The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a fashion and set off toward the Galaxy at touring blast. And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very serious conference to a close. "You saw what happened to Helmuth's planet," Kinnison's voice was oddly hard, "and I gave you all I could get of the thought about the destruction of all life upon Sol III. A big-enough duodec bomb in the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don't really _know_ anything except that we hadn't better let them catch us asleep at the switch again--we've got to be up on our toes every second." And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters. II. During practically all of the long trip back to Earth, Kinnison kept pretty much to his cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And at Prime Base, through week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think. Finally, however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no less a personage than Surgeon General Lacy. "Snap out of it, lad," that worthy advised, smilingly. "When you concentrate on one thing too long, you know, the vortices of thought occupy narrower and narrow loci, until finally the effective volume becomes infinitesimal. Or, mathematically, the then range of cogitation, integrated between the limits of plus and minus infinity, approaches zero as a limit--" "Huh? What are you talking about?" the Lensman demanded. "Poor mathematics, perhaps, but sound psychology," Lacy grinned. "It got your undivided attention, didn't it? That was what I was after. In plain English, if you keep on thinking around in circles you'll soon be biting yourself in the small of the back. Come on, you and I are going places." "Where?" "To the Grand Ball in honor of the Grand Fleet, my boy--old Dr. Lacy prescribes it for you as a complete and radical change of atmosphere. Let's go!" The city's largest ballroom was a blaze of light and color. A thousand polychromic lamps flooded their radiance downward through draped bunting upon an even more colorful throng. Two thousand items of feminine loveliness were there, in raiment whose fabrics were the boast of hundreds of planets, whose hues and shades put the spectrum itself to shame. There were over two thousand men, clad in plain or beribboned or bemedaled full civilian dress, or in the variously panoplied dress uniforms of the many Services. "You're dancing with Miss Forrester first, Kinnison," the surgeon introduced them informally, and the Lensman found himself gliding away with a stunning blonde, ravishingly and revealingly dressed in a dazzlingly blue wisp of Manarkan glamorette--fashion's _dernier cri_.