Each boarded his ship; and as the Dauntless and the Velan tore through space toward far Lyrane, Kinnison paced his room, scowling in black abstraction. Nor would a mind reader have found his thoughts either cogent or informative.
"Lyrane IX ... LYRANE IX ... Lyrane IX ... LYRANE IX ... and something that I can't even feel or perceive, but that kills anybody and everybody else ... KLONO'S tungsten TEETH and CURVING CARBALLOY CLAWS!!!"
XXI.
Helen's story was short and bitter. Human or near-human Boskonians came to Lyrane II and spread insidious propaganda all over the planet. Lyranian matriarchy should abandon its policy of isolationism. Matriarchs were the highest type of life. Matriarchy was the most perfect of all existing forms of government—why keep on confining it to one small planet, when it should by right be ruling the entire Galaxy? The way things were, there was only one Elder Person; all other Lyranians, even though better qualified than the then incumbent, were nothing—and so on. Whereas, if things were as they should be, each individual Lyranian person could be and would be the Elder Person of a planet at least, and perhaps of an entire solar system—and so on. And the visitors, who, they insisted, were no more males than the Lyranian persons were females, would teach them. They would be amazed at how easily, under Boskonian guidance, this program could be put into effect.
Helen fought the intruders with every jet she had. She despised the males of her own race; she detested those of all others. Believing that hers was the only existing matriarchal race, especially since neither Kinnison nor the Boskonians seemed to know of any other, she was sure that any prolonged contact with other cultures would result, not in the triumph of matriarchy, but in its fall. She not only voiced these beliefs as she held them—violently—but also acted upon them in the same fashion.
Because of the ingrained matriarchally conservative habit of Lyranian thought, particularly among the older persons, Helen found it comparatively easy to stamp out the visible manifestations; and, being in no sense a sophisticate, she thought that the whole matter was settled. Instead, she merely drove the movement underground, where it grew tremendously. The young, of course, rebellious as always against the hide-bound, mossbacked, and reactionary older generation, joined the subterranean New Deal in droves. Nor was the older generation solid. In fact, it was riddled by the defection of many thousands who could not expect to attain any outstanding place in the world as it was and who believed that the Boskonians' glittering forecasts would come true.
Disaffection spread, then, rapidly and unobserved; culminating in the carefully-planned uprising which made Helen an Ex-Chief Person and put her into the tower room to await a farcical trial and death.
"I see." Clarrissa caught her lower lip between her teeth. "Very unfunny. I noticed that you didn't mention or think of any of your persons as ringleaders ... peculiar that you couldn't catch them, with your telepathy ... no, natural enough, at that ... but there's one I want very much to get hold of. Don't know whether she was really a leader, or not, but she was mixed up in some way with a Boskonian Lensman. I never did know her name. She was the wom ... the person who managed your airport here when Kim and I were—"
"Cleonie? Why, I never thought ... but it might have, at that ... yes, as I look back—"
"Yes, hindsight is a lot more accurate than foresight," the Red Lensman grinned. "I've noticed that myself, lots of times."