Subject: Doomed Lensmen - Chapters 8 & 9
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 08:26:28 -0800
From: Lee Gold <leeway@mediaone.net>
To: mobrien@dnaco.net

Chapter 8:  JOURNEY'S END

        From the control room of his ship, hidden on the back side of the Moon,
Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne watched with grim satisfaction the evacuation and
dismantling of the Galactic Patrol's First Galaxy Grand Headquarters.
His plans for panicking Tellus into withdrawing from the ranks of
Civilization had worked to perfection.  It was true that the ousted
Patrol was not withdrawing very far - only to Mars.  But that, DuQuesne
reflected, would hardly make much difference in the long run.
        Already he had succeeded in becoming master of Tellus by taking over
the powerful political and economic combine set up by Jake Briggs,
Chairman of the Board for Universal Telenews, covert owner of Central
Spaceways and heir to the fabulous fortune of Tellurian billionaire
Alexander Edmundson.  Even now, ten of Central Spaceways' precision
manufacturing plants were retooling, and would soon begin turning out
simplified projectors at the rate of over five hundred a day.
        Nor was there any danger that the Patrol or Boskone might spy on those
plants and learn the secret of the projector.  For they were protected
by special mind screens - screens that DuQuesne was confident would
withstand the probing of even a third stage mentality.  In his own
plenum, they had been found proof against the prying of even more
powerful minds, those of the Intellectuals of Margholl.
        At that thought, DuQuesne's countenance lost for a moment its look of
sardonic satisfaction.  He was remembering the time when he had once
been one of that group of pure intellectuals - a bodiless intelligence,
immaterial and immortal, capable of creating and manipulating matter at
will, destroyable only by contact with a sixth order screen.  He had
experienced that state, however, for only a few short minutes after a
cloud of hydrogen gas had destroyed the capsule in which his arch-foe
Richard Seaton had imprisoned him, along with seven Margholians, the
last survivors of their once mighty culture.  Almost immediately after
the Intellectuals had thus regained their freedom, One - the chief of
the Margholians - had ejected DuQuesne from the group, deciding that his
excessive concern for such a trivial matter as that of revenge against
Seaton showed that he was not sufficiently advanced to become a worthy
companion to them.
        "You have failed," One had told him, "and I now know that no member of
your race can ever become a true Scholar.  You will be rematerialized
and allowed to do whatever you please.  Furthermore, since you should
have precisely the same chance as before of living out your normal
instant of life in a normal fashion, I will construct a vessel for you
that will be the replica of your former one except that it will have a
sixth order drive so that you can return to your home galaxy in
comparatively few of your days."
        And even as the entity finished speaking, it had been done, and
DuQuesne had found himself once more embodied, seated before what
appeared to be the familiar control board of the mighty craft he had
formerly owned.
        Naturally his first thought had been to recapture the ideal state of
existence that he had just lost.  He had known, of course, that the
power of his recreated ship was in no way superior to that of Seaton's
Skylark.  And he was equally aware that his own previous discorporation
had been accomplished not by Seaton but by the Margholians.
Nevertheless DuQuesne was well aware that he did possess one advantage
that Seaton had lacked:  he knew the properties of being a pure
intellectual from personal experience, not merely from theoretical
speculation.
        He also had another advantage which might prove equally significant:
his long study of Oriental philosophy.  When he and Seaton had first
encountered the Intellectuals, they had advised him to continue his
study of those Eastern mystics if he wished to develop himself so that
he could someday become one of their number.  He had done so for several
years, concentrating particularly on astral projection, the art of
projecting one's soul outside of one's body.  It was in this way,
DuQuesne believed, that the Margholians must have originally
dematerialized themselves.
His own powers of concentration were not sufficient to achieve such a
result.  With the aid of a certain amount of material help from the
ship, however, it should be quite possible for him to set himself free
once again from the confines of his material body.
        It had taken DuQuesne nearly twenty hours of concentrated work to
investigate his new ship thoroughly enough to determine how its present
functions might b modified to produce the results he desired.  It had
then been the work of only a few minutes to program the computer to
produce the intricate pattern of fifth and sixth order forces that he
had finally decided would do the trick.  Then DuQuesne had dropped his
hands from the control board and immersed himself in thought,
concentrating on his memories of being a disembodied intelligence and on
his desire to regain the state he had so briefly known.

        The attempt had not been a total failure, but it also not been
altogether successful.  DuQuesne's conscious personality had indeed
succeeded in projecting itself free from his body so that it became a
separate, viable entity.  His body, however, had not disappeared as when
the Margholians had effected his transition.  Instead, his body had
remained seated before the control board and - without the stimulus of
the scientist's driving intelligence - promptly fallen sound asleep.
        DuQuesne had spent the new few hours investigating his new state of
existence.  He had soon discovered that it was almost impossible for him
to annihilate one milligram of matter, let alone any larger mass.  He
was also currently unable to create and manipulate matter with the same
ease ass had the millennia-old Margholians.  It cost him minutes of
concentration to create even an atom, hours to bring any more complex
structure into being.   He had accepted these limitations as a true
scientist, without anger or bafflement at the occurrence of the
unexpected, although resolved to experiment and see whether a regimen of
mental exercise would lead to an increase in his powers.
