"Holy ... Klono's ... claws!" Kit was gasping like a fish. "Just where, Mentor, do you figure I'm going to pick up the jets to swing that load? And as to co-ordinating the kids—that's out. I'd make just one suggestion to any one of them and she'd forget all about the battle and tear into me ... no, I'll take that back. The stickier the going, the closer they rally 'round."
"Right. It will always be so. Now, youth, that you have these facts, explain these matters to me, as a sort of preliminary exercise."
"I think I see." Kit thought intensely. "The kids don't fight with each other because they don't overlap. They fight with me because my central field overlaps them all. They have no occasion to fight with anybody else, nor have I, because with anybody else our viewpoint is always right and the other fellow knows it—except for Palainians and such, who think along different lines than we do. Thus, Kay never fights with Nadreck. When he goes off the beam, she simply ignores him and goes on about her business. But with them and me—we'll have to learn to arbitrate, or something, I suppose—" his thought trailed off.
"Manifestations of adolescence; with adulthood, now coming fast, they will pass. Let us get on with the work."
"But wait a minute!" Kit protested. "About this co-ordinator thing. I can't do it. I'm too much of a kid. I won't be ready for a job like that for a thousand years!"
"You must be ready," Mentor's thought was inexorable. "And, when the time comes, you shall be. Now, come fully into my mind."
There is no use in repeating in detail the progress of an Arisian supereducation, especially since the most accurate possible description of the most important of those details would be intrinsically meaningless. When, after a few weeks of it, Kit was ready to leave Arisia, he looked much older and more mature than before; he felt immensely older than he looked. The concluding conversation of that visit, however, is worth recording.
"You now know, Kinnison," Mentor mused, "what you children are and how you came to be. You are the accomplishment of long lifetimes of work. It is with most profound satisfaction that I now perceive clearly that those lifetimes have not been spent in vain."
"Yours, you mean." Kit was embarrassed, but one point still bothered him. "Dad met and married mother, yes, but how about the others? Tregonsee, Worsel, and Nadreck? They and the corresponding females were also penultimates, of lines as long as ours. Your Council decided that the human stock was best, so none of the other Second-Stage Lensmen ever met their female complements. Not that it could make any difference to them, of course, but I should think that three of your fellow students wouldn't feel so good."