"I see."

A few months later, Von Ulrich was back, watching Barton moulding something out of clay, a sort of human shape without a face. There were other self-amusement gimmicks, wood-working, soap-carving, movies, and the like, but Barton preferred molding things haphazardly out of clay, and sometimes reading one of the books he wasn't supposed to have brought along because books were no longer popular.

"What were you thinking about when you molded this thing?" Von Ulrich asked.

"Nothing much, sir."

"You must have been thinking of something?"

"I guess I was thinking of a man sleeping beside a river in green grass with nobody for miles around. Something like that."

"You weren't by any chance thinking about a dead man?"

"I don't like death much."

Later on sometime, Von Ulrich dropped around again on his therapeutic tour of basketballs, and Martian bases, and other bases even more remote. Barton wondered how anyone could find the basketball drifting in all that blackness. Just a little ragged spheroid like a piece of dead slag, something like a cork bobbing in a black ocean too big even to bother thinking about. If no one ever found the basketball Barton would have been happier, because the basketball was self-sustaining and could go on and on for years without supplies or any human contact.

"Getting a little lonely maybe?" Von Ulrich asked.

"No sir."

"Don't miss having people around. Your wife, your son?"

Barton wanted to laugh.

"Well, I'll be back to see you, Barton. I may be gone a year this time."

"Happy New Year," Barton said.

But it didn't seem like a year when Von Ulrich came back in his sleek little space-hopping clinic. It didn't seem like much of anything.

"You don't find the absence of women irritating, Barton?"

"I can take them or leave them, sir."

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