"Doc, after this project you know more about contemp' stuff than any professor who got his degree studying the textbooks _you_ wrote." It was impossible to dislike Madison except for practiced periods--that was probably one reason he had his job. "All right," I growled. "Get your dirty pants off my clean desk and I'll get out the bottle. We'll--celebrate, huh?" But you know how I felt, General? You remember how I tried to get out of it. I felt like I had led in the lambs and now I had to help shear them. As a part-time historian I can tell you there's a word for that--Judas goat. Give or take a word. * * * * * "It isn't the real thing, Doc," Madison spelled out for me, wearing a lemon twist of smile. I looked at the twin banks of gauge-facings and circuit housings in which centered TV screens picturing either Meyverik or Johnson. Red and sea-green lights chased each other around the control boards, died, were born again. On the screens the three color negatives mixed to purple, shifted through a series of wrong combinations and settled to normal as the stereo-oscillation echoed, convexed insanely, and deepened to hold. Video reception is lousy from five hundred thousand miles out. I was too eye-heavy to be surprised. "Don't tell me this is _The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton_ all over again?" Madison clapped me on the shoulder and breathed mint at me, eyes on twittering round faces. "Who wrote that? Poe? No, no mock-up to fake space conditions for them but calculate the cost of the _real_ interstellar ship. We couldn't trust either of them with it yet. You didn't really think we could afford _two_ ships. Why do you think we haven't told one man about his opposite in a second ship? No safety margin allowable in our appropriation, Doc. Or so they tell me. There's enough fuel and food to take Johnson and Meyverik a long way but not the distance." He shook his lean head almost wistfully. "Damn it, Madison, do you mean I've been beating my lobes out for weeks for _nothing_? I tested them. I checked them out. Either was capable of making the flight successfully--for their own different reasons." Madison took his hand off my shoulder and made a fist of it. "I'm not questioning your decision! Will you ram that through your obscene skull, Thorn!" "Who is?" I whispered. "Not me. Not I, not I." "The general," I announced. "Just not me." Was he actually trembling? But it wasn't concern about what I thought of him. Somebody closer, maybe. Things were building up for him. He jammed his nose almost up against the glass dial surfaces, swaying gently in his cups, staring slightly cross-eyed at the arrowed numbers. "You'll continue your tests from here," Madison said. "Tell them they are going to die." My face was at once cool and damp. "That's a tough examination," I gasped. "A lie," Madison told me. "The boys at Psychicentre worked out the problems."