Second Stage Lensman

At the end of Gray Lensman we left Kim and Clarissa blissfully walking out and getting ready to get married. This novel literally opens with:

“Stop, youth!” the voice of Mentor the Arisian thundered silently, deep within the Lensman’s brain.

Well, apparently happy nuptuals are not going to be part of the program right now. Kinnison was about to make a huge mistake because the Eich were just another echelon within Boskone, but not the top dogs at all. And Mentor pushes Kinnison to think about what happened as not a victory but a setback, that the Patrol is even worse off now than it was before the events in Gray Lensman. The point that Kinnison soon realizes is that Boskone is at least as big and well organized as Civilization, i.e. the worlds of the Galactic Patrol, if not more so. As evidence is that they were operating in two galaxies long before the Patrol had any suspicion of that fact. Second, they have always had multiple lines of communication and multiple active arms. As a corollary Kinnison deduces that the enemy had observers and saw both the Negative Matter planetary object and the “nutcracker” of the two planet used to destroy the Eich, and that they will be quite capable of duplicating anything our side did. And can the Patrol defend against such an attack on Tellus? And soon the attack comes, but the Patrol was ready because Kinnison stayed on his job.

Now the title of this novel refers to a Lensman who has returned to Arisia for advanced training. We saw Kinnison do this in Galactic Patrol, and in it is revealed that Worsel has also done this. Now we learn that Tregonsee of Rigel IV has done so as well. All three of these beings are the most advanced of their race, and in fact they are three of the four races on which Arisia originally set up a breeding program. We have not yet met the representative of the fourth race, though his race has appeared in the series previously. We will meet him though in this novel.

Following the attack on Tellus which was defeated by the Patrol, Kinnison went back to his main job which was to find out who the real leaders of Boskone were and where they were located. And step one introduces the Matriarchy of Lyrane. This fascinating society is made up entirely of women, with a few vestigial and bestial males kept around for the purposes of breeding more women. In fact, they don’t consider themselves women or female, simply persons. And somehow they had gotten involved in Boskonian affairs, but very indirectly. They fanatically hate males, so Kinnison cannot go there himself, nor can he send any other male. What he really needs is a female Lensman, or Lenswoman, and there has never been such a thing in the entire history of the Patrol. Then he thinks of his fiancee, Clarissa MacDougal, and thinks she would be perfect for the job. But he can’t make that decision himself, so he checks with Mentor of Arisia, who agrees it would be wise. This got retconned when he wrote First Lensman and Virgilia Samms was turned down for a Lens, but told that someday in the future there would be a woman who would wear the Lens. And Clarissa MacDougal is a direct descendant of Virgilia Samms.

Then we meet the fourth Second Stage Lensman, Nadreck of Palain. He is from a race that lives in a frigid cold environment, making him in some ways similar to the Eich. And he explains to Kinnison that he was looking at a situation that might involve danger to himself, so he went to Mentor for more training. This initially shocks Kinnison since Lensmen always go in, no matter the danger. But he reflects that different races must have different values This is later echoed in First Lensman when Virgil Samms meets a Palainian on Pluto and finds their values very different from his, and similarly accepts that these differences might not be obstacles.

Kinnison then goes undercover as the jeweler Cartiff because of a hint to a Boskonian planet in the First Galaxy where he might pick up a further lead. But the only thing he gets is that Lyrane is important, and his Clarissa, now a Lensman,is working there with Matriarchs. Then the scene shifts to the bad guys who now are running Boskone, in the planetary system of Thrale. There we have one planet that is very Earthlike, with people are completely human. In Smith’s Universe having humans arise independently on various worlds is taken for granted. Also in the Thrale system is the planet Onlo which is again very frigid and inhabited by beings who live in sub-zero temperatures, do not have blood, and breathe poisonous gasses. And in this Universe the races seem to fall into either warm-blooded oxygen breathers on the one hand, or frigid, poison-breathing beings on the other. This contrasts with the Skylark Universe where it was oxygen breathers vs. chlorine breathers. Smith adds something now when he explains that the frigid poison-breathers must have a metabolic extension into the fourth dimension. And examples of both types of being are found on either side of the conflict. the Tyrant of Thrale is a human, as is Kinnison. And the Onlonians (and the Eich) are frigid poison-breathers, but then so is Nadreck of Palain.

While Kinnison and Nadreck are tracing communication lines to find the Boskonian leaders, the Patrol decides cover them by invading the Second Galaxy and creating a base of operations there. This is successful in both terms: the base on the planet Klovia is created, and Kinnison and Nadreck succeed in tracing the communications lines and discovering Onlo and Thrale. While Nadreck settles in on Onlo, Kinnison impersonates a Lieutenant in the armed forces of Thrale and starts to work his way up the ladder within the Tyrant of Thrale’s military organization. First he disposes of his Captain, and takes his place. Then his Major. From here he wangles a transfer to the personal staff of the Alcon, the tyrant of Thrale. In due course he kills Alcon and takes his place. So now Kimball Kinnison, Lensman of the Galactic Patrol is the leader of Boskonia. Or is he? There is Prime Minister Fossten who seems to be the power behind the throne. Although Kinnison does not know it, we know he is Gharlane of Eddore, the real leader of Boskonia, and part of the Inner Circle of Eddore. We have met him before, in the guise of Gray Roger, the supposed pirate, back in Triplanetary. We come to a climax when the fleet of Boskonia, developed and trained by Kinnison in his role of Tyrant of Thrale, heads to Klovia for the confrontation with the fleet of the Galactic Patrol. Both Kinnison and Fossten are on board the flagship of the Boskonian fleet when they finally come to one-on-one fighting, mostly mental. Kinnison comes out on top, but only because Mentor, and possibly other Arisians, are secretly helping him. They do it in secret because they want him to feel self-confident about doing it himself. One thing they have stressed previously in this series is that allowing an inferiority complex to develop within the Patrol would destroy its usefulness in the final showdown yet to come. So they constrain Gharlane’s appearance to that of an old Arisian, and create a cock-and-bull story about a long ago Arisian youth who weny insane and left Arisia. And they tell Kinnison that he had the ability to defeat this Arisian.

While Kinnison was doing this, Nadreck was working on Onlo, but in an entirely different fashion. He attempted to get all of the Onlonians to kill each other, but botched it in his own eyes by having to physically kill three of them himself. But with all of them now dead, the Patrol decided to take over the planet and staff it with beings from similar planets that were part of Civilization. And on Thrale, masses of Lensmen moved in and took over running the place thus preserving and gaining access to irreplaceable records there.

And last, but not least, we come to the romance between Kinnison and MacDougal, which was so brutally stopped at the beginning of this novel. But when Kinnison and MacDougal contact Mentor this time, he tells them he has been expecting them, and that their marriage is not only permitted, but necessary. Clarissa finds this phrasing somewhat sinister, but Kinnison brushes it off by saying that Mentor probably meant that his “Visualization of the Cosmic All” had the marriage occurring about now, so it was “necessary” to Mentor. But there is one more book to this series, and we will discover that Mentor did not use the term in a careless manner. As we have said, Kinnison and MacDougal are the penultimate stage of a breeding program put in place millennia ago, and it is time for them to start with the breeding. And we’ll see what that means in Children of the Lens.