Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up an apple on the central panel and re-explained the age-old analogy between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth and the apple. Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon. "That's an interesting question, Eve. But we are still too many millions of miles away to know yet. Before you are ready to leave the ship, you will know." In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his--with one exception. He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for long. Often, when he grew tired of free-falling, he visited his lonely chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship. On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they were pre-set. They _had_ to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong. It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs permanently off. * * * * * The stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big--bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the _Destiny_ had ever come to a star. Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others-- The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were--flat, undeep.