Children of the Lens

As we have discussed the whole point of the Arisian program was to breed new beings capable of defeating the Eddorians, and they set up such programs on four planets inhabited by very different races: Earth, Velantia, Rigel and Palain. They did not know when they started which race would take the ultimate step, but by the time of the events in this series they had settled on the humans of Earth. The penultimate stage was reached when Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougal had arrived on the scene. They represented the end point of two lines of people that had persisted for millennia, but which never mixed. This was made explicit in the prequels that Smith wrote later, Triplanetary and First Lensman, and to ensure no mixing they made the two lines psychologically incompatible until the end stage was reached. The Arisians had done something similar on Velantia, Rigel, and Palain, but when they decided on the humans the other lines were abandoned. Worsel of Velantia, Tregonsee of Rigel, and Nadreck of Palain would have the penultimate “males” of their species, but they never met their counterparts and never as far as we know had any offspring, or at least none are recorded in the books.

And Kimball and Clarissa have in fact produced five offspring: A young man named Christopher, and two sets of non-identical twin girls. The first set of twins are named Kathryn and Karen, pulling in the initial “K” from their father, and the second set named Camilla and Constance, with the initial “C” from their mother. All five are in essence Third Stage Lensmen, though only Christopher has undergone formal training. But all five have depths to their minds that no one outside of the five, including their parents, will ever know. For instance, in an early scene Kimball and Clarissa are having a conversation and think they are in a room thought-screened against their daughters, but they are mistaken since no thought-screen could stop the girls.

Christopher has been going to Arisia regularly for advanced training, but decided to go to the Academy on Terra for the last two years of the Patrol training, not for the any mental training, but purely for physical training. And he is due to graduate. And just as this happens a crisis is developing. Mysterious outbreaks of “disaffections, psychoses, mass hysterias, hallucinations; pointing toward a Civilization-wide epidemic of revolutions and uprisings for which there seems to be no basis or justification whatever.” Kimball couldn’t crack it, not could the other three Second Stage Lensmen. And by Patrol tradition, when that happens it gets assigned to the top graduate from the academy, which of course will be Christopher Kinnison. And what Kimball has reasoned out is that this means Christopher will have to go after the real Boskone, which Kimball never could. What he does not know (and never will know) is that when he defeated the being known as Prime Minister Fossten that was actually Gharlane of Eddore. And it was actually Mentor who defeated Gharlane, and then confined his form of flesh to look like a renegade Arisian. Kimball must never know this because it would set up an inferiority complex that would ruin the Arisian plans. Christopher, being a Third Stage Lensman can handle the truth. And while Christopher will indeed be key in going after the real Boskone, i.e. Eddore, he won’t be alone. Kimball says all the other Lensmen, particularly the Second Stage Lensmen will be helping. But what he does not yet understand is that the four girls have an important part to play in this as well. It is important that there are four of them, because each one will shadow one of the Second Stage Lensmen, both to protect them and guide them in various ways.

And in fact each of the four girls matches up well with one of the Second Stage Lensmen, and this is no accident. Each of the four Lensmen comes from a different race and has different strengths and weaknesses, and I think Smith was making the point that all of these characteristics and capabilities are important to the final product. And in the climax of the novel when the four girls link up into something more than human we see this reflected and and see the aim of the Arisian program. And Smith has each of the girls match up temperamentally with one of the Second Stage Lensmen. And another factor Smith brings in is that none of them is interested in any of the men they meet. It is not that they are asexual or homosexual in any way, it is simply that no man can match up with them. But then Smith will add “except one”, and that is clearly a reference to their brother Christopher. Hmm…this is getting interesting.

Then there is the idea that the 5 children need to “Grow up”. This is a concept also used in the stand-alone novel Galaxy Primes, and it comes down to the idea that people with unusual mental powers tend to go through life on cruise control because everything comes easily to them. But if they encounter something they can’t easily (if at all) handle, that can force them into humility as the first step in becoming truly mature. In various ways all five of the children have such an experience, and it shakes them. And then, each one individually, they return to Arisia for further development and training. They do receive this training, but this is the end of that road. The Arisians make it clear that the five children are beyond any Arisian in ability and capability, and that any further training by Arisians would only stunt their growth, sort of like putting new wine in old wine skins. They need to find out for themselves what their full abilities are. This has been implicit in the series all along. If the Arisians could have defeated the Eddorians unaided they would have done so. But they could not, so they had to adopt a course of action to produce a successor race with even greater ability than the Arisians. They say that what they did with their breeding program was to accelerate a process that would have occurred naturally over millions of years. So the children are not freaks, they are just ahead of where they would be without the Arisian program.

