This wasn't getting us anywhere and we both knew it. We stared at each other in the tele for a long silent minute. Then she said, "This will be the end for us, Al. Remember that before it's too late...."

I saw again the haunted look on Kelly's face. The almost desperate pleading there of something I could never understand unless—

"I'm going." I said before I could let her change my mind.

"Then there's nothing more to say. Goodbye, Al."

And she switched off the set on me. Her face was gone, and maybe our life together too. Just like that.

There was a three-day orientation period before we took off. Ships on the Stardust Overdrive were operated by two-man teams and I was assigned to a man named Radwick, an older man, who had been on the Drive before. He was as crazy as a carnival mirror. He was a semanticist and he carried around a small bag full of wooden blocks. He would set these on a table and shift them around into various positions. "I am thinking on the non-verbal level," he told me. "I'm expressing ideas in things."

"Maybe we'd better go over the Company manual. I got a lot to learn in only three days."

He had white hair and a thin face and a patient smile. "Nonsense. You can't learn that way. You learn by doing. When we get into space, I'll teach you all you need to know about the Drive."

I put in a complaint to the Company. "Listen," I told the supervisor. "I don't like the idea of teaming up with a grown-up man who plays with blocks. This boy has really lost his lid."

The supervisor gave me the stern Company treatment. "Don't you know that we can't get one man in a hundred for the Drive?" he said. "We can't afford to pick and choose. You volunteered for Stardust and you'll have to abide by our system of operation."

I was glad to get out of earth and into the planets. The people of earth loved that far-off metal we brought back from the stars, called duronium plus. You could make a hundred year suit with it or you could carry an atomic pile around in your pocket in a wallet made of the stuff. It was profitable trade for the Company, but nobody wanted to have anything to do with the rest of the culture of the far-off stars. Every human who had gone out there had either not come back, or had come back with too few of his marbles. In order to get their duronium plus they had to 

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