Kinnison's search for the real Boskone lead to Lundmark's Nebula, thenceforth called the Second Galaxy. His ship, the superpowerful Dauntless, met and defeated a squadron of Boskonian warships. The Tellurians landed upon the planet Medon, whose people were fighting a losing war against the forces of Boskone. The Medonians, electrical wizards who had been able to install inertia-neutralizers and a space drive upon their planet, moved their world over to our First Galaxy.
With the cessation of military activity, however, the illicit traffic in habit-forming drugs amongst all races of warm-blooded oxygen breathers had increased tremendously; and Kinnison, deducing that Boskone was back of the Drug Syndicate, decided that the best way to find the real leader of the enemy was to work upward through the drug ring.
Disguised as a dock walloper, he frequented the saloon of a drug baron, and helped to raid it; but, although he secured much information, his disguise was penetrated.
He called a Conference of Scientists, to devise means of building a gigantic bomb of negative matter. Then, impersonating a Tellurian secret-service agent who lent himself to the deception, he tried to investigate the stronghold of Prellin of Bronseca, one of Boskone's Regional Directors. This disguise also failed and he barely escaped.
Ordinary disguises having proved useless against Boskone's clever agents, Kinnison himself became Wild Bill Williams; once a gentleman of Aldebaran II, now a space rat meteor miner. Instead of pretending to drink he really drank; making of himself a practically bottomless drinker of the most vicious beverages known to space. He became a drug fiend—a bentlam eater—discovering that his Arisian-developed mind could function at full efficiency even while his physical body was stupefied. He became widely known as the fastest, deadliest performer with twin ray guns that had ever struck the asteroid belts. Thus, through solar system after solar system, he built up an unimpeachable identity as a hard-drinking, wildly carousing, bentlam-eating, fast-shooting space hellion; a lucky or a very skillful meteor miner; a derelict who had been an Aldebaranian gentleman once and who would be again if he should ever strike it rich and if he could conquer his weaknesses.
Physically helpless in a bentlam stupor, he listened in on a zwilnik conference and learned that Edmund Crowninshield, of Tressilia III, was also a Regional Director of the enemy.
Boskone formed an alliance with the Overlords of Delgon, and through a hyperspatial tube or vortex the combined forces again attacked humanity. Not simple slaughter this time, for the Overlords tortured their captives and consumed their life forces in sadistic orgies. The Conference of Scientists solved the mystery of the tube and the Dauntless attacked through it; returning victorious.
Wild Bill Williams struck it rich at last. Forthwith he abandoned the low dives in which he had been wont to carouse, and made an obvious effort to become again an Aldebaranian gentleman. He secured an invitation to visit Crowninshield's resort. The Boskonian, believing that Williams was basically a drink and drug-soaked bum, took him in, to get his quarter-million credits. Relapsing into a characteristically wild debauch, Kinnison-Williams did squander a large part of his new fortune; but he learned from Crowninshield's mind that one Jalte, a Kalonian by birth, was Boskone's Galactic Director and that Jalte had his headquarters in a star cluster just outside the First Galaxy. Pretending bitter humiliation and declaring that he would change his name and disappear, the Gray Lensman left the planet—to investigate Jalte's base.
He learned that Boskone was not a single entity, but was a council. He also learned that, while the Kalonian did not know who or where Boskone was, Eichmil, Jalte's superior, who lived upon the planet Jarnevon in the Second Galaxy, would probably know all about it.