moment, shook his head. "No, wait. Let me think about
this."

He looked speculatively out of the window for a few moments. Then he
said,

"Message Meloni that this one chap's body--what's his name, Kieran?--is
to be preserved in space against a chance of future revival."

Hausman nearly blotted his copybook by exclaiming, "For God's sake--" He
choked that down in time and said, "But it could be centuries before a
revival process is perfected, if it ever is."

Garces nodded. "I know. But you're missing a psychological point that
could be valuable to UNRC. This Kieran has relatives, doesn't he?"

Hausman nodded. "A widowed mother and a sister. His father's been dead a
long time. No wife or children."

Garces said, "If we tell them he's dead, frozen in space and then
buried, it's all over with. Won't those people feel a lot better if we
tell them that he's _apparently_ dead, but might be brought back when a
revival-technique is perfected in the future?"

"I suppose they'd feel better about it," Hausman conceded. "But I don't
see--"

Garces shrugged. "Simple. We're only really beginning in space, you
know. As we go on, UNRC is going to lose a number of men, space-struck
just like Kieran. A howl will go up about our casualty lists, it always
does. But if we can say that they're only frozen until such time as
revival technique is achieved, everyone will feel better about it."

"I suppose public relations are important--" Hausman began to say, and
Garces nodded quickly.

"They are. See that this is done, when you go up to confer with Meloni.
Make sure that it gets onto the video networks, I want everyone to see
it."

Later, with many cameras and millions of people watching, Kieran's body,
in a pressure-suit, was ceremoniously taken to a selected position where
it would orbit the Moon. All suggestions of the funerary were carefully
avoided. The space-struck man--nobody at all referred to him as
"dead"--would remain in this position until a revival process was
perfected.

"Until forever," thought Hausman, watching sourly. "I suppose Garces is
right. But they'll have a whole graveyard here, as time goes on."

As time went on, they did.

2.

In his dreams, a soft voice whispered.

He did not know what it was telling him, except that it was important.
He was hardly aware of its coming, the times it came. There would be the
quiet murmuring, and something in him seemed to hear and understand, and
then the mur