So Trase went on with his growing up, and they told him to study medicine, so he gobbled up his chemistry, his biology, and anthropology, but he studied space-math at night. By the time he got out of prep-school he could work some astro-nav problems in his head and knew the names, tonnages, and horsepower of the seven hundred models of space vessels without so much as cracking a book. He read a story about a stowaway one day, and then he read it again. It made his mind start to working and he began to say to himself, "Maybe they're wrong about my ears. Maybe I would be a good spaceman. If a man's got a mind to be a spaceman, looks like he ought to be able to make himself do it, doesn't it?" The space-station doctor spoke sympathetically. "No, Trase, there's very little that can be done. An operation, maybe--but the only doctor I know capable of performing such an operation is on Earth, and it would cost thousands of dollars. No, Trase, be happy, can't you? Most spacemen are not really happy. I think they really envy us gravity-bound people, for they can't ever know a real home. Can't you see the wistfulness in their faces and the haunted look deep back in their eyes?" Yes, Trase could see all that, but to him it was because they saw things that no other man could see. Trase didn't believe the doctor. He had to try it, so he smuggled himself into an air-lock one day, grabbed an air-suit, and wandered out on the ground of the moon. Now the moon's got a little gravity, you know, but when Trase got out of the artificial gravity of the Moon-Station, he began to run into trouble. It was all right as long as he stood still, because the little gravity of the moon would pull at the liquid in his ears. But if he moved suddenly, why it would shake all around in there, and the moon and the stars and the bright big Earth over there would whirl in a blaze of light. Then Trase would wake up lying on his face with his suit messed up from being sick. So Trase figured out a method of training himself. "I'll show 'em," he would groan through clenched teeth while the sky wheeled around his head. "By the Great Big Bear I'll show 'em that a spaceman _can_ be made!" * * * * * His private method of training was to move in exaggerated slow motion. To walk out on the rough ground of the moon and lift one foot so-o-o slowly and carefully, with his eyes fixed on one tall, spiky peak of the Appenines, and with the crust of Mare Imbrium staying in place. He got where he could cover a mile or two in an earth-time afternoon, never taking his eyes off the fix on the mountain peak, never moving his head to catch a glimpse of the fiery trails of the space vessels roaring off into the purple-blue sky. And the magic catch-phrase would come like a chant from between his twisted lips, "Spacemen are made ... spacemen are made!"