"Lensman 08 - The Dragon Lensman - with David A Kyle (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

years before that, Tellus, also known as Earth, had been created in the time of the great
Coalescence. And billions of years before that event, our Milky Way galaxy, also known
as the First Galaxy, was inhospitable to life, almost barren of planets and virtually
deserted.

The life-spores of Man existed before all these things, incredibly far back for uncountable
eons. The ancestral source was the race of the Arisians from the beginning of Time,
Visualizers of the Cosmic All, future guardians of Civilization.

Fully as ancient, nearly equal in macrocosmic mind power, and as evil as the Arisians
were good, were the Eddorians of the Second Galaxy. Whereas the Arisians were of our
own space-time continuum, the Eddorians were not, coming on their wandering planet to
the Second Galaxy from a different, horribly alien plenum. They were dedicated to a
continuing search for more worlds to sate their lust for dominance. Their ambition was at
last to be glutted by the Coalescence. In that cataclysmic event their enslaved star island
passed, end to end, through our own galaxy. The stupendous interstellar forces which
were unleashed thus created billions of new worlds. The inevitable conflict between the
Arisians and the Eddorians, the prototype confrontation between Good and Evil, had
arrived. The struggle began for the lives and souls of the many races that were evolving.
As Civilization grew, the Elders of Arisia surreptitiously encouraged the new life forms to
resist the tyranny and to shape their independent ways toward perfection.

In the universal deceit which developed around the rise of the Eddorian-inspired
Boskonian outlaws, the greatest secret of all was kept by the Arisians. Their immortal
enemies, the Eddorians, were kept forever ignorant of their existence. The Arisians were
the covert and incognito patrons of those opposing the evil Eddorians; they were the real,
formidable counterforce in the eons-long contest with Boskonia and its masters.

Four widely-scattered planets with advanced life forms were the nucleus of the
resistance in the First Galaxy: Tellus, known as Earth or Terra, Velantia, Rigel Four, and
Palain Seven. Each, subtly encouraged by the Arisians, developed four dissimilar races,
but it was Tellus which became the focal point for the organized force against Boskone
and its puppet-masters. From Tellus came the formation of the Galactic Patrol, to be the
instrument of Eddorian destruction. Also from Tellus came the Kinnison and Samms fam-

ilies leading to their zenith, the union of their foremost leaders, Kimball Kinnison, the Gray
Lensman, and Clarrissa MacDougall, the Red Lensman.

Within generations of the First Lensman, Virgil Samms, many Lensmen had been
recruited into a special corps of Patrolmen. They were outstanding military leaders and
scientists, possessing extraordinary natural, non-mutated abilities. The Lensman name
came from the peculiar semi-living Lens each one wore, usually on a wrist, a unique gift
obtained from Mentor of Arisia. These incredible instruments, radiant crystal
complexities, were badges of honor, forgery-proof identification, and amplifiers of
psychic powers. They were awarded only to those chosen by Mentor itself, the
amorphous fusion-entity of the four intellectually greatest Arisian Molders of Civilization.
The psychical match to the quintessential individuality of the Lensman was exact-so
perfect, in fact, that it released latent parapsychic or psi powers, telepathy in particular.
Only the original recipient of the Lens could wear it-for anyone else it brought instant
death.