Maybe you know they're born and not made, and maybe you don't know why. I'll tell you then, cause my story isn't right without it. * * * * * Back when I was a kid in Tennessee, I used to raise a thousand chickens every spring and never lost but a few. But there was one chicken one year that I'll remember for the rest of my days. He never was able to walk. From the time he was hatched he kept falling on his face, or his behind, and rolling over and over, with the other chickens walking on him. So one day I asked the Doc what was wrong. "No equilibrium," said the Doc, and _now_ you know what that means! Right inside his ear the canals were messed up, the canals where the liquid rolls around, and this chicken didn't know which way was up. Seems like he didn't have any liquid in there. No liquid at all. Well, that's what makes a spaceman. A man with a normal ear, why he knows which way is up or down, because the gravity pulls that liquid around in there, and it rolls over those sensory hairs which contact the brain with the latest information. But when the first spacemen got out into space, there wasn't any gravity to pull the liquid, and it charged around in there whichever way it felt like--up, down, sideways, whichever way they moved their heads, and the walls, sky, and world just whirled around. They all got sick; couldn't see, couldn't eat, couldn't move. Most of the first rockets just passed right on by the moon and went out into space, and those that didn't just piled into it head on, with half-dead men lying at the controls. But in number 19 there was a man who'd always had trouble with his sense of balance, a man who fell easily and hit hard when he went down. That man saved his crew. For when they got out in space they got sick, like the other eighteen crews, but the other man, he just heaved a sigh of relief, just looked out at the sky and the stars and the great big universe of space, and his whole insides cried, "This is for me!" Yes sir, he was a spaceman-born--the first spaceman--and he brought that ship back by himself to tell the world that spacemen are born. It was a funny thing too. For so many of the born spacemen are weaklings, kids who never feel sure of themselves, who never can play hard games because they're always falling down. Other kids always made fun of them, but now these men came into their own. They weren't at home on the earth, the moon, Mars, or _any_ planet--their home was the deep purple nothingness of space. And they built our space colonies and have always run our space-lanes. But Trase Barnes wasn't one of them. Like I say, Trase's father was a spaceman, a long thin giant of a man who loved the sky and lived in it. Trase's mother was like his father, a space-woman born, and they lived out there at No-Grav City, hung there fifty thousand miles away from the moon, where spacemen live without the heavy bonds of gravity.