in unison, and action followed word.

“You aren’t asking if everything stayed on the beam.” This from Lacy.

“No need—I had a spy-ray on the whole performance.”

“You would—you’re the type. However, I would have, too, if I had a panel full of them in my office. . Well, say it, you old space-hellion!” Lacy grinned again, albeit a trifle wryly.

“Nothing to say, saw-bones. You did a grand job, and you’ve got nothing to blow a jet about.”

“No? How would you like to have a red-headed spitfire who’s scarcely dry behind the ears yet tell you to your teeth that you’ve got softening of the brain? That you had the mental capacity of a gnat, the intellect of a Zabriskan fontema? And to have to take it, without even heaving the insubordinate young jade into the can for about twenty-five well-earned black spots?”

“Oh, come, now, you’re just blasting. It wasn’t that bad!”

“Perhaps not—quite—but it was bad enough.”

“She’ll grow up, some day, and realize that you were foxing her six ways from the origin.”

“Probably. . In the meantime, it’s all part of the bigger job. . Thank God I’m not young any more. They suffer so.”

“Check. How they suffer!”

“But you saw the ending and I didn’t. How did it turn out?” Lacy asked.

“Partly good, partly bad.” Haynes slowly poured two more drinks and thoughtfully swirled the crimson, pungently aromatic liquid around and around in his glass before he spoke again. “Hooked—but she knows it, and I’m afraid she’ll do something about it.”

“She’s a smart operator—I told you she was. She doesn’t fox herself about anything. Hmm. . A bit of separation is indicated, it would seem.”

“Check. Can you send out a hospital ship somewhere, so as to get rid of her for two or three weeks?”

“Can do. Three weeks be enough? We can’t send him anywhere, you know.”

“Plenty—he’ll be gone in two.” Then, as Lacy glanced at him questioningly, Haynes continued: “Ready for a shock? He’s going to Lundmark’s Nebula.”

“But he can’t! That would take years! Nobody has ever got back from there yet, and there’s this new job of his. Besides, this separation is only supposed to last until you can spare him for a while!”

“If it takes very long he’s coming back. The idea has always been, you know, that intergalactic matter may be so thin—one atom per liter or so—that such a flit won’t take one-tenth the time supposed. We recognize the danger—he’s going well heeled.”

“How well?”

“The very best.”

“I hate to clog their jets this way, but it’s got to be done. We’ll give her a raise when I send her out—make her sector chief. Huh?”

“Did I hear any such words lately as spitfire, hussy, and jade, or did I dream them?” Haynes asked, quizzically.

“She’s all of them, and more—but she’s one of the best nurses and one of the finest women that ever lived, too!”

“QX, Lacy, give her her raise. Of course she’s good. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be in on this deal at all. In fact, they’re about as fine a couple of youngsters as old Tellus ever produced.”

“They are that. Man, what a pair of skeletons!”

* * * * *

And in the Nurses’ Quarters a young woman with a wealth of red-bronze-auburn hair and tawny eyes was staring at her own reflection in a mirror.

“You half-wit, you ninny, you lug!” she stormed, bitterly if almost inaudibly, at that reflection. “You lame-brained moron, you red-headed, idiotic imbecile, you microcephalic dumbbell, you clunker! Of all the men in this whole cockeyed galaxy, you would have to make a dive at Kimball Kinnison, the one man who thinks you’re just part of the furniture. At a Gray Lensman. .” Her expression changed and she whispered softly, “A . Gray . Lensman. He can’t love anybody as long as he’s carrying that load. They can’t let themselves be human . quite . perhaps loving him will be enough. .”

She straightened up, shrugged, and smiled; but even that pitiful travesty of a smile could not long endure. Shortly it was buried in waves of pain and the girl threw herself down upon her bed.

“Oh Kim, Kim!” she sobbed. “I wish . why can’t you . Oh, why did I ever have to be born!”

* * * * *

Three weeks later, far out in space, Kimball Kinnison was thinking thoughts entirely foreign to his usual pattern. He was in his bunk, smoking dreamily, staring unseeing at the metallic ceiling. He was not thinking of Boskone.

