five years. Feel perfectly free to break in with questions at any time. You know that every year one million eighteen-year-old boys of Earth are chosen as cadets by competitive examinations. You know that during the first year, before any of them see Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less than fifty thousand. You know that by graduation day there are only, approximately, one hundred left in the class. Now I am allowed to tell you that you graduates are those who have come with flying colors through the most brutally rigid, the most fiendishly thorough process of elimination that it has been possible to develop.

"Every man who can be made to reveal any sign of weakness is dropped. Most of these are dismissed from the patrol. There are many splendid men, however, who, for some reason not involving moral turpitude, are not quite what a Lensman must be. These men make up our organization, from grease monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the rank of Lensman. This explains what you already know—that the Galactic Patrol is the finest body of intelligent beings yet to serve under one banner.

"Of the million who started, you few are left. As must every being who has ever worn or who ever will wear the Lens, each of you has proven repeatedly, to the cold verge of death itself, that he is in every possible respect worthy to wear it. For instance, Kinnison here once had a highly adventurous interview with a lady of Aldebaran II and her friends. He did not know that we knew all about it, but we did."

Kinnison's very ears burned scarlet, but the commandant went imperturbably on: "So it was with Voelker and the hypnotist of Karalon; with LaForge and the bentlam eaters; with Flewelling when the Ganymede-Venus thionite smugglers tried to bribe him with ten million in gold."

"Good Heavens, commandant!" broke in one outraged youth. "Didn't we do any real work at all?"

"Plenty of it; but at the same time each of you underwent enough testing to prove definitely that you could not be cracked. And none of you need be ashamed, for you have passed every test. Those who did not pass them were those who were dropped.

"Nor is it any disgrace to have been dismissed from the service before graduation into the patrol. The million who started with you were the pick of the planet, yet we knew in advance that of that selected million scarcely one in ten thousand would measure up in every essential. Therefore, it would be manifestly unfair to stigmatize the rest of them because they were not born with that extra something, 

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