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knees, and this pillow up here is for your chin. You hold onto these handles here, in front of the pillow, and you brace your feet against this bar back here. Just before we blast, you dig your chin down into that pillow hard. If you have your mouth open, you're liable to get up to the Station minus a few teeth. In front of each bunk here, you see these three lights. The green one means you can relax, talk if you want to, readjust your position, whatever you want. The orange one means a blast within one minute, and the red one means a blast within ten seconds. The red one stays on throughout a blast. Okay?"

Ricks said, "The company had us play with these cribs. They filled us in pretty good."

"I'm glad to hear that. I'm always pleased to get my human cargo to the Pod alive. Let's get into the bunks now and get ourselves ready. Blast is due in a couple minutes."

Blair saw to it that the three engineers were properly situated in their bunks, and then he crawled into the one nearest Ricks. He had the feeling that young man would be needing his hand held in just a few minutes.

Harvey Ricks was not a crybaby. Way back in grammar school, he was known as the kid who couldn't be made to cry. A lot of the other kids tried it, and some of them were pretty ingenious, but no one ever succeeded. Harvey Ricks was not a crybaby.

He didn't cry when he flunked out of MIT, either, in the first semester of his sophomore year. He wanted to, God knows, but he didn't. He simply packed his gear and went on home, and spent six months thinking it over. Until the MIT fiasco, schoolwork had always come readily to him. He'd never had to do much studying, and so he'd never learned the methods or picked up the habit. He'd managed to breeze through his secondary schooling with natural intelligence and smooth glibness, and he'd tried the same technique at college. It hadn't worked.

During those six months at home, he'd learned why it hadn't worked. He still had his textbooks, and he spent a lot of time with them, not so much out of a desire to learn as out of a nostalgia for the school that had rejected him. Gradually he began to see where he'd gone wrong. He was at a level of learning now where natural intuition and glibness weren't enough. There were facts and concepts and relationships in those textbooks that he just couldn't pick up in a rapid glossing of the subject matter, and there were other things in the textbooks that he couldn't even understand until he had a