"Uh-huh!" exclaimed LaForge and Holmberg as one.

"You can play that across the board for the whole class," Kinnison agreed. "Well, we'll soon know. It's time to get going."

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 5 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 did not move, 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 unpracticed 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. 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 

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