And in that assumption, Duran concluded, had been hidden the fallacy which had made a fiasco of the project. For was not maturity largely a matter of finding an acceptable place for oneself in the scheme of things? Was not maturity essentially a realistic, but wholly irrevocable, resignation? If so, it had been inevitable that those who came to volunteer would, for the most part, be the misfits and the malcontents, men who hoped to escape the imagined or to find the imaginary. The mature, the resigned, had assuredly inherited the earth. Only the young could seek the stars. END * * * * *