det. "You'll what?"

"All right, you two!" barked Strong. "Plug your jets! By the craters of
Luna, one minute you act like hot-shot spacemen, and the next, you
behave like children in a kindergarten!"

Suddenly the compartment echoed to hearty laughter. The cadets and their
skipper turned to see Governor Hardy standing on the radar-bridge
ladder, brief case in hand, roaring with laughter. He climbed down and
faced the three cadets.

"If kindergarten behavior will produce spacemen like you, I'm all for
it. Congratulations, all three of you. You did a good job!"

"Thank you, sir," said Tom.

Hardy turned to Strong. "Captain, I'm going ahead to the Solar Council
building and get things set up for the screening. I imagine there are
many anxious colonists ready to be processed!"

As Strong and the cadets came to attention and saluted, Governor Hardy
turned and left the control deck.

Strong turned to the cadets. "From now on, you might as well forget that
you're spacemen. Report to the Administration Building in one hour.
You're going to do all your space jockeying in a chair from now on!"

* * * * *

For the next week, the three Space Cadets spent every waking hour in the
Solar Council Administration Center, interviewing applicants who had
passed their psychograph personality tests. Endlessly, from early
morning until late at night, they questioned the eager applicants.
Ninety-nine out of one hundred were refused. And when they were, they
all had different reactions. Some cried, some were angry, some
threatened, but the three cadets were unyielding. It was a thankless
job, and after more than a week of it, tempers were on edge.

"What would you do," Roger would ask an applicant, "if you were suddenly
drifting in space, in danger, and found that you had lost the vacuum in
your audio tubes? How would you get help?"

Not one in over three hundred had realized that space itself was a
perfect vacuum and could be substituted for the tubes. Roger had turned
thumbs down on all of them.

Astro and Tom found their interviews equally as rough. One applicant
admitted to Tom that he wanted to go to the satellite to establish a
factory for making rocket juice, a highly potent drink that was not
outlawed in the solar system, but was looked on with strong disfavor.
When Tom turned down his application, the man tried to get Tom to enter
into partnership with him, and when Tom refused, the man bec