And throughout her interior the Patrol ship, always in complete readiness for strife, was being gone over again with microscopic thoroughness, to be put into more readiness, if possible, even than that.
After a few hours Illona danced back to Kinnison's "con" room, fairly bubbling over.
"They're marvelous, Lensman!" she cried, "simply marvelous!"
"What are marvelous?"
"The boys," she enthused. "All of them. They're here because they want to be—why, the officers don't even have whips! They like them, actually! The officers who push the little buttons and things and those who walk around and look through the little glass things and even the gray-haired old man with the four stripes, why they like them all! And the boys were all putting on guns when I left—why, I never heard of such a thing!—and they're just simply crazy about you. I thought it was awfully funny that you took off your guns as soon as the ship left Lyrane and that you don't have guards around you all the time because I thought sure somebody would stab you in the back or something, but they don't even want to and that's what's so marvelous and Hank Henderson told me—"
"Save it!" he ordered. "Jet back, angel face, before you blow a fuse." He had been right in not operating—this girl was going to be a mine of information concerning Boskonian methods and operations, and all without knowing it. "That's what I have been trying to tell you about our Civilization; that it is founded upon the freedom of the individual to do pretty much as he pleases, as long as it is not to the public harm. And, as far as possible, equality of all the entities of Civilization."
"Uh-huh, I know you did," she nodded brightly, then sobered quickly, "but I couldn't understand it. I can't understand it yet; I can scarcely believe that you all are so—You know, don't you, what would happen if this were a Lonabarian ship and I would go running around talking to officers as though I were their equal?"
"No—what?"
"It's inconceivable, of course; it simply couldn't happen. But if it did, I would be punished terribly—perhaps, though, at a first offense, I might be given only a twenty-scar whipping." At his lifted eyebrow she explained, "One that leaves twenty scars that show for life.