ith a suit, and be there
forever. But Captain McClelland's shock gun and the understanding
seeping into me from the thought recorders calmed me down eventually.

"So I turned to creation as I lay there in my bunk. I designed many
spaceships. And from those, I designed fewer and fewer, incorporating
the best from each. And now I have on microfilm a ship that can thrust
out to the ends of our galaxy. There aren't any flaws.... Oh, I tell
you, by God, I'd like to see her come to life!"

He leaned back, sweat rolling down his bony cheeks.

Miss Gordon, dietician and televisor, the motionless old lady with
cropped, white hair, and face bones across which the paper skin was
stretched, said, "There was only one thing I wanted when I knew I
couldn't have marriage and a family. There was a perfect food for the
human animal. I could find it. I began working on formulas. Over and
over again, I put the food elements together and took them apart and
put them together again. I threw away the work of years and started
over again until at last I had my perfect formula."

She clasped her hands. "Man's nutrition problem is solved. From the
oceans and the air and the Earth, from the cosmic rays and the lights
of the suns and from the particles of the microcosm, Man can take into
his body all the nutrition that can enable him to live forever." She
sat very still, smiling. "And it's got to be given a try."

Silence.

Colonel Halter watched the old figures sitting like figures in a wax
museum, waiting, waiting. He turned a dial. The picture that flashed
onto the screen in his office showed the pocked ship standing upright
now, like some tree that had grown in the middle of a desert where it
was never meant to grow.

The space tugs had streaked out beyond the atmosphere to finish other
assignments. There were no crowds, no official cars, no platforms, no
bands. Only darkness and silence.

Halter turned a dial. The control room of the old ship flashed back
onto the screen. The ancient crew sat as before. Halter saw his own
face on their television screen.

Something was missing, he thought. What? What hadn't been said?

And then suddenly it came to him.

The captain. He hadn't spoken of any contribution he had made during
those interminable years.

* * * * *

Halter thought back over Captain McClelland's record. No family. Wiped
out when he was a baby in the last war. Educated and raised by the
g