E. E. Smith

“ Kinnison stayed. So did VanBuskirk, fighting with all his stubborn Dutch mind. Revolted, outraged, nauseated as they were at the sights and sounds, they stayed. Flinching with the victims as they were fed into the hoppers of slowly turning mills; wincing at the unbelievable acts of the boilers, the beaters, the scourgers, the flayers; suffering themselves every possible and many apparently impossible nightmares.
The light in the cavern now changed to a strong, greenish-yellow glare; and in that hard illumination it was to be seen that each dying being was surrounded by a palely glowing aura. ”

“ Up and up, out beyond the last tenuous trace of atmosphere, on and on through space it flew with ever-increasing velocity until Nevia's gigantic blue sun had been left so far behind that it became a splendid blue-white star. Then, projectors cut off to save the precious iron whose disintegration furnished them power, for week after week Captain Nerado and his venturesome crew of scientists drifted idly through the illimitable void. Sun after sun, as visible in their ultra-instruments as though the flying vessel were moving slower than light, they studied without finding a single planet. ”

“ Even Mentor, the ancient Arisian sage, never did understand.
All that any of them knew was that an infinitely loving and intensely suffering woman, stretched rigidly upon a bed, hurled out through space and time a passionately questing thought—a thought behind which she put everything she had.
Clarrissa Kinnison, Red Lensman, had much—and every iota of that impressive sum total ached for, yearned for, and insistently demanded her Kim—her one and only Kim. Kim her husband; Kim the father of her children; Kim her lover; Kim her other half; Kim her all in all for so many perfect years. ”

“ Now, you scum of the Solar System, you shall be permitted to witness an entrancing spectacle on the way to our headquarters, where all your knowledge is to be taken from you before you die, lingeringly and horribly. There is a strange space-vessel nearing us probably searching for the one we took and which you dogs of Callisto must have been fortunate enough to take from us before we could study and kill its human cargo. Watch its destruction and cringe—and know, in your suffering, that the more you suffer, the greater shall be our enjoyment. ”

“ Know you, American, that we supermen of the Fenachrone are as far above any of the other and lesser breeds of beings who spawn in their millions in their countless myriads of races upon the numberless planets of the Universe as you are above the inert metal from which this, your ship, was built. The Universe is ours, and in due course we shall take it—just as in due course I shall take this vessel. Do your worst; I shall not speak." The creature's eyes flamed, hurling a wave of hypnotic command through Seaton's eyes and deep into his brain. ”

“ I am Eukonidor of Arisia, speaking to you through this mass of undead flesh which was once your chief psychologist, Eichamp, the Eighth of that high council which you call Boskone. I had intended to spare the lives of these two simple creatures, but I perceive that such action would be useless. Their minds and the minds of all you who listen to me are warped, perverted, incapable of reason. ”

“ Suddenly—in an instant—had appeared the two monstrosities who had been taken to the capital. And in that same fleeting instant one of the monsters was leaping at him. And ahead of that monster there came lashing out an enormous anchor chain, one of whose links of solid steel no ordinary mortal could lift; an anchor chain hurtling toward him with a velocity and a momentum upon that tenuous hyperworld unthinkable.
The almost-immaterial flesh of the hyperman could no more withstand that fiercely driven mass of metal than can a human body ward off an armor-piercing projectile in full flight. ”

“ The few of the old, true blood stand out head and shoulders above the throng, and you stand out, even among them. Who else could it have been? Who else hath the strength of arm and soul, the inner and the outer courage? No coward I, Tedric, nor ever called so, but on that altar my very bones turned jelly. I could not have swung weapon against Sarpedion. I tremble yet at the bare thought of what you did; I know not how you could have done it."
"You feared the god, Lady Rhoann, as do so many. I hated him."
"'Tis not enough of explanation. And 'Rhoann' merely, Tedric, remember?" ”

“ Samms' muscles relaxed. He opened his eyes groggily; then, as a wave of humiliated realization swept over his consciousness, he closed them again and shuddered. He had always thought himself pretty much of a man; how could he possibly have descended to such nauseous depths of depravity, of turpitude, of sheer moral degradation? And yet every cell of his being was shrieking its demand for more; his mind and his substance alike were permeated by an over-mastering craving to experience again the ultimate thrills which they had so tremendously, so outrageously enjoyed. ”

