'You got me that time, pal,' Jones acknowledged with a wry face, '-that crack about me being a stockholder. I'm ashamed of it.'

'Then why don't you sell?'

Jones looked disgusted. 'What kind of a solution is that? Do you think I can avoid the responsibility of knowing about it just unloading my stock?'

'Oh, the devil with it,' said Wingate. 'Drink up.'

'Righto,' agreed Jones. It was his first night aground after a practice cruise as a reserve officer; he needed to catch up on his drinking. Too bad, thought Wingate, that the cruise should have touched at Venus-'All out! All out! Up aaaall you idlers! Show a leg there! Show a leg and grab a sock!' The raucous voice sawed its way through Wingate's aching head. He opened his eyes, was blinded by raw white light, and shut them hastily. But the voice would not let him alone. 'Ten minutes till breakfast,' it rasped. 'Come and get it, or we'll throw it out!'

He opened his eyes again, and with trembling willpower forced them to track. Legs moved past his eyes, denim clad legs mostly, though some were bare-repulsive hairy nakedness. A confusion of male voices, from which he could catch words but not sentences, was accompanied by an obbligato of metallic sounds, muffled but pervasive-shrrg, shrrg, thump! Shrrg, shrrg, thump! The thump with which the cycle was completed hurt his aching head but was not as nerve stretching as another noise, a toneless whirring sibilance which he could neither locate nor escape.

The air was full of the odor of human beings, too many of them in too small a space. There was nothing so distinct as to be fairly termed a stench, nor was the supply of oxygen inadequate. But the room was filled with the warm, slightly musky smell of bodies still heated by bedclothes, bodies not dirty but not freshly washed. It was oppressive and unappetizing-in his present state almost nauseating.