        His next surprise had come when his body awoke once more,… and he had
found himself receiving what might be charitably termed its thoughts -
its cravings for food and rest.  He had listened with detached curiosity
as the body used a thought-helmet to create a dinner, ate it ravenously,
and then returned to bed and slept once more.
        Before the body awakened once more, DuQuesne had succeeded in fully
analyzing the strange situation in which he now found himself.  He had
indeed succeeded in becoming a free mind once again.  The essence of his
conscious personality had been fully set free from his body.  That body
had, however, survived the discorporation process completely.  Its heart
still beat.  Its glands still functioned.  Its brain cells still
remembered all that he had ever learned.  And some of his personality
undoubtedly still remained within it, remnants not of the conscious part
of his psyche but of his libido, his unconscious mind.
        It should be quite interesting, DuQuesne had thought, to observe the
extent to which his original personality would regenerate itself on the
basis of his brain's retained memories and synapses.  The fact that the
link between himself and his - call it his doppelganger - was close
enough to permit him to receive the other's thoughts would make
observation of the process quite easy. Once he had determined what to do
about the doppelganger, he could then return to his primary purpose:
the destruction of Richard Seaton.
        For the next few months, then, DuQuesne had observed - with growing
distaste - the thoughts and actions of his former body.  What had
surprised him most was that nobody else seemed to notice the difference
in "his" behavior, not even the closest of his Tellurian acquaintances,
Dr. Stephanie de Marigny.
        The growth in the doppelganger's egoism was, thought DuQuesne,
particularly obvious.  He himself had never cared particularly about
naming things.  His first Osnomian spaceship, for instance, would have
remained anonymous if his henchman had not decided to name it the Violet
on the ironical grounds that the battleship was "such a sweet, harmless,
inoffensive little thing."  In contrast, one of his doppelganger's first
actions had been to christen his new ship - and in honor of himself, the
Capital D.
        Nor was that the only sign that a different personality was now
inhabiting his body.  The increasing influence of the sexual drive in
the other's psyche was equally noticeable.
        Despite these indications that his body's new personality differed
greatly from his own in terms of its desires and criteria, DuQuesne was
inexpressibly surprised and - for perhaps the first time in his adult
life - actually shocked when he became aware that his doppelganger was
planning to go back on his word, to break his truce with Seaton.
        DuQuesne found himself faced with a dilemma.  He was inextricably tied
to his doppelganger, bound to receive its thoughts as long as it
remained alive, caught in a rapport with a debased mockery of himself
that might continue for over half a century.  He knew that long before
that even his iron control would break - and he would either find his
own personality subtly degenerating to reflect his doppelganger's - or
else become completely insane.
        Worse still, he could not destroy his body and thus put an end to the
slow torture.  He could not get past the Capital D's sixth order
screens, and there was no reason for his doppelganger to ever venture
outside them.  If that loathsome being wished to observe or affect
anything outside the ship, he could always do so by means of the
projector.
        No, the only practical solution, DuQuesne reluctantly decided was to
somehow put so much distance between himself and his doppelganger that
the rapport would broken.  But how was he to do it?  One thousand
galaxies away, the other's thoughts still came in clearly, without
seeming to have been in any way affected by the intervening distance.
Mere remoteness within the three-dimensional continuum was evidently not
enough.  He would have to find some more radical means of separation.
        The device that seemed likeliest to turn the trick was one that he
himself had never used before, but that his doppelganger had recently
acquired - the quad. a mechanical teleporter invented by the Jelmi.
DuQuesne had intently observed the results of his doppelganger's
experiments with the machine.  Now he created a quad for himself,
building it out of the countless free photons floating about him.  By
varying a number of parameters, he found that the quad could be set to
transport an object not merely from one place to another but also from
one plenum to another.  He had perfected a means of inter-plenum
travel.
        Carefully he scanned plena, searching for an inhabited galaxy analogous
to the Milky Way but one in which neither he nor Seaton had any
analogues.  Then he painstakingly created a ship for himself, a virtual
duplicate of Seaton's formidable Skylark of Valeron.  His last step was
to create a new DuQuesne body, place it inside the ship, and enter it.
He would have to make the inter-plenum transfer in a corporate state;
the quad's power was unfortunately limited to handling material objects.
        DuQuesne's one regret was that he was leaving Seaton behind unattended
to.  But he was comforted by the thought that even if he himself did not
return to his native plenum for a century or so, he could still take
care of his enemy by proxy.  Once he had established himself as a
galactic overlord in the new plenum, it would be relatively simple to
send back a party of killers with instructions to locate and dispose of
his long-time foe.
        And so Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne had left his native plenum and entered a
new one.  That had been only eleven days ago.  In that time, he had
already made himself secret master of Tellus.  Now, still driven by his
unbounded desire for power, he found himself faced with two major
competitors for the prize of bi-galactic rule - the Galactic Patrol,
headed unofficially by the Children of the Lens - and the divided forces
of Boskone, one of them headed by Surgat the Plooran, the other - far
fewer in number but yet far more powerful - headed by Gharlane of
Eddore.  Each of these powers controlled not less than ten million
worlds.  And yet DuQuesne, master of merely one planet, dared to dream
of conquering the Two Galaxies.  And the means to do it would soon be
his!