When he had thought at Mac, back there at that dance, he had, for the first time in his life, failed to narrow down his beam to the exact thought being sent. Why? The explanation he had given the girl was totally inadequate. For that matter, why had he been so glad to see her there? And why, at every odd moment, did visions of her keep coming into his mind—her form and features, her eyes, her lips, her startling hair? . She was beautiful, of course, but not nearly such a seven-sector callout as that thionite dream he had met on Aldebaran II—and his only thought of her was an occasional faint regret that he hadn’t half-wrung her lovely neck . why, she wasn’t really as good-looking as, and didn’t have half the je ne sais quoi of, that blonde heiress—what was her name?—oh, yes, Forrester. .

There was only one answer, and it jarred him to the core—he would not admit it, even to himself. He couldn’t love anybody—it just simply was not in the cards. He had a job to do. The Patrol had spent a million credits making a Lensman out of him, and it was up to him to give them some kind of a run for their money. No Lensman had any business with a wife, especially a Gray Lensman. He couldn’t sit down anywhere, and she couldn’t flit with him. Besides, nine out of every ten Gray Lensmen got killed before they finished their jobs, and the one that did happen to live long enough to retire to a desk was almost always half machinery and artificial parts. .

No, not in seven thousand years. No woman deserved to have her life made into such a hell on earth as that would be—years of agony, of heart-breaking suspense, climaxed by untimely widowhood; or, at best, the wasting of the richest part of her life upon a husband who was half steel, rubber, and phenoline plastic. Red in particular was much too splendid a person to be let in for anything like that. .

But hold on—jet back! What made him think he rated any such girl? That there was even a possibility—especially in view of the way he had behaved while under her care in Base Hospital—that she would ever feel like being anything more to him than a strictly impersonal nurse? Probably not—he had Klono’s own gadolinium guts to think that she would marry him, under any conditions, even if he made a full-power dive at her. .

Just the same, she might. Look at what women did fall in love with, sometimes. So he’d never make any kind of a dive at her; no, not even a pass. She was too sweet, too fine, too vital a woman to be tied to any space-louse; she deserved happiness, not heartbreak. She deserved the best there was in life, not the worst; the whole love of a whole man for a whole lifetime, not the fractions which were all that he could offer any woman. As long as he could think a straight thought he wouldn’t make any motions toward spoiling her life. In fact, he hadn’t better see Reddy again. He wouldn’t go near any planet she was on, and if he saw her out in space he’d go somewhere else at a hundred parsecs an hour.

With a bitter imprecation Kinnison sprang out of his bunk, hurled his half-smoked cigarette at an ash-tray, and strode toward the control room.

* * * * *

The ship he rode was of the Patrol’s best. Superbly powered, for flight, defense, and offense, she was withal a complete space-laboratory and observatory; and her personnel, over and above her regular crew, was as varied as her equipment. She carried ten Lensmen, a circumstance unique in the annals of space, even for such trouble-shooting battle-wagon as the Dauntless was; and a scientific staff which was practically a cross-section of the Tree of Knowledge. She carried Lieutenant Peter vanBuskirk and his company of Valerian wildcats; Worsel of Velantia and three score of his reptilian kinsmen; Tregonsee, the blocky Rigellian Lensman, and a dozen or so of his fellows; Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke and his crew. She carried three Master Pilots, Prime Base’s best—Henderson, Schermerhorn and Watson.

The Dauntless was an immense vessel. She had to be, in order to carry, in addition to the men and the things requisitioned by Kinnison, the personnel and the equipment which Port Admiral Haynes had insisted upon sending with him.

“But great Klono, Chief, think of what a hole you’re making in Prime Base if we don’t get back!” Kinnison had protested.

“You’re coming back, Kinnison,” the Port Admiral had replied, gravely. “That is why I am sending these men and this stuff along—to be as sure as I possibly can that you do come back.”

Now they were out in inter-galactic space, and the Gray Lensman, closing his eyes, sent his sense of perception out beyond the confining iron walls and let it roam the void. This was better than a visiplate; with no material barriers or limitations he was feasting upon a spectacle scarcely to be pictured in the most untrammeled imaginings of man.

There were no planets, no suns, no stars; no meteorites, no particles of cosmic debris. All nearby space was empty, with an indescribable perfection of emptiness at the very thought of which the mind quailed in incomprehending horror. And, accentuating that emptiness, at such mind-searing distances as to be dwarfed into buttons, and yet, because of their intrinsic massiveness, starkly apparent in their three-dimensional relationships, there hung poised and motionlessly stately the component galaxies of a Universe.

