ds then. You don't even need the mask, for
that matter. Or not very much. Everybody's still pretty clean. The place
smells--oh, let's see--about like the locker room in a gym. You know?
You can stand it. That's if nobody's got space sickness, of course. We
were lucky that way.

"But that's about how it's going to get anyway, you know. Outside the
masks, it's soup. It isn't that you smell it so much. You kind of
_taste_ it, in the back of your mouth, and your eyes sting. That's after
the first two or three months. Later on, it gets worse.

"And with the mask on, of course, the oxygen mixture is coming in under
pressure. That's funny if you're not used to it. Your lungs have to work
a little bit harder to get rid of it, especially when you're asleep, so
after a while the muscles get sore. And then they get sorer. And then--

"Well.

"Before we take off, the psych people give us a long doo-da that keeps
us from killing each other. But they can't stop us from thinking about
it. And afterward, after we're back on Earth--this is what you won't
read about in the articles--they keep us apart. You know how they work
it? We get a pension, naturally. I mean there's got to be a pension,
otherwise there isn't enough money in the world to make anybody go. But
in the contract, it says to get the pension we have to stay in our own
area.

[Illustration]

"The whole country's marked off. Six sections. Each has at least one big
city in it. I was lucky, I got a lot of them. They try to keep it so
every man's home town is in his own section, but--well, like with us,
Chowderhead and the captain both happened to come from Santa Monica. I
think it was Chowderhead that got California, Nevada, all that Southwest
area. It was the luck of the draw. God knows what the captain got.

"Maybe New Jersey," I said, and took another white pill.

* * * * *

We went on to another place and she said suddenly, "I figured something
out. The way you keep looking around."

"What did you figure out?"

"Well, part of it was what you said about the other fellow getting New
Jersey. This is New Jersey. You don't belong in this section, right?"

"Right," I said after a minute.

"So why are you here? I know why. You're here because you're looking for
somebody."

"That's right."

She said triumphantly, "You want to find that other fellow from your
crew! You want to fight him!"

I couldn't help shaking, white pills or n