It happened in his fourth year, shortly before the summer break. Pirx, fresh out of basic training, had passed his qualifying tests on the mock-ups, logged two unsimulated flights, and soloed once to the Moon. By now he fancied himself something of a rocket jockey, a space ace, whose real home was among the planets and who had only one set of clothes—his g-suit, much the worse for wear, of course—the first to sound the time-honored meteorite alert and with a brilliantly executed maneuver save his ship, himself, and his less keen-eyed buddies from certain disaster. That was how he liked to think of himself, anyway; and it always pained him, while shaving, to observe how unscathed his manifold experiences had left him: not a single telltale nick! Not even the nastiest of these experiences—the time the Harelsberg machine went off in his hands as he was setting his ship down in the Sinus Medii—had rewarded him with a single gray hair. Oh, well, maybe it was wishful thinking—but gee, how nice to have just a sprinkling of gray around the temples, a few crow’s-feet at least, the kind bearing witness to prolonged concentration on the reference stars. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be; he was what he was—a smooth-faced, chubby-cheeked cadet. And so, while running his razor over his face, swallowing his shame, he would go on inventing all sorts of adventures, one more spine-tingling than the next, designed to show him off to his full heroic stature. Matters, who either knew of his frustration or merely intuited it, advised him to grow a mustache. Whether or not his advice was sincerely meant, the next day Pirx, in the privacy of his morning shave, stood before the mirror balancing a black shoelace on his lip—and nearly cracked up. From that day on, he had reason to doubt Matters’s sincerity, though not that of Matters’s sister—Matters’s very cute sister—who once confided that he had the look of a “decent, regular sort of fella.” That was the last straw.