Galactic Patrol

GALACTIC PATROL

Fist serialized in "ASTOUNDING," Sep '37 - Feb '38; First book, Fantasy Press hardbound, 1950;

BY E. E. “DOC” SMITH

Graduation

Dominating twice a hundred square miles of campus, parade-ground, Airport, and spaceport, a ninety-story edifice of chromium and glass sparkled dazzlingly in the bright sunlight of a June morning. This monumental pile was Wentworth Hall, in which the Tellurian candidates for the Lens of the Galactic Patrol live and move and have their being. One wing of its topmost floor seethed with tense activity, for that wing was the habitat of the lordly FiveYear Men, this was Graduation Day, and in a few minutes Class Five was due to report in Room A.

Room A, the private office of the Commandant himself, the dreadful lair into which an undergraduate was summoned only to disappear from the Hall and from the Cadet Corps, the portentous chamber into which each year the handful of graduates marched and from which they emerged, each man in some subtle fashion changed.

In their cubicles of steel the graduates scanned each other narrowly, making sure that no wrinkle or speck of dust marred the space-black and silver perfection of the dress uniform of the Patrol, that not even the tiniest spot of tarnish or dullness violated the glittering golden meteors upon their collars or the resplendently polished ray-pistols and other equipment at their belts. The microscopic mutual inspection over, the kit-boxes were snapped shut and racked, and the embryonic Lensmen made their way out into the assembly hall.

In the wardroom Kimball Kinnison, Captain of the Class by virtue of graduating at its head, and his three lieutenants, Clifford Maitland, Raoul LaForge, and Widel Holmberg, had inspected each other minutely and were now simply awaiting, in ever-increasing tension, the zero minute.

"Now, fellows, remember that drop!" the young Captain jerked out. "We're dropping the shaft free, at higher velocity and in tighter formation than any class ever tried before. If anybody hashes the formation – our last show and with the whole Corps looking on . . . . ."

"Don't worry about the drop, Kim," advised Maitland. "All three platoons will take that like clockwork. What's got me all of a dither is what is really going to happen in Room A."

"Uh-huh!”
exclaimed LaForge and Holmberg as one, and

"You can play that across the board for the whole Class," Kinnison agreed. "Well, we'll soon know – it's time to get going," and the four officers stepped out into the assembly hall, the Class springing to attention at their approach.

Kinnison, now all brisk Captain, stared along the mathematically exact lines and snapped.

"Report!"

"Class Five present in full, sir!” The sergeant-major touched a stud at his belt and all vast Wentworth Hall fairly trembled under the impact of an all-pervading, lilting, throbbing melody as the world's finest military band crashed into "Our Patrol."

"Squads left-March !” Although no possible human voice could have been heard in that gale of soul-stirring sound and although Kinnison's lips scarcely moved, his command was carried to the very bones of those for whom it was intended – and to no one else-by the tight-beam ultra-communicators strapped upon their chests. "Close formation -

forward - March !"

In perfect alignment and cadence the little column marched down the hall. In their path yawned the shaft – a vertical pit some twenty feet square extending from main floor to roof of the Hall, more than a thousand sheer feet of unobstructed air, cleared now of all traffic by flaring red lights. Five left heels clicked sharply, simultaneously upon the lip of the stupendous abyss. Five right legs swept out into emptiness. Five right hands snapped to belts and five bodies, rigidly erect, arrowed downward at such an appalling velocity that to unpractised vision they simply vanished.

Six-tenths of a second later, precisely upon a beat of the stirring march, those ten heels struck the main floor of Wentworth Hall, but not with a click. Dropping with a velocity of almost two thousand feet per second though they were at the instant of impact, yet those five husky bodies came from full speed to an instantaneous, shockless, effortless halt at contact, for the drop had been made under complete neutralization of inertia – “free," in space parlance. Inertia restored, the march was resumed -- or rather continued -- in perfect time with the band. Five left feet swung out, and as the right toes left the floor the second rank, with only bare inches to spare, plunged down into the space its predecessor had occupied a moment before.

Rank after rank landed and marched away with machinelike precision. The dread door of Room A opened automatically at the approach of the cadets and closed behind them.

"Column right -- March!" Kinnison commanded inaudibly, and the Class obeyed in clockwork perfection. "Column left -- March! Squad right -- March! Company -- Halt!

Salute!”

In company front, in a huge, square room devoid of furniture, the Class faced the Ogre -- Lieutenant-Marshal Fritz von Hohendorff, Commandant of Cadets. Martinet, tyrant, dictator -- he was known throughout the System as the embodiment of soullessness, and, insofar as he had ever been known to show emotion or feeling before any undergraduate, he seemed to glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly rigid disciplinarian that Earth had ever known. His thick, white hair was roached fiercely upward into a stiff pompadour. His left eye was artificial and his face bore dozens of tiny, threadlike scars, for not even the marvelous plastic surgery of that age could repair entirely the ravages of space-combat. Also, his right leg and left arm, although practically normal to all outward seeming, were in reality largely products of science and art instead of nature.

Kinnison faced, then, this reconstructed potentate, saluted crisply, and snapped.

"Sir, Class Five reports to the Commandant."

