nd looked up at night to
the stars, and when he drank cool water, or breathed morning air, or
walked or sat or lay down, what was there for him to think?

He had one life, the same as any man, one time to be upon the Earth, and
it was ending now as a record of nothing, as a piece of loneliness
carved with great pain, as a celestial abortion, withered, wasted. There
was nothing in his life, nothing, nothing, which he had ever wanted to
be, and now he was dying without reason in a world without reason,
unused, empty, collapsing, alone.

He went down to the beach again.

In the days that came, he was a shocking sight. What was happening
became known, and when he walked the streets people stared at the
wonder, the sickness, the man who was dying. Therefore he went out to
the beaches and slept and took no treatments and no one will ever know
what was in his mind, his million-faceted mind, as he waited to die.

* * * * *

Well, it was told to me at last because I knew Wainer, and they needed
him. It was told hesitantly, but when I heard it I broke away and ran,
and in the clean air of the beach I found Wainer and told him.

At first he did not listen. I repeated it several times. I told him what
the Rashes had been able to learn. He stood breathing heavily, face to
the Sun, staring out over the incoming sea. Then I knew what he was
thinking.

The Rashes had told me this:

The atrophy of the lungs was not all that happened, but it was the major
thing, and it came only to Rejects. After years of study, it could be
stated, cautiously, that the disease seemed to be in the nature of an
_evolutionary_ change. For many years they had probed for the cause of
the Rejects, and the final conclusion--to be kept from the people--was
that there was some variation in the brain of the Reject, something
subtly, unfathomably different from the brain of a Rash. And so it was
also with the lungs, and with other parts of the body. And the
scientists thought it was Evolution.

I told this to Wainer, and more, while peace spread slowly across his
rugged face. I said that the nature of life was to grow and adapt, and
that no one knew why. The first cells grew up in the sea and then
learned to live on land, and eventually lifted themselves to the air,
and now certainly there was one last step to be taken.

The next phase of change would be into space, and it was clear now what
Wainer was, what all the Reject