took one look and he knew Mr. Zytztz would not pass this time.

They asked Mr. Zytztz about his ether-time, and he produced a sheaf of discharge slips that would have made most captains envious. Then they began to throw questions at him—questions that came like red-hot rocket jets. They set him adrift in the asteroid belt. They fused his rear jets. They burned out his front jets. They choked up his instruments with ether-dust. They put his chief engineer in bed with space-vertigo. They threw out his navigation officer and gave him a black spot over the entire star system. They eclipsed the sun. They punctured his hull with meteorites.

But Mr. Zytztz wasn't perturbed. He stood there on his stalk in the center of the room and listened attentively and courteously to each question, and gave the answers in his soft, unruffled voice.

He sent a man outside to burn off the fused portions of his rear jets. He took what was left of the front jets and welded them together. He sent the first mate to the engine-room. He navigated by watching the stars, and when they covered the stars he proved to the board that he could draw a line within thirty minutes of true north or within thirty minutes of any given right ascension without instruments of any kind.

That was magnificent. Mr. Zytztz had what might be called absolute orientation. They even put him in a seamless room and revolved and rolled him, and each time his sense of direction performed more accurately than any Earth compass, because it was built inside of him and it was right....

He had them on all counts. The one thing they could have stuck him on—the actual details of repairing a piece of machinery—they didn't ask about.

He got his ticket. He got it and set off for the administration building as fast as he could shuffle, the precious book clutched firmly in his leaf-ends.

No, he didn't get a ship. He offered to take a third mate's berth, but they said they didn't have anything open. He wound up working for passage to Mars.

CHAPTER VII

Philipusters Belong Outside

Several months later Healey heard on the video that his father, Admiral Healey of the Stratosphere Fleet, had retired. It puzzled Healey, because his father was not an old man, and it wasn't like the Healeys to retire so early. Healey saw Pickens on his next landing, and Pickens gave him the story.

"Your father 

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