Numberless races of intelligent beings already know Kinnison well, since his fame has spread north, south, east, west, zenith and nadir, to the six points of the three-dimensional galactic-inductor compasses of two galaxies. On the other hand, many know him not at all. Many have never even heard of Tellus, nor of Sol, our parent sun; even though it was upon that proud planet of this, our Solarian System, that the Galactic Patrol came into being. Indeed, it is inevitable that this biography will in days to come be of interest to races which, inhabiting planets not yet reached by the Cosmic Survey, have not even heard of the Galactic Patrol, to say nothing of knowing its origin and its history. In view of the above inescapable facts, and after a great deal of thought and care, I have decided to write this Prologue, which will summarize very simply that which is already most widely known; namely, the happenings up to and including the first phase of the Boskonian War. Even that condensation, however, leaves me all too little space in which to do justice to the part that Kimball Kinnison played in enabling the civilization of the Galactic Council to triumph over the monstrous culture of Boskone. With the understanding, then, that the more informed mentality may skip from here to Chapter I, I proceed. * * * * * Should I begin with Arisia? That forbidding, forbidden planet whose inhabitants, having achieved sheerly unimaginable heights of philosophical and mental power, withdrew almost completely into themselves, leaving traces only in Galaxy-wide folk tales and legends of supermen and gods? Probably not. I should, it seems to me, begin with Earth's almost prehistoric bandits and gangsters, gentry who flourished in the days when space flight was mentioned only in fantastic fiction. Know, then, that for ages law enforcement lagged behind law violation because the minions of the law were limited in their spheres of action, while criminals were not. Thus, in the days following the invention of the automobile, State troopers could not cross State lines. Later, when what were then known as the "G-men" combined with the various State constabularies to form the National Police, they could not follow the stratosphere planes of the lawbreakers across national boundaries. Still later, when interplanetary flight became commonplace, the Planetary Guards were at the same old disadvantage. They had no authority off their own worlds, while the public enemies flitted unhampered from planet to planet. And finally, with the development of the inertialess drive and the consequent traffic between hundreds of thousands of solar systems, crime became so rampant as to threaten the very foundations of civilization.