"Don't work up a temperature about MacDougall, then. As long as she's around him--and that's twenty-four hours a day--he'll get everything in the Universe that he can get any good out of." "That's so, too. This other thing's out of our hands now, anyway. Kinnison can't hold his position long against her and himself both--overwhelmingly superior force. Just as well, too--civilization needs more like those two." "Check, but the affair isn't out of our hands yet, by any means. We've got quite a little more fine work to do there, as you'll see, before it's a really good job. But about Kinnison--" "Yes. When are you going to fit arms and legs on him? He should be practicing with them at this stage of the game, I should think--I was." "You _should_ think--but, unfortunately, you don't, about anything except war," was the surgeon's dry rejoinder. "If you did, you would have paid more attention to what Phillips has been doing. He is making the final test today. Come along--your conference with Kinnison can wait half an hour." In the research laboratory which had been assigned to Phillips they found von Hohendorff with the Posenian. Haynes was surprised to see the old commandant of cadets, but Lacy quite evidently had known that he was to be there. "Phillips," the surgeon general began, "explain to Admiral Haynes, in nontechnical language, what you are doing." "The original problem was to discover what hormone or other agent caused proliferation of neural tissue--" "Wait a minute; I'd better do it," Lacy broke in. "Anyway, you wouldn't do yourself justice. The first thing that Phillips found out was that the problem of repairing damaged nervous tissue was inextricably involved with several other unknown things, such as the original growth of such tissue, its relationship to growth in general, the regeneration of lost members in lower forms, and so on. You see, Haynes, it is a known fact that nerves do grow, or else they could not exist; and in some lower forms of life they regenerate. Those facts were all he had, at first. In higher forms, even during the growth stage, regeneration does not occur spontaneously. Phillips set out to find out why. "The thyroid controls growth, but does not initiate it, he learned. This fact seemed to indicate that there was an unknown hormone involved--that certain lower types possess an endocrine gland which is either atrophied or non-existent in higher types. If the latter, he was sunk. He reasoned, however, that, since higher types evolved from lower, the gland in question might very well exist in a vestigial stage. He studied animals, thousands of them, from the germ upward. He exhausted the patience of the Posenian authorities; and when they cut off his appropriation, on the ground that the thing was impossible, he came here. We gave him carte blanche.