I felt very much at home with them. There was Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astrophysicist, his magnificent u.v.-blackened body a study in the surface musculature of the human male. At his table was Karl Fyrmeister, who has a practically complete collection of the airmail stamps of the world to console him on long winter evenings. All the stamps are quite sterile. Karl was talking with Gloria Moss, whose academic specialty was group dynamics. She demonstrated muscular dynamics so attractively that when she walked about the campus in her chastity-suit she drew whistles, a truly remarkable accolade when you consider that the c-suit is somewhat less faithful to the wearer's form than a poncho. Keto Hannamuri sat the four-place table with Bud and Karl and Gloria. He was my fellow-medic among McQueen's Beasts, a pediatrician. Kids loved him. Wearing his sterility-suit as he made his Ped Ward rounds, that Oriental smile showing through the face-plate of his mask, Keto seemed to the television-nurtured youngsters the very model of the friendly extra-solar alien, complete with space-suit. Besides his flair for showmanship, Keto was a remarkably fine doctor. As we passed his table, he slapped the Firebird's short-shorted callipygia in a kin-ship-gesture of the Flesh-Presser clan. I felt a sudden overwhelming love for all these people, my brothers-and-sister-in-exile. I took my tray to sit down quick with the Firebird before my reserve, depleted by the emotional beating I'd taken at noon, gave way. The menu featured radared steak. The meat was germ-free and somewhat tenderized by the high-energy beams. (A purist in culinary proteins might go so far as to say denatured.) The nearest any Lapin came to ingesting a bacterium was here at the table, where we ate billions of bacterial corpses. The bugs achieved a post-mortem revenge by triggering the production of faint bacterial antibodies in our blood. Besides the steaks and the myriads of murdered microbes, we had an aseptic salad prepared from Tank-grown hydroponic vegetation, dressed with Roquefort, the cheese that vies with penicillin in my private hall of fame as the noblest product ever a mold gave man. The Scotch that Dr. McQueen had promised to send was on hand, Seitz-filtered into a sterile White Horse bottle. Not really caring to dilute my poignancies with alcohol, I passed the whiskey among the tables nearby. * * * * *