Kimball Kinnison, while not, strictly speaking, a mutant, was the penultimate product of a prodigiously long line of selective, controlled breeding. So was Clarrissa MacDougall. Just what course the science of Arisia took in making those two what they are I can deduce, but I do not as yet actually know. Nor, for the purpose of this record, does it matter. Port Admiral Haynes and Surgeon General Lacy thought that they brought them together and promoted their romance. Let them think so—as agents, they did. Whatever the method employed, the result was that the genes of those two uniquely complementary penultimates were precisely those necessary to produce the first, and at present the only Third-Stage Lensmen.

I was born upon Klovia, as were, three or four Galactic-Standard years later, my four sisters—two pairs of twins. I had little babyhood, no childhood. Fathered and mothered by Second-Stage Lensmen, accustomed from infancy to wide-open two-ways with such beings as Worsel of Velantia, Tregonsee of Rigel IV, and Nadreck of Palain VII, it would seem obvious that we did not go to school. We were not like other children of our age; but before I realized that it was anything unusual for a baby who could scarcely walk to be computing highly perturbed asteroidal orbits as "mental arithmetic," I knew that we would have to keep our abnormalities to ourselves, insofar as the bulk of mankind and of Civilization was concerned.

I traveled much; sometimes with my father or mother or both, sometimes alone. At least once each year I went to Arisia for treatment. I took the last two years of Lensmanship, for physical reasons only, at Wentworth Hall upon Tellus instead of upon my native Klovia—because upon Tellus the name Kinnison is not at all uncommon, while upon Klovia the fact that "Kit" Kinnison was the son of the Co-ordinator could not have been concealed.

I graduated, and with my formal enlensment this record properly begins. Much has been told elsewhere, notably in Smith's "History of Civilization"; but all such works are, and of necessity must be, pitifully incomplete.

I have recorded this material as impersonally as possible, realizing fully that my sisters and I did only the work for which we were specifically developed and trained; even as you who read this will do that for which you shall have been developed and are to be trained.

Respectfully submitted, Christopher Kinnison, L3, Klovia.

I.

Galactic Co-ordinator Kimball 

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