g, and opened a cabinet. From it he took a rack of spare radar
parts and three thick coils of wire. Paresi, startled, turned and saw
Hoskins peering owlishly at the Captain.

Anderson withdrew some tools, reached far back in the cabinet, and took
out a large bottle.

"Oh," said Paresi. "That.... I thought you were doing something
constructive."

In the far shadows, Hoskins turned silently back to his game. The
Captain gazed down at the bottle, tossed it, caught it. "I am," he said.
"I am."

He came and sat beside the doctor. He thumbed off the stopper and drank
ferociously. Paresi watched, his eyes as featureless as the imprisoning
dark.

"Well?" said the Captain pugnaciously.

Paresi's hands rose and fell, once. "Just wondering why."

"Why I'm going to get loopin', stoopin' drunk? I'll tell you why,
head-shrinker. Because I want to, that's why. Because I like it. I'm
doing something I like because I like it. I'm not doing it because of
the inversion of this concealed repression as expressed in the involuted
feelings my childhood developed in my attitude toward the sex-life of
beavers, see, couch-catechizer old boy? I like it and that's why."

"I knew a man who went to bed with old shoes because he liked it," said
Paresi coldly.

The Captain drank again and laughed harshly. "Nothing can change you,
can it, Nick?"

Paresi looked around him almost fearfully. "I can change," he whispered.
"Ives is gone. Give me the bottle."

Something clattered to the deck at the hem of the black curtain.

"'S another hallucination," said the Captain. "Go pick up the
hallucination, Nicky-boy."

"Not my hallucination," said Paresi. "Pick it up yourself."

"Sure," said the Captain good-naturedly. He waited while Paresi drank,
took back the bottle, tilted it sharply over his mouth. He wiped his
lips with the back of his hand, exhaled heavily, and went to the
blackness across the cabin.

"Well, what do you know," he breathed.

"What is it this time?"

[Illustration: Spaceman in melting room.]

Anderson held the thing up. "A trophy, that's what." He peered at it.
"_All-American, 2675._ Little statue of a guy holding up a victory
wreath. Nice going, little guy." He strode to Paresi and snatched away
the bottle. He poured liquor on the head of the figurine. "Have a drink,
little guy."

"Let me see that."

Paresi took it, held it, turned it over. Suddenly he dropped it as if it
were a red-hot coal. "Oh, dear God....