"E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 5 - Second Stage Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

would
require several long Arisian lifetimes for its building.
Nor would that building be easy. The Eddorians must be kept in ignorance,
both
of Arisia and of the proposed generator, until too late to take effective
counter-
measures. Also, no entity below the third level of intelligence could ever be
allowed to
learn the truth, for that knowledge would set up an inferiority complex that
would rob the
generator of its ability to do the work.
On the four most promising planets of the First Galaxy тАФour Earth or Sol
Three,
Velantia, Rigel Four, and Palain SevenтАФbreeding programs, to develop the highest
mentality of which each race was capable, were begun as soon as intelligent life
appeared.
On our Earth there were only two blood lines, since humanity has only two
sexes.
One was a straight male line of descent, and was always named Kinnison or its
equivalent. Civilizations rose and fell; Arisia surreptitiously lifting them up,
Eddore
callously knocking them down. Pestilences raged, and wars, and famines, and
holocausts and disasters that decimated entire populations again and again; but
the
direct male line of descent of the Kinnisons was never broken.
The other line, sometimes male and sometimes female, which was to culminate
in the female penultimate of the Arisian program, was equally persistent and was
characterized throughout its prodigious length by a peculiarly spectacular shade
of red-
bronze-auburn hair and equally striking gold-flecked, tawny eyes. Atlantis fell,
but the
red-headed, yellow-eyed child of red-haired Captain Phryges had been sent to
North
Maya, and lived. Patroclus, the red-headed gladiator, begot a red-haired
daughter
before he was cut down. And so it went.
World Wars One, Two, and Three, occupying as they did only a few moments of
Arisian-Eddorian time, formed merely one incident in the eons-long game.
Immediately
after that incident, Gharlane of Eddore made what proved to be an error. Knowing
nothing of the Arisians, he assumed that the then completely ruined Tellus would
not
require his personal attention again for many hundreds of Tellurian years, and
went
elsewhere; to Rigel Four, to Palain Seven, and to Velantia Two, or Delgon, where
he
found that his creatures, the Overlords, were not progressing satisfactorily. He
spent
quite a little time there; during which the men of Earth, aided by the Arisians,
made a