It's this way in Interstel: you're taught to be a loner. You're expected to have absolute confidence in your own abilities and complete skepticism about the talents of others. You're supposed to be suspicious, cynical, courageous, and completely trustworthy. And you're not expected to have friends. Which, obviously, in the light of the aforementioned and part of what is yet to come, could serve as the definition of redundancy. You're required to weed out incompetents wherever you find them without prejudice, mercy, or feeling. The standing order is survival, yet you are expected to lay down your life gladly if the sacrifice will save one, pink-cheeked, short-time, assistant teamer who gives the barest suggestion that he might some day grow up to be a man and repay the thousands of credits squandered upon his training in that profound hope. Which, stated another way, has become the Eleventh Commandment of special agents: _Remember the body corporeal and keep it inviolate_; and, if the reaction of the rank-and-file of Galactic Survey to Interstel is used as criterion, is the best-kept secret in the explored, physical universe. "The agent's burden," Gravis calls it. Moya's jaw dropped when he caught sight of me--apparently he had been told only to expect an agent--but he recovered quickly. "Hello, Callum," he barked. "I won't say it's a pleasure. Stow your gear and strap down." The claxon sounded stridently, and the inflectionless voice of the robopilot said: "Sixty seconds." I got into the indicated gee couch and squirmed around seeking some measure of comfort. It had been designed for a much larger man, and I gritted my teeth in the expectation of taking a beating. * * * * * After a bruising few minutes, we went weightless, then the servos put us back on internal gravity, and the crew unstrapped. They ignored me studiously; it wasn't entirely bad manners; there's plenty to be done in the interval prior to the first hop, and it isn't all in just checking co-ordinates and programming master con. The usual space plan calls for several accelerations and a lot of distance between Terra-Luna proximity and Solar System departure. But Space Regs are disregarded on Priority One missions. So, for probably less than an hour, things were going to be busy in Astrogation. I retrieved my kit and looked for an unoccupied cubicle. GS star ships are designed to accommodate twenty-four men in reasonable comfort--a figure arrived at more historically--the sum of experience--than arbitrarily, as the minimum number necessary for the adequate exploration of a new star system.