put his hands on the plating. “No,” he thought to himself. “No, no!” But his world was correct, he knew, for it had been arrived at by correct procedures, developed by behavioral and axiological engineers sensitive to, and responsive to, the most enlightened political imperatives and nuances. But then why the pain, the misery, the ennui, the frustration, the grief, the sorrow, he asked himself. But then he thought how foolish this was, for why, really, should there be some striking congruence between the “good” and what people might find to their liking, or between the right, or the correct, and that which might prove productive of fulfillment, satisfaction, or happiness? Perhaps the entire issue had been viewed askew, and actually it was good and right, or appropriate, or correct, that the members of his species be unhappy, that they suffer emptiness and misery, that they remain unfulfilled. But Brenner did not care for this possibility at all, perhaps as a consequence of some insistent, unreconciled deviation in an uncorrected genetic makeup. Besides, he asked himself, how then should matters be determined. If there were no necessity for the good and the right to conduce to satisfaction or happiness, then presumably there would be no necessity that they should conduce to dissatisfaction or unhappiness either. Would one not expect random correlations? But the correlations on the home world did not seem to be random. They seemed on the whole detrimental to human satisfaction, to human welfare, happiness, and meaningfulness, at least if these things were taken in an uncritical, primitive sense. Was it essential that civilization prove inimical to human fulfillment, Brenner wondered. Were these two values, if values they were, antithetical, mutually exclusive, incapable of accommodations, incapable of achieving simultaneous fruition. That did not seem likely. To be sure, certain modalities of civilization might require the rejection, the repudiation, of human fulfillment, but surely, amongst all the dazzling infinities of social possibility, such were not the only conceivable modalities. And, too, what then were the touchstones for good or right, or for the proper, or the correct, he wondered, if not just such things as happiness, satisfaction, and meaningfulness, things so often, and so grievously, impaired and thwarted, if not actually absent, from the world he knew. But perhaps there is no common will, he thought. Perhaps there is no common interest. In the end perhaps there is only the struggle, the conflict, and the fraud, the victory of some announced as the victory of all. What was his species, he wondered. Brenner then became alarmed for he had lost touch with the plating. As he had closed the port and not yet reillumined the lounge he had been in the utter darkness. Suddenly he was no longer certain of his orientation, or bearings. He did not now know where he was, what was up or down, relative the webbings, or what was left or right. He reached out, turning in the darkness, out of touch with contact points as simple as the grip near the port. Suddenly the lights went on in the lounge. At the entrance panel, with a certain rather puzzled attitude of head and neck, was one of the crew. Immediately Brenner could obtain his bearings. Gratefully, when he could get a hand on a solid object, in this case, the wall at the side of the port, he pushed toward the webbing, and, in a moment, had it in hand. The crew member with loping strides, and a series of small clicks on the floor plating, as tiny magnetized disks attached to the first clawed digits of its rear appendages made their contact with the metal, went to the observation port and checked its closure. It then turned about to regard Brenner. It was making its rounds, clearly, and on these rounds one of its duties was apparently to check the closure of port shieldings. The port shielding, incidentally, when opened, activated the lounge entrance lock, closing off the lounge, except to authorized crew members.. In this fashion if the port should be shattered any attendant decompression would be limited to the lounge. To be sure it would take a considerable impact to threaten the quartz of the port, and any object capable of injuring it would presumably have been picked up long ago by the ship’s sensors, their signals feeding into the guidance system in such a way as to initiate an evasive action, to be followed by a later return to course.