“ And now Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, sat at his desk in a strained, dull apathy. His face was a yellowish-gray white, his tendoned hands gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard and lifeless, stared unseeingly past the small, three-dimensional block portrait of all that had made life worth living.
For his guardian against lightning had been a vortex-magnet at the moment when a luckless wight had attempted to abate the nuisance of a "loose" atomic vortex. ”

“ He launched a mental bolt, at the impact of which Kinnison's mind literally turned inside out in a wildly gyrating spiral vortex of dizzyingly confused images.
"Resist!" came the harsh command.
"Resist! How?" demanded the writhing, sweating Lensman. "You might as well tell a fly to resist an inert space ship!"
"Use your will—your force—your adaptability. Shift your mind to meet mine at every point. Apart from these fundamentals neither I nor any one else can tell you how; each mind must find its own medium and develop its own technique. ”

“ The Tyrant was raging, furious; the premier was alertly, watchfully intent.
"I did not expect any more physical privacy than I have been granted," Kinnison grated, after listening quietly to a minute or two of Alcon's unbridled language. "This thing of being spied upon continuously, both by men and by mechanisms, while it is insulting and revolting to any real man's self-respect, can—just barely—be borne. I find it impossible, however, to force myself to submit to such an ultimately degrading humiliation as the surrender of the only vestiges of privacy I have remaining; those of my mind. ”

“ Iron, once solid, now a viscous red liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up that intangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of the Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin, destruction and death. Office buildings, skyscrapers towering majestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed into heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into the ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wake as the mazes of underground piping disappeared. ”

“ Then Kinnison's Bergenholm broke down. The Bergenholm, the generator of the force that neutralizes inertia—the sine qua non of interstellar speed. For, while any mass in the free condition can assume an almost unlimited velocity, inert matter cannot equal even that of light—the veriest crawl, as space speeds go. Also, there is no magic, no getting of something for nothing, in the operation of a Bergenholm. It takes power, plenty of power, to run one, and whenever one goes out, the ship dependent upon it is, to all intents and purposes, anchored in space. ”

“ Now at the door of the observatory, Dorothy paused and shrank back against Seaton, her eyes widening as she stared at Orlon.
"No, daughter, why should we fear the Change?" he answered her unspoken question, calm serenity in every inflection of his quiet voice. "The life-principle is unknowable to the finite mind, as is the All-Controlling Force. But even though we know nothing of the sublime goal toward which it is tending, any person ripe for the Change can, and of course does, liberate the life-principle so that its progress may be unimpeded." ”

“ Their terrible rays bored in, softening, fusing, volatilizing metal, short-circuiting connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circumference of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction—uninterrupted, cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form a spectacle of violence incredible. ”

“ Kit demanded. "You've hinted on that same theme a thousand times, and I don't know what you mean any better than I did before!"
"You must develop your own powers." Mentor's thought was as final as fate. "Your mind is potentially far abler than mine. You will in time come to know my mind in full; I never will be able to know yours. For the lesser, but full mind to attempt to instruct in methodology the greater, although emptier one, is to set that greater mind in an under-sized mold and thus to do it irreparable harm. You have the abilities and the powers. ”

“ Scouts and cruisers caught in that ravening beam flashed briefly, like sparks flying from a forge, and vanished. Battleships and superdreadnoughts the same. Even the solid war head of fortresses and maulers was utterly helpless. No screen has ever been designed capable of handling that hellish load; no possible or conceivable substance can withstand, save momentarily, the ardor of a sunbeam. For the energy liberated by the total annihilation of four million tons per second of matter is in fact as irresistible as it is incomprehensible. ”

“ Thus between the patrol and the drug syndicate there rages a bitterly continuous battle to the death. Arrayed against both factions is the massed life of the noisome planet, omnivorous as it is, eternally ravenous, and of an individual power and ferocity and a collective aggregate of numbers none of which is to be despised. And eternally raging against all these contending parties are the wind, the lightning, the rain, the flood, and the hellish vibratory output of Trenco's enormous, malignant, blue-white sun. ”