DEFINITION

By DAMON KNIGHT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Startling Stories, February 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Man, n. A pentagonal, dipolar, monoplane dominant, of intelligence 96, native of District 10039817. Unabsorbed.

It is a truism that a human being can get used to very nearly everything. The hardy Eskimo, lying belly-down on a plain of ice that stretched unbroken to the sky, probably spent little of his time in meditating upon the vastness and inscrutability of the Universe ... he was thinking of his dinner. And Charles Samson, seven hundred years later, looked past his long nose at a scene of equal majesty—our galaxy, viewed from a ship in mid-arc—in a similar frame of mind.

It was approximately sixteen hours, galactic time; a trifle later according to Samson's stomach. He had played a vicious game of handball with his wife an hour and a half before, and now he was hungry.

The Eskimo, although a patient man, might have reflected that it was unreasonable of this particular seal to wake up and look around him at this precise moment. Samson, equally virtuous, told himself that his wife might have chosen a more opportune time to experiment with her cookery. Midge had conceived an idea for a soufflé such as had never before been seen by Man, and had accordingly been adding new circuits to the autochef for the past eighty-five minutes.

If she ran to form, the soufflé—which would be a triumph, in spite of seventeen separate miscalculations—would be served in about twenty minutes more. Samson would have preferred an artless slab of steak now.

These, it may be considered, were picayune thoughts to occupy a brain which had been interminably trained and tested, stocked with a fabulous assortment of knowledge, and then sent out, with one other human mind for company, to patrol a hegemony ten billion times as vast as Caesar's.

At the moment, however, there was nothing world-shaking for it to do. Charles and Midge, like a thousand other teams of trouble-shooters assigned to the volume of space known as Slice 103, earned their pay by intense, difficult, and sometimes dangerous labor which averaged three months out of the year; the rest of their time was spent in traveling from one assignment to the next, or simply in 

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