"QX--you asked for it. Queer things have been going on all over. Inexplicable things ... no apparent reason." "Such as?" "Almost any kind of insidious deviltry you care to name. Disaffections, psychoses, mass hysterias, hallucinations; pointing toward a Civilization-wide epidemic of revolutions and uprisings for which there seems to be no basis or justification whatever." "Why, Kim! How could there be? I haven't heard of anything like that!" "It hasn't got around. Each solar system thinks that it's a purely local condition, but it isn't. As Galactic Co-ordinator, with a broad view of the entire picture, my office would, of course, see such a thing before anyone else could. We saw it, and set out to nip it in the bud ... but--" He shrugged his shoulders and grinned wryly. "But what?" Clarrissa persisted. "It didn't nip. We sent Lensmen to investigate, but none of them got to the first check-station. Then I asked our Second-Stage Lensmen--Worsel, Nadreck, and Tregonsee--to drop whatever they were doing and solve it for me. They struck it and bounced. They followed, and are still following, leads and clues galore, but they haven't got a millo's worth of results so far." "What? You mean to say it's a problem _they_ can't solve?" "That they haven't, to date," he corrected, absently. "And that 'gives me furiously to think'." "It would," she conceded, "and it also would make you itch to join them. Think at me, and it'll help you correlate. You should have gone over the data with me right at first." "I had reasons not to, as you'll see. But I'm stumped now, so here goes. We'll have to go away back, to before we were married. First: Mentor told me, quote, only your descendants will be ready for that which you now so dimly grope, unquote. Second: you were the only being ever able to read my thoughts without the aid of the Lens. Third: Mentor told us, when we asked him if it was QX for us to go ahead that our marriage was _necessary_, a choice of phraseology which bothered you somewhat at the time, but which I then explained as being in accord with his visualization of the Cosmic All. Fourth: the Patrol formula is to send the man best fitted for any job to do that job, and if he can't swing it, to send the Number One graduate of the current class of Lensmen. Fifth: a Lensman has got to use everything and everybody available, no matter what or who it is. I used even you, you remember, in that Lyrane affair and others. Sixth: Sir Austin Cardynge believed to the day of his death that we were thrown out of that hyperspatial tube, and out of space, deliberately." "Well, go on. I don't see much, if any connection." "You will, if you think of those six points in connection with our present predicament. Kit graduates next month, and he'll rank Number One of all Civilization, for all the tea in China." "Of course. But after all, he's a Lensman. He will insist upon being assigned to some problem; why not to that one?"