I stood now before the officer, tense and afraid. This was critical, the last check-point before I could actually set foot in the ship. "_It is now H minus forty-five_," the timer's metallic voice said. The officer looked up at me, and then at the faked photoprint on my papers. "Kim Hall, age twenty-nine, vocation agri-technician and hydroponics expert, height 171 centimeters, weight 60 kilos. Right?" I nodded soundlessly. "Sums check within mass-limits. Physical condition index 3.69. Fertility index 3.66. Compatibility index 2.99." The officer turned to a trim-looking assistant. "All check?" The uniformed girl nodded. I began to breathe again. "Next desk, please," the officer said shortly. I moved on to the medics at the next stop. A gray-clad nurse checked my pulse and respiration. She smiled at me. "Excited?" she asked. "Don't be." She indicated the section of the checking station where the breeders were being processed. "You should see how the bulls take it," she said with a laugh. She picked up an electrified stamp. "Now don't worry. This won't hurt and it won't disfigure you permanently. But the ship's guards won't let you aboard without it. Government regulations, you know. We cannot load personal dossiers on the ships and this will tell the officers all they need to know about you. Weight limitations, you see." I almost laughed in her face at that. If there was one thing all Earth could offer me that I wanted, it was that stamp on my forehead: a passport to the stars.... She set the stamp and pressed it against my forehead. I had a momentary fear about the durability of the flesh mask that covered my face, but it was unnecessary. The plastiskin took the temporary tattoo the way real flesh would have. I felt the skin and read it in my mind. I knew exactly what it said. I'd dreamed of it so often and so long all my life. My ticket on the _Martian Queen_. My pass to those lands in the sky. CERT SXF HALL, K. RS MART QUEEN SN1775690. I walked across the ramp and into the lift beside the great tapering hull of the rocket. My heart was singing. The timer said: "_It is H minus thirty-one_." And then I stepped through the outer valve, into the _Queen_. The air was brisk with the tang of hydrogenol. Space-fuel. The ship was alive and humming with a thousand relays and timers and whispering generators, readying herself for space. * * * * * I lay down in the acceleration hammock and listened to the ship. This was everything I had wished for all my life. To be a free man among the stars. It was worth the chances I had taken, worth the lying and cheating and danger.