Basically the ship was an ion-jet job with atomic primaries and a spindizzy converter that might possibly take her up as high as middle yellow Cth--far enough to give her a good turn of speed, but not enough to compensate for timelag. Her screens were monstrosities, double polyphase lattices that looked about as spacetight as so many sieves. There were no acceleration dampers, no temporal compensators, no autopilot, no four-space computer, and the primaries operated on nuclear rather than binding energy. The control chairs weren’t equipped with forcefields, but instead had incredibly primitive safety webs that held one in place by sheer tensile strength. Taking a ship like that into space was an open invitation to suicide. A man needed a combination of foolhardy bravery and incredible fatalism to blast off in a can like this. He had the stimulus, but the knowledge of what he would face troubled him more than he cared to admit. More and more, as he understood the ship, he was amazed at the courage of the ancients who had blithely leaped into hyperspace in these flying coffins with no more motivation than to see what was beyond the nearest star. And in ships more primitive than this men had swept through the star systems nearest Earth in the outward expansion of the First Millennium. He sighed. The breed of man must have been tough in the old days--and he’d soon be finding out if any of that ancient toughness remained. He opened the door to his quarters. Copper was sitting in his favorite chair, a pile of completed assemblies neatly stacked beside her, and a disorderly file of crumpled cloth at her feet. Her face was sullen as she looked up at him. “I’ve had about all of this I’m going to take,” she said mutinously as she stirred the heap of cloth with a bare foot. “Not even you are going to make me wear those--things!” Kennon sighed. It was the same old story. For months he had been trying patiently to indoctrinate Copper with a minimum of civilized habits, but she was quite literally a savage. In her entire lifetime she had never worn clothing, and to encase her body in hose, kilts, blouse, and sandals was a form of torture. She scratched, wiggled, and twisted at the garments until she looked as bad as she felt, and would usually finish a session by tearing off the offending clothes and sulking. She was doing it now. “You must act like a civilized human being,” Kennon said mildly. “You’re simply going to have to learn to wear these clothes properly.” “Why? I’m more comfortable as I am.” “That’s not the point. You are going to be living in human society and you must act human. The only planet where you could get away with nudity is Santos, and we’re not going there.” “Why not?” “I’ve explained it time and again. We’ll have to go to Beta. That’s the only place I know where you’ll have a fair hearing. And on Beta people wear clothes. They have to. It’s cold, even in summer, and in the wintertime, there’s snow.” “What’s snow?”