The man who came to my rescue at last was the astrogator, a Hawaiian named Kei. With Polynesian perspicacity, he had smuggled a personal supply of liquor aboard, against regulations. The other crew members knew he took a nip regularly on off-duty hours, but they never could locate his cache. "Pretty dull, huh, groundie?" remarked Kei as we played gin rummy with cards that insisted on floating off into the wilds of the gravityless centerdeck. "Maybe I can pep things up. Ever been drunk in free fall?" "No," I said. "I'm afraid I don't have your foresight." He grinned smugly. "You got to try it once, anyhow," he said. "Maybe once will be all you'll want, though, after the hangover hits you. It makes DTs look like a Grade B movie. Let's go down to the storage deck." I glanced over at Dori. She was apparently asleep in her bunk. We went below, and Kei broke out a bottle of fair whiskey from a cache behind one of the storage cabinets. He winked at me, cracked the cork and passed it over. It didn't take long for the liquor to take hold, and I began to realize what Kei meant when he said it was an experience every man should go through once. As you know, when a spaceship is in "free fall," with no rockets blasting, there is no gravity at all, and you float free in space. To be drunk in free fall is to add the freedom of the alcohol to the freedom of space. You float on rosy clouds, not just mentally, but physically. You swim around in nothing, airily, deliciously. There's nothing on Earth or Mars like it, because you can experience it only in space. I saw, too, why Kei would go to the storage deck to drink, even if he hadn't kept his private cache there. On the storage deck, your wild gestures won't hit some vital lever or button--and no one else can hear your ravings. For there's something about a space drunk that makes you babble. You talk your head off; you talk your heart out. A space drunk is a good catharsis for all the mental quirks and repressions that have been bothering you, and maybe I needed such a catharsis. Possibly Kei did, too. At any rate, we chattered to each other like boyhood chums, telling our dreams, our aspirations, revealing our most secret vices and meannesses. I was not shocked, but duly sympathetic, to learn that Kei had knifed his brother to death in his teens, and had taken up space service to escape the resulting complications. Beside this revelation of fratricide, my own selfishness and my cold-blooded reasons for marrying Dori seemed tame. But I made it as strong as I could. "She thinks I love her!" I shouted, laughing uproariously, and Kei laughed with me. "Think of that! I'm a brilliant, hard-headed, practical man, and look at her: nice enough, but washed-out, colorless. She's useful. She's made me rich. But if I'd pick out a woman to fall in love with...."