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It is a truism that a human being can get used to very nearly everything. The hardy Eskimo, lying belly-down on a plain of ice that stretched unbroken to the sky, probably spent little of his time in meditating upon the vastness and inscrutability of the Universe ... he was thinking of his dinner. And Charles Samson, seven hundred years later, looked past his long nose at a scene of equal majesty—our galaxy, viewed from a ship in mid-arc—in a similar frame of mind.

It was approximately sixteen hours, galactic time; a trifle later according to Samson's stomach. He had played a vicious game of handball with his wife an hour and a half before, and now he was hungry.

The Eskimo, although a patient man, might have reflected that it was unreasonable of this particular seal to wake up and look around him at this precise moment. Samson, equally virtuous, told himself that his wife might have chosen a more opportune time to experiment with her cookery. Midge had conceived an idea for a soufflé such as had never before been seen by Man, and had accordingly been adding new circuits to the autochef for the past eighty-five minutes.

If she ran to form, the soufflé—which would be a triumph, in spite of seventeen separate miscalculations—would be served in about twenty minutes more. Samson would have preferred an artless slab of steak now.

These, it may be considered, were picayune thoughts to occupy a brain which had been interminably trained and tested, stocked with a fabulous assortment of knowledge, and then sent out, with one other human mind for company, to patrol a hegemony ten billion times as vast as Caesar's.

At the moment, however, there was nothing world-shaking for it to do. Charles and Midge, like a thousand other teams of trouble-shooters assigned to the volume of space known as Slice 103, earned their pay by intense, difficult, and sometimes dangerous labor which averaged three months out of the year; the rest of their time was spent in traveling from one assignment to the next, or simply in drifting, waiting for something of importance to turn up.

Two days ago, for example, they had been halfway along a leisurely arc between the Hilkert system and the observatory settlement on de Broglie II, when Slice H.Q. had buzzed them and told them to change course for Kenilworth IV—an isolated and obscure one-man post out on the perimeter of the Slice. Tomorrow, as likely as not, another message would inform them that the trouble, whatever it was, had simmered down. Then they would blast into a new arc, and it would be six days, at least—even if another wild-goose chase did not intervene—before they touched ground. Meanwhile, they amused themselves as well as they could....

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As for the stars, which lay spread out to the infinity beyond the inch-thick vitrin of the ship's veranda window, the trouble with them was that they were always the same. Maugham records that when he first saw the Taj Mahal, he felt an ineffable surprise and joy; but on the following day, it was only a beautiful building. He had seen it before.

Samson had been in space for something over half his lifetime. Accordingly, when the communicator bell rang, it shattered no meditations on the relations of Man to Nature; on the contrary, Samson, uncoiling himself and walking through the doorway into the lounge, carried with him the firm mental image of a ham sandwich, with relish and mustard.

"Let's hear it," he said.

Obediently, the communicator uncorked a quiet male voice: "Harlow calling the Samsons. Acknowledge if you're awake, will you? Over."

Midge appeared at the opposite end of the room, brushing a strand of black hair back from her forehead. "We read you, Harlow," said Samson. "Go ahead. Over." The light-tube which encircled the ceiling, having turned pink at Harlow's "Over," glowed spectrum-white again at Samson's, indicating that the communicator was ready to receive.

"Something?" said Midge, coming forward.

Samson waved his hand at her, palm down, in a gesture that meant "Shut up and listen." Simultaneously, Harlow's voice began again: "I'll give you the story, anyhow; you can pick it up from the cube later if you're not reading me now. Kids, this Kenilworth thing is a lot bigger than it looked two days ago. It may be even bigger than I think it is now, in which case we'll all have to start digging hidey-holes. It's all yours—I haven't got anybody else within two weeks' run of the place. So listen."

There was a pause and a click, which Samson identified as the sound of Harlow's teeth gripping his ever-present pipe. Then, "Here's the call I got from Jackson, the Kenilworth deputy. That was three days ago. I don't think there's anything in it that I missed, but I'll let you decide that. It came in at three-oh-five hours G.T."

A younger voice said excitedly, "Jackson, Kenilworth IV, calling Harlow, Slice 103 H.Q. Urgent. Harlow, hold onto your hair. The Kassids are back. Over to you."

Harlow's recorded voice, sounