"Certainly, or a hundred times that many," Cardynge snapped, testily. "You heard me say, did you not, that this opportunity is priceless, and may very well be unique?" "QX, you can come," and Kinnison went on into the _Dauntless_. * * * * * Kinnison went to bed wondering. Maybe the chief was right. He woke up, still wondering. Perhaps he was taking himself too seriously. Perhaps he was, as Haynes had more than intimated, indulging in mock heroics. He prowled about. The two ships of space were still locked together. They would fly together to and along that dread tunnel, and he had to see that everything was on the green. He went into the wardroom. One young officer was thumping the piano right tunefully and a dozen others were rending the atmosphere with joyous song. In that room any formality or "as you were" signal was unnecessary; the whole bunch fell upon their commander gleefully and with a complete lack of restraint, in a vociferous hilarity very evidently neither forced nor assumed. Kinnison went on with his tour. "What was it?" he demanded of himself. Haynes didn't feel guilty. Cardynge was worse--he would kill forty thousand men, including the Lensman and himself, without batting an eye. These kids didn't give a damn. Their fellows had been slain by the Overlords, the Overlords had in turn been slain. All square--QX. Their turn next? So what? Kinnison himself did not want to die--he wanted to live--but if his number came up that was part of the game. What was it, this willingness to give up life itself for an abstraction? Science, the Patrol, Civilization--notoriously ungrateful mistresses. Why? Some inner force--some compensation defying sense, reason, or analysis? Whatever it was, he had it, too. Why deny it to others? What in all the nine hells of Valeria was he griping about? "Maybe _I'm_ nuts!" he concluded, and gave the word to blast off. To blast off--to find and to traverse wholly that awful hypertube, at whose far terminus there would be lurking no man knew what. XVII. Out in space Kinnison called the entire crew to a mass meeting, in which he outlined to them as well as he could that which they were about to face. "The Boskonian ship will undoubtedly return automatically to her dock," he concluded. "That there is probably docking space for only one ship is immaterial, since the _Dauntless_ will remain free. That ship is not manned, as you know, because no one knows what is going to happen when the fields are released in the home dock. Consequences may be disastrous to any foreign, untreated matter within her. Some signal will undoubtedly be given upon landing, although we have no means of knowing what that signal will be and Sir Austin has pointed out that there can be no communication between that ship and her base until her generators have been cut.