ng of all is not ever to be able to
know what these people were like. It's almost as if some part of us had
been lopped off, isn't it? What did the people of Miracastle think
about? What was their philosophy of life? What was their social
organization? What was their ultimate goals? When you realize how much
we learned of ourselves from an examination of our own primitive
cultures, the sense of loss really comes home. Think how much more we
could have learned of ourselves by acquiring the perspective of a truly
alien culture. It's almost as if we could really understand ourselves at
last if we could only understand a totally alien culture ..."

"Well, that's gone," Mr. Tucker said. The words were brittle and
discrete. They hung in memory and the listeners waited as though for an
echo of something shouted into a canyon. The echo did not come.

They were silent. Grief is the final knowledge of time. When one first
learns that it can never be turned backward upon itself to permit the
correction of past sins and the rightings of wrongs transfixed and
forever unalterable. Grief is the frantic, futile beating of hands
against a barrier without substance, both obscenely unreal and yet the
only reality. Grief is the knowledge that we cannot step backwards
before the death of loved ones and see those precious half-forgotten
dream faces once again. Grief is the knowledge that time is immutable.

Outside the Richardson Dome, the wind was changing. It could now neither
support the life that was nor the life that would be, and it howled in
melancholy and insensate anguish its loneliness and longing to the
eternal and ever-changing pattern of the stars.

* * * * *

The Committee concluded their interviews with an old-line corporal. He
had just short of thirty years service and had several times traveled
the two-way escalator of non-commissioned rank from master sergeant to
private. He was perhaps typical of many of the older soldiers. His love
of the Corps was expressed by his loyalty to it; his hatred of the Corps
was expressed by his inability to abide by its regulations.

"You knew Sergeant Schuster very well?" Mr. Tucker asked.

"He was a new man," the corporal said. "He got on just before lift-off.
A week, two weeks, something like that. I knew him, I guess. He was one
of them kind that was always thinking. And like you know, sir, thinking
ain't too good for a soldier. I've known a lot of guy