He was very, very lonely. He was acutely conscious that he hadn't acted in the best possible way about Furness' action in speaking for him about the take-off. It was true that he should have been consulted. It was true that he hadn't intended to stand on his dignity. It was even true that he'd asked for reassurance rather than information, because the tests should have been complete. But Furness took it wrongly, and there was no way to mend the matter. He couldn't read the stuff he'd brought. He smoked and brooded until he noticed the pile of cigarette butts he'd built up. He looked at his watch and dourly went to bed. He couldn't sleep. At long last he managed to doze off by reciting the names, capitals, and principal products of all the fifty states. He made himself so boring he went to sleep. But when he slept he dreamed, and in the dream the ship was out of its hangar and being fueled. And McCauley dreamed that the fueling was being done all wrong. Horribly wrong. There were two tank trucks beside the ship. One was the hydrazine truck and the other the nitric. And they were pumping the two liquids into the ship at the same time. In his dream, McCauley's hair stood up straight on end. He tried to protest, but words wouldn't come. The hoses were being handled exactly as hoses at a filling station were in fueling a car. A man held each hose negligently, and from time to time squinted down past the nozzle to see how nearly full his tank was. McCauley knew that it was impossible and unthinkable, but in his dream it was both possible and plausible. He saw bubbling, fuming nitric acid spout out of the filling tube and go splashing down on the ground. The nitric acid man looked at it stupidly as more splashed down after it. And then McCauley managed to cry out--and the dream disaster happened. The hydrazine overflowed too. It poured down.... And in his dream McCauley saw a sheet of purest fire leap up. Both trucks detonated in white-hot flame, and the ship crumpled and blew into atoms.... He found himself sitting up in his bunk, gasping, with the memory of the bubbling sounds he'd made which had waked him. It was a good dream to wake up from. He sat up and heard small noises outside in what should have been the wholly silent night. He went to the window and tilted a slat of the Venetian blind.