"Nuts!" he is wont to exclaim in answer to a direct question as to some particular event or situation. "Why in all the nine hells of Valeria are you still wasting time writing about me?" But eventually I get the data I need, and thus it is comparatively easy to make this work completely authentic, as far as the Gray Lensman himself is concerned.
It may be objected that I have recorded as facts certain minutiae which, considering what happened to the planet of the Eich and in the light of other happenings elsewhere, cannot be known so exactly by any living entity. This objection is untenable; as profound research upon every debatable point has shown conclusively that something very similar to, if not in fact identical with, each such detail must have occurred.
Of the two great difficulties, one lies in the selection of material. The story of Kimball Kinnison easily could—and really should—fill a dozen encyclopedic spools; it is a Galactic shame and an almost impossible undertaking to compress it into one two-hour tape. The other sticking point is the diversity of my audience. For in the First Galaxy alone there are millions of planets, peopled by races as divergent in mentality and in physique as they are far apart in space. Some races will read this chronicle from printed pages; some will see it; some will hear it; some will both see it and hear it; some, unable either to see or to hear, will receive it telepathically. Still others, in other Galaxies, will undoubtedly acquire it in fashions starkly incomprehensible to me, its compiler.
Numberless races of intelligent beings already know Kinnison well, since his fame has spread north, south, east, west, zenith and nadir, to the six points of the three-dimensional galactic-inductor compasses of two galaxies. On the other hand, many know him not at all. Many have never even heard of Tellus, nor of Sol, our parent sun; even though it was upon that proud planet of this, our Solarian System, that the Galactic Patrol came into being. Indeed, it is inevitable that this biography will in days to come be of interest to races which, inhabiting planets not yet reached by the Cosmic Survey, have not even heard of the Galactic Patrol, to say nothing of knowing its origin and its history.
In view of the above inescapable facts, and after a great deal of thought and care, I have decided to write this Prologue, which will summarize very simply that which is already most widely known; namely, the happenings up to and including the first phase of the Boskonian War. Even that condensation, however, leaves me all too little space in which to do justice to the part that Kimball Kinnison played in enabling the civilization of the Galactic Council to triumph over the monstrous culture of Boskone.
With the understanding, then, that the more informed mentality may skip from here to Chapter I, I proceed.
Should I begin with Arisia? That forbidding, forbidden planet whose inhabitants, having achieved sheerly unimaginable heights of philosophical and mental power, withdrew almost completely into themselves, leaving traces only in Galaxy-wide folk tales and legends of supermen and gods? Probably not. I should, it seems to me, begin with Earth's almost prehistoric bandits and gangsters, gentry who flourished in the days when space flight was mentioned only in fantastic fiction.
Know, then, that for ages law enforcement lagged behind law violation because the minions of the law were limited in their spheres of action, while criminals were not. Thus, in the days following the invention of the automobile, State troopers could not cross State lines. Later, when what were then known as the "G-men" combined with the various State constabularies to form the National Police, they could not follow the stratosphere planes of the lawbreakers across national boundaries.
Still later, when interplanetary flight became commonplace, the Planetary Guards 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 development of the inertialess drive and the consequent traffic between hundreds of thousands of solar systems, crime became so rampant as to threaten the very foundations of civilization.