waway on a spaceship if he couldn't even get close to it?

He wandered around outside, staring through the charged wire fence at
the crowds, the spacemen, the ships inside. They were gigantic shining
things, those wonderful ships, each so long that he realized for the
first time how far away they must have been and how rapidly they must
have traveled, for those he saw had seemed to him like shooting stars.
They were pointed almost straight up. Near the stern of each ship was a
vacuum-pit to absorb the radioactive exhaust gases.

His eye caught an old tub, its shininess dulled, its hull faintly
scarred. Just such a ship, he thought with a thrill, as the one on which
Comets Carter had been shanghaied on that momentous occasion when ...

* * * * *

_The old freighter swung a great circle, its torsion jets blasting
desperately in an effort to keep it on an even keel. This, thought
Comets Carter, was it. This was the foul revenge that Rogue Rogan had
planned, the evil death he had plotted with his unhuman companions. In a
moment the pulsating radiations of electroid rays would set off the
cargo of ghoulite, and when the interplanetary echoes of the explosion
died away, Comets Carter would be no more than a series of photon
packets, his body torn apart, his very atoms converted into radiation
that was hurtling with the speed of light to the far corners of the
universe...._

* * * * *

It hadn't happened that way, of course. But if it _had_ happened--well,
it might have on just such a tub as this.

A guard saw him peering through the fence, and said, "What are you
looking at, kid?"

"Those ships," said Plato, honestly enough. And then he added, to throw
the man off the track, "Gee, I'd be scared to go up in one of them. No,
sir, you couldn't get me into one of them for a million credits."

The man laughed. "They're not for the likes of you. A lot of those ships
go to other stars."

"Other stars? Gosh! Does that little one, the _Marie T._--"

"That tub? Just an interplanetary freighter. But even that isn't for
you. Now run along and mind your own business."

Plato was happy to run along. Unfortunately, he realized, running along
didn't help him to get past the fence.

And then he had a fear-inspiring thought. He couldn't tell an
interplanetary ship from an interstellar. What if he did manage,
somehow, to get in and stow away--and then found himself on