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Wheel!
    “Jeepers!” he said feelingly. “Goshtimighty!”
    “It’s all of that,” the Starboard Admiral agreed. “Now go put on your Grays, take the Dentless. and get the hell out of here!”
    “Yes, sir!” And Ginnison was gone.
    He went to his quarters and took off his black-and-silver uniform. Then he proudly donned the starkly utilitarian gray leather uniform which was the garb of the Unattached Lensman. And as he did so, he made that curious gesture known as Gray Seal. No entity has ever donned or ever will don that Gray uniform without making that gesture. It is the only way you can get the zipper closed.

    In his office, solidly sealed against both thought and spy-ray beams, the Starboard Admiral sat and stared at the glowing Lens on his wrist, the Lens which was, and is, the symbol of the rank and power of every Lensman of the Galactic Patrol.
    But it is far more than merely a symbol.
    It is a lenticular structure of hundreds of thousands of tiny crystalloids, and each is built and tuned to match the ego of one individual entity. It is not, strictly speaking, alive, but its pseudolife is such that when it is in circuit with the living entity to whom it is synchronized, it gives off a strong, changing, characteristically polychromatic light. It is a telepathic communicator of astounding power and range, and kills any being besides its owner who attempts to wear it.
    Thus, it is both pretty and useful.
    Manufactured and issued by the mysterious beings of dread and dreaded Arisia, it cannot be counterfeited, and is given only to those entities of the highest honor, integrity, honesty, and intelligence. That knowledge made the Starboard Admiral, as, indeed, it did all Lensmen, feel smug.

    The mighty Dentless. from needle prow to flaring jets, was armed and armored, screened and shielded as was no other ship of her class and rating. Under the almost inconceivable thrust of her mighty driving jets, she drilled a hole through the void at her cruising velocity of a hundred parsecs per hour.
    Not in the inert state could she so have done, for no body with inertial mass can travel faster than the velocity of light, which, in the vast reaches of the galaxy, is the veriest crawl.
    But her Bergenholm, that intricate machine which renders a spaceship inertialess, or “free,” permitted her to move at whatever velocity her ravening jets could achieve against the meager resistance of the almost perfect vacuum of interstellar space. Unfortunately, the Bergenholm, while it could completely neutralize inertial mass, never quite knew what to do with gravita tional mass, which seems to come and go as the circumstances require.

    As the Dentless bored on through the awesome void toward her goal, Ginnison and Chief Firing Officer Flatworthy checked and rechecked her mighty armament. Hot and tight were her ravening primary beams, against which no material object, inert or free, can offer any resistance whatever. When struck by the irresistible torrents of energy from a primary, any form of matter, however hard, however resistant, however refractory, becomes, in a minute fraction of a second, an unimaginably hot cloud of totally ionized gases.
    Equally tight, but not so hot, were the ultrapowerful secondaries, whose beams could liquify or gassify tungsten or even the ultraresistant neocarballoy in the blink of an eye.
    The inspection over, Ginnison lit a cigarette with a tertiary and Lensed a thought to an entity in another part of the ship. “Woozle, old snake, I hate to disturb your contemplations, but could you come to my cabin? We have things to discuss.”
    “Immediately, Ginnison,” that worthy replied, and shortly thereafter Ginnison’s door opened and there entered a leatherwinged, crocodile-headed, thirty-foot-long, crooked-armed, pythonish, reptilian nightmare. He draped himself across a couple of parallel bars, tied himself into a tasteful bow-knot, and extended a few weirdly-stalked eyes. “Well?”
    Ginnison