Bat's father, Nakano Kendo, had grown up in Nagasaki. He'd been exposed to radiation by the second atom blast there. Bat had befuddled the geneticists by showing up a mutation one generation before he was supposed to. He used to laugh about that. His mother had been Russian. Certainly you couldn't tell his nationality by looking at him. His face held a suggestion of the Asiatic, but trying to place him anthropologically would have been as difficult as finding a pure Anglo-Saxon, whatever that is. Bat was just the product of an insane age. A child of a man whose germ plasm had been dosed with radiation. But for all of that Bat Kendo was normal. Two arms, two legs, two eyes. Only his built-in radar marked him as different. That, and his terrific taste for booze. I never saw him sober. Yet to see him, you'd never guess he was perpetually saturated. There may have been bigger drunks in space, but I never knew one. As a tubeman, he never had an equal. As an all around right guy, he never will have. It was Bat that talked me into signing on the _Eagle_. They needed a Pilot, and where a better place to find one than in the Foy City drunk tank? I knew the _Eagle_, of course. Everyone in the Luna-Earth System did. She was a five hundred tonner, newly converted to atomics and fitting in the Foundation yards for a flight to Venusberg. She was going to pick up a full cargo of weather-plant from the settlement. A hundred tons of it. And brother, that's a lot of weather-plant. This was to be the first quantity shipment of the stuff. The "pilot-shipment." The botanists suspected a lot and had great hopes. But it was up to the _Eagle_ to get the stuff to Earth. She was the only ship available for the trip with enough storage space for the plant, and when I listened to Bat talk about it, the flight began to take on the aspect of a mercy mission. I knew people were going hungry back Earthside, and old Bat was really steamed up about it. I dare say if it hadn't been for his pep talk I'd never have signed on. Deep space was still new, and I liked living. But Bat talked me into it, and as soon as the turnkey shook us out of the sack and shooed us out, Bat and I headed for the Foundation yards and the _Eagle_. My first view of the ship didn't do much to make me happy about the trip. She looked old and scabrous standing tall on her tail fins out on the flat, glaring plain of Mare Imbrium. Her hull was meteor-scarred and eroded by atmospheric friction, and there seemed to be an abundance of patch-welds on her. Her tubes, however, were spanking brand new, and after I had inspected her control-tube-pile system--as all prospective pilots have a right to do--in company with Bat and Captain Reynard, I signed.