In it was a letter and the manuscript to the Storm in Space
Overture. He wanted me to register the work and get the government fee,
and he asked me the only favor he had ever asked of anyone, that I get
him the money, because he was going into space.

He came back some weeks later, on foot. I had gotten the money from
Rejects--they had heard the Overture--it was enough. He brought Lila
with him and was going to make reservations. He was heading, I think,
only as far as Alpha Centauri.

It was too late.

* * * * *

They examined him, as someone should have a long time ago, as someone
would have if he had only ever asked, but in the end it would have made
no difference either way, and it was now that they found out about his
lungs.

There was nothing anyone could do. At first I could not believe it.
People did not get sick and die. _People just did not die!_ Because I
was only a Reject and a surgeon, no Rash doctor had ever told me that
this had happened before, many times, to other men. I heard it not from
the Rashes, but from Wainer.

His lungs were beginning to atrophy. They were actually dying within his
body, and no one as yet knew why, or could stop it. He could be kept
alive without lungs, yes, for a long while. I asked if we could graft a
lung into him and this is what I was told: Because no one had yet
synthesized human tissue, the graft would have to be a human lung, and
in this age of longevity there were only a few available. Those few, of
course, went only to important men, and Wainer was nothing.

I volunteered a lung of my own, as did Lila, as did many Rejects. There
was hope for a while, but when I looked into Wainer's chest I saw for
myself that there was no way to connect. So much was wrong, so much
inside him was twisted and strange that I could not understand how he
had lived at all. When I learned of the other men who had been like
this, I asked what had been done. The answer was that nothing had been
done at all.

So Wainer did not go out into space. He returned instead to his single
room to sit alone and wait, while the cool world around him progressed
and revolved, while the city and its people went on without notice,
while a voucher was being prepared somewhere, allowing the birth of
another child because citizen Wainer would soon be dead.

What could the man have thought, that huge, useless man? When he sat by
his window and watched the world moving by, a