“Yes?”

“I don’t know how well you know my background…”

“Quite well,” Haskell assured him.

“Then you might have noticed that I have certain tendencies toward—well, a certain accident-proneness. To tell you the honest truth, I have a hard time surviving right here on Earth.”

“I know,” Mr. Haskell said pleasantly.

“Then how would I make out on an alien planet? And why would you want me?”

Mr. Haskell looked slightly ill at ease. “Well, you stated our position wrongly when you said ‘ordinary explorers for ordinary people.’ It isn’t that simple. A colony is composed of thousands, often millions of people, who vary considerably in their survival potentialities. Humanity and the law state that all of them must have a fighting chance. The people themselves must be reassured before they’ll leave Earth. We must convince them—and the law—and ourselves—that even the weakest will have a chance for survival.”

“Go on,” Perceveral said.

“Therefore,” Haskell said quickly, “some years ago we stopped using the optimum-survival explorer, and began using the minimum-survival explorer.”

Perceveral sat for a while digesting this information. “So you want me because any place I can live in, anyone can live in.”

“That more or less sums up our thinking on the problem,” Haskell said, smiling genially.

“But what would my chances be?”

“Some of our minimum-survival explorers have done very well.”

“And others?”

“There are hazards, of course,” Haskell admitted. “And aside from the potential dangers of the planet itself, there are other risks involved in the very nature of the experiment. I can’t even tell you what they are, since that would destroy our only control element on the minimum-survival test. I simply tell you that they are present.”