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 deep in the hollows of the hot metal.

"You're glad to be leaving, aren't you--" Steinhart said finally. "Happy
to be the first man to try for the planets----"

Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull
rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.

They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of
the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered
in