        And while DuQuesne luxuriated in thoughts of his future triumphs, a
ship sped at an incredible velocity through a hyper-spatial tube, its
pilot D'zillich, Gharlane of Eddore's craft second-in-command, its cargo
Kit Kinnison, eldest Child of the Lens, now a prisoner in the hands of
Civilization's deadliest foes.  And outside the hyper-spatial tube,
Constance Kinnison glided along the tube's surface and followed its
course, racing ahead of the Boskonian craft to the tube's point of
origin, the far-off planet of Nergal.
        "I'm going to go in as the first ransomer," Kit had hold his sister two
days before.  "There's no other way to get a quick line on their
location…. Con, analyze the tube when and if it forms and follow it.
Don't worry bout me; I can take care of myself.  But find out where that
tube goes."
        She had not disputed his assurance that he would be safe.  Kit had
plenty of jets.  He could take anything those Boskonian apes dished out
and come back for more.  If he couldn't get the job done, Constance had
thought, nobody could.

        Meanwhile, aboard the Nergalian vessel, Kit Kinnison was beginning to
resign himself to the prospect of utter, total defeat.
        At first all had gone routinely.  The hyper-spatial tube had appeared
just as he had expected, and he had been immediately pulled aboard by
tractor beams into the ship waiting inside.  His captors had instantly
immobilized him with a tractor zone, stripped him of the armored
spacesuit he had been wearing as a protection against the bitter
sub-zero temperatures of Lyrane IX, and methodically frisked him for
concealed weapons.
        His first sign that he was up against more than he had bargained for
came when, after allowing himself to be rendered apparently helpless, he
had attempted to take over the mind of one of his captors, driving  a
solid beam of thought along a channel perceivable only by a third grade
mentality.  The result was starkly incredible.  Nothing happened!  The
zwilnik was wearing a shield that solidly screened him from the bottom
of the spectrum right to the very top.
        "Feeling frustrated, Lensman?" a voice asked, but did not wait for a
reply.  "You have volunteered to become a prisoner of war in order to
ransom two thousand Plutonians.  A noble deed.  But first we must
interview you to make sure that you are acting in good faith."
        The speaker turned to the crewman operating the tractor zone and gave a
series of curt instructions.  A few seconds later Kit found himself
being towed by the tractor zone out into and through the ship's winding
corridors.  Doors opened for him and closed behind him until at last he
was brought to an abrupt halt in what was evidently the ship's control
room.  In it there were two beings.  One sat with his back to Kit,
intent on the ship's control panel.  But it was the other being on whom
Kit's attention was immediately focused.
        Standing impassively in the middle of the room was a gray man.  Not
only was he dressed entirely in gray but his hair was gray, his eyes
were gray, and even his skin was a light gray, as if it had been tinted
to its present shade of tan.  To Kit, it seemed that he was looking at
an obscene burlesque of a Gray Lensman.
        "Lensman Christopher Kinnison," the being said quietly but crisply.
"You have no idea how much satisfaction it gives me to meet with you
under these circumstances.  But first let me introduce myself so that
you too can appreciate the significance of this meeting.  I have been
known to your people by many names - Sulla, Marius, Mithradates, Nero,…
Roger,… Fossten….
        "I am Gharlane of Eddore."
        "But….  The Arisians said you were dead.  How-"
        "We have less than an hour until this ship reaches its destination.  I
have no intention in wasting that time in explaining my existence to a
mentality that will soon cease to exist itself."
        And with that, Gharlane attacked.  Crescendoing waves of mental force
beat agonizingly against Kit's mind shield.  The young Lensman valiantly
defended himself against the mounting fury of the Eddorian's onslaught,
but he soon realized that he was ultimately doomed to lose the contest.
And yet, though he felt despair in every atom of his being, Kit doggedly
hung on, the Lens on his brawny forearm blazing ever brighter and
brighter as he drew on it for more and more energy.
        But finally, despite all Kit's efforts, the titanic battle of minds
drew towards its inevitable end, and Kit's mind shield gave way before
the irresistible force of Gharlane's attack.  With a feeling of utter
horror, Kit felt the Eddorian gradually take over his mind.
        And now on the seemingly helpless mind of the young Lensman, Gharlane
began to impose a set of commands.  Kit was to return to Thrale, to
board the Directrix - the mighty flagship of the Galactic Patrol's Grand
Fleet - and to destroy her.
        With overwhelming anguish, Kit realized why Gharlane had chosen not to
kill him.  He, Child of the Lens, had now become merely a tool of the
Eddorian.  The Guardian of Civilization would become its involuntary
executioner.

        And then Kit felt that anguish cease.  For now Gharlane began to
impress a series of false memories on the young Lensman's unresisting
mind.
