Twelve Mentat students complete their training at the Lampadas school, including Draigo Roget and two Sisters from Rossak. After instructors question the candidates, Gilbertus Albans grants final approval to all twelve, confident in their abilities.

The graduation ceremony emphasizes tradition, ceremony, and invented institutional weight, even though Gilbertus understands much of it is symbolic. He has designed these rituals to impress outsiders, especially Butlerians, while also making practical use of obscure ancient languages that could serve as private codes. Gilbertus formally dispatches each graduate to advance human mental capabilities, and the audience repeats the Butlerian-friendly phrase, “The mind of man is holy.”

After the ceremony, Draigo thanks Gilbertus for his instruction. Gilbertus urges Draigo to remain as an instructor and suggests Draigo could someday rise very high in the school, but Draigo believes his future lies in the wider Imperium. Gilbertus reluctantly accepts the decision, knowing he must eventually abandon the school and assume another identity because his unnaturally long life is becoming harder to disguise.

Gilbertus later watches Draigo’s shuttle depart from the floating airfield, feeling both pride and loss. Around the airfield, workers build a breakwater because large marsh creatures have damaged the landing area, and Gilbertus values the nearby wilderness as a source of danger that sharpens human adaptability.

Back in his locked private office, Gilbertus speaks with Erasmus’s hidden memory core. Erasmus asks again for a temporary body so he can resume experiments and expand his studies of human behavior, but Gilbertus worries about danger and discovery. The robot reveals that boredom has led him to modify his own programming, causing unusual changes in the core’s glow.

Their conversation turns philosophical and dangerous. Erasmus argues that Butlerian fear and superstition threaten humanity and that humans and thinking machines should ultimately coexist, while Gilbertus insists humankind must remain in charge. Although Gilbertus remains wary of giving Erasmus mobility, the exchange reveals his loneliness, his dependence on the robot, and the unresolved risk of keeping Erasmus alive.