I grabbed a sheet of paper and began figuring again. It took me only a minute or two this time. The period of the Aspera's orbit was seven and a half years, and seven and a half years Earth time make four Mars years within a few days. That was how much hope I had--in seven and a half years I would be back in the immediate vicinity of Mars, and I might have enough power in the steering jets to claw my way in to one of the moons. If I didn't bump into an asteroid. If Jupiter didn't pull me too far off course. If I didn't go star-happy in the meanwhile, or starve. Before seven and a half years were up I'd be eating the air plant. I threw down the pencil, caught it on the first wild bounce, and stowed it away in my pocket. I felt like a fool. With reason. It takes a very fancy kind of fool to rot four years in the Girdle swamps on Venus, getting drunk only every second month so he can save up enough of his pay to put himself through Space Tech, and then, when he has graduated second in his class, to throw away a plushy job with Translunar and go barging off into space in an ancient can and get himself wrecked just because he lets a girl talk him into making a magnificent gesture. That's what I told myself. It didn't help any, but I had it coming. I was a worse fool than that, even. Betty Day hadn't talked me into this. I had thought the whole thing up with my own little brain. The germ of the idea was hers, though, or rather the inspiration for it. II For that matter, Betty Day inspired a lot of my ideas, ever since my first opening day at Space Tech. The first task they put us to on the opening day was to sit through a welcoming address from the President of the Institute. Maybe it was a good speech if you happened to be a kid fresh out of school, like most of the class, with your head full of the ideas of romance and glory that the tridim space operas pump into the cash customers, but when he began to talk about our "mission" and being "pioneers of the new frontier" it got a little too thick for me. I hadn't come to the Institute of Space Technology to look for glory. I had come for the excellent if commonplace purpose of qualifying for a well-paid job. My father's happy-go-lucky space-ratting was not for me. I intended to do my planeteering with the resources of a nice fat soulless corporation behind me. Four years in the Girdle of Venus--which name, in case you are wondering, is a neat little piece of irony--had left me very sane and practical and disenchanted about the whole matter. I let the President gabble on and began to glance around the auditorium.