        When the Nergalian ship emerged from the hyper-spatial tube, Kit's face
was glowing with triumph.  Vividly he recalled how he had
single-handedly captured the spaceship, probed the mind of its captain
and found a vital clue to the whereabouts of Surgat, head of the
resurgent Boskonian Empire.  With a high heart, he donned his spacesuit
again, Lensed his sister Constance to pick him up, left the Boskonian
vessel, matched velocities with Constance's ship, and entered it.
        Constance immediately spun the speedster around end for end, then set
the tiny craft to drive forward at its greatest possible speed.  Then
she got up from the control chair and ran to her brother's arms.  "Oh,
Kit.  It's so good to see you again."
        He held her tightly in his arms, kissed her tenderly, then said, "It's
good to see you again too, Con.  For awhile, I was scared that I might
not be able to do it again; some of those apes were pretty tough
monkeys.  But it all came out all right after-  Or did it?"
        "I don't understand what you mean, Kit."  Her gold-flecked tawny eyes
stared up at him in puzzlement.
        "Neither do I."  He released her, then said, "Leave me alone for a
couple of minutes, Con.  I've got some hard thinking to do."
        Painstakingly, Kit forced himself to review his recent memories,
subjecting each to an excruciatingly minute scrutiny.  Finally he came
to the soul-stunning conclusion that his memories had somehow been
subtly tampered with.  But why?  And what in truth had happened to him
within that hyper-spatial tube?
        In that moment of trial, the true strength of Christopher Kinnison's
personality fully showed itself.  He fought doggedly against the
conditioned memories, fought his way to the truth - and won.  And knew
himself in that moment of victory to be still bound by the commands of
Gharlane of Eddore.
        And in that moment of mingled triumph and defeat, Kit realized that
there was only one way in which he could defeat the Eddorian's plans,
one way in which he could prevent himself from destroying the Directrix
and thus dooming the forces of Civilization to utter defeat.  And he
shuddered with every fiber of his being at the thought what he must soon
do.
        "Con," Kit said quietly, "things didn't go well back there.  Not at
all.  They got me - conditioned me to go back and destroy the
Directrix.  And I have to do it.  I can't stop myself.  And you can't
stop me.  If you tried, I'd… have to destroy you."
        "Kit, I still don't understand.  Who could lay a compulsion that strong
on you, a third stage Lensman?"
        "An Eddorian could.  An Eddorian did.  Gharlane of Eddore is still
alive."
        The girl gasped with horror.  "But Kit, what can we do?  The Directrix
mustn't be destroyed."
        "I know.  There's only one way out.  I've got to die.  I've got to kill
myself."
        "Kit, no!"
        "I've got to.  There's no other way.  Con, if you love me,… give me
your DeLameter."
        The girl looked him levelly for several moments, gold-flecked tawny
eyes staring steadily into gold-flecked tawny eyes.  "QX, Kit," she said
at last, "but first, please… kiss me goodbye."
        He nodded, then slowly drew her to him again and kissed her tenderly.
"Con," he murmured, brokenly, "I think I realize now for the first time
what Mentor meant when he said that someday we'd find lifemates who'd
truly be our equals.  Oh, Con, to have to lose you now, all four of
you….  If only there were some other way…."  He fell silent, then
continued in a changed voice, "I can't keep fighting against these
compulsions much longer.  Give me the DeLameter, Con."
        Silently, she handed him the blaster, then turned away from him and
walked slowly back to the control chair.  For the rest of the trip, she
kept her attention rigidly focused on the viewscreen before her.
Finally the tiny speedster reached its journey's end, the spaceport of
Thrale.  Then at last Constance Kinnison, Child of the Lens, got up from
the control chair and left the room, expressionlessly filing her way
past the remains of what had once been her beloved brother.
 Chapter 9:  THE POWER OF HATE

        Once her tiny speedster had finally landed on Thrale, Constance
Kinnison's first impulse had been to leave the ship as soon as
possible.  Her face was expressionless as she got up from the control
chair and, without looking down, filed past the remains of what had once
been her beloved brother.  But behind her lovely and apparently serene
countenance, her mind burned with the agony of trying to control the
turmoil of grief and rage which throbbed within her.
        All through the trip back to Thrale, she had been remembering Kit's
words at the time when - less than two weeks ago - the five Children of
the Lens had received word that their parents and home planet had been
suddenly and utterly destroyed.
        "We've got no time for private griefs," Kit had told her then.  "We've
got two galaxies to take care of.  We're the only Guardians that
Civilization's got left - and we've got to live up to the
responsibility."
        Constance Kinnison had now resolved to continue to be equal to that
burden - or die in the attempt!
        As soon as she had left the ship, she got in touch with her three
sisters.  Her twin Camilla was also on Thrale, already back from her
recent second stage Lensmen hunting trip in the First Galaxy.  The two
older girls, Kathryn and Karen, were on Tellus, a galaxy away, but their
thoughts came in as diamond-clear as those of her twin.
        "So, how did the ransom operation go?" Cam asked.  "Did they use a
hyper-spatial tube for the pick-up?"
