"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a spaceman then." "But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?" I smiled and shook my head. "If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson." You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster. There was silence. You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the feeling that I shouldn't have come here. You kept looking at me until I had to ask: "What are you thinking, Laura?" You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. "No, I shouldn't be thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that." "I could never hate you." "It--it's about the stars," you said very softly. "I understand why you want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were kids. Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I lived for months, just thinking about it. "One summer we went. I had fun. I saw the old buildings and castles, and the spaceports and the Channel Tube. But after it was over, I realized England wasn't so different from America. Places seem exciting before you get to them, and afterward they're not really." I frowned. "And you mean it might be the same with the stars? You think maybe I haven't grown up yet?" Anxiety darkened your features. "No, it'd be good to be a spaceman, to see the strange places and make history. But is it worth it? Is it worth the things you'd have to give up?" I didn't understand at first, and I wanted to ask, "Give up _what_?" Then I looked at you and the promise in your eyes, and I knew. All through the years I'd been walking down a single, narrow path. Government boarding school, the Academy, my eyes always upward and on the stars. Now I'd stumbled into a cross-roads, beholding a strange new path that I'd never noticed before. _You can go into space_, I thought, _and try to do as much living in ten years as normal men do in fifty. You can be like Everson, who died in a Moon crash at the age of 36, or like a thousand others who lie buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like Charlie--a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally alone, never finding a home._ _Or there's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, rooted people with a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth instead of poisonous dust._