After that, there wasn't any more studying medicine for Trase. He had to go to work. Because of his aptness with figures he got a job in the dispatcher's office as assistant calculator. It paid well, but somehow it didn't mean so much any more, for Trase seemed to be living in an emptiness greater than that of space. He clocked in and clocked out each shift, and his error index was smaller than that of any other clerk in the office. The other clerks used to look at him and grunt, "There goes Trase Barnes--never a mistake. He's just as infallible as the machine." So he went up. Assistant calculator to calculator, to assistant dispatcher to dispatcher. In seven years he was chief dispatcher and in three more he ran the Moon-Station space-port. Twenty-nine years old, vice-president of Air-Lanes, Inc., owned a block of Marsopolis, Inc., stock, and had never been off the moon. In later years, it kind of quit bothering him, except sometimes when some of his pilots came in to make a report and they'd seen a flashing meteor on Io, or had screamed through the blue, thin, upper atmosphere of Jupiter--and they simply could not hide their feelings in the language of official reports. At times like that, Trase would sometimes slip on the air-suit, go through his old routine out there on the forgotten dust of Mare Imbrium, and mutter his phrase about "Spacemen are made!" But it was just a ritual, just an escape, just a way of breathing an occasional bit of life into an empty dream, and Trase knew it. Where was that feeling of yesterday, that lift in his breast, that catch in his throat, that wild calling from out there among the white stars that made his legs tremble, his heart hammer, and his spirit cry out, "I'll be there"? Where, indeed, had the ghosts gone, those ghosts that fought so bitterly the mound-bound vision of himself, sitting at his desk and never leaving the moon? * * * * * Trase had just come in from one of those visits one afternoon when Irinia Custer walked into his office unannounced, and caught him there in an unlighted office, staring out at the constellations low on the horizon. Now, Irinia was almost a legend. Her reaction time was the fastest of any pilot employed by Air-Lanes Inc. Her hardness and cynicism in the face of danger, death, and the accepted ideals of life made top story-telling material wherever spacemen gathered. She wouldn't have needed to be beautiful, but on top of it all she was; for her sensuous figure and black hair, with equally coal-black eyes, made her wild beauty as legendary as her deeds. Yet Trase Barnes was known to be twice as cold-blooded as she, an automaton who sent pilots into danger with nothing but money in mind.