        "Yes," said Constance.  "Kit was right about that."  She stopped,
trying to summon u her strength to tell them now.  But no, there were
other facts of importance that they should learn first.  Without
perceptible pause, she continued her tale.  "I followed the tube from
the outside in my speedster.  It was being projected from a star cluster
on the outskirts of the far side of the Second Galaxy.  I was there
about half an hour before the Boskonian ship came through and I took the
chance to look around, without drawing any attention.  That cluster is
definitely the new Boskonian home base.
        "For one thing, it's heavily guarded.  The screens are as good as
Eddore's were.  And - I didn't have enough time to do a full
investigation but - there's a planet orbiting one of the stars there
whose measurements fit those of Pluto to twenty decimals.
        "I'd just finished checking that out when Kit came - and…."  At that
point Constance's hard-won control nearly deserted her!  Then she
mastered herself once more and, in a series of flashing thoughts, told
her sisters about the tragic events of the last day.
        Stunned silence followed.  Then Kathryn said slowly, "This calls for
Grand Fleet action.  We've got to get Gharlane as soon as possible
before he disrupts Civilization permanently."
        "Mentor himself apparently couldn't do that job," reminded Karen
tartly.
        "Mentor once told me that our minds had power superior even to that of
the Arisians," said Kathryn.  "There's no theoretical reason why we
couldn't do what was impossible for him.  We did it once before, when we
helped Mom rescue Dad from the Hell-Hole."
        "But potential power still isn't a substitute for experience," Kay
promptly returned.  "Gharlane is millennia old.  We're all still under
twenty-one.  Do you seriously believe we can destroy him?  The Unit
might have been able to.  But now that Kit's died, the Unit is gone!"
        "If we can't destroy Gharlane, we can still destroy his base of
operations," said Camilla.  "He can't achieve anything significant
without an organization to work through.  And besides, let's not
underestimate ourselves.  Even if the Unit is no longer possible, we can
still work in fusion; we've done it before.  And I'd match our fusion up
against a Boskone one any day.
        "Kay, you and Kit used to handle the job of driving and directing our
five-fold fusion.  Do you think you can do it alone for the four of us?"
        "Of course," said Kathryn.  "That is, if you're all willing.  Con and
Kay, what about it?"
        Constance agreed enthusiastically.  Karen's reply came more slowly.
"QX, Kat.  There's really nothing else we can do anyway - except sit
around and wait to see what that srizonified Eddorian will do next.
This way maybe we'll fail - but at least we'll fail fighting."

        Less than twenty-four hours later, mobilization of the Galactic
Patrol's Grand Fleet was complete.  Nor did that mobilization leave the
ranks of Civilization undefended.  The Patrol strategists had not
forgotten that the week of grace granted the Thralian Empire in Surgat
of Boskone's ultimatum would come to an end within that day.
        Therefore, to guard against the possibility of a sneak attack on the
Civilized worlds of either the First or the Second Galaxy, the Patrol
forces based in the First Galaxy had been divided into two groups.  Half
of them had remained in the First Galaxy, each assigned the duty of
patrolling twice the area of space that they had previously defended.
The other half of the First Galaxy fleets had been moved to the Second
Galaxy, there ready to defend its Civilized worlds from any surprise
Boskonian attack.
        And, having been thus set free from its normal defense duties, the
entire Patrol force of the Second Galaxy now moved, under the command of
Galactic Coordinator Tregonsee, to attack a small star cluster on the
far outskirts of the Second Galaxy, the cluster which, according to
Constance Kinnison, held the home base of the resurgent Boskone - and
the kidnapped Sol IX, Pluto with its over fifty million inhabitants.
Nor were warships the only weapons at the Grand Fleet's disposal.  It
also brought with it over five hundred loose planets, now flying free
but all with tremendous intrinsic inertial velocities, and the same
number of negaspheres.
        Tregonsee had initially suggested also bringing along a number of
planets from Nth space.  Camilla, however, had advised against it on the
grounds that fitting out the planets for action would give the enemy too
much time to prepare for an attack.  "As it is, we're cutting it awfully
close, Uncle Trig," she had told him.  "We don't want to get there and
find they've decided to move somewhere else while we weren't looking."
        She didn't tell him that her sister Constance had returned to land her
personal ship on a deserted portion of Pluto, which Tellurian
geographers had dubbed Tartarus, and which Pluto's fourth-dimensional
inhabitants who considered a Terran polar winter as unbearably hot
called the Stormlands because of its inclement weather.  There she
waited, prepared to alert her sisters to any military action in the
system - and to try to save the people of Pluto from the upcoming Patrol
attack.
        Tregonsee had eventually agreed to Camilla's proposals.  She had
listened to him with apparent concentration but actually had paid
attention to the Rigelian's cogitations with only a fraction of her
mind.  Most of it had been engaged in a private conversation with her
oldest sister.
        "So you see, Kat, we just don't dare let them use a hyperspace
projectile.  During the Battle of Ploor, it was only Arisian supervision
that kept the hyperspace matter's mass from instantaneously becoming
some high-order infinity.  If it had, all the matter in known space
would have coalesced with it in zero time.  We just won't be able to
take time out for that kind of close order supervision - not and handle
Gharlane simultaneously."
