"Smith, E E Doc - Lensman 4 - Gray Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

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 and unobtrusively lifting them up, Eddore
callously knocking them down as soon as it became evident that they were not what Eddore
wanted. 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
Captain Phryges had been sent to North Maya, and lived. Patroclus, the red-headed gladiator,
begot a red-headed 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. That incident was important,
however, because immediately after it Gharlane of Eddore made what proved to be an error.
Knowing nothing of the Arisians, or of what they had done to raise the level of intelligence of
mankind, he assumed that the then completely ruined Earth 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; time during which the men
of Earth, aided almost openly by the Arisians, made a phenomenally rapid recovery from the
ravages of atomic warfare and fantastically 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 general demoralization to institute a really
effective planetary police force. Then, with the advent of inter-planetary 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.
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 blockedЧblocked so
savagely and so completely that he could not even 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; but Gharlane's
blocker was in fact an Arisian fusionЧthe four-ply mentality which was to become known to
every Lensman of the Galactic 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 efficientlyЧwork at all, for that matterЧwhen 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 whatever of our Patrol, with a completely alien languageЧmaybe no language at
allЧwhen it takes months even to find out who and whereЧif anyЧthe native police officers
are?"Also, there was the apparently insuperable difficulty of the identification of authorized
personnel. Triplanetary's best scientists had done their best in the way of a non-counter-feitable
badgeЧthe historic Golden Meteor, which upon touch impressed upon the toucher's
consciousness an unpronounceable, unspellable symbolЧbut that best was not enough. What
physical science could devise and synthesize, physical science could analyze and duplicate; and
that analysis and duplication had caused trouble indeed.