"QX. That fact means that you do, right now, crawl into the deepest, most heavily thought–screened hole in Lyrane and stay there until I, personally, come and dig you out," he replied, grimly. "It means, Admiral Haynes, that I want Worsel and Tregonsee as fast as I can get them—not orders, of course, but very, very urgent requests. And I want vanBuskirk and his gang of Valerians, and Grand Fleet, with all the trimmings, within easy striking distance of Dunstan's Region as fast as you can possibly get them there. And I want…"
"Why all the excitement, Kim?" Haynes demanded. "You're 'way ahead of me, both of you. Give!"
"I don't know anything, either," Kinnison emphasized the verb very strongly. "However, I suspect a lot. Everything, in fact, grading downward from the Eich. I'd say Overlords, except that I don't see how…what do you think, Cris?"
"What I think is too utterly fantastic for words—my visualization of the Cosmic All calls for another Eich–Overlord alliance."
"Could be, I guess. That would…"
"But they were all destroyed, weren't they?" Haynes interrupted.
"Far from it." This from the nurse. "Would the destruction of Tellus do away with all mankind? I am beginning to think that the Eich are to Boskonia exactly what we are to Civilization."
"So am I," Kinnison agreed. "And, such being the case, I'm going to get in touch with Nadreck of Palain Seven—I think I know his pattern well enough to Lens him from here."
"Nadreck? Your new playfellow? Why?" Clarrissa asked, curiously.
"Because he's a frigid–blooded, poison–breathing, second–stage Gray Lensman," Kinnison explained. "As such he is much closer to the Eich, in every respect, than we are, and may very well have an angle that we haven't." And in a few minutes the Palanian Lensman became en rapport with the group.
"An interesting development, truly," his soft thought came in almost wistfully when the situation had been made clear to him. "I fear greatly that I cannot be of any use, but I am not doing anything of importance at the moment and will be very glad indeed to give you whatever slight assistance may be possible to one of my small powers. I come at speed to Lyrane II."
11: Alcon of Thrale
Kinnison had not underestimated the power and capacity of his as yet unknown opposition. Well it was for him and for his Patrol that he was learning to think; for, as has already been made clear, this phase of the conflict was not essentially one of physical combat. Material encounters did occur, it is true, but they were comparatively unimportant. Basically, fundamentally, it was brain against brain; the preliminary but nevertheless prodigious skirmishing of two minds—or, more accurately, two teams of minds—each trying, even while covering up its own tracks and traces, to get at and to annihilate the other.
Each had certain advantages.
Boskonia—although we know now that Boskone was by no means the prime mover in that dark culture which opposed Civilization so bitterly, nevertheless "Boskonia" it was and still is being called—for a long time had the initiative, forcing the Patrol to wage an almost ^purely defensive fight. Boskonia knew vastly more about Civilization than Civilization knew about Boskonia. The latter, almost completely unknown, had all the advantages of stealth and of surprise; her forces could and did operate from undeterminable points against precisely–plotted objectives. Boskonia had the hyper–spatial tube long before the Conference of Scientists solved its mysteries; and even after the Patrol could use it it could do Civilization no good unless and until something could be found at which to aim it.
Civilization, however, had the Lens. It had the backing of the Arisians; maddeningly incomplete and unsatisfactory though that backing seemed at times to be. It had a few entities, notably one Kimball Kinnison, who were learning to think really efficiently. Above all, it had a massed purpose, a loyalty, an esprit de corps back–boning a morale which the whip–driven ranks of autocracy could never match and which the whip–wielding drivers could not even dimly understand.
Kinnison, then, with all the powers of his own mind and the minds of his friends and co–workers, sought to place and to identify the real key mentality at the destruction of which the mighty Boskonian Empire must begin to fall apart; that mentality in turn was trying with its every resource to find and to destroy the intellect which, pure reason showed, was the one factor which had enabled Civilization to throw the fast–conquering hordes of Boskonia back into their own galaxy.
Now, from our point of vantage in time and space, we can study at leisure and in detail many things which Kimball Kinnison could only surmise and suspect and deduce. Thus, he knew definitely only the fact that the Boskonian organization did not collapse with the destruction of the planet Jarnevon.
We know now, however, all about the Thrallian solar system and about Alcon of Thrale, its unlamented Tyrant. The planet Thrale—planetographically speaking, Thrallis II—so much like Tellus that its natives, including the unspeakable Alcon, were human practically to the limit of classification; and about Onlo, or Thrallis IX, and its monstrous natives. We know now that the duties and the authorities of the Council of Boskone were taken over by Alcon of Thrale; we now know how, by reason of his absolute control over both the humanity of Thrale and the monstrosities of Onlo, he was able to carry on.
Unfortunately, like the Eich, the Onlonians simply cannot be described by or to man. This is, as is already more or less widely known, due to the fact that all such nonaqueous, sub–zero–blooded, non–oxygen–breathing peoples have of necessity a metabolic extension into the hyper dimension; a fact which makes even their threedimensional aspect subtly incomprehensible to any strictly three–dimensional mind.
Not all such races, it may be said here, belonged to Boskonia. Many essentially similar ones, such as the natives of Palain VII, adhered to our culture from the very first. Indeed, it has been argued that sexual equality is the most important criterion of that which we know as Civilization. But, since this is not a biological treatise, this point is merely mentioned, not discussed.
The Onlonians, then, while not precisely describable to man, were very similar to the Eich—as similar, say, as a Posenian and a Tellurian are to each other in the perception of a Palainian. That is to say practically identical; for to the unknown and incomprehensible senses of those frigid beings the fact that the Posenian possess four arms, eight hands, and no eyes at all, as compared with the Tellurian's simply paired members, constitutes a total difference so slight as to be negligible.
But to resume the thread of history, we are at liberty to know things that Kinnison did not. Specifically, we may observe and hear a conference which tireless research has reconstructed in toto. The place was upon chill, dark Onlo, in a searingly cold room whose normal condition of utter darkness was barely ameliorated by a dim blue glow. The time was just after Kinnison had left Lonabar for Lyrane II. The conferees were Alcon of Thrale and his Onlonian cabinet officers. The armor–clad Tyrant, in whose honor the feeble illumination was, lay at ease in a reclining chair; the pseudo–reptilian monstrosities were sitting or standing in some obscure and inexplicable fashion at a long, low bench of stone.
"The fact is," one of the Onlonians was radiating harshly, "that our minions in the other galaxy could not or would not or simply did not think. For years things went so smoothly that no one had to think. The Great Plan, so carefully worked out, gave every promise of complete success. It was inevitable, it seemed, that that entire galaxy would be brought under our domination, its Patrol destroyed, before any inkling of our purpose could be perceived by the weaklings of humanity.
"The Plan took cognizance of every known factor of any importance. When, however, an unknown, unforeseeable factor, the Lens of the Patrol, became of real importance, that Plan of course broke down. Instantly upon the recognition of an unconsidered factor the Plan should have been revised. All action should have ceased until that factor had been evaluated and neutralized. But no—no one of our commanders in that galaxy or handling its affairs ever thought of such a thing…"