        Kathryn had agreed, and the matter had thus been settled.  The Patrol's
Grand Fleet would have to go up against its oldest and deadliest foe
deprived of its most formidable weapon.
        But still, despite all that, despite the tragic events of the last
three weeks, the spirit of the Patrolmen still remained unshaken.
Morale ran high throughout the Grand Fleet as that mighty armada
steadily forged its way across the galaxy, its thousands of ships kept
in perfectly battle formation by command coordinators aboard the
Directrix, who were now under the supreme command of Tregonsee, with
Nadreck, Kathryn, Karen, and Camilla handling the flagship's big tank.
        Also present in the flagship's control room were two recently Enlensed
beings, Kwadra of Rigel IV and Surpione of Valentia, whom Camilla had
jus t recruited in her recent trip to the First Galaxy.  These two were,
as each of the other Kinnison girls immediately recognized, potential
second stage Lensmen.  And, since minds stable at the second level of
stress do not occur by sheer chance, each girl realized at once that
here were the potential mates that Mentor had designed for Tregonsee and
Worsel.
        "What troubles me," Camilla told her sisters, "is that I wasn't able to
find either of Nadreck's potential complements.  But I suppose they
probably emigrated from Palain VII to another world.  I just didn't have
time to search all the frigid-type worlds in the Two Galaxies.  For all
I know, they're on Pluto.  Con, keep an eye out for them."
        "They're not there," said Karen.  "They're both dead.  Over twenty
years dead.
        "You remember how secretive Nadreck has always been about the details
of his attack on Onlo.  I got curious about it and deep probed him
surreptitiously.
        "It turned out that Onlo wasn't just a military fortress.  It was also
a central military intelligence base, where difficult prisoners were
sent to be interrogated.  When Nadreck attacked it, his key objective
was, of course, simply to destroy the planet as a military base by
making the Onlonians kill one another.  With his characteristic
single-mindedness, he didn't realize until too late that he was dooming
all of the planet's prisoners at the same time.  And, as those prisoners
died there, Nadreck suddenly found himself in a wide open three-way with
two of them.  It was just like what happened to Mom and Dad at the grand
Ball, but with three minds, not two.  Except for the ending.  The other
two Palainians died.  That's why Nadreck's kept it under Lensman's Seal
all these years."
        "I'm surprised Mentor didn't intervene to save the two Palainians,"
said Constance.
        "By then Mentor had already decided on the Tellurian line of evolution
as the source of the third stage Lensmen he wanted.  Therefore, to him,
the lives of those two Palainians were of no importance.  He started
treating Dad and Mom the same way once we five reached mental maturity.
Remember when Dad was lost in the Hell-Hole and Mom nearly killed
herself trying to save him.  Mentor wasn't a bit worried about the death
of either of them.  It wasn't until we stepped in to help that he got
concerned."
        "And right now we'd better get ready to step in again," broke in
Kathryn.  "We should be touching their outermost scanning screens within
the next few minutes.  Constance may have sneaked through them, but
there's no way a fleet this size can do that - as long as the screens
stay up.  Let's go into fusion."
        She laid out a matrix, and the other three girls came in.  There was a
brief moment of snuggling and fitting; then each of the girls
experienced the same feeling of mingled disappointment and approval.
This was in no way like the perfection of the Unit, but it was still a
fusion of incredible power and efficiency.  Kay spoke for them all when
she said, "Maybe we have got a chance of destroying Gharlane at that."
        "Let's hit him now and find out," said Constance.  "There's no point in
waiting any longer."
        "QX," Kathryn agreed.  And the four-fold fusion struck out.  As the
four girls flung themselves into that attack, the other beings in the
Directrix's big tank room were surprised to note that a Lens, bigger and
brighter than that worn by any of the second stage Lensmen, now flamed
on Kathryn's wrist; and indeed the very air above those three
red-bronze-auburn heads now began to pulsate with that indescribable
glow uniquely characteristic of the Lens of Arisia.  And in Constance's
speedster, the same glow flickered over her head.  Mere physical
distance did not affect the raw power of that third level fusion or its
inbred attunement to the Arisian Lens.  The energies released registered
on the Plutonians' detectors, and set them to mount an expedition into
the wilds of the Stormlands to find out what forces had been unleashed
there.
        But as that attack struck the mechanical screens that guarded the
Nergalian star cluster, it triggered an automatic relay established over
twenty years before.  The Nergalians had long foreseen the eventual fall
of Eddore under Arisian attack and determined that their own world must
be even more securely guarded.  To that end, they had created a truly
diabolical device, an instrument capable of altering the relationship
between a Lensman and his Lens so that the Lens ceased to be attuned to
its wearer - and therefore instantly reverted to its unsatisfied state,
thus killing its wearer and anyone else touching it.
        The amount of energy used up by this device was, however, so great that
all the Nergalians' resources were sufficient for using it to destroy
only a handful of Lensmen.  They had therefore reluctantly reserved it
for use against second and third stage intelligences only.  And they had
tied it into their basic defense system, so that any Lensman with a mind
powerful enough to be capable of penetrating Nergal's defensive thought
screens would be instantaneously destroyed by his own Lens.  Constance
Kinnison had remained unaffected so far because she hadn't felt any need
to materialize a Lens to serve as a focus to her mental powers; it was
enough for her that a Lens would appear near her, circling her head like
a cornet of coruscating light, whenever she summoned up all her mental
strength.
