Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about tomorrow's menu."

The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The pièce de résistance was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really steak."

Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed. "Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and cycler-salt."

"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.

"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and grasshoppers, to stay alive."

"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.

"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me, Belly-Robber?"

Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really don't know what I can do to please you."

"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban Hausfrau with the vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will keep my belly content and my brain alive."

"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the 

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