On green, warm Tellus, many mega pa.r.s.ecs from the black cloud which enveloped the eternally and infernally frigid planet of the Meich, Lensman Gimble Ginnison, having been released from the hospital at Prime Base, was talking to Surgeon-Major Macy, who had just given him his final checkup.

"How am I, Doc?" he asked respectfully, "QX for duty?"

Well, you were in pretty bad shape when you came in," the Lensman surgeon said thoughtfully.

"We almost had to clone you to keep you around, son. Those Axlemen really shot you up."

"Check. But how am I now?"

The older Lensman looked at the sheaf of charts, films, tapes, and reports on his desk. "Mmm.

Your skeleton seems in good shape, but I wonder about the rest of you. The most beautiful nurses in the Service attended you during your convalescence, and you never made a pa.s.s-never even patted a f.a.n.n.y."

"Gosh," Ginnison flushed hotly, "was I expected to?"

"Not by me," the older man said cryptically.

"Well, am I QX for duty? I have to do a flit."

Surgeon-Major Macy handed Ginnison an envelope.."Take this to the Starboard Admiral"s office.

He"ll let you know. Where are you flitting for?"

"I"m not sure yet," Ginnison said evasively, taking the envelope.

"Right. Clear ether, Gimble."

"Clear ether, Macy ."

True to an old tradition, these two friends never told each other anything.

The Starboard Admiral slit open the envelope and took in its contents at a glance. "According to Macy, you"re fit for duty, son. Congratulations. And, in spite of everything, that was a right smart piece of work you did on Mulligans II."

Ginnison looked at the tips of his polished boots. "Gee whiz," he said, blushing. Then, looking up: "If I"m fit for duty, sir, I"d like to make a request. That mess on Cadilax needs to be cleaned up. I"m ready to try it, sir, and I await your orders."

The Starboard Admiral looked up into the gray eyes of the young, handsome, broad-shouldered, lean, lithe, tough, hard, finely-trained, well-muscled, stubborn, powerful man who stood before him.

"Gim," he said firmly, "You have disobeyed every order I have ever given you. It always came out all right, so I can"t gripe, but, as of now, I"m getting out from under. I"ve talked to the Galactic Council, and they agree. We are giving you your Release."

The Release! The goal toward which every Lensman worked

and so few attained! He was now an Unattached Lensman, responsible to no one and nothing save his own conscience. He was no longer merely a small cog in the mighty machine of the Galactic Patrol He was a Big Wheel!

"Jeepers!" he said feelingly. "Goshtimighty!"

"It"s all of that," the Starboard Admiral agreed. "Now go put on your Grays, take the Dentless.

and get the h.e.l.l out of here!"

"Yes, sir!" And Ginnison was gone.

He went to his quarters and took off his black-and-silver uniform. Then he proudly donned the starkly utilitarian gray leather uniform which was the garb of the Unattached Lensman. And as he did so, he made that curious gesture known as Gray Seal. No ent.i.ty has ever donned or ever will don that Gray uniform without making that gesture. It is the only way you can get the zipper closed.

In his office, solidly sealed against both thought and spy-ray beams, the Starboard Admiral sat and stared at the glowing Lens on his wrist, the Lens which was, and is, the symbol of the rank and power ofevery Lensman of the Galactic Patrol.

But it is far more than merely a symbol.

It is a lenticular structure of hundreds of thousands of tiny crystalloids, and each is built and tuned to match the ego of one individual ent.i.ty. It is not, strictly speaking, alive, but its pseudolife is such that when it is in circuit with the living ent.i.ty to whom it is synchronized, it gives off a strong, changing, characteristically polychromatic light. It is a telepathic communicator of astounding power and range, and kills any being besides its owner who attempts to wear it.

Thus, it is both pretty and useful.

Manufactured and issued by the mysterious beings of dread and dreaded Arisia, it cannot be counterfeited, and is given only to those ent.i.ties of the highest honor, integrity, honesty, and intelligence.

That knowledge made the Starboard Admiral, as, indeed, it did all Lensmen, feel smug.

The mighty Dentless. from needle prow to flaring jets, was armed and armored, screened and shielded as was no other ship of her cla.s.s and rating. Under the almost inconceivable thrust of her mighty driving jets, she drilled a hole through the void at her cruising velocity of a hundred pa.r.s.ecs per hour.

Not in the inert state could she so have done, for no body with inertial ma.s.s can travel faster than the velocity of light, which, in the vast reaches of the galaxy, is the veriest crawl.

