Children of the lens

by E. E. Smith

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.