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 became violent
and the cadet had to call enlisted Solar Guardsmen to throw him out.

While Tom and Roger made decisions quickly and decisively, Astro, on the
other hand, patiently listened to all the tearful stories and
sympathized with the applicants when they were unable to tear down a
small reactor unit and rebuild it blindfolded. Painfully, sometimes with
tears in his own eyes, he would tell the applicant he had failed, just
when the would-be colonist would think Astro was going to pass him.

The three cadets were doing their jobs so well that in the one hundred