"Dr. Holt will be your instrument man. He will design and build whatever special equipment your researches call for. Let me know soon what you'll need in the way of furniture and assistants." He left them standing in the nearly bare room. Through the window they watched his stiff form march back to his own office. Nat Holt shifted position and grinned at Paul. "I may as well tell you that the General has briefed me thoroughly on what he considered your probable reaction to the Project. I'm just curious enough to want to know if he was right." "The General and I understand each other--I think," said Paul. "He knows I'm contemptuous of his approach to a problem of human behavior by ordering it solved. But he knows I'll take his money and spend it on the biggest, deepest investigation of human behavior via psychometrical analysis that has ever been conducted." "It ought to be enough to buy gold fringed couches for all the analysts in the country." Paul raised his brows. "If it's that way with you, then why are you joining me?" he asked. "Because I have a stake in this, too! I want to see the problem solved just as much as the General does. And I think it _can_ be solved. But not this way! "There's only one way to produce men of superior abilities. The method of adequate training. Hard, brutal discipline and training of oneself. I'm going to convince Oglethorpe of it after he's seen the failure you intend to produce for him." "That shouldn't be hard," said Paul. "It's the General's own view. The Project is simply to implement that view. "But let's not have any misunderstanding about my intentions. I expect to give honest value in research for every dollar spent. I expect to turn up data that will go a long way toward providing better spacemen for the Command--and to give Captain West the monument he asked for!" * * * * * Alone in his hotel room that night, Paul stood at the window overlooking the desert. Beyond the distant hills a faint glow in the sky marked the location of Space Command Base. He regarded it, and considered the enormity of the thing that was being brewed for the world in that isolated outpost. Now the chance was his to prove that manhood was a quality to be proud of, that machines could be built and junked and built again, but that a man's life was unique in the universe and could never be replaced once it was crushed. For years he'd struggled to probe the basic nature of Man and find out what divorces him from the merely mechanical. He'd known there would probably never be enough money to reach his goal. And then Oglethorpe had come, offering him all the money in the world to reach a nebulous objective that Space Command did not know was unobtainable. _Somebody_ was going to spend that money. With clear conscience, Paul rationalized that it might as well be him. He'd see that the country got value for what it spent, even if this was not quite what the Space Command expected.