Children of the Lens

by Edward E Smith

  The Overlord himself had wondered why they had not been able to kill them all. They wanted intensely enough to do so; their lust for life-force simply could not be sated. He knew only that something had limited their killing to ten percent of the bag.

  Worsel grinned wolfishly at that thought, even while he was admiring the quality of the psychology able to impress such a compulsion upon such intractable minds as those. That was the work of the Boskonian higher-ups; to spread confusion wider and wider.

  The other ninety percent had merely been “played with”—a procedure which, although less satisfying to the Overlords than the ultimate treatment, was not very different as far as the victims’ egos were concerned. For none of them emerged from the ordeal with any memory of what had happened, or of who or what he had ever been. They were not all completely mad; some were only partially so. All had, however, been…altered. Changed; shockingly transformed. No two were alike. Each Overlord, it appeared, had tried with all his ultra-hellish might to excel his fellows in the manufacture of an outrageous something whose like had never before been seen on land or sea or in the depths of space.

  These and many other things Worsel studied carefully. He’d head for the “Hell-Hole in Space,” he decided. This planet, the Overlords he had just slain, were not the Hell-Hole; could have had nothing to do with it—wrong location.

  He knew now, though, what the Hell-Hole really was. It was a cavern of Overlords—couldn’t be anything else—and in himself and his crew and his mighty vessel he, the Overlord-slayer supreme of two galaxies, had everything it took to extirpate any number of Overlords. That Hell-Hole was just as good as out, as of that minute.

  And just then a solid, diamond-clear thought came in.

  “Worsel! Con calling. What goes on there, fellow old snake?”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Kinnison Writes a Space-Opera

  ACH OF THE SECOND-STAGE Lensmen had exactly the same facts, the same data, upon which to theorize and from which to draw conclusions. Each had shared his experiences, his findings, and his deductions and inductions with all of the others. They had discussed minutely, in wide-open four-ways, every phase of the Boskonian problem. Nevertheless the approach of each to that problem and the point of attack chosen by each was individual and characteristic.

  Kimball Kinnison was by nature forthright; direct. As has been seen, he could use the approach circuitous if necessary, but he much preferred and upon every possible occasion employed the approach direct. He liked plain, unambiguous clues much better than obscure ones; the more obvious and factual the clue was, the better he liked it.

  He was now, therefore, heading for Antigan IV, the scene of the latest and apparently the most outrageous of a long series of crimes of violence. He didn’t know much about it; the request had come through regular channels, not via Lens, that he visit Antigan and direct the investigation of the supposed murder of the Planetary President.

  As his speedster flashed through space the Gray Lensman mulled over in his mind the broad aspects of this crime-wave. It was spreading far and wide, and the wider it spread and the intenser it became the more vividly one salient fact struck out. Selectivity—distribution. The solar systems of Thrale, Velantia, Tellus, Klovia, and Palain had not been affected. Thrale, Tellus, and Klovia were full of Lensmen. Velantia, Rigel, Palain, and a good part of the time Klovia, were the working headquarters of Second-Stage Lensmen. It seemed, then, that the trouble was roughly in inverse ratio to the numbers or the abilities of the Lensmen in the neighborhood. Something, therefore, that Lensmen—particularly Second-Stage Lensmen—were bad for. That was true, of course, for all crime. Nevertheless, this seemed to be a special case.

  And when he reached his destination he found out that it was. The planet was seething. Its business and its everyday activities seemed to be almost paralyzed. Martial law had been declared; the streets were practically deserted except for thick-clustered groups of heavily-armed guards. What few people were abroad were furtive and sly; slinking hastily along with their fear-filled eyes trying to look in all directions at once.

  “QX, Wainwright, go ahead,” Kinnison directed bruskly when, alone with the escorting Patrol officers in a shielded car, he was being taken to the Capitol grounds. “There’s been too much pussyfooting about the whole affair.”

