And then he set his lips close together, turned on his heel and left the sewing room. "Nothing," he said aloud, "is going to happen to you. That's why they put medocenters on these ships." And he went to the place and spent the afternoon being checked over.

He found himself in perfect health. For some reason he was disappointed.

The weeks passed slowly, but they did pass, and Clifton busied himself with exhaustive checks throughout the entire ship, interested himself in the stereos (they weren't so bad now that he had nothing else to do), music tapes (he weeded out the ones he didn't like), massages (he was pleased to discover they left him with a glow), books (funny how hard it was to read after the ease of stereo), mathematics (how much he'd forgotten), a few languages (German was still his hardest), moods of writing (he just did not have the knack), painting (he was always drawing machinery and wondering why)—and found the image of Karen's laughing blue eyes still there at the edge of his mind, though curiously distant, as if it were one of the stereos he had seen.

Then the hunger started.

He sat for long hours in the chill of the sleep locker and envied the sleepers there, row on row, all of them without a worry, without thought, trustful of him, confident he would get them through, none of them knowing Karen was dead and not caring, and he had an urge to wake them all and throw a furious party to end all parties.

And sometimes he'd have a party there all by himself.

And then he grew to hate them. When he did, he went to the medocenter and this was erased and he was made whole again.

But the hunger got worse.

"Karen, Karen!" And he finally wondered if it was really Karen he wanted. And the medocenter only made his hunger worse and he cursed the efficiency of it.

Then one day he got out the file of the sleepers, went through it from Abelard, Johannes, to Yardley, Greta, and put the pictures in the stereo and saw what the sleepers looked like and wondered which of them would prove the most companionable. Which man, that is, for a woman ... well, it just would not be right to awaken a woman. It would not look right in the log, for one thing, and he was sure all he needed was another person to talk to and it might as well be a man. After all, man is a gregarious animal. If he had someone to talk to....

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