"Take your post, sir." The veteran saluted as punctiliously, and as he did so a semi-circular desk rose around him from the floor -- a desk whose most striking feature was an intricate mechanism surrounding a splint-like form.

"Number One, Kimball Kinnison !" von Hohendorff barked. "Front and center --

March ! . . . . . The oath, sir."

"Before the Omnipotent Witness I promise never to lower the standard of the Galactic Patrol," Kinnison said reverently, and, baring his arm, thrust it into the hollow form.

From a small container labelled "#1, Kimball Kinnison," the Commandant shook out what was apparently an ornament -- a lenticular jewel fabricated of hundreds of tiny, dead-white gems. Taking it up with a pair of insulated forceps he touched it momentarily to the bronzed skin of the arm before him, and at that fleeting contact a flash as of many-colored fire swept over the stones. Satisfied, he dropped the jewel into a recess provided for it in the mechanism, which at once burst into activity.

The forearm was wrapped in thick insulation, molds and shields snapped into place, and there flared out an instantly-suppressed flash of brilliance intolerable. Then the molds fell apart, the insulation was removed, and there was revealed the LENS. Clasped to Kinnison's brawny wrist by a bracelet of imperishable, almost unbreakable, metal in which it was imbedded it shone in all its lambent splendor – no longer a whitely inert piece of jewelry, but a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance which proclaimed to all observers in symbols of ever-changing flame that here was a Lensman of the GALACTIC PATROL.

In similar fashion each man of the Class was invested with the symbol of his rank.

Then the stern-faced Commandant touched a button and from the bare metal floor there arose deeply-upholstered chairs, one for each graduate.

"Fall out," he commanded, then smiled almost boyishly -- the first intimation any of the Class ever had that the hard-boiled old tyrant could smile -- and went on in a strangely altered voice.

"Sit down men, and smoke up. We have an hour in which to talk things over, and now I can tell you what it is all about. Each of you will find his favorite refreshment in the arm of his chair.

"No, there's no catch to it," he continued in answer to amazedly doubtful stares, and lighted a huge black cigar of Venerian tobacco as he spoke. "You are Lensmen now.

Of course you have yet to go through the formalities of Commencement, but they don't count. Each of you really graduated when his Lens came to life.

"We know your individual preferences, and each of you has his favorite weed, from Tilotson' s Pittsburgh stogies up to Snowden's Alsakanite cigarettes -- even though Alsakan is just about as far away from here as a planet can be and still lie within the galaxy.

"We also know that you are all immune to the lure of noxious drugs. If you were not, you would not be here today. So smoke up and break up -- ask any questions you care to, and I will try to answer them. Nothing is barred now this room is shielded against any spy-ray or communicator beam operable upon any known frequency."

There war a brief and rather uncomfortable silence, then Kinnison suggested, diffidently.

"Might it not be best, sir, to tell us all about it, from the ground up? I imagine that most of us are in too much of a daze to ask intelligent questions."

“Perhaps. While some of you undoubtedly have your suspicions, I will begin by telling you what is behind what you have been put through during the last five, yearn. Feel perfectly free to break in with questions at any time. You know that every year one million eighteen-year-old boys of Earth are chosen as cadets by competitive examinations. You know that during the first year, before any of them see Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less than fifty thousand. You know that by Graduation Day there are only approximately one hundred left in the class. Now I am allowed to tell you that you graduates are those
who
have come with flying colors through the most brutally rigid, the moat fiendishly thorough process of elimination that it has been possible to develop.

"Every than who can be made to reveal any real weakness is dropped. Most of these are dismissed from the Patrol. There are many splendid men, however, who, for some reason not involving moral turpitude, are not quite what a Lensman must be. These men make up our organization, from grease-monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the rank of Lensman. This explains what you already know -- that the Galactic Patrol is the finest body of intelligent beings yet to serve under one banner.

"Of the million
who
started, you few are left. As must every being who has ever worn or
who
ever will wear the Lens, each of you has proven repeatedly, to the cold verge of death itself, that he is in every respect worthy to wear it. For instance, Kinnison here once had a highly adventurous interview with a lady of Aldebaran II and her friends.

He did not know that we knew all about it, but we did

Kinnison's very ears burned scarlet, but the Commandant went imperturbably on.

"So it was with Voelker and the hypnotist of Karalon, with LaForge and the bentlam-eaters, with Flewelling when the Ganymede-Venus thionite smugglers tried to bribe him with ten million in gold . . . . .

"Good Heavens, Commandant!" broke in one outraged youth. "Do you -- did you --

know everything that happened?"

"Not quite everything, perhaps, but it is my business to know enough. No man who can be cracked has ever worn, or ever will wear, the . Lens.. And none of you need be ashamed, for you have passed every test. Those who did not pass them were those who were dropped.

"Nor is it any disgrace to have been dismissed from the Cadet Corps. The million who started with you were the pick of the planet, yet we knew in advance that of that selected million scarcely one in ten thousand would measure up in every essential.

Therefore it would be manifestly unfair to stigmatize the rest of them because they were not born with that extra something, that ultimate quality of fiber which does, and of necessity must, characterize the wearers of the Lens. For that reason not even the man himself knows why he was dismissed, and no one save those who wear the Lens knows why they were selected -- and a Lensman does not talk.