"I'll tell you why," I said. "It's because we're fond of our foster-sisters, but we're also a little bored with them. And they with us. We men know every canned peach's flirtations and frailties and conversational gambits so thoroughly that one of us could no more marry one of them than the average outsider could marry his kid sister." "Even that's been done, John, just for principle's sake," Dorsey said. "The Pharaohs wed their sisters because no one else was exalted enough for the honor. Our predicament is not dissimilar. The primal urge, John, will in time overwhelm the curse of contiguity." "Could be," I said. "But it's not just sex that's agonizing me, Bud. Prison has whole constellations of frustration. However warm and understanding our guards may be, this is still a prison, and half of us are stir-crazy. Why did Mike Bohrman take off his chastity-suit last winter, to walk barefoot through the snow with only his suit-shorts on, till he collapsed from the cold? It was a prison-break, Bud. So was Mary deWitte's witless marriage. They were both suicide, the lifer's one way over the wall." "Stir-crazy?" Dorsey asked. "You're exaggerating, John." "Open your eyes, Bud," I said. "Look at Karl Fyrmeister's hands, for example. I'm violating no medical confidence to tell you that Karl got his dermatitis as the result of compulsive hand-washing. There's a fine neurotic symptom for a germ-free Lapin! If I'm exaggerating our collective un-sanity, Bud, tell me why Lucy Cashdollar has become an apprentice alcoholic. Why does Fizz Ewell, with an I.Q. that must range in the 150's and the most brilliant record the Nuclear Engineering Department has ever seen, spend six hours a day working crossword puzzles? Why do you have that tic of your left orbicularis oculi? Why am I an insomniac, with a nasty barbiturate habit? Look around, Bud. You'll see that our little home has turned into something of a snakepit. Our neuroses are only garter snakes so far; but they'll grow into cobras, given time and further frustration to feed on." * * * * * Dorsey's left eye twitched as though my mentioning his tic had triggered it. He self-consciously raised his fingers to the vellicating muscle, more to hide than to soothe it. "While our keepers were sending Lapins through every major discipline offered on the campus," he said, "it seems they'd have done well to have trained one of us in psychiatry." "For what?" I demanded. "So we could have someone right here in the Tank to spoon out our soothing-syrups? Man, we've got a right to be stir-crazy. We're life prisoners and we've committed no crime." I stopped to get my calm back. "Bud," I asked, "do you know what I want more than anything else, next to Anne?" "Of course I do," Dorsey said. "Like you've pointed out, John, we've got no secrets from each other. Your big itch is to step aboard one of the Orion ships. You want to join up for the chase after interplanetary white whales."