  “Very well, sir,” and Wainwright told his tale. Things had been happening for months. Little things, but disturbing. Then murders and kidnappings and unexplained disappearances had begun to increase. The police forces had been falling farther and farther behind. The usual cries of incompetence and corruption had been raised, only further to confuse the issue. Circulars—dodgers—handbills appeared all over the planet; from where nobody knew. The keenest detectives could find no clue to paper-makers, printers, or distributors. The usual inflammatory, subversive, propaganda—“Down with the Patrol!” “Give us back our freedom!” and so on—but, because of the high tension already prevailing, the stuff had been unusually effective in breaking down the morale of the citizenry as a whole.

  “Then this last thing. For two solid weeks the whole world was literally plastered with the announcement that at midnight on the thirty-fourth of Dreel—you’re familiar with our calendar, I think?—President Renwood would disappear. Two weeks warning—daring us to do our damndest.” Wainwright got that far and stopped.

  “Well, go on. He disappeared, I know. How? What did you fellows do to prevent it? Why all the secrecy?”

  “If you insist I’ll have to tell you, of course, but I’d rather not.” Wainwright flushed uncomfortably. “You wouldn’t believe it. Nobody could. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t been there. I’d rather you’d wait, sir, and let the vice-president tell you, in the presence of the treasurer and the others who were on duty that night.”

  “Um…m… I see…maybe.” Kinnison’s mind raced. “That’s why nobody would give me details? Afraid I wouldn’t believe it—that I’d think they’d been…” He stopped. “Hypnotized” would have been the next word, but that would have been jumping at conclusions. Even if true, there was no sense in airing that hypothesis—yet.

  “Not afraid, sir. They knew you wouldn’t believe it.”

  After entering Government Reservation they went, not to the president’s private quarters, but into the Treasury and down into the sub-basement housing the most massive, the most utterly impregnable vault of the planet. There the nation’s most responsible officers told Kinnison, with their entire minds as well as their tongues, what had happened.

  Upon that black day business had been suspended. No visitors of any sort had been permitted to enter the Reservation. No one had been allowed to approach Renwood except old and trusted officers about whose loyalty there could be no question. Air-ships and space-ships had filled the sky. Troops, armed with semi-portables or manning fixed-mount heavy stuff, had covered the grounds. At five minutes before midnight Renwood, accompanied by four secret-service men, had entered the vault, which was thereupon locked by the treasurer. All the cabinet members saw them go in, as did the attendant corps of specially-selected guards. Nevertheless, when the treasurer opened the vault at five minutes after midnight, the five men were gone. No trace of any one of them had been found from that time on.

  “And that—every word of it—is TRUE!” the assembled minds yelled as one, all unconsciously, into the mind of the Lensman.

  During all this telling Kinnison had been searching mind after mind; inspecting each minutely for the tell-tale marks of mental surgery. He found none. No hypnosis. This thing had actually happened, exactly as they told it. Convinced of that fact, his eyes clouded with foreboding, he sent out his sense of perception and studied the vault itself. Millimeter by cubic millimeter he scanned the innermost details of its massive structure—the concrete, the neocarballoy, the steel, the heat-conductors and the closely-spaced gas cells. He traced the intricate wiring of the networks of alarms. Everything was sound. Everything functioned. Nothin
g had been disturbed.

  The sun of this system, although rather on the small side, was intensely hot; this planet, Four, was pretty far out. Well beyond Cardynge’s Limit. A tube, of course…for all the tea in China it had to be a tube. Kinnison sagged; the indomitable Gray Lensman showed his years and more.

  “I know it happened.” His voice was grim, quiet, as he spoke to the still protesting men. “I also know how it was done, but that’s all.”

  “HOW?” they demanded, practically in one voice.

  “A hyper-spatial tube,” and Kinnison went on to explain, as well as he could, the functioning of a thing which was intrinsically beyond the grasp of any non-mathematical three-dimensional mind.

  “But what can we or anybody else do about it?” the treasurer asked, numbly.

