th spurious
naivete, and there were guffaws which soon died out. After all, this
_was_ a serious occasion, and who wanted to be a jerk? Now that the
price had been shoved down into the ground, they could probably get
their Archer Fives--their all-important vacuum armor. They were one more
hurdle nearer to the stars.

Two regular members of the Bunch hadn't yet shown up. Ten were present,
including Gimp in the Archie. All were different. Each had a name.

But Frank Nelsen figured that numbers, names, and individual variations
didn't count for much, just then. They were a crowd with an overall
personality--often noisy, sometimes quiet like now, always a bit grim to
sustain their nerve before all they had to learn in order to reduce
their inexperienced greenness, and before the thought of all the
expensive equipment they had to somehow acquire, if they were to take
part in the rapid adaptation of the solar system to human uses. Most of
all, their courage was needed against fear of a region that could be
deadly dangerous, but that to them seemed wonderful like nothing else.

The shop smelled of paint, solvent and plastic, like most any other.
Gimp, sitting in the Archer, beside the oil-burning stove, didn't say
any more. He forgot to play tough, and seemed to lose himself in a
mind-trip Out There--probably as far as he would ever get. His face,
inside the helmet, now looked pinched. His freckles were very plain in
his paled cheeks. Gimp was awed.

So was everybody else, including Paul Hendricks, owner of the Hobby
Center, who was approaching eighty and was out of the running, though
his watery blue eyes were still showing the shine of boyhood, right now.

Way back, Paul Hendricks used to barnstorm county fairs in a
wood-and-fabric biplane, giving thrill rides to sports and their girls
at five dollars a couple, because he had been born sixty years too soon.

Much later in his spotty career, he had started the store. He had also
meant to do general repair work in the backroom shop. But in recent
years it had degenerated into an impromptu club hall, funk hole,
griping-arguing-and-planning pit, extracurricular study lab and project
site for an indefinite horde of interplanetary enthusiasts who were
thought of in Jarviston as either young adults of the most resourceful
kind--for whom the country should do much more in order to insure its
future in space--or as just another crowd of delinquents, more bent on
suicide and tro