long awaited, bitterly
won. "Do you really want me to tell you?"

"I want you to tell me."

Then Paul told him. It took about ten minutes. It was not tempered
with mercy.

It split Dan Fowler's world wide open at the seams.

* * * * *

"You've been talking about the Starship," said Paul Fowler. "All
right, that's as good a starting place as any. I came to Starship
Project--what was it, fifteen years ago? Almost sixteen, I guess. This
was my meat. I couldn't work well with people, I worked with _things_,
processes, ideas. I dug in hard on Starship. I loved it, dreamed it,
lived with it. I had dreams in those days. Work hard, make myself
valuable here, maybe I'd _get_ rejuvenation, so I could work more on
Starship. I believed everything you just said. Alpha Centauri,
Arcturus, Vega, anywhere we wanted to go--and I could go along! It
wouldn't be long, either. We had Lijinsky back with us after his
rejuvenation, directing the Project, we had Keller and Stark and Eddie
Cochran--great men, the men who had pounded Starship Project into
reality, took it out of the story books and made the people of this
country want it bad enough to pay for it. Those men were back now--new
men, rebuilt bodies, with all their knowledge and experience
preserved. Only now they had something even more precious than life:
_time_. And I was part of it, and I too could have time."

Paul shook his head, slowly, and sank back into the chair. His eyes
were very tired. "A dream, nothing more. A fantasy. It took me fifteen
years to learn what a dream it was. Not even a suspicion at
first--only a vague puzzlement, things happening that I couldn't quite
grasp. Easy to shrug off, until it got too obvious. Not a matter of
wrong decisions, really. The decisions were right, but they were in
the wrong places. Something about Starship Project shifting, changing
somehow. Something being lost. Slowly. Nothing you could nail down, at
first, but growing month by month.

"Then one night I saw what it was. That was when I equipped the lab
here, and proved to myself that Starship Project was a dream."

* * * * *

He spread his hands and smiled at Dan like a benign old Chips to a
third-form schoolboy. "The Starship isn't going to Alpha Centauri or
anywhere else. It's not going to leave the ground. I thought I'd live
long enough to launch that ship and be one of its crew. Well, I won't.
That ship wou