human folly as Earth was."

"He's euphoric," Paula said again, but her face was stricken.

"Of all the people in that space-cemetery, we had to pick one who
thinks like that," said Vaillant, with a sort of restrained fury.

"You said yourself that the oldest one would be the best," said Webber.
"Sako will change him."

Kieran walked down the corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed as
he walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without his
consent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now something
that he had just said had bitterly disappointed them.

"Come along," he said buoyantly to the two. "Let us not lag. Once aboard
the flitter and the girl is mine."

"Oh for God's sake shut up," said Webber.

4.

It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieran
had one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste in
his mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression.
He looked sourly around.

He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough in
which to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away was
sleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appeared
to be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front of
it. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though he
might be sleeping, too.

That was all--a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were,
presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there was
nothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen in
the ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns and
darknesses lay outside.

"A flitter," Webber had informed him, "just doesn't have room for the
complicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury you
dispense with in a flitter. We'll see when we get to Sako."

After a moment he had added, "If we get to Sako."

Kieran had merely laughed then, and had promptly gone to sleep. When he
had awakened, it had been with the euphoria all gone and with his
present hangover.

"At least," he told himself, "I can truthfully say that this one wasn't
my fault. That blasted spray--"

He looked resentfully at the sleeping woman in the chair. Then he
reached and roughly shook her shoulder.

She opened her eyes and looked at him, first sleepily and then with
resentment.

"You had no right to wake me up," she said.

Then, before Kieran co