The hatch covers were open and the gangways already in place for boarding. At about the midway point, the gangways were blocked by a lead stand, planted with a little red pennon on a flexible staff. He knew the ritual. Question: “Pilot, are you ready to carry out your mission?” Answer: “Yes, sir, I am”—and then, for the first time in his life, he would proceed to move aside the pennon. Suddenly he had a premonition: during the boarding ceremony he saw himself tripping over the railing and taking a nose dive all the way to the bottom—accidents like that happened. And if such accidents happened to anyone, they were bound to happen to Pirx. In fact, there were times when he was apt to think of himself as a born loser, though his instructors were of a different opinion. To them he was just a moron and a bumbler, whose mind was never on the right thing at the right moment. Granted, he had no easy time of it when it came to words; between his thoughts and his deeds there yawned… well, if not an abyss, then at least an obstruction, some obstacle that was forever making life difficult for him. It never occurred to Pirx’s instructors—or to anyone else, for that matter—that he was a dreamer, since he was judged to be a man without a brain or a thought in his head. Which wasn’t true at all.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Boerst had stationed himself in the prescribed place, a step away from the gangway, and that he was standing at attention, his hands pressed flat against the rubber air pouches of his space suit.

On him that wacky costume looks tailor-made, thought Pirx, and on me it looks like a bunch of soccer balls.