Also in this novel Eddore and the Eddorians appear on stage in a way they haven’t previously. Gharlane of Eddore was the pirate Grey Roger that we saw in Triplanetary. And he was Prime Minister Fossten in Second Stage Lensman. But he was the only Eddorian we saw. We don’t see a lot more now, but Eddorians go to a conference with their subordinates on the planet Ploor, and also discuss plans to demoralize the Patrol by killing Kinnison, although there is some disagreement on this plan, and in the end they decide to just push him into another universe as far from this one as possible. Kinnison is the most public and recognizable person in the Patrol, the “rock star” if you will, but I question if his removal or death would protect Eddore. They do not know about the abilities of the five children, and in the cold calculus of the plan Kinnison is no longer necessary; his genes have gone into his children, and that was the necessary contribution he made.

After all of this we come to the action. The first engagement comes when the Boskonians attack Arisia. They send their fleets through hyperspacial tubes, which is now the preferred way of attacking since it happens so fast that the attackee doesn’t much time to prepare a counter. But of course the Patrol, with Second Stage Lensmen (there are now five of them since Clarissa got the advanced training), the five children, and all of the Arisians together are able to outmaneuver the Boskonian fleets. The Arisians make a point of saying that the Eddorians tend to rely on physical force, which may be their weakness. And it is clear that no Eddorians were part of that Boskonian fleet. The fleet would have done much better if they were there, but the Eddorian way is to give orders to subordinates on what is to be done.

The second engagement is the destruction of Ploor. The Ploorans were just one step below the Eddorians on the Boskonian organization chart, and very capable. When the Grand Fleet arrives and takes stock, they see that Ploor is defended at least as well as Prime Base on Tellus. And that means that the super weapons used previously would not work. In the arms race, Ploor is at least as far along as the Patrol in most respects. But the Patrol has come up with yet another super weapon, planets that come from a space where inert matter travels faster than the speed of light. When such a planet is brought into our space and turned inert, something big happens. It even turns Ploor’s star into a supernova. But it is noted by the Patrol that the defenses of Ploor were operating much more smoothly and efficiently than any previous Boskonian defense. What they did not know was the Eddorians had taken over the defense of Ploor.

Following this, Kinnison goes into the trap laid for him that pushes him into a remote universe. He, and and everyone around him, knows it is a trap but he goes in anyway.

Then the destruction of Eddore takes place. All Lensmen throughout the two galaxies are told to link their minds with Mentor, who then feeds all of their energy to the five children, who have joined into a single brain called the Unit. And with all of that energy and the control that the Unit can bring to bear, the Eddorians are completely wiped out. And note that Kinnison missed this climactic battle totally, thus proving my previous point. And with the Eddorians all gone, the Arisians announce that they are passing on to the next plane of existence, and that from now on the five children are to be the “Guardians of Civilization”.

Robert A Heinlein, in his book Expanded Universe, has an article called Larger Then Life: A Tribute to E.E. “Doc” Smith, and in it he says:

“The Lensman [series] was left unfinished. There was to have been at least a seventh volume. As always, Doc had worked it out in great detail, but never (so far as I know) wrote it down because it was unpublishable then. But he told me the ending orally and in private. I shan’t repeat it, it is not my story. Possibly somewhere there is a manuscript, I hope so! All I will say is that the ending develops by inescapable logic from clues in Children of the Lens.“

So while Heinlein doesn’t say what this would have entailed, I am convinced that part of it is that the four girls would have to mate with their brother. The clues are in the text of Children of the Lens, and you can see it would have been unpublishable at that time. I have no idea what other things might have gone into the seventh novel. But at the end of Children of the Lens it is implied that a new crisis has arisen, and that the “children” (now surely adults in every sense of the term) will have to pass on the Guardianship to a new race.