The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

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      Kinnison faced, then, this reconstructed potentate, saluted crisply, and snapped:—

      “Sir, Class Five reports to the Commandant.”

      “Take your post, sir.” The veteran saluted as punctiliously, and as he did so a semi-circular desk rose around him from the floor—a desk whose most striking feature was an intricate mechanism surrounding a splint-like form.

      “Number One, Kimball Kinnison!” von Hohendorff barked. “Front and center—March! . The oath, sir.”

      “Before the Omnipotent Witness I promise never to lower the standard of the Galactic Patrol,” Kinnison said reverently; and, baring his arm, thrust it into the hollow form.

      From a small container labelled “#1, Kimball Kinnison,” the Commandant shook out what was apparently an ornament—a lenticular jewel fabricated of hundreds of tiny, dead-white gems. Taking it up with a pair of insulated forceps he touched it momentarily to the bronzed skin of the arm before him, and at that fleeting contact a flash as of many-colored fire swept over the stones. Satisfied, he dropped the jewel into a recess provided for it in the mechanism, which at once burst into activity.

      The forearm was wrapped in thick insulation, molds and shields snapped into place, and there flared out an instantly-suppressed flash of brilliance intolerable. Then the molds fell apart, the insulation was removed, and there was revealed the LENS. Clasped to Kinnison’s brawny wrist by a bracelet of imperishable, almost unbreakable, metal in which it was imbedded it shone in all its lambent splendor—no longer a whitely inert piece of jewelry, but a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance which proclaimed to all observers in symbols of ever-changing flame that here was a Lensman of the GALACTIC PATROL.

      In similar fashion each man of the Class was invested with the symbol of his rank. Then the stern-faced Commandant touched a button and from the bare metal floor there arose deeply-upholstered chairs, one for each graduate.

      “Fall out!” he commanded, then smiled almost boyishly—the first intimation any of the Class ever had that the hard-boiled old tyrant could smile—and went on in a strangely altered voice:

      “Sit down, men, and smoke up. We have an hour in which to talk things over, and now I can tell you what it is all about. Each of you will find his favorite refreshment in the arm of his chair.

      “No, there’s no catch to it,” he continued in answer to amazedly doubtful stares, and lighted a huge black cigar of Venerian tobacco as he spoke. “You are Lensmen now. Of course you have yet to go through the formalities of Commencement, but they don’t count. Each of you really graduated when his Lens came to life.

      “We know your individual preferences, and each of you has his favorite weed, from Tilotson’s Pittsburgh stogies up to Snowden’s Alsakanite cigarettes—even though Alsakan is just about as far away from here as a planet can be and still lie within the galaxy.

      “We also know that you are all immune to the lure of noxious drugs. If you were not, you would not be here today. So smoke up and break up—ask any questions you care to, and I will try to answer them. Nothing is barred now—this room is shielded against any spy-ray or communicator beam operable upon any known frequency.”

      There was a brief and rather uncomfortable silence, then Kinnison suggested, diffidently:

      “Might it not be best, sir, to tell us all about it, from the ground up? I imagine that most of us are in too much of a daze to ask intelligent questions.”

      “Perhaps. While some of you undoubtedly have your suspicions, I will begin by telling you what is behind what you have been put through during the last five years. Feel perfectly free to break in with questions at any time. You know that every year one million eighteen-year-old boys of Earth are chosen as cadets by competitive examinations. You know that during the first year, before any of them see Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less than fifty thousand. You know that by Graduation Day there are only approximately one hundred left in the class. Now I am allowed to tell you that you graduates are those who have come with flying colors through the most brutally rigid, the most fiendishly thorough process of elimination that it has been possible to develop.

      “Every man who can be made to reveal any real weakness is dropped. Most of these are dismissed from the Patrol. There are many splendid men, however, who, for some reason not involving moral turpitude, are not quite what a Lensman must be. These men make up our organization, from grease-monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the rank of Lensman. This explains what you already know—that the Galactic Patrol is the finest body of intelligent beings yet to serve under one banner.

      “Of the million who started, you few are left. As must every being who has ever worn or who ever will wear the Lens, each of you has proven repeatedly, to the cold verge of death itself, that he is in every respect worthy to wear it. For instance, Kinnison here once had a highly adventurous interview with a lady of Aldebaran II and her friends. He did not know that we knew all about it, but we did.”

      Kinnison’s very ears burned scarlet, but the Commandant went imperturbably on:

      “So it was with Voelker and the hypnotist of Karalon; with LaForge and the bentlam-eaters; with Flewelling when the Ganymede-Venus thionite smugglers tried to bribe him with ten million in gold .”

      “Good Heavens, Commandant!” broke in one outraged youth. “Do you—did you—know everything that happened?”

      “Not quite everything, perhaps, but it is my business to know enough. No man who can be cracked has ever worn, or ever will wear, the Lens. And none of you need be ashamed, for you have passed every test. Those who did not pass them were those who were dropped.

      “Nor is it any disgrace to have been dismissed from the Cadet Corps. The million who started with you were the pick of the planet, yet we knew in advance that of that selected million scarcely one in ten thousand would measure up in every essential. Therefore it would be manifestly unfair to stigmatize the rest of them because they were not born with that extra something, that ultimate quality of fiber which does, and of necessity must, characterize the wearers of the Lens. For that reason not even the man himself knows why he was dismissed, and no one save those who wear the Lens knows why they were selected—and a Lensman does not talk.

      “It is necessary to consider the history and background of the Patrol in order to bring out clearly the necessity for such care in the selection of its personnel. You are all familiar with it, but probably very few of you have thought of it in that connection. The Patrol is of course an outgrowth of the old Planetary Police systems; and, until its development, law enforcement always lagged behind law violation. Thus, in the old days following the invention of the automobile, state troopers could not cross state lines. Then when the National Police finally took charge, they could not follow the rocket-equipped criminals across the national boundaries.

      “Still later, when interplanetary flight became a commonplace, the Planetary Police were at the same old disadvantage. They had no authority off their own worlds, while the public enemies flitted unhampered from planet to planet. And finally, with the invention of the inertialess drive and the consequent traffic between the worlds of many solar systems, crime became so rampant, so utterly uncontrollable, that it threatened the very foundations of Civilization. A man could perpetrate any crime imaginable without fear of consequences, for in an hour he could be so far away from the scene as to be completely beyond the reach of the law.

      “And helping powerfully toward utter chaos were the new vices which were spreading from world to world; among others the taking СКАЧАТЬ