Kinnison did, too well. The surviving personnel of the two _Brittanias_, the full present complement of the _Dauntless_, the crews of every other ship in Base, practically everybody on the Reservation--Haynes himself certainly, even Lacy and old von Hohendorff, everybody, even or especially if they had no business on such a trip as that--would volunteer; and every man jack of them would yell his head off at being left out. Each would have a thousand reasons for going. "QX, I suppose. You win." Kinnison submitted, although with ill grace, rebelliously. "But I don't like it, nor any part of it. It clogs my jets." "I know it, Kim," Haynes put a hand upon the boy's shoulder, tightening his fingers. "We all have to do it, it's part of the job. But remember always, Lensman, that the Patrol is not an army of mercenaries or conscripts. Any one of them--just as would you yourself--would go out there, _knowing_ that it meant death in the torture chamber of the Overlords, if in so doing he knew that he could help to end the torture and the slaughter of non-combatant men, women, and children that is now going on." * * * * * Kinnison walked slowly back to the Field; silenced, but not convinced. There was something screwy somewhere, but he couldn't-- "Just a moment, young man!" came a sharp, irritated voice. "I have been looking for you. At what time do you propose to set out for that which is being so loosely called the 'hyperspatial vortex'?" He pulled himself out of his abstraction to see Sir Austin Cardynge. Testy, irascible, impatient, and vitriolic of tongue, he had always reminded Kinnison of a frantic hen attempting to mother a brood of ducklings. "Hi, Sir Austin! Tomorrow--hour fifteen. Why?" The Lensman had too much on his mind to be ceremonious with this mathematical nuisance. "Because I find that I must accompany you, and it is most damnably inconvenient, sir. The Society meets Tuesday week, and that ass Weingarde will--" "Huh?" Kinnison ejaculated. "Who told you that you had to go along, or that you even _could_, for that matter?" "Don't be a fool, young man!" the peppery scientist advised. "It should be apparent even to your feeble intelligence that after your fiasco, your inexcusable negligence in not reporting even the most elementary vectorial-tensorial analysis of that extremely important vortex, someone with at least a rudimentary brain should--" "Hold on, Sir Austin!" Kinnison interrupted the harangue, "Do you mean to say that you want to come along just to study the mathematics of that damn--" "_Just_ to study it!" shrieked the old man, almost tearing his hair. "You dolt--you blockhead! My God, why should anything with such a brain be permitted to live? Don't you even know, Kinnison, that in that vortex lies the solution of one of the greatest problems in all science?" "Never occurred to me," the Lensman replied, unruffled by the old man's acid fury. He had had weeks of it, at the Conference.