First Lensman

by Edward E Smith

  The blast went on; the plate showed, instead of a view of the space-field, a blaze of blue-white light. The warship was inertialess, it is true; but so terrific were the forces released that incandescent gases, furiously driven, washed the dock and everything for hundreds of yards around it.

  The plate cleared. Through the lower, denser layers of atmosphere the Chicago bored in seconds; then, as the air grew thinner and thinner, she rushed upward faster and faster. The terrain below became concave…then convex. Being completely without inertia, the ship’s velocity was at every instant that at which the friction of the medium through which she blasted her way equaled precisely the force of her driving thrust.

  Wherefore, out in open space, the Earth a fast-shrinking tiny ball and Sol himself growing smaller, paler, and weaker at a startling rate, the Chicago’s speed attained an almost constant value; a value starkly impossible for the, human mind to grasp.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Rigel Four

  OR HOURS VIRGIL SAMMS SAT motionless, staring almost unseeing into his plate. It was not that the view was not worth seeing—the wonder of space, the ever-changing, constantly-shifting panorama of incredibly brilliant although dimensionless points of light, against that wondrous background of mist-besprinkled black velvet, is a thing that never fails to awe even the most seasoned observer—but he had a tremendous load on his mind. He had to solve an apparently insoluble problem. How…how… HOW could he do what he had to do?

  Finally, knowing that the time of landing was approaching, be got up, unfolded his fans, and swam lightly through the air of the cabin to a hand-line, along which he drew himself into the control room. He could have made the trip in that room, of course, if he had so chosen; but, knowing that officers of space do not really like to have strangers in that sanctum, he did not intrude until it was necessary.

  Captain Winfield was already strapped down at his master conning plate. Pilots, navigators, and computers worked busily at their respective tasks.

  “I was just going to call you, First Lensman.” Winfield waved a hand in the general direction of a chair near his own. “Take the Lieutenant-Captain’s station, please.” Then, after a few minutes: “Go inert, Mr. White.”

  “Attention, all personnel,” Lieutenant-Captain White spoke conversationally into a microphone. “Prepare for inert maneuvering, Class Three. Off.”

  A bank of tiny red lights upon a panel turned green practically as one. White cut the Bergenholm, whereupon Virgil Samms’ mass changed instantly from a weight of zero to one of five hundred and twenty five pounds—ships of war then had no space to waste upon such non-essentials as artificial gravity. Although he was braced for the change and cushioned against it, the Lensman’s breath whooshed! out sharply; but, being intensely interested in what was going on, he swallowed convulsively a couple of times, gasped a few deep breaths, and fought his way back up to normalcy.

  The Chief Pilot was now at work, with all the virtuoso’s skill of his rank and grade; one of the hall-marks of which is to make difficult tasks look easy. He played trills and runs and arpeggios—at times veritable glissades—upon keyboards and pedals, directing with micrometric precision the tremendous forces of the superdreadnaught to the task of matching the intrinsic velocity of New York Spaceport at the time of his departure to the I. V. of the surface of the planet so far below.

  Samms stared into his plate; first at the incredibly tiny apparent size of that incredibly hot sun, and then at the barren-looking world toward which they were dropping at such terrific speed.

  “It doesn’t seem possible…” he remarked, half to Winfield, half to himself, “that a sun could be that big and that hot. Rigel Four is almost two hundred times as far away from it as Earth is from Sol—something like eighteen billion miles—it doesn’t look much, if any, bigger than Venus does from Luna—yet this world is hotter than the Sahara Desert.”

  “Well, blue giants are both big and hot,” the captain replied, matter-of-factly, “and their radiation, being mostly invisible, is deadly stuff. And Rigel is about the biggest in this region. There are others a lot worse, though. Doradus S, for instance, would make Rigel, here, look like a tallow candle. I’m going out there, some of these days, just to take a look at it. But that’s enough of astronomical chit-chat—we’re down to twenty miles of altitude and we’ve got your city just about stopped.”

