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reputation as a classical scholar, unnoticed and unknown. And then, in the September of his thirteenth year, had come the break-up.
    A man called Tallence had somehow stumbled across the story of Ticker Troon and the missile, and had applied to the authorities for the lifting of the security ban. After twelve years there was no good reason for silence - and, indeed, had been none for some time. Four Satellite Stations had for several years been known to be in position - the British one, two fair-sized Russian ones, and the huge American one. The existence of space-mines was no longer a secret, nor was the fact that all the stations now carried means to combat them. Tallence, therefore, had managed  to carry his point and, presently, to produce his book.
    It was a good book, and the publishers spared nothing on the publicity that launched it; the conveniently timed citation of a posthumous V.C. for Ticker Troon helped, too; and the book went straight into the epic class. It sold by the hundred thousand; it was seized upon by translators at once, and went into all languages save those allied with the Intransigent Sixth, where it was believed that the space-station was a Soviet invention. It was filmed, televised, digested, and strip-treated until, a year later, there was scarcely a man, woman, or child outside the Soviet Empire who did not know of Ticker Troon and his exploit.
    For his son, it had been all very exciting at first. Suddenly to discover that one had a hero father, to be invited to big parties, to have news-writers and cameramen besieging, to take the seat of honour at a premiere, to be introduced on platforms, were great thrills. Soon, however, he had become awkwardly conscious of his ignorance, and of people’s disappointment when their talk of space meant nothing to him. To overcome that, he had begun to read books on astronomy and spacework. In them he learnt that his grandfather had not been fully informative in teaching him that the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas, that Venus emerged from the sea, that Orion was the: great hunter who met his match in Diana. And as he read he too had seemed to hear ‘the far gnat-voices cry, star to faint star across the sky’.
    The excitement of being a public figure had soon worn off. The sense of being watched became distasteful. The feeling that he was expected to be exceptional weighed upon him at school, and only slightly less when he went up to Oxford. The house that his mother had accepted with a feeling of reluctant obligation never had the quality of home that there had been in the cottage. His mother seemed to be forever socially busy now; his new interests were not shared by his grandfather; it seemed impossible to remain unreminded for an hour that he was the son of Ticker Troon - and that was rather like finding one had Sir Francis Drake, Lord Nelson, or the National Gallery for a father.
    His discovered fascination with the problems of space made it worse; as if a part of him had turned traitor and conspired to draw him away from his old interests, and deeper into his father’s shadow. He tried hard to retain the belief that Phoebus Apollo was more interesting than Phoebus, the Eye of Heaven; that Mars, as the alias of the roughneck son of Zeus and Hera, had more significance than Mars, the nearest and potentially most attainable of the planets; that Aristotle, the Peripatetic, was of more importance than the crater on the moon that had been named after him, but in vain. An unquenchable curiosity had sprung alight in his mind, and presently he had been forced to admit that though his father’s qualities might be beyond him, he had certainly inherited his one passionate interest. With that once decided, he had been willing to set about using his name to further it, and he had entered the Service.
    He had, at first, used it quite diffidently. He did not seek publicity; that was not necessary, but neither did he shun it any longer. He avoided the