  “Nothing whatever.” Kinnison’s voice was flat. “When it’s gone, it’s gone. Where does the light go when a lamp goes out? No more trace. Hundreds of millions of planets in this galaxy, as many in the Second. Millions and millions of galaxies. All that in one universe—our own universe. And there are an infinite number—too many to be expressed, let alone to be grasped—of universes, side by side, like pages in a book except thinner, in the hyper-dimension. So you can figure out for yourselves the chances of ever finding either President Renwood or the Boskonians who took him—so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from zero absolute.”

  The treasurer was crushed. “Do you mean to say that there’s no protection at all from this thing? That they can keep on doing away with us just as they please? The nation is going mad, sir, day by day—one more such occurrence and we will be a planet of maniacs.”

  “Oh, no—I didn’t say that.” The tension lightened. “Just that we can’t do anything about the president and his aides. The tube can be detected while it’s in place, and anyone coming through it can be shot as soon as he can be seen. What you need is a couple of Rigellian Lensmen, or Ordoviks. I’ll see to it that you get them. I don’t think, with them here, they’ll even try to repeat.” He did not add what he knew somberly to be a fact, that the enemy would go elsewhere, to some other planet not protected by a Lensman able to perceive the intangible structure of a sphere of force.

  Frustrate, the Lensman again took to space. It was terrible, this thing of having everything happening where he wasn’t and when he got there having nothing left to work on. Hit-and-run—stab-in-the-back—how could a man fight something he couldn’t see or sense or feel or find? But this chewing his fingernails to the elbow wasn’t getting him anywhere, either; he’d have to find something that he could stick a tooth into. What?

  All former avenues of approach were blocked; he was sure of that. The Boskonians who were now in charge of things could really think. No underling would know anything about any one of them except at such times and places as the directors chose, and those conferences would be as nearly detection-proof as they could be made. What to do?

  Easy. Catch a big operator in the act. He grinned wryly to himself. Easy to say, but not…however, it wasn’t impossible. The Boskonians were not super-men—they didn’t have any more jets than he did. Put himself in the other fellow’s place—what would he do if he were a Boskonian big shot? He had had quite a lot of experience in the role. Were there any specific groups of crimes which revealed techniques similar to those which he himself would use in like case?

  He, personally, preferred to work direct and to attack in force. At need, however, he had done a smooth job of boring from within. In the face of the Patrol’s overwhelming superiority of armament, especially in the First Galaxy, they would have to bore from within. How? By what means? He was a Lensman; they weren’t. Jet back! Or were they, perhaps? How did he know they weren’t, by this time? Fossten the renegade Arisian… No use kidding himself; Fossten might have known as much about the Lens as Mentor himself, and might have developed an organization that even Mentor didn’t know anything about. Or Mentor might be figuring that it would be good for what ailed a certain fat-headed Gray Lensman to have to dope this out for himself. QX.

  He shot a call to Vice-Coordinator Maitland, who was now in complete charge of the office which Kinnison had temporarily abandoned.

  “Cliff? Kim. Just gave birth to an idea.” He explained rapidly what the idea was. “Maybe nothing to it, but we’d better get up on our toes and find out. You might suggest to the boys that they check up here and there, particularly around the rough spots. If any of them find any trace anywhere of off-color, sour, or even slightly rancid Lensmanship, with or without a Lens appearing in the picture, burn a hole in space getting it to me. QX?… Thanks.”

  Viewed in this new perspective, Renwood of Antigan IV might have been neither a patriot nor a victim, but a saboteur. The tube could have been a prop, used deliberately to cap the mysterious climax. The four honest and devoted guards were the real casualties. Renwood—or whoever he was—having accomplished his object of undermining and destroying the whole planet’s morale, might simply have gone elsewhere to continue his nefarious activities. It was fiendishly clever. That spectacularly theatrical finale was certainly one for the book. The whole thing, though, was very much of a piece in quality of workmanship with what he had done in becoming the Tyrant of Thrale. Far-fetched? No. He had already denied in his thoughts that the Boskonian operators were super-men. Conversely, he wasn’t, either. He would have to admit that they might very well be as good as he was; to deny them the ability to do anything he himself could do would be sheer stupidity.

