Second Stage Lensmen (Unabridged). E. E. Smith

nurse and Lensman retraced their way to the room they had left so shortly before. Port Admiral Haynes and Surgeon-Marshal Lacy still sat upon the nurse’s davenport, scheming roseate schemes having to do with the wedding they had so subtly engineered.

      “Back so soon? Forget something, MacDougall?” Lacy asked, amiably. Then, as both men noticed the couple’s utterly untranslatable expression:

      “What happened? Break it out, Kim!” Haynes commanded.

      “Plenty, chief,” Kinnison answered, quietly. “Mentor stopped us before we got to the elevator. Told me I’d put my foot in it up to my neck on that Boskonian thing. That instead of being all buttoned up, my fool blundering has put us farther back than we were when we started.”

      “Mentor!”

      “Told you!”

      “Put us back!”

      It was an entirely unpremeditated, unconscious duet. The two old officers were completely dumbfounded. Arisians never had come out of their shells, they never would. Infinitely less disturbing would have been the authentic tidings that a brick house had fallen upstairs. They had nursed this romance along so carefully, had timed it so exactly, and now it had gone p-f-f-f-t—it had been taken out of their hands entirely. That thought flashed through their minds first. Then, as catastrophe follows lightning’s flash, the real knowledge exploded within their consciousnesses that, in some unguessable fashion or other, the whole Boskonian campaign had gone p-f-f-f-t, too.

      Port Admiral Haynes, master tactician, reviewed in his keen strategist’s mind every phase of the recent struggle, without being able to find a flaw in it.

      “There wasn’t a loop-hole anywhere,” he said aloud. “Where do they figure we slipped up?”

      “We didn’t slip—I slipped,” Kinnison stated, flatly. “When we took Bominger—the fat Chief Zwilnik of Radelix, you know—I took a bop on the head to learn that Boskone had more than one string per bow. Observers, independent, for every station at all important. I learned that fact thoroughly then, I thought. At least, we figured on Boskone’s having lines of communication past, not through, his Regional Directors, such as Prellin of Bronseca. Since I changed my line of attack at that point, I did not need to consider whether or not Crowninshield of Tressilia III was by-passed in the same way; and when I had worked my way up through Jalte in his star-cluster to Boskone itself, on Jarnevon, I had forgotten the concept completely. Its possibility didn’t even occur to me. That’s where I fell down.”

      “I still don’t see it!” Haynes protested. “Boskone was the top!”

      “Yeah?” Kinnison asked, pointedly. “That’s what I thought—but prove it.”

      “Oh.” The Port Admiral hesitated. “We had no reason to think otherwise . looked at in that light, this intervention would seem to be conclusive . but before that there was no .”

      “There were so,” Kinnison contradicted,” but I didn’t see them then. That’s where my brain went sour; I should have seen them. Little things, mostly, but significant. Not so much positive as negative indices. Above all, there was nothing whatever to indicate that Boskone actually was the top. That idea was the product of my own wishful and very low-grade thinking, with no basis or foundation in fact or in theory. And now,” he concluded bitterly,” because my skull is so thick that it takes an idea a hundred years to filter through it—because a sheer, bare fact has to be driven into my brain with a Valerian maul before I can grasp it—we’re sunk without a trace.”

      “Wait a minute, Kim, we aren’t sunk yet,” the girl advised, shrewdly. “The fact that, for the first time in history, an Arisian has taken the initiative in communicating with a human being, means something big—really big. Mentor does not indulge in what he calls ‘loose and muddy’ thinking. Every part of every thought he sent carries meaning—plenty of meaning.”

      “What do you mean?” As one, the three men asked substantially the same question; Kinnison, by virtue of his faster reactions, being perhaps half a syllable in the lead.

      “I don’t know, exactly,” Clarrissa admitted. “I’ve got only an ordinary mind, and it’s firing on half its jets or less right now. But I do know that his thought was ‘almost’ irreparable, and that he meant precisely that—nothing else. If it had been wholly irreparable he not only would have expressed his thought that way, but he would have stopped you before you destroyed Jarnevon. I know that. Apparently it would have become wholly irreparable if we had got .” she faltered, blushing, then went on, “. if we had kept on about our own personal affairs. That’s why he stopped us. We can win out, he meant, if you keep on working. It’s your oyster, Kim . it’s up to you to open it. You can do it, too—I just know you can.”

      “But why didn’t he stop you before you fellows smashed Boskone?” Lacy demanded, exasperated.

      “I hope you’re right, Cris—it sounds reasonable,” Kinnison said, thoughtfully. Then, to Lacy:

      “That’s an easy one to answer, doctor. Because knowledge that comes the hard way is knowledge that really sticks with you. If he had drawn me a diagram before, it wouldn’t have helped, the next time I get into a jam. This way it will. I’ve got to learn how to think, if it cracks my skull.

      “Really think,” he went on, more to himself than to the other three. “To think so it counts.”

      “Well, what are we going to do about it?” Haynes was—he had to be, to get where he was and to stay where he was—quick on the uptake. “Or, more specifically, what are you going to do and what am I going to do?”

      “What I am going to do will take a bit of mulling over,” Kinnison replied, slowly. “Find some more leads and trace them up, is the best that occurs to me right now. Your job and procedure are rather clearer. You remarked out in space that Boskone knew that Tellus was very strongly held. That statement, of course, is no longer true.”

      “Huh?” Haynes half-pulled himself up from the davenport, then sank back. “Why?” he demanded.

      “Because we used the negasphere—a negative-matter bomb of planetary anti-mass—to wipe out Jalte’s planet, and because we smashed Jarnevon between two colliding planets,” the Lensman explained, concisely. “Can the present defenses of Tellus cope with either one of those offensives?”

      “I’m afraid not . no,” the Port Admiral admitted. “But .”

      “We can admit no ‘buts’, admiral,” Kinnison declared, with grim finality. “Having used those weapons, we must assume that the Boskonian scientists—we’ll have to keep on calling them ‘Boskonians’, I suppose, until we find a truer name—had recorders on them and have now duplicated them. Tellus must be made safe against anything we have ever used; against, as well, everything that, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, we can conceive of the enemy using.”

      “You’re right . I can see that,” Haynes nodded.

      “We’ve been underestimating them right along,” Kinnison went on. “At first we thought they were merely organized outlaws and pirates. Then, when it was forced upon us that they could match us—overmatch us in some things—we still wouldn’t admit that they must be as large and as wide-spread as we are—galactic in scope. We know now that they were wider-spread than we are. Intergalactic. They penetrated into our galaxy, riddled it, before we knew that theirs was inhabited or inhabitable. Right?”

      “To a hair, although I never thought of it in exactly that way before.”

      “None of us have—mental cowardice. And they have the advantage,” Kinnison continued, inexorably,” in knowing that our Prime Base is on Tellus; whereas, if Jarnevon was not in fact theirs, we have no idea whatever where it is. And another point. Was that fleet of theirs a planetary outfit?”

      “Well, Jarnevon was a big planet, and the Eich were a mighty warlike race.”

      “Quibbling a bit, aren’t you, chief?”

      “Uh-huh,”