renamed our unfortunate shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed haut cuisine and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.

Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink, textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat. For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not. "Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea, "you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun in my home country: Mensch ist was er isst. It means, you are what you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this Schweinerei you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the ladder from the dining-cubby.

"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.

"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."

"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"

"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."

Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies, we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."

"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."

Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye from Medical 

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