They flitted, and the great battleship made the second cruise as uneventfully as she had made the first. The Chicago's officers and crew knew that the young people left the vessel separately; that they returned separately, each in his or her lifeboat. They met, however, not in the control room, but in Jack Kinnison's private quarters; the three young Lensmen and the girl. The three were embarrassed; ill at ease. The Lenses were—definitely—not working. No one of them would put his Lens on Jill, since she did not have one.... The girl broke the short silence.
"Wasn't she the most perfectly beautiful thing you ever saw?" she breathed. "In spite of being over seven feet tall? She looked to be about twenty—except her eyes—but she must have been a hundred, to know so much—but what are you boys staring so about?"
"She!" Three voices blurted as one.
"Yes. She. Why? I know we weren't together, but I got the impression, some way or other, that there was only the one. What did you see?"
All three men started to talk at once, a clamor of noise; then all stopped at once.
"You first, Spud. Whom did you talk to, and what did he, she, or it say?" Although Conway Costigan was a few years older than the other three, they all called him by nickname as a matter of course.
"National Police Headquarters—Chief of the Detective Bureau," Costigan reported, crisply. "Between forty three and forty five; six feet and half an inch; one seventy five. Hard, fine, keen, a Big Time Operator if there ever was one. Looked a lot like your father, Jill; the same dark auburn hair, just beginning to gray, and the same deep orange-yellow markings in his eyes. He gave me the works; then took this Lens out of his safe, snapped it onto my wrist, and gave me two orders—get out and stay out."
Jack and Mase stared at Costigan, at Jill, and at each other. Then they whistled in unison.
"I see this is not going to be a unanimous report, except possibly in one minor detail," Jill remarked. "Mase, you're next."
"I landed on the campus of the University of Arisia," Northrop stated, flatly. "Immense place—hundreds of thousands of students. They look me to the Physics Department—to the private laboratory of the Department Head himself. He had a panel with about a million meters and gauges on it; he scanned and measured every individual component element of my brain. Then he made a pattern, on a milling router just about as complicated as his panel. From there on, of course, it was simple—just like a dentist making a set of china choppers or a metallurgist embedding a test-section. He snapped a couple of sentences of directions at me, and then said 'Scram!' That's all."