        The anti-Lens projector had been used only once before in the entire
history of the Two Galaxies.  Then it had resulted in the destruction of
second stage Lensman Worsel of Velantia.  Now it was automatically
triggered into action against Tregonsee, Nadreck, and the four Kinnison
girls.
        Tregonsee and Nadreck died immediately, without knowing even a moment
of pain.  The Arisians had designed the Lens to be deadly but not an
instrument of torture.
In the air over the Kinnison sisters' heads, the pulsating radiance that
had glowed with the radiant color characteristic of the Lens of Arisia
in its satisfied form now changed hue, turned dull and deadly.  And the
same change simultaneously occurred on the Lens encircling Kathryn's
wrist!
        In that moment, as her sisters stared at her in horror, Kathryn
Kinnison, eldest Daughter of the Lens died.  And with her death, the
fusion which she had been coordinating fell to pieces.
        And - at that exact instant - the Nergalians launched their attack
against the invading Grand Fleet.
        First there came, aimed directly at the advancing armada, what can only
be described as a hyper-sunbeam, a bar of quasi-solid lightning into
which had been compressed the energy output not of merely one sun but of
all the stars in the entire cluster!
        The Patrol had found the sunbeam to be a highly destructive weapon,
although a clumsy and unwieldy one.  This hyper-sunbeam, however, was
neither clumsy nor unwieldy, not because it differed in quality from the
sunbeam, but because it was being handled and aimed not by mere first
level mentalities but by a hand-picked team of Nergalians, the least of
whom was on a par with any of the Patrol's second stage Lensmen, with
their decisions implemented by the a computer that received their orders
not through any slow intermediary of mechanical controls but through
direct thought transfer.
        So Nergal's counterattack now carefully and meticulously stripped away
layer after layer of the Patrol's Grand Fleet, always careful to leave
the Directrix unharmed. Gharlane of Eddore did not choose to allow those
aboard the Fleet's flagship to die so easily.
        Instead, Gharlane himself now attacked, unleashing his full powers for
the first time in millennia, fighting with an intensity that he had not
used since the last of Eddore's savage internecine wars had ceased.  His
bolts of thought ripped their way into the Directrix, as if the
flagship's screens had not even existed - and then rebounded,
temporarily stopped by Karen Kinnison's instinctively flung up shield.
        Under the impetus of that ultimately lethal attack, Karen and Camilla
linked hands and drew Constance once more into a mental fusion, to
launch a counterattack.  But it was in vain.  Constance's most powerful
mental bolts rebounded harmlessly from the Eddorian's hard-held block.
        In the Directrix's control room, Karen and Camilla stood there,
motionless, heads bent and almost touching, grasping one another's
wrists.  At their feet lay the lifeless body of their oldest sister.
Around them lay scattered other equally lifeless bodies, for already the
reverberations, the ricochets, the spent forces of Gharlane's attack had
wrought grievously against the bystanders.  Those forces were so deadly
to all life that even their transformation products affected
tremendously the nervous systems of all nearby their targets.
        And still the Eddorian's attack continued, never letting up for one
moment.  Gharlane bored onward, driving a needle of pure force against
Karen's supposedly absolutely impenetrable shield.  Minute after slow
minute, that titanic battle of minds raged on.  And ultimately Karen's
shield gave way, was punctured - and in the instant of the puncturing it
disappeared like a broken bubble and was no more.  And so great was the
torrent of force cascading into the Directrix that within a moment after
Karen's shield had gone down, all life within the flagship of
Civilization was utterly snuffed out.
        Such was the end of Civilization's Grand Fleet in its last battle
against the forces of Boskone.
        And on Pluto, nearly a light hour away, Constance's heart still beat,
but her mind, her personality, that vital essence that had made her a
force that even Gharlane could not dismiss as negligible, was now
utterly gone.  It was not Gharlane, not D'zillich, but the aide Borkle
who took on the final task of tidying up the Battle of Nergal by taking
the living body of Constance Kinnison, the last Child of the Lens. and
causing her to leave the warm haven of her ship and go out onto the
merciless blasts of Pluto's Tartarus, where death came to her in the
moment of her first breath.  The next day, the bright red of her hair
drew  the attention of the Plutonian expedition, who could guess that
she had come
 in a futile attempt to aid them but would never guess how close that
attempt had come to success, would have succeeded if only the Grand
Fleet had been led not just by the four Kinnison sisters but by the
entire Unit, as it would have been if only Kit Kinnison had still been
alive.

        And on Nergal, Gharlane of Eddore, now that he had permanently disposed
of the five Children of the Lens, knew himself to be able to realize his
dreams of infinite power, power unhindered by any effective opposition
whatsoever.  It was with unalloyed satisfaction that the Eddorian turned
to his own private extension of Nergal's computer and asked, "What is
the probability now that Nergal under my leadership will dominate the
Material Cosmic All?"