But her Bergenholm, that intricate machine which renders a s.p.a.ceship inertialess, or "free,"

permitted her to move at whatever velocity her ravening jets could achieve against the meager resistance of the almost perfect vacuum of interstellar s.p.a.ce. Unfortunately, the Bergenholm, while it could completely neutralize inertial ma.s.s, never quite knew what to do with gravitational ma.s.s, which seems to come and go as the circ.u.mstances require.

As the Dentless bored on through the awesome void toward her goal, Ginnison and Chief Firing Officer Flatworthy checked and rechecked her mighty armament. Hot and tight were her ravening primary beams, against which no material object, inert or free, can offer any resistance whatever. When struck by the irresistible torrents of energy from a primary, any form of matter, however hard, however resistant, however refractory, becomes, in a minute fraction of a second, an unimaginably hot cloud of totally ionized gases.

Equally tight, but not so hot, were the ultrapowerful secondaries, whose beams could liquify or ga.s.sify tungsten or even the ultraresistant neocarballoy in the blink of an eye.

The inspection over, Ginnison lit a cigarette with a tertiary and Lensed a thought to an ent.i.ty in another part of the ship. "Woozle, old snake, I hate to disturb your contemplations, but could you come to my cabin? We have things to discuss."

"Immediately, Ginnison," that worthy replied, and shortly thereafter Ginnison"s door opened and there entered a leatherwinged, crocodile-headed, thirty-foot-long, crooked-armed, pythonish, reptilian nightmare. He draped himself across a couple of parallel bars, tied himself into a tasteful bow-knot, and extended a few weirdly-stalked eyes. "Well?"

Ginnison looked affectionately at the horribly monstrous Lensman. "Concerning l"affaire Cadilax,"

he began.

"I know nothing about it, fortunately," Woozle interrupted. "That gives you a chance to explain everything."

"Very well, then. As you well know, I have spent a long time searching for clues that will lead me to the top echelon of Boskonia-Boskonia, that frightful, inimical. soul-destroying, intergalactic organization which is so ineradicably opposed to all the moral values which we of Civilization hold so dear."

Woozle closed a few eyes. "Yes. Continue."

"On Leanonabar," Ginnison continued, "I got a line through Banjo Freeko, the planetary dictator, but only after I blew up the mining industry on his planet and killed a few thousand innocent people-regretfully, of course. But I do that all the time. It revolts me, but I do it."

"What boots it?" Woozle asked. "You got your line, didn"t you? You humans are so squeamish."

"To continue," said Ginnison. "This is the line I traced." And in Woozle"s mind there appeared a three-dimensional representation of intergalactic s.p.a.ce.

Two galaxies floated there in the awesome awfulness of the unimaginable vastness of the intergalactic void.

From Leanonabar, in the First, or Tellurian, Galaxy, a thin, hard red line ran straight through and past the Second Galaxy, out into the vast reaches of the intergalactic s.p.a.ce beyond.

"Isn"t that rather overdoing it?" came Woozle"s thought. "You think this line may extend beyond-?"

Ginnison shook his head. "Not really. There"s nothing along that line for half a billion pa.r.s.ecs, and that"s a Seyfert Galaxy."

"Tough about them," Woozle opinioned. "Let"s get back to Cadilax."

"Oh, yes. Well, Cadilax is clear across the Galaxy from Leanonabar, so that would give us a good baseline for our second triangulation."

"1 trust," Woozle thought, "that you have a better reason than that for picking Cadilax."

"Certainly." Rising from his seat, Ginnison paced across the deck of his cabin, turned, and paced back. "In the past several months, all h.e.l.l has broken loose on Cadilax. The drug trade has gone up three hundred percent. Thionite, heroin, hashish, nitrolabe, cocaine, bentlam, and caffeine-all of them have increased tremendously, and Narcotics can"t find the source. The adolescents have gone wild; the boys are wearing their hair long, and the girls have given up perms. Illicit s.e.x is rampant. They live in unstructured social groups." He took a deep breath, and said, in a hushed voice: "There have even been demonstrations against the way the Patrol is running the Boskonian War!"

"Madness, indeed," Woozle agreed, "but are you certain that your information is up-to-date?"

"Reasonably certain," Ginnison pondered. "The latest information we have-"

At that point, a sharp, cold, Lensed thought intruded.

"Lensman Ginnison, greeting. I humbly request communication with you."

