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right around a corner, hiding there in the ship’s interior.
    â€œRaoul?” she said.
    ...And softly the voice of Raoul Penard spoke from the ship’s hull all around them, as if the man was talking to himself. But it was a quieter, happier talking to himself than Jim had heard before. Raoul was quoting one of the poems of William Henry Drummond again. But this time it was a poem entirely in English and there was no trace of accent in the words at all...
    O, Spirit of the mountain that speaks to us to-night, Your voice is sad, yet still recalls past visions of delight, When ‘mid the grand old Laurentides, old when the Earth was new, With flying feet we followed the moose and caribou. And backward rush sweet memories, like fragments of a dream, We hear the dip of paddles …
    Raoul’s voice went on, almost whispering, contentedly to itself. Jim looked up from listening, and saw Mary’s eyes fixed on him with a strange, hard look he had not seen before.
    â€œYou didn’t seem to follow me, just now,” said Mary. “You didn’t seem to understand what I meant. You’re one of our most valuable lives, the true white knight that all of us dream of being at one time or another, but only one in billions actually succeeds in being born to be.”
    Jim stared back at her.
    â€œI told you,” he said, “I can’t help it.”
    â€œThat’s not what I’m talking about,” said Mary. “You wanted to go out and fight the dragons, but life was too short. But what about now?”
    â€œNow?” echoed Jim, staring at her. “You mean—me?”
    â€œYes,” said Mary. Her face was strange and intense, and her voice seemed to float on the soft river of words flowing from the black box. “I mean you. What are you going to be doing, a thousand years from today?”

Chapter 5
    Jim had more than a month of accumulated leave time coming and he took it. He wanted to go someplace with the feel of hot sand under his bare feet and the smell of sea in the breeze. He wanted to forget about space and about Raoul Penard and La Chasse Gallerie ; he wanted to forget about the old Canadian poems and songs, and about Mary Gallegher. Above all, he wanted to forget what she had said the last time they had talked. Instead he wanted to fill his mind with wine, women and song. But he lied to himself.
    So he went off, relying on sand, salt-smelling breezes and the touch of women to burn all he wanted to forget out of his mind. He went to a place in Baja California called Barres de Hijo and signed in at a resort there. It had everything he was looking for, including charterboat fishing for sailfish and tarpon. It also—or rather the resort hotel he stayed at—had a swimming pool at which he met a fellow vacationer named Barbie Novak, who did fit his ideas of beauty and liked him even better when she found out he was one of the Frontier Guard pilots, on leave.
    The days and nights, consequently, were a pleasant blur with Barbie for a companion, until she had to go home; and following that there was a girl named Joan Takari. But morning after she had left he found himself lying alone on the beach, hoping she had gotten home all right; and he could not remember her face.
    So instead of looking around for more women to companion him, he took to sitting and walking by himself, lying on the beach and listening to the waves or seated up on the rocks overlooking a part of the shore that had no beach, watching the surf crash on the blue-black boulders below in white foam.
    It was not, he concluded, that he wanted to live forever. But nonetheless Mary’s words from their last meeting stuck in his mind. In a way they had taken the place of the emptiness inside him—which was still there, but was now like a dark cavern into which a small aperture had broken, letting in a single ray of light.
    He had dreamed of space and wanted it from the first time he had