        The computer did now answer.
        Instead there came a voice from behind him.  "The probability," it
said, "is exactly zero."
        Gharlane had not been aware that anyone was in the room with him; he
could detect no mind, no thoughts, no life force.  He whirled about,
raging with fury at the insubordinate Nergalian who had chosen this
moment to try out a mind screen and attempt a coup d'etat.  But the
humanoid he now faced was no Nergalian, no minion of Boskone, but a
total and absolute stranger!
"If you have come here on behalf of the Patrol to tell me that," said
Gharlane coldly, "know that you have come too late.  All of
Civilization's minds of power are now dead.  The Arisians bred only a
limited number of second and third stage intelligences, and I have now
succeeded in eliminating all of them."
        "And I am sincerely thankful to you for doing it," the other replied.
"It would have probably taken me several months to manage it.  As it is,
it has already taken me almost two hours to put out of action all of the
Galactic Patrol forces currently operating in the First Galaxy."
        "I had thought no on else survived.  Just when did you leave the
Circle?"
        "I never entered it.  I am not an Eddorian.  But I am similar to your
people in one respect.  Like you, I was not born in this plenum.  The
difference is that you arrived here several millennia ago, and it took
you this long to come close to conquering it.  I've only been here for a
little over two weeks.
        "My native plenum is quite backward in many areas of scientific
investigation compared to this one.  No one there, for example, has ever
devised a Lens.  On the other hand, scientists there have experimented
with and learned how to control phenomena which your plenum is totally
unfamiliar with.
        "One result of this experimentation is the projector, the means by
which I am now speaking to you.  The image it projects cannot be
affected by any physical force.  And, as I'm sure you've already
noticed, the mind of the person whose image is projected, cannot be read
or affected by any mental force directed to the image.  A projection
thus has all the advantages of personal presence and none of the
disadvantages.  It's a convenient way for conducting conversations at a
distance.
        "It's also a very efficient method of attack.  I told you before that
I've had the Patrol's First Galaxy fleets put out of action.  The job
was done by two thousand Tellurians, each equipped with a limited
projector, capable of materializing a projection only in an inertialess
zone.  Almost two hours ago, each man projected his image into the
engine room of a Patrol vessel - and stuck his finger into the
Bergenholm drive, then cut off the projection, reset the controls for
another Patrol ship, and so on.
        "A very simple method of destruction, wouldn't you agree?  I took care
of your computer here myself in a similar fashion, using my own
unlimited projector - just before I made my presence here known to you."
        "All need for the computer is now over," said Gharlane calmly.  "Its
continued existence would only have tempted some Nergalian to dream of
supplanting me…. And so you tell me that all the Patrol's ships in the
First Galaxy are now limited to sublight-speed velocities.  Have you had
any thoughts about their ships in the Second Galaxy?"
        "If any of them tries to cross between the galaxies, it'll get wrecked
somewhere in intergalactic space.  Otherwise, I intend to let the
remnants of Boskone and the remnants of the Patrol fight it out here in
the Second Galaxy until I have sufficiently consolidated my command of
the First Galaxy to be able to take on the Second one.  I will, of
course, take steps to see that neither side gains any overwhelming
victory in that contest."
        "And what do you intend to do to stop me from wrecking this plan of
yours?"  Even before he had finished speaking, Gharlane attacked.  But
the intense mental forces at his command which had previously proved so
deadly now had no effect whatsoever.  The Eddorian's hardest-driven
probes merely passed harmlessly through the space occupied by the
other's seeming presence.
        The stranger did not counterattack but instead stood there smiling
sardonically for several minutes, then said imperturbably, "Despite your
present asinine attempt to kill me, I have no particular desire to kill
you.  Once I would have done so as the only way to ensure that you would
not interfere with my plans.  Now I have a more effective means than
death to get rid of you.
        "I am going to transfer you to another plenum.  And, anticipating your
next question, you will not be able to come back here, because I will -
at the moment of your departure - set up a screen about this plenum
which will keep out you and any other trespassers who may be wandering
around.
        "I plan on staying here for some time, at least the next few
centuries.  And so, to console all the old and dear friends I left
behind for my absence, I'm going to send you to my native plenum.  I
want you to be particularly sure to give my warmest regards to an
especially close companion of mine - his name is Richard Ballinger
Seaton.  Tell him you've got a message for him from Dr. Marc C.
DuQuesne.  Tell him that I'm only sorry that present conditions make it
impossible for me to look him up myself.  I'm sure he'll understand."
        And with that, DuQuesne set his inter-plenum transporter device into
action, and Gharlane vanished from the room, forcibly expelled from the
plenum in which for so long he had been one of the most powerful
mentalities - and now barred from returning to it.  The Eddorian's only
consolation in that moment was that the enemies he had fought for so
long were no longer alive to triumph at his defeat.  Nor would they have
rejoiced greatly at the turn of events, even if they had been capable of
seeing it.  For if Eddore and the Boskonian Empire now seemed inevitably
destined to utter defeat, so too was Civilization.  Both were now
utterly doomed!