Ginnison recognized that thought. It was that of Shadrack, a poison-blooded, frigid-breathing Lensman he had known of yore.

"Sure, little chum; what is it?"

"I do not interrupt?" Shadrack quavered.

"Not at all. Go ahead."

"I trust I do not intrude upon matters of far greater importance than that of my own meager and faulty information?"

"Certainly not," Ginnison rea.s.sured.

"As is well known," continued the soft thought, "I am a yellow-bellied, chicken-livered, jelly-gutted coward -a racial characteristic which I cannot and do not deny. Therefore, I most humbly apologize for this unwarranted intrusion upon your thoughts."

"No need to overdo it, little chum," said Ginnison. " A simple grovel will be enough."

"Thank you, Ginnison," Shadrack snivelled gravely. "Then may I inquire, in my own small way, if you are aware of the existence of an ent.i.ty known as Banlon of Downlo? He is, like myself, a creature accustomed to temperatures scarcely above zero absolute, but of far greater courage and bravery than any of my race possess."

"BANLON!" Ginnison"s Lensed thought fairly shrieked. "Klono, yes, I know of him!" Then, more calmly: "He"s been out after my hide since we destroyed Downlo."

"That, I fear, is true," Shadrack commented. "Even now, he has, according to the information which my poor powers have allowed me to glean, englobed the Dentless with a fleet of twelve ships which are prepared to blast you out of the ether."

"Klono"s curving carballoy claws arid gilded gadolinium gizzard!" Ginnison roared mentally.

"Why didn"t you say so in the first place?"

"I am devastated," Shadrack replied. "It is, again, a racial characteristic which I cannot avoid. It took me too long to apologize." A pause, then: "I fear, even now, that I may have been too late," Shadrack apologized. "Clear ether, Ginnison."

"Clear ether, little chum," The Lensed connection cut off, and Ginnison flashed a thought to the control room, only to discover that, indeed, the Dentless was surrounded.

In a black, indetectable, refrigerated speedster, many pa.r.s.ecs from the soon-to-be scene of battle, that ent.i.ty known as Banlon of Downlo gloated over his instruments as he watched the englobement of the Dentless take form.

Like the Meich, and like Shadrack, he was of a race whose normal temperature was near that of boiling helium, and thus required extra-dimensional extensions in order to gather enough energy to survive. Superficially, that sounds glib enough, but, unfortunately, your historian knows less about dimensional a.n.a.lysis than you do, so let"s drop it right there.

To return to our narrative, Banlon, a safe distance away from the impending conflict, observed minutely the behavior of the Boskonian squadron which had englobed the Dentless. Each captain of the twelve Boskonian warships had done his job to perfection.

"Very well," Banlon radiated harshly to his minions, "englobement is now complete. Tractors and pressors on! Cut your Bergenholms and go inert! Blast that ship out of the ether!

Inertialess as she was, the mighty Dentless, caught in a web of tractor and pressor beams, could not continue at speed against the resistance of an inert combined ma.s.s twelve times that of her own.

Relative to the Boskonian squadron, she came to a dead halt in s.p.a.ce, easy prey for the Boskonians.

At Banlon"s order, all twelve Boskonian ships fired at once toward the center of their englobement, where the apparently helpless Patrol ship floated.

Beams, rods, cones, stilettos, icepicks, corkscrews, knives, forks, and spoons of energy raved against the screens of the Dentless. Quasi-solid bolts of horrendous power chewed, gnawed, flared, snarled, and growled against he energy screens of the Patrol ship, seeking eagerly to blast through them to the hull metal. All of circ.u.mambient s.p.a.ce was filled with the frightful discharge of those tremendous bolts of power.

The screens of the Dentless flared red, orange, yellow, green blue, and into the violet. From there, they went into the ultraviolet and x-ray spectrum. But still they held.

Gimble Ginnison, teeth clenched and jaw muscles knotted, stared with unblinking gaze of grey eyes at the plate before him, listening to the reports from the officers commanding the various functions of the ship. But only one of those reports was really important.

"Screens holding, Lensman!"

"Fire secondaries"" the Lensman ordered crisply.

The prodigious might of the Patrol ship"s secondaries flared out toward the twelve Boskonian ships.

Those screens, too, blazed up the spectrum toward the ultraviolet, then toward blackness.

"Primaries one through twelve! Ready?"

"Ready, sir!"

"At my order, then." Ginnison watched his plate closely.