e the strangest. He had his
switch blade out, and was tossing it expertly against a wall
two-by-four, in which it stuck quivering each time. This seemed his one
skill, his pride, his proof of manhood. And he wanted to get into space
like nobody else around, except maybe Gimp Hines. It wasn't hard to
sense how his head worked--the whole Bunch knew.

Tiflin's face seemed to writhe, now, with self-doubt and truculence; his
eyes were on the photos of the heroes, beginning way back; Goddard. Von
Braun. Clifford, who had first landed on the far side of the Moon.
LaCrosse, who had reached Mercury, closest to the sun. Vasiliev, who had
just come back from the frozen moons of Jupiter, scoring a triumph for
the Tovies--somebody had started calling them that, a few years ago--up
in high Eurasia, the other side of an ideological rift that still
threatened the ever more crowded and competitive Earth, though mutual
fear had so far kept the flare ups within limits. Bannon, whose
expedition was even now exploring the gloomy cellar of Venus' surface,
smothered in steam, carbon dioxide and poisonous formaldehyde.

To Tiflin, as to the others, even such places were glamorous. But he
wanted to be a big shot, too. It was like a compulsion. He was touchy
and difficult. Three years back, he had been in trouble for breaking and
entering. Maybe his worship of space, and his desire to get there and
prove himself, were the only things that had kept him straight for so
long--grimly attentive at Tech, and at work at his car-washing job,
nights.

In his nervousness, now, he stuck a cigarette savagely between his lips,
and lighted it with a quick, arrogant gesture, hardly slowing down the
continuous toss and recovery of his knife.

This had begun to annoy big Art Kuzak. For one thing, Tiflin was doing
his trick too close to the mass of crinkly, cellophane-like stuff draped
over a horizontal wooden pole suspended by iron straps from the ceiling.
The crinkly mass was one of the Bunch's major projects--their first
space bubble, or bubb which they had been cutting and shaping with more
care and devotion than skill.

"Cripes--put that damn shiv away, Tif!" Art snapped. "Or lose it
someplace!"

Ramos, who was a part-time mechanic at the same garage where Tiflin
worked, couldn't help taunting. "Yeah--smoking, too. Oh-oh. Using up
precious oxygen. Better quit, pal. Can't do much of that Out There."

This was a wrong moment to rib Tiflin. He was in an