SECOND STAGE LENSMEN By E. E. Smith, Ph.D. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November, December 1941, January, February 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] HISTORICAL Law enforcement lagged behind crime because the police were limited in their spheres of action, while criminals were not. Therefore, when Bergenholm invented the inertialess drive and commerce throughout the Galaxy became commonplace, crime became so rampant as to threaten the very existence of Civilization. Thus came into being the Galactic Patrol, an organization whose highest members are called "Lensmen." Each is identified by wearing the Lens, a pseudoliving telepathic jewel matched to the ego of its wearer by those master philosophers, the Arisians. The Lens cannot be either imitated or counterfeited, since it glows with color when worn by its owner, and since it kills any other who attempts to wear it. Of each million selected candidates for the Lens all except about a hundred fail to pass the grueling tests employed to weed out the unfit. Kimball Kinnison graduated No. 1 in his class and was put in command of the spaceship Brittania—a war vessel of a new type, using explosives, even though such weapons had been obsolete for centuries. The "pirates"—the Boskonian Conflict was just beginning, so that no one yet suspected that the Patrol faced anything worse than highly organized piracy—were gaining the upper hand because of a new and apparently almost unlimited source of power. Kinnison was instructed to capture one of the new-type pirate ships, in order to learn the secret of that power. He found and defeated a Boskonian warship. Peter VanBuskirk led the storming party of Valerians—men of human type, but of extraordinary size, strength and agility because of the enormous gravitational force of their home planet—in wiping out those of the pirate crew not killed in the battle between the two ships. The scientists of the expedition secured the information desired. It could not be transmitted to Prime Base, however, because the pirates blanketed all channels of communication. Boskonian warships were gathering, and the crippled Brittania could neither run nor fight. Therefore each man was given a spool of tape bearing the data and all the Patrolmen took to the lifeboats.
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