“And my own form too,” Morley said, half to himself. He felt grim, now; Gossim had gotten to him. Gossin had always been good with words, amazing in an engineer. It had been Gossim’s silver-tongued words which had kept them all at their tasks throughout the years. But those words, to a good extent, had become vapid as far as the Morleys were concerned. The words did not work as they once had. And yet a glimmer of their past glory remained. He could just not quite shake off the bulky, dark-eyed engineer.

But we’re leaving, Morley thought. As in Goethe’s Faust, “In the beginning was the deed.” The deed and not the word, as Goethe, anticipating the twentieth century existentialists, had pointed out.

“You’ll want to come back,” Gossim opined.

“Hmm,” Seth Morley said.

“And you know what I’ll say to that?” Gossim said loudly. “If I get a request from you—both of you Morleys—to come back here to Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz, I’ll say, ‘We don’t have any need of a marine biologist; we don’t even have an ocean. And we’re not going to build so much as a puddle so that you can have a legitimate reason for working here.’”

“I never asked for a puddle,” Morley said.

“But you’d like one.”

“I’d like any kind of body of water,” Morley said. “That’s the whole point; that’s why we’re leaving and that’s why we won’t be coming back.”

“You’re sure Delmak-O has a body of water?” Gossim inquired.

“I assume—” Morley began, but Gossim cut him off.

“That,” Gossim said, “is what you assumed about Tekel Upharsin. That’s how your trouble began.”

“I assumed,” Morley said, “that if you advertised for a marine biologist—” He sighed, feeling weary. There was no point trying to influence Gossim; the engineer—and chief officer of the kibbutz—had a closed mind. “Just let me eat my cheese,” Morley said, and tried an additional slice. But he had grown tired of the taste; he had eaten too much. “The hell with it,” he said, tossing his knife down. He felt irritable and he did not like Gossim; he felt no desire to continue the conversation. What mattered was the fact that no matter how he felt, Gossim could not revoke the transfer. It carried an override, and that was the long and the short of it… to quote William S. Gilbert.