alone.

“We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart observed in a quiet voice.

Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on their forehead?

“We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.

Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught the movement and half-smiled.

“I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the psych said.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”

“Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart said. “It’s just some of the things——”

Kimball said: “I talked too much.”

“You had to.”

“You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would you,” the Colonel said smiling.

“You were married, Kim. What happened?”

“More therapy?”

“I’d like to know. This is for me.”

Kimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the way she put it.”

“She knew you were a career officer; what did she expect——?”

“That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”

“Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”

They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear, deep night.

“I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean that.”

“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening gulf.

“What will you do?”

“You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it comes.”

“In two years.”

“In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that it didn’t matter?

He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.

“Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”

“Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up already?

“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of course. You know there’s no such thing as a normal human being. We all have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”

Kimball turned to regard the psych coolly. “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do you know?”

The analyst flushed. “No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,” Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely child.”

Kimball was watching the sky again.

Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”

Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny sunbright flashes