Behind the flying vessel the First Galaxy was a tiny, brightly-shining lens, so far away that such minutiæ as individual solar systems were invisible; so distant that even the gigantic masses of its accompanying globular star-clusters were merged indistinguishably into its sharply lenticular shape. In front of her, to right and to left of her, above and beneath her were other galaxies, never explored by man or by any other beings subscribing to the code of Galactic Civilization. Some, edge on, were thin, wafer-like. Others appeared as full disks, showing faintly or boldly the prodigious, mathematically inexplicable spiral arms by virtue of whose obscure functioning they had come into being. Between these two extremes there was every possible variant in angular displacement.

Utterly incomprehensible although the speed of the space-flyer was, yet those galaxies remained relatively motionless, hour after hour. What distances! What magnificence! What grandeur! What awful, what poignantly solemn calm!

Despite the fact that Kinnison had gone out there expecting to behold that very scene, he felt awed to insignificance by the overwhelming, the cosmic immensity of the spectacle. What business had he, a sub-electronic midge from an ultra-microscopic planet, venturing out into macro-cosmic space, a demesne comprehensible only to the omniscient and omnipotent Creator?

He got up, shaking off the futile mood. This wouldn’t get him to the first check-station, and he had a job to do. And after all, wasn’t man as big as space? Could he have come out here, otherwise? He was. Yes, man was bigger even than space. Man, by his very envisionment of macro-cosmic space, had already mastered it.

Besides, the Boskonians, whoever they might be, had certainly mastered it; he was now certain that they were operating upon an inter-galactic scale. Even after leaving Tellus he had hoped and had really expected that his line would lead to a stronghold in some star-cluster belonging to his own galaxy, so distant from it or perhaps so small as to have escaped the notice of the chart-makers; but such was not the case. No possible error in either the determination or the following of that line placed it anywhere near any such cluster. It led straight to and only to Landmark’s Nebula; and that galaxy was, therefore, his present destination.

Man was certainly as good as the pirates; probably better, on the basis of past performance. Of all the races of the galaxy, man had always taken the initiative, had always been the leader and commander. And, with the exception of the Arisians, man had the best brain in the galaxy.

The thought of that eminently philosophical race gave Kinnison pause. His Arisian sponsor had told him that by virtue of the Lens the Patrol should be able to make Civilization secure throughout the galaxy. Just what did that mean—that it could not go outside? Or did even the Arisians suspect that Boskonia was in fact inter-galactic? Probably. Mentor had said that, given any one definite fact, a really competent mind could envisage the entire Universe; even though had added carefully that his own mind was not a really competent one.

But this, too, was idle speculation, and it was time to receive and to correlate some more reports. Therefore, one by one, he got in touch with scientists and observers.

The density of matter in space, which had been lessening steadily, was now approximately constant at one atom per four hundred cubic centimeters. Their speed was therefore about a hundred thousand parsecs per hour; and, even allowing for the slowing up at both ends due to the density of the medium, the trip should not take over ten days.

The power situation, which had been his gravest care, since it was almost the only factor not amenable to theoretical solution, was even better than anyone had dared hope; the cosmic energy available in space had actually been increasing as the matter content decreased—a fact which seemed to bear out the contention that energy was continually being converted into matter in such regions. It was taking much less excitation of the intake screens to produce a given flow of power than any figure ever observed in the denser media within the galaxy.

Thus, the atomic motors which served as exciters had a maximum power of four hundred pounds an hour; that is, each exciter could transform that amount of matter into pure energy and employ the output usefully in energizing the intake screen to which it was connected. Each screen, operating normally on a hundred thousand to one ratio, would then furnish its receptor on the ship with energy equivalent to the annihilation of four million pounds per hour of material substance. Out there, however, it was being observed that the intake-exciter ratio, instead of being less than a hundred thousand to one, was actually almost a million to one.

It would serve no useful purpose here to go further into the details of any more of the reports, or to dwell at any great length upon the remainder of the journey to the Second Galaxy. Suffice it to say that Kinnison and his highly-trained crew observed, classified, recorded, and conferred; and that they approached their destination with every possible precaution. Detectors were full out, observers were at every plate, the ship itself was as immune to detection as Hotchkiss’ nullifiers could make it.

