"I'll say I have!" She fed him; then, bending over, she squeezed him tight and kissed him emphatically. "You and the commandant are just perfectly wonderful old darlings, and I love you all to pieces," she declared. "I think Lacy was simply poisonous to laugh at you the way he did. Why, you two are the world's greatest heroes! He knew perfectly well all the time, the lug, that of course you'd be hungry; that you'd have to eat twice as much as usual while your legs and things were growing. Don't worry, admiral, I'll feed you until you bulge. I want you to hurry up with this, so that they'll do it to Kim."
"Thanks, Mac," and as she wheeled him back into the main office he considered her anew. A ravishing creature, but sound. Rash, and a bit stubborn, perhaps; impetuous and head-strong; but clean, solid metal all the way through. She had what it takes—she qualified. She and Kinnison would make a mighty fine couple when the lad got some of that heroic damn nonsense knocked out of his head—but there was work to do.
There was. The Galactic Council had considered thoroughly Kinnison's reports; its every member had conferred with him and with Worsel at length. Throughout the First Galaxy the Patrol was at work in all its prodigious might, preparing to wipe out the menace to civilization which was Boskone. First-line superdreadnoughts—no others would go upon that mission—were being built and armed, rebuilt and rearmed.
Well it was that the Galactic Patrol had previously amassed an almost inexhaustible supply of wealth, for its "reserves of expendible credit" were running like water.
Weapons, supposedly of irresistible power, were made even more powerful. Screens already "impenetrable" were stiffened into even greater stubbornness.
Primary projectors were made to take even higher loads, for longer times. New and heavier Q-type helices were designed and built. Larger and more destructive duodec bombs were hurled against already ruined, torn, and quivering test planets. Uninhabited worlds were being equipped with super-Bergenholms and with driving projectors. The negasphere, the most incredible menace to navigation which had ever existed in space, was being patrolled by a cordon of guard ships.
And all this activity centered in one vast building and culminated in one man—Port Admiral Haynes, Galactic councilor and chief of staff. And Haynes could not get enough to eat because he was cutting a new set of teeth!
He cut them, all thirty-two of them. His new limbs grew perfectly, even to the nails. Hair grew upon what had for years been a shining expanse of pate. But, much to Lacy's relief, it was old skin, not young, which covered the new limbs. It was white hair, not brown, that was dulling the glossiness of Haynes' bald old head. His bifocals, unchanged, were still necessary if he were to see anything clearly, near or far.
"Our experimental animals aged and died normally," Lacy explained graciously, "but I was beginning to wonder if we had rejuvenated you two, or perhaps endowed you with eternal life. Glad to see that the new parts have the same physical age as the rest of you—it would be mildly embarrassing to have to kill two Gray Lensmen to get rid of them."