  Where did that put him? On Radelix, by Klono’s golden gills! A good-sized planet. Important enough, but not too much so. People human. Comparatively little hell being raised there—yet. Very few Lensmen, and Gerrond the top. Hm…m. Gerrond. Not too bright, as Lensmen went, and inclined to be a bit brass-hattish. To Radelix, by all means, next.

  He went to Radelix, but not in the Dauntless and not in gray. He was a passenger aboard a luxury liner, a writer in search of local color for another saga of the space-ways. Sybly Whyte—one of the Patrol’s most carefully-established figments—had a bullet-proof past. His omnivorous interest and his uninhibited nosiness were the natural attributes of his profession—everything is grist which comes to an author’s mill.

  Sybly Whyte, then, prowled about Radelix. Industriously and, to some observers, pointlessly. He and his red-leather notebook were apt to be seen anywhere at any time, day or night. He visited space-ports, he climbed through freighters, he lost small sums in playing various games of so-called chance in spacemen’s dives. On the other hand, he truckled assiduously to the social elite and attended all functions into which he could wangle or could force his way. He made a pest of himself in the offices of politicians, bankers, merchant princes, tycoons of business and manufacture, and all other sorts of greats.

  He was stopped one day in the outer office of an industrial potentate. “Get out and stay out,” a peg-legged guard told him. “The boss hasn’t read any of your stuff, but I have, and neither of us wants to talk to you. Data, huh? What the hell do you need of data on atomic cats and bulldozers to write them damn space-operas of yours? Why don’t you get a roustabout job on a freighter and learn something first-handed? Get yourself a space-tan instead of that imitation you got under a lamp: work some of that lard off your carcass!” Whyte was definitely fatter than Kinnison had been; and, somehow, softer; he peered owlishly through heavy lenses which, fortunately, did not interfere with his sense of perception. “Then maybe some of your tripe will be half-fit to read—beat it!”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir; very much, sir.” Kinnison bobbed obsequiously and scurried out, writing industriously in his notebook the while. He had, however, found out what he wanted to know. The boss was nobody he wanted.

  Nor was an eminent statesman whom he button-holed at a reception. “I fail to see, sir, entirely, any point in your interviewing me,” that worthy informed him, frigidly. “I am not, I am—uh—sure, suitable material for any opus upon which you may be at work.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, you can’t ever tell, sir,” Kinnison said. “You see, I never know who or what is going to get into any of my stories until after I start to write it, and sometimes not even then.” The statesman glared and Kinnison retreated in disorder.

  To stay in character Kinnison actually wrote a novel; it was later acclaimed as one of Sybly Whyte’s best.

  “Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…” Kinnison was taping verbosely along when his first real clue developed.

  A yellow “attention” light gleamed upon his visiphone panel, a subdued chime gave notice that a message of importance was about to be broadcast to the world. Kinnison-Whyte flipped his switch and the stern face of the provost-marshal appeared upon the screen.

  “Attention, please,” the image spoke. “Every citizen of Radelix is urged to be on the lookout for the source of certain inflammatory and subversive literature which is beginning to appear in various cities of this planet. Our officers cannot be everywhere at once; you citizens are. It is hoped that by the aid of your vigilance this threat to our planetary peace and security can be removed before it becomes really serious; that we can avoid the imposition of martial law.”

  This message, while not of extreme or urgent import to most Radeligians, held for Kinnison a profound and unique meaning. He was right. He had deduced the thing one hundred percent. He knew what was going to happen next, and how; he knew that neither the law-enforcement officers of Radelix nor its massed citizenry could stop it. They could not even impede it. A force of Lensmen could stop it—but that would not get the Patrol anywhere unless they could capture or kill the beings really responsible for what was done. To alarm them would not do.