t the big man
only smiled.

"Okay," he said. "When are you leaving?"

"You aren't going to complain? The kind of ship I have in mind costs at
least two hundred thousand credits."

"I know that. But I've had a look at Cavour's diary, too. It was only a
matter of time before you decided to follow the old duck to Venus, and
I'm too smart to think that there's any point in putting up a battle.
Let me know when you've got your ship picked out and I'll sit down and
write the check."

But it was not as simple as all that. Alan shopped for a ship--he wanted
a new one, as long as he could afford it--and after several months of
comparative shopping and getting advice from spaceport men, he picked
the one he wanted. It was a sleek glossy eighty-foot job, a Spacemaster
3878 model, equipped with Lexman converters and conventional ion-jets
for atmosphere flying. Smooth, streamlined, it was a lovely sight as it
stood at the spacefield in the shadow of the great starships.

Alan looked at it with pride--a slender dark-green needle yearning to
pierce the void. He wandered around the spaceport and heard the fuelers
and oilers discussing it in reverent tones.

"That's a mighty fine piece of ship, that green one out there. Some
lucky fellow's got it."

Alan wanted to go over to them and tell them, "That's my ship. Me. Alan
Donnell." But he knew they would only laugh. Tall boys not quite
nineteen did not own late-model Spacemasters with price-tags of cr.
225,000.

He itched to get off-planet with it, but there were more delays. He
needed a flight ticket, first, and even though he had had the necessary
grounding in astrogation technique and spacepiloting as an automatic
part of his education aboard the _Valhalla_, he was rusty, and needed a
refresher course that took six weary months.

After that came the physical exams and the mental checkup and everything
else. Alan fumed at the delay, but he knew it was necessary. A
spaceship, even a small private one, was a dangerous weapon in unskilled
hands. An out-of-control spaceship that came crashing to Earth at high
velocity could kill millions; the shock wave might flatten fifty square
miles. So no one was allowed up in a spaceship of any kind without a
flight ticket--and you had to work to win your ticket.

It came through, finally, in June of 3879, a month after Alan's
twentieth birthday. By that time he had computed and recomputed his
orbit to Venus a hundred different times.

T