Barton started to look out the spaceport again, but jerked his head in the other direction. He didn't want to look out. Von Ulrich waited, but Barton didn't say anything. Finally, with a tight smile on his face, Von Ulrich got up and went to the door.

"I'll see you again, Barton. Some time."

Barton started. "Wait--don't go," he started to say. But something constricted in his throat and he hardly even moved his lips, and no sound came out at all.

He saw the cold streak flash past the view port. It was Von Ulrich's clinic. Quickly he looked toward the wall. The chrono was gone. Von Ulrich had taken it with him. There was a watch, a wristwatch. Barton ran around looking for the wristwatch, but he couldn't find it.

When he lay down again and closed his eyes, he couldn't rest. He couldn't sleep. His heart beat got louder, and after a while that was all he could hear, and when he tried to figure out how many times a minute his heart was, or was not, beating, he couldn't. What time was it?

The war in which all of Earth's outposts were involved, lasted thirty years. The basketballs were forgotten for a long time, and when they were remembered again, a special search was rewarded by finding only two of them. In the first basketball there was no trace of the watchman who had been abandoned in it almost half a century before, and no indication of what had happened to him.

In the second one, Von Ulrich found Barton still lying peacefully on the couch, looking hardly any different than when Von Ulrich had walked out and left him there.

Von Ulrich, who had been retired for a long time and who was unable to get about except in a wheelchair, had requested inclusion among the search boat's personnel. No one had figured out why because even if they found any basketballs, it was certain that no one would be alive on any of them, let alone anyone needing Von Ulrich's specialized talents.

Von Ulrich had hoped that Barton's basketball would be found and when it was found, he insisted on being carried through the interconnecting airlock into the spheroid that looked on the outside like a dead piece of slag.The ship's medical officer, a man young and rather stiff, was shocked at first to see Barton lying there, but he had a ready explanation as he used his stethoscope. "Must have sprung a leak and let in preserving frigidity."

"But then how did the 

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