But when I like someone straight off, his past is just so much water over the dam if he wants it that way.

I never did find out the truth about Pete—right up until we parted. I had a lot of fun kidding him about it. "Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years, but you slept a thousand, Pete! You crawled out of an old ship and went to sleep in the desert.

"Did you get tired, Pete? Of the roar and the dust and the night—the crocus-flower faces of Venusians, the gopher-girls of Mars and the pinwheeling stars—of the night and the dust and the roar? Couldn't you take it in the old days, Pete, when ships kept bursting apart at the seams and there was an ant hill on Callisto called a colony, with twenty living dead men in it?

"The ant hill's a city now, Pete. And you're still Pete, still around, and I'm just cutting my wisdom teeth on my first streak of hard luck! Hard like a biscuit, Pete! A dog biscuit flung to a dog!"

I was raving even more wildly as I stared out over that graveyard of old ships, feeling sorry for myself, envying Pete because he didn't seem to care much whether he lived or died.

But I was wrong. Pete did care.

"If we could just get back to Earth, Jim!" he pleaded. "If we could smell the green earth again, after it's been rainin'! If we could just get a whiff o' the sea!"

I swung on him. "What chance have we? You don't value dough so much when you've got it to toss around. But when you're stony broke you get to feeling like a stone. Weighed down, petrified! You can't do anything without dough!"

Pete made a clucking sound. "All right! You got trimmed, Jim—and bad! But last night you had another streak of luck!"

I stared at him, hard.

He gestured toward the old ships. "There's a yardmaster down there with a list of ships a yard long. If you want to buy a ship you just stand around twiddling your thumbs until he notices you. If he sizes you up right—you get a bargain!"

"You mean if he thinks you've got some dough, but not much?"

"Uh huh!" Pete winked. "But if he thinks you've got a lot of dough you could get a bargain too. Without shelling out a cent!"

It didn't take me long to get what Pete was driving at. I'd taken a beating, and everyone knew it. But everyone knew my face too! I 

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