well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows.

The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.

But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities.

It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy.

Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror.

So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.

He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.

The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall.

"Need a fresher?" the host inquired.

Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. "No, no, I'm fine." He let the word hang there for examination. "Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?"

The host shrugged. It was 

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