In similar fashion each man of the class was invested with the symbol of his rank. Then the stern-faced inspector general touched a button and from the bare metal floor there arose deeply upholstered chairs, one for each graduate.
"Fall out!" he commanded, then smiled almost boyishly—the first intimation any of the class had ever had that the hard-boiled old tyrant could smile—and went on in a strangely altered voice: "Sit down, men, and smoke up. We have an hour in which to talk things over, and now I can tell you what it is all about. Each of you will find his favorite refreshment in the arm of his chair.
"No, there's no catch to it," he continued, in answer to amazedly doubtful stares, and lighted a huge black cigar of Venus-grown tobacco as he spoke. "You are Lensmen now, and henceforth each of you is accountable only to himself and to GHQ. Of course, you have yet to go through the formalities of commencement, but they don't count. Each of you really graduated when the Lens was welded around his arm.
"We know your individual preferences, and each of you has his favorite weed, from Tillotson's Pittsburgh stogies up to Snowden's Alsakanite cigarettes—even though Alsakan is just about as far away from here as a planet can be and still lie within the galaxy.
"We also know that you are all immune to the lure of noxious drugs. If you were not, you would not be here to-day. So smoke up and speak up. Ask any questions you care to, and I will try to answer them. Nothing is barred now. This room is shielded against any spy ray or communicator beam operable upon any known frequency."
There was a brief and rather uncomfortable silence. Then Kinnison suggested, diffidently: "Might it not be best, sir, to tell us all about it, from the ground up? I imagine that most of us are in too much of a daze to ask intelligent questions."
"Perhaps. While some of you undoubtedly have your suspicions, I will begin by telling you what is behind what you have been put through during the last five years. Feel perfectly free to break in with questions at any time. You know that every year one million eighteen-year-old boys of Earth are chosen as cadets by competitive examinations. You know that during the first year, before any of them see Wentworth Hall, that number shrinks to less than fifty thousand. You know that by graduation day there are only, approximately, one hundred left in the class. Now I am allowed to tell you that you graduates are those who have come with flying colors through the most brutally rigid, the most fiendishly thorough process of elimination that it has been possible to develop.
"Every man who can be made to reveal any sign of weakness is dropped. Most of these are dismissed from the patrol. There are many splendid men, however, who, for some reason not involving moral turpitude, are not quite what a Lensman must be. These men make up our organization, from grease monkeys up to the highest commissioned officers below the rank of Lensman. This explains what you already know—that the Galactic Patrol is the finest body of intelligent beings yet to serve under one banner.
"Of the million who started, you few are left. As must every being who has ever worn or who ever will wear the Lens, each of you has proven repeatedly, to the cold verge of death itself, that he is in every possible respect worthy to wear it. For instance, Kinnison here once had a highly adventurous interview with a lady of Aldebaran II and her friends. He did not know that we knew all about it, but we did."