in quarantine or to go
wandering around a dismal hole like the Enclave." Alan stood up,
stretched, and took a deep breath. "Phew! Get a lungful of that sweet,
fresh, allegedly pure Terran air! I'll take ship atmosphere, stale as it
is, any time over this smoggy soup."

"I'll go along with that. Say, look--a strange face!"

Alan turned and saw a young starman of about his own age coming toward
them. He wore a red uniform with gray trim instead of the
orange-and-blue of the _Valhalla_.

"Welcome, newcomers. I suppose you're from that ship that just put down?
The _Valhalla_?"

"Right. Name's Alan Donnell, and this is Roger Bond. Yours?"

"I'm Kevin Quantrell." He was short and stocky, heavily tanned, with a
square jaw and a confident look about him. "I'm out of the starship
_Encounter_, just back from the Aldebaran system. Been in the Enclave
two weeks now--with a lot more ahead of me."

Alan whistled. "Aldebaran! That's--let's see, 109 years round trip. You
must be a real old-timer, Quantrell!"

"I was born in 3403. Makes me 473 years old, Earthtime. But I'm
actually only seventeen and a half. Right before Aldebaran we made a hop
to Capella, and that used up 85 years more in a hurry."

"You've got me by 170 years," Alan said. "But I'm only seventeen
myself."

Quantrell grinned cockily. "It's a good thing some guy thought up this
Tally system of chalking up every real day you live through. Otherwise
we'd be up to here in confusion all the time."

He leaned boredly against the wall of a rickety building which once had
proudly borne the chrome-steel casing characteristic of early 27th
Century architecture, but whose outer surface was now brown and scaly
from rust. "What do you think of our little paradise?" Quantrell asked
sarcastically. "Certainly puts the Earther cities to shame."

He pointed out across the river, where the tall, glistening buildings of
the adjoining Earther city shone in the morning sunlight.

"Have you ever been out there?" Alan asked.

"No," Quantrell said in a tight voice. "But if this keeps up much
longer----" He clenched and unclenched his fists impatiently.

"What's the trouble?"

"It's my ship--the _Encounter_. We were outspace over a century, you
know, and when we got back the inspection teams found so many things
wrong with the ship that she needs just about a complete overhauling.
They've been working her over for the last two weeks, and the way it
looks it'll be another coupl