Up to the Second Galaxy the Dauntless flashed, and into it. Was this Island Universe essentially like the First Galaxy as to planets and peoples? If so, had they been won over or wiped out by the horrid culture of Boskonia or was the struggle still going on?

“If we assume, as we must, that the line we followed was the trace of Boskone’s beam,” argued the sagacious Worsel, “the probability is very great that the enemy is in virtual control of this entire galaxy. Otherwise—if they were in a minority or were struggling seriously for dominion—they could neither have spared the forces which invaded our galaxy, nor would they have been in condition to rebuild their vessels as they did to match the new armaments developed by the Patrol.”

“Very probably true,” agreed Kinnison, and that was the consensus of opinion. “Therefore we want to do our scouting very quietly. But in some ways that makes it all the better. If they’re in control, they won’t be unduly suspicious.”

And thus it proved. A planet-bearing sun was soon located, and while the Dauntless was still light-years distant from it, several ships were detected. At least, the Boskonians were not using nullifiers!

Spy-rays were sent out. Tregonsee the Rigellian Lensman exerted to the full his powers of perception, and Kinnison hurled downward to the planet’s surface a mental viewpoint and communications center. That the planet was Boskonian was soon learned, but that was all. It was scarcely fortified: no trace could he find of a beam communicating with Boskone.

Solar system after solar system was found and studied, with like result. But finally, out in space, one of the screens showed activity; a beam was in operation between a vessel then upon the plates and some other station. Kinnison tapped it quickly; and, while observers were determining its direction, hardness, and power, a thought flowed smoothly into the Lensman’s brain.

“. proceed at once to relieve vessel P4K730. Eichlan, speaking for Boskone, ending message.”

“Follow that ship, Hen!” Kinnison directed, crisply. “Not too close, but don’t lose him!” He then relayed to the others the orders which had been intercepted.

“The same formula, huh?” vanBuskirk roared, and “Just another lieutenant, that sounds like, not Boskone himself.” Thorndyke added.

“Perhaps so, perhaps not.” The Gray Lensman was merely thoughtful. “It doesn’t prove a thing except that Helmuth was not Boskone, which was already fairly certain. If we can prove that there is such a being as Boskone, and that he isn’t in this galaxy . well, in that case, we’ll go somewhere else,” he concluded, with grim finality.

The chase was comparatively short, leading toward a yellowish star around which swung eight average-sized planets. Toward one of these flew the unsuspecting pirate, followed by the Patrol vessel, and it soon became apparent that there was a battle going on. One spot upon the planet’s surface, either a city or a tremendous military base, was domed over by a screen which was one blinding glare of radiance. And for miles in every direction ships of space were waging spectacularly devastating warfare.

Kinnison shot a thought down into the fortress, and with the least possible introduction or preamble, got into touch with one of its high officers. He was not surprised to learn that those people were more or less human in appearance, since the planet was quite similar to Tellus in age, climate, atmosphere, and mass.

“Yes, we are fighting Boskonia,” the answering thought came coldly clear. “We need help, and badly. Can you . ?”

“We’re detected!” Kinnison’s attention was seized by a yell from the board. “They’re all coming at us at once!”

Whether the scientists of Boskone developed the detector-nullifier before or after Helmuth’s failure to deduce the Lensman’s use of such an instrument is a nice question, and one upon which a great deal has been said. While interesting, the point is really immaterial here; the facts remaining the same—that the pirates not only had it at the time of the Patrol’s first visit to the Second Galaxy, but had used it to such good advantage that the denizens of that recalcitrant planet had been forced, in sheer desperation of self-preservation, to work out a scrambler for that nullification and to surround their world with its radiations. They could not restore perfect detection, but the condition for complete nullification was so critical that it was a comparatively simple matter to upset it sufficiently so that an image of a sort was revealed. And, at that close range, any sort of an image was enough.

The Dauntless, approaching the planet, entered the zone of scrambling and stood revealed plainly enough upon the plates of the enemy vessels. They attacked instantly and viciously; within a second after the lookout had shouted his warning the outer screens of the Patrol ship were blazing incandescent under the furious assaults of a dozen Boskonian beams.

_______________

^[2] A stimulating, although non-intoxicating beverage prepared from the fruit of a Crevenian shrub, Fayaloclastus Augustifolius Barnstead; much in favor as a ceremonial drink among those who can afford it. E.E.S.