  The Chicago slowed gently to a halt; perched motionless upon softly hissing jets. Samms directed his visibeam downward and sent along it an exploring, questing thought. Since he had never met a Rigellian in person, he could not form the mental image or pattern necessary to become en rapport with any one individual of the race. He did know, however, the type of mind which must be possessed by the entity with whom he wished to talk, and he combed the Rigellian city until he found one. The rapport was so incomplete and imperfect as to amount almost to no contact at all, but he could, perhaps, make himself understood.

  “If you will excuse this possibly unpleasant and certainly unwarranted intrusion,” he thought, carefully and slowly, “I would like very much to discuss with you a matter which should become of paramount importance to all the intelligent peoples of all the planets in space.”

  “I welcome you, Tellurian.” Mind fused with mind at every one of uncountable millions of points and paths. This Rigellian professor of sociology, standing at his desk, was physically a monster…the oil-drum of a body, the four blocky legs, the multi-branchiate tentacular arms, that immobile dome of a head, the complete lack of eyes and of ears…nevertheless Samms’ mind fused with the monstrosity’s as smoothly, as effortlessly, and almost as completely as it had with his own daughter’s!

  And what a mind! The transcendent poise; the staggeringly tremendous range and scope—the untroubled and unshakeable calm; the sublime quietude; the vast and placid certainty; the ultimate stability, unknown and forever unknowable to any human or near-human race!

  “Dismiss all thought of intrusion, First Lensman Samms… I have heard of you human beings, of course, but have never considered seriously the possibility of meeting one of you mind to mind. Indeed, it was reported that none of our minds could make any except the barest and most unsatisfactory contact with any of yours they chanced to encounter. It is, I now perceive, the Lens which makes this full accord possible, and it is basically about the Lens that you are here?”

  “It is,” and Samms went on to cover in flashing thoughts his conception of what the Galactic Patrol should be and should become. That was easy enough; but when he tried to describe in detail the qualifications necessary for Lensmanship, he began to bog down. “Force, drive, scope, of course…range…power…but above all, an absolute integrity…an ultimate incorruptibility…” He could recognize such a mind after meeting it and studying it, but as to finding it… It might not be in any place of power or authority. His own, and Rod Kinnison’s, happened to be; but Costigan’s was not…and both Knobos and DalNalten had made inconspicuousness a fine art…

  “I see,” the native stated, when it became clear that Samms could say no more. “It is evident, of course, that I cannot qualify; nor do I know anyone personally who can. However…”

  “What?” Samms demanded. “I was sure, from the feel of your mind, that you…but with a mind of such depth and breadth, such tremendous scope and power, you must be incorruptible!”

  “I am,” came the dry rejoinder. “We all are. No Rigellian is, or ever will be or can be, what you think of as ‘corrupt’ or ‘corruptible’. Indeed, it is only by the narrowest, most intense concentration upon every line of your thought that I can translate your meaning into a concept possible for any of us even to understand.”

  “Then what… Oh, I see. I was starting at the wrong end. Naturally enough, I suppose, I looked first for the qualities rarest in my own race.”

  “Of course. Our minds have ample scope and range; and, perhaps, sufficient power. But those qualities which you refer to as ‘force’ and ‘drive’ are fully
as rare among us as absolute mental integrity is among you. What you know as ‘crime’ is unknown. We have no police, no government, no laws, no organized armed forces of any kind. We take, practically always, the line of least resistance. We live and let live, as your thought runs. We work together for the common good.”

  “Well… I don’t know what I expected to find here, but certainly not this…” If Samms had never before been completely thunderstruck, completely at a loss, he was then. “You don’t think, then, that there is any chance?”

  “I have been thinking, and there may be a chance…a slight one, but still a chance,” the Rigellian said, slowly. “For instance, that youth, so full of curiosity, who first visited your planet. Thousands of us have wondered, to ourselves and to each other, about the peculiar qualities of mind which compelled him and others to waste so much time, effort, and wealth upon a project so completely useless as exploration. Why, he had even to develop energies and engines theretofore unknown, and which can never be of any real use!”

  Samms was shaken by the calm finality with which the Rigellian dismissed all possibility of the usefulness of interstellar exploration, but stuck doggedly to his purpose.

  “However slight the chance, I must find and talk to this man. I suppose he is now out in deep space somewhere. Have you any idea where?”

  “He is now in his home city, accumulating funds and manufacturing fuel with which to continue his pointless activities. That city is named…that is, in your English you might call it… Suntown? Sunberg? No, it must be more specific… Rigelsville? Rigel City?”

  “Rigelston, I would translate it?” Samms hazarded.

  “Exactly—Rigelston.” The professor marked its location upon a globular mental map far more accurate and far more detailed than the globe which Captain Winfield and his lieutenant were then studying.

  “Thanks. Now, can you and will you get in touch with this explorer and ask him to call a meeting of his full crew and any others who might be interested in the project I have outlined?”

  “I can. I will. He and his kind are not quite sane, of course, as you know; but I do not believe that even they are so insane as to be willing to subject themselves to the environment of your vessel.”

  “They will not be asked to come here. The meeting will be held in Rigelston. If necessary, I shall insist that it be held there.”

  “You would? I perceive that you would. It is strange…yes, fantastic…you are quarrelsome, pugnacious, anti-social, vicious, small-bodied and small-brained; timid, nervous, and highly and senselessly excitable; unbalanced and unsane; as sheerly monstrous mentally as you are physically…” These outrageous thoughts were sent as casually and as impersonally as though the sender were discussing the weather. He paused, then went on: “And yet, to further such a completely visionary project, you are eager to subject yourself to conditions whose counterparts I could not force myself, under any circumstances whatever, to meet. It may be…it must be true that there is an extension of the principle of working together for the common good which my mind, for lack of pertinent data, has not been able to grasp. I am now en rapport with Dronvire the explorer.”

  “Ask him, please, not to identify himself to me. I do not want to go into that meeting with any preconceived ideas.”

  “A balanced thought,” the Rigellian approved. “Someone will be at the airport to point out to you the already desolated area in which the space-ship of the explorers makes its so-frightful landings; Dronvire will ask someone to meet you at the airport and bring you to the place of meeting.”

  The telepathic line snapped and Samms turned a white and sweating face to the Chicago’s captain.

  “God, what a strain! Don’t ever try telepathy unless you positively have to—especially not with such an outlandishly different race as these Rigellians are!”

  “Don’t worry; I won’t.” Winfield’s words were not at all sympathetic, but his tone was. “You looked as though somebody was beating your brains out with a spiked club. Where next, First Lensman?”

  Samms marked the location of Rigelston upon the vessel’s chart, then donned ear-plugs and a special, radiation-proof suit of armor, equipped with refrigerators and with extra-thick blocks of lead glass to protect the eyes.

  The airport, an extremely busy one well outside the city proper, was located easily enough, as was the spot upon which the Tellurian ship was to land. Lightly, slowly, she settled downward, her jets raving out against a gravity fully twice that of her native Earth. Those blasts, however, added little or nothing to the destruction already accomplished by the craft then lying there—a torpedo-shaped cruiser having perhaps one-twentieth of the Chicago’s mass and bulk.

  The superdreadnaught landed, sinking into the hard, dry ground to a depth of some ten or fifteen feet before she stopped. Samms, en rapport with the entity who was to be his escort, made a flashing survey of the mind so intimately in contact with his own. No use. This one was not and never could become Lensman material. He climbed heavily down the ladder. This double-normal gravity made the going a bit difficult, but he could stand that a lot better than some of the other things he was going to have to take. The Rigellian equivalent of an automobile was there, waiting for him, its door invitingly open.

  Samms had known—in general—what to expect. The two-wheeled chassis was more or less similar to that of his own Dillingham. The body was a narrow torpedo of steel, bluntly pointed at both ends, and without windows. Two features, however, were both unexpected and unpleasant—the hard, tough steel of which that body was forged was an inch and a half thick, instead of one-sixteenth; and even that extraordinarily armored body was dented and scarred and marred, especially about the fore and rear quarters, as deeply and as badly and as casually as are the fenders of an Earthly jalopy!

  The Lensman climbed, not easily or joyously, into that grimly forbidding black interior. Black? It was so black that the port-hole-like doorway seemed to admit no light at all. It was blacker than a witch’s cat in a coal cellar at midnight! Samms flinched; then, stiffening, thought at the driver.

  “My contact with you seems to have slipped. I’m afraid that I will have to cling to you rather more tightly than may be either polite or comfortable. Deprived of sight, and without your sense of perception, I am practically helpless.”

  “Come in, Lensman, by all means. I offered to maintain full engagement, but it seemed to me that you declined it; quite possibly the misunderstanding was due to our unfamiliarity with each others’ customary mode of thought. Relax, please, and come in…there! Better?”

  “Infinitely better. Thanks.”

  And it was. The darkness vanished; through the unexplainable perceptive sere of the Rigellian he could “see” everything—he had a practically perfect three-dimensional view of the entire circumambient sphere. He could see both the inside and the outside of the ground car he was in and of the immense space-ship in which he had come to Rigel IV. He could see the bearings and the wrist-pins of the internal-combustion engine of the car, the interior structure of the welds that held the steel plates together, the busy airport outside, and even deep into the ground. He could see and study in detail the deepest-buried, most heavily shielded parts of the atomic engines of the Chicago.

  But he was wasting time. He could also plainly see a deeply-cushioned chair, designed to fit a human body, welded to a stanchion and equipped with half a dozen padded restraining straps. He sat down quickly; strapped himself in.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  The door banged shut with a clangor which burst through space-suit and ear-plugs with all the violence of a nearby thunderclap. And that was merely the beginning. The engine started—an internal-combustion engine of well over a thousand horsepower, designed for maximum efficiency by engineers in whose lexicon there were no counterparts of any English words relating to noise, or even to sound. The car took off; with an acceleration which drove the Tellurian backward, deep into the cushions. The scream of tortured tire
s and the crescendo bellowing of the engine combined to form an uproar which, amplified by and reverberating within the resonant shell of metal, threatened to addle the very brain inside the Lensman’s skull.

  “You suffer!” the driver exclaimed, in high concern. “They cautioned me to start and stop gently, to drive slowly and carefully, to bump softly. They told me you are frail and fragile, a fact which I perceived for myself and which has caused me to drive with the utmost possible care and restraint. Is the fault mine? Have I been too rough?”

  “Not at all. It isn’t that. It’s the ungodly noise.” Then, realizing that the Rigellian could have no conception of his meaning, he continued quickly:

  “The vibrations in the atmosphere, from sixteen cycles per second up to about nine or ten thousand.” He explained what a second was. “My nervous system is very sensitive to those vibrations. But I expected them and shielded myself against them as adequately as I could. Nothing can be done about them. Go ahead.”

  “Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations? Atmospheric vibrations?” The driver marveled, and concentrated upon this entirely new concept while he—

  1. Swung around a steel-sheathed concrete pillar at a speed of at least sixty miles per hour, grazing it so closely that he removed one layer of protective coating from the metal.

  2. Braked so savagely to miss a wildly careening truck that the restraining straps almost cut Samms’ body, space-suit and all, into slices.

  3. Darted into a hole in the traffic so narrow that only tiny fractions of inches separated his hurtling Juggernaut from an enormous steel column on one side and another speeding vehicle on the other.

  4. Executed a double-right-angle reverse curve, thus missing by hair’s breadths two vehicles traveling in the opposite direction and one in his own.

  5. As a grand climax to this spectacular exhibition of insane driving, he plunged at full speed into a traffic artery which seemed so full already that it could not hold even one more car. But it could—just barely could. However, instead of near misses or grazing hits, this time there were bumps, dents—little ones, nothing at all, really, only an inch or so deep—and an utterly hellish concatenation and concentration of noise.