placid than I. But for me the monotony was torture: you must remember that, besides the lack of privacy, our food was doctored, too, and we could not have lived as man and wife had we had privacy.

Of course, I played cards with the crew, for there was always at least one who was off duty and not sleeping. But I had determined I would do nothing to make Mars as untenable for me as Earth had become, and I resisted the temptation to really gamble with any of them. And gambling for pennies is not card playing to me.

The man who came to my rescue at last was the astrogator, a Hawaiian named Kei. With Polynesian perspicacity, he had smuggled a personal supply of liquor aboard, against regulations. The other crew members knew he took a nip regularly on off-duty hours, but they never could locate his cache.

"Pretty dull, huh, groundie?" remarked Kei as we played gin rummy with cards that insisted on floating off into the wilds of the gravityless centerdeck. "Maybe I can pep things up. Ever been drunk in free fall?"

"No," I said. "I'm afraid I don't have your foresight."

He grinned smugly.

"You got to try it once, anyhow," he said. "Maybe once will be all you'll want, though, after the hangover hits you. It makes DTs look like a Grade B movie. Let's go down to the storage deck."

I glanced over at Dori. She was apparently asleep in her bunk.

We went below, and Kei broke out a bottle of fair whiskey from a cache behind one of the storage cabinets. He winked at me, cracked the cork and passed it over.

It didn't take long for the liquor to take hold, and I began to realize what Kei meant when he said it was an experience every man should go through once. As you know, when a spaceship is in "free fall," with no rockets blasting, there is no gravity at all, and you float free in space. To be drunk in free fall is to add the freedom of the alcohol to the freedom of space. You float on rosy clouds, not just mentally, but physically. You swim around in nothing, airily, deliciously. There's nothing on Earth or Mars like it, because you can experience it only in space.

I saw, too, why Kei would go to the storage deck to drink, even if he hadn't kept his private cache there. On the storage deck, your wild gestures won't hit some vital lever or button—and no one else can hear your ravings. For 

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