was having the luxury of all that space in the sleeping
quarters. Harry thrived on it.

And some of the other hands were interesting companions. True, they
were renegades and mavericks, but they were each of them unique and
individual, and Harry enjoyed listening to them fan the breeze during
the long nights.

There was Big Phil, who was pushing sixty now. But you'd never know
it, not unless you got him to talking about the old days when he'd
been a boy in Detroit. His daddy had been one of the last of the Union
Men, back in the days of what they used to call the Organized Labor
Movement. He could tell you about wage-hour agreements and the
Railroad Brotherhood and contract negotiations almost as if he knew of
these things through personal experience. He even remembered the
Democratic Party. Phil got out when the government took over and set
up Vocational Apt and Industrial Supervision; that's when he drifted
west.

Tom Lowery's family had been military; he claimed to have been a
member of the last graduating class ever to leave West Point. When the
armament race ended, his prospects of a career vanished, and he
settled down as a guard at Canaveral. Finally, he'd headed for the
open country.

Bassett was the scholar of the outfit. He could sit around and quote
old-time book-authors by the hour--classic writers like Prather and
Spillane. In another age he might have been a college professor or
even a football coach; he had an aptitude for the arts.

And there was Lobo, the misogynist, who had fled a wife and eleven
children back in Monterey; and Januzki, who used to be mixed up with
one of those odd religious cults out on the Coast. He bragged he'd
been one of the Big Daddy-Os in the Beat Generationists, and he argued
with Bassett about some old-time evangelist named Kerouac.

* * * * *

Best of all, though, Harry liked talking to Nick Kendrick. Nick's
hobby was music, and he treasured his second-hand stereophonic unit
and collection of tapes. He too was a classicist in his way, and there
was many a long winter night when Harry sat there listening to ancient
folk songs. The quaint atonalities of progressive jazz and the
childishly frantic rhythms of "cool sounds" were somehow soothing and
reassuring in their reminder of a simple heritage from a simpler age.

But above all, these men were wranglers, and they took a peculiar
pride in the traditions of their own calling. There wasn'