Of each million selected candidates for the Lens all except about a hundred fail to pass the grueling tests employed to weed out the unfit. Kimball Kinnison graduated No. 1 in his class and was put in command of the spaceship Brittania—a war vessel of a new type, using explosives, even though such weapons had been obsolete for centuries. The "pirates"—the Boskonian Conflict was just beginning, so that no one yet suspected that the Patrol faced anything worse than highly organized piracy—were gaining the upper hand because of a new and apparently almost unlimited source of power. Kinnison was instructed to capture one of the new-type pirate ships, in order to learn the secret of that power.
He found and defeated a Boskonian warship. Peter VanBuskirk led the storming party of Valerians—men of human type, but of extraordinary size, strength and agility because of the enormous gravitational force of their home planet—in wiping out those of the pirate crew not killed in the battle between the two ships.
The scientists of the expedition secured the information desired. It could not be transmitted to Prime Base, however, because the pirates blanketed all channels of communication. Boskonian warships were gathering, and the crippled Brittania could neither run nor fight. Therefore each man was given a spool of tape bearing the data and all the Patrolmen took to the lifeboats.
Kinnison and VanBuskirk, in one of the boats, were forced to land upon the planet Delgon, where they joined forces with Worsel—later to become Lensman Worsel—a winged, reptilian native of a neighboring planet, Velantia. The three destroyed a number of the Overlords of Delgon, a sadistic race of monsters who preyed upon the other races of their solar system by sheer power of mind. Worsel accompanied the Patrolmen to Velantia, where all the resources of the planet were devoted to preparing defenses against the expected Boskonian attack. Several others of the Brittania's lifeboats reached Velantia, called by Worsel's prodigious mind working through Kinnison's ego and Lens.
Kinnison finally succeeded in tapping a communicator beam, thus getting one line upon Helmuth, who "spoke for Boskone"—it was supposed then that Helmuth actually was Boskone instead of a comparatively unimportant Director of Operations—and upon his Grand Base.
The Boskonians attacked Velantia and six of their vessels were captured. In these ships, manned by Velantian crews, the Tellurians set out for Earth and the Prime Base of the Galactic Patrol. Kinnison's Bergenholm, the generator of the force which makes inertialess—"free," in space parlance—flight possible, broke down, wherefore he had to land upon the planet Trenco for repairs.
Trenco, the tempestuous, billiard ball-smooth planet where it rains forty-seven feet and five inches every night and where the wind blows eight hundred miles an hour. Trenco, the world upon which is produced thionite, the deadliest and most potent of all habit-forming drugs. Trenco, the Mecca of all the "zwilniks"—members of the Boskonian drug ring; sometimes loosely applied to any Boskonian—of the Galaxy. Trenco, whose weirdly charged ether and atmosphere so distort beams and vision that it can be policed only by such beings as the Rigellians, who possess the sense of perception instead of sight and hearing!
Lensman Tregonsee, of Rigel IV, then in command of the Patrol's wandering base upon Trenco, furnished Kinnison a new Bergenholm and he again set out for Tellus.
Meanwhile Helmuth, the Boskonian commander, had deduced that some one particular Lensman was back of all his setbacks; and that the Lens, a complete enigma to the Boskonians, was in some way connected with Arisia. That planet had always been dreaded and shunned by all spacemen. No one would ever say why, but no being who had ever approached that planet uninvited could be compelled, even by threat of death, to go near it again.
Helmuth, thinking himself secure by virtue of his thought-screens, the secret of which he had stolen from Velantia, went alone to Arisia, to learn how the Lens gave its wearer such power. He was stopped at the barrier. His thought-screens were useless—the Arisians had given them to Velantia, hence knew how to break them down. He was punished to the verge of insanity, but was finally permitted to return to his Grand Base, alive and sane: "Not for your own good, but for the good of that struggling young civilization which you oppose."