the approach of the cadets and closed behind them.

"Column right—march!" Kinnison commanded inaudibly, and the class obeyed in clockwork perfection. "Column left—march! Squads right—march! Company—halt! Salute!"

In company front, in a huge, square room devoid of furniture, the class faced the ogre—Inspector General Fritz von Hohendorff, commandant of cadets. Martinet, tyrant, dictator—he was known throughout the system as the embodiment of soullessness; and, insofar as he had ever been known to show emotion or feeling before any undergraduate, he seemed to glory in his repute of being the most pitilessly rigid disciplinarian that Earth had ever known. His thick, white hair was roached fiercely upward into a stiff pompadour. His left eye was of glass and his face bore dozens of tiny, thread-like scars; for not even the marvelous plastic surgery of that age could repair entirely the havoc wrought by the lethal rays of space combat. Also, his right leg and left arm, although practically normal to all outward seeming, were in reality largely products of science and art instead of nature.

Kinnison faced, then, this reconstructed potentate, saluted crisply, and snapped: "Sir, Class 5 reports to the commandant."

"Take your post, sir." The veteran saluted as punctiliously; and as he did so a semicircular desk rose around him from the floor—a desk whose most striking feature was an intricate mechanism surrounding a splintlike form so shaped as to receive a man's left arm.

"No. 1, Kimball Kinnison!" Von Hohendorff barked. "Front and center—march! The oath, sir."

"Before the omnipotent witness I promise never to lower the standard of the Galactic Patrol," Kinnison said reverently; and, baring his left arm, thrust it into the hollow form.

From a small container labeled: "No. 1, Kimball Kinnison," the commandant shook out what was apparently an ornament—a lenticular jewel fabricated of hundreds of tiny, dead-white gems. Taking it up with a pair of insulated forceps, he touched it momentarily to the bronzed skin of the arm before him, and at that fleeting contact a flash as of many-colored fire swept over the stones. Satisfied, he dropped the jewel into a recess provided for it in the mechanism, which at once burst into activity.

The forearm was wrapped in thick insulation; molds and shields snapped into place, and there flared out an instantly suppressed flash of brilliance intolerable. Then the molds 

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