"Smith, E E 'Doc' - Lensman 05 - Second Stage Lenman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

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
rapid recovery from the ravages of atomic warfare and very rapid advances in both
sociology and technology.
Virgil Samms, the auburn-haired, tawny-eyed Crusader who was to become the
first wearer of Arisia's Lens, took advantage of the demoralization to institute an
effective planetary police force. Then, with the advent of interplanetary flight, he was
instrumental in forming the Interplanetary League. As head of the Triplanetary Service
he took a leading part in the brief war with the Nevians, a race of highly intelligent
amphibians who used allotropic iron as a source of atomic power.1
Gharlane of Eddore came back to the Solarian System as Gray Roger, the
enigmatic and practically immortal scourge of space, only to find his every move so
completely blocked that he could not kill two ordinary human beings, Conway Costigan
and Clio Marsden. Nor were these two, in spite of some belief to the contrary, anything
but what they seemed. Neither of them ever knew that they were being protected.
Gharlane's blocker was in fact an Arisian fusion; the four-ply mentality which was to
become known to every Lensman of the Patrol as Mentor of Arisia.
The inertialess drive, which made an interstellar trip a matter of minutes instead
of lifetimes, brought with it such an increase in crime, and made detection of criminals
so difficult, that law enforcement broke down almost completely. As Samms himself
expressed it:
"How can legal processes work efficiently-work at all, for that matter-when a
man can commit a murder or a pirate can loot a space-ship and be a hundred parsecs
away before the crime is even discovered? How can a Tellurian John Law find a
criminal on a strange world that knows nothing of our Patrol, with a completely alien


1For a complete treatment of matters up to this point, including the discovery of the
inertialess-"free"-space-drive, the Nevian War, and the mind-to-mind meeting of Mentor of Arisia and
Gharlane of Eddore, see Triplanetary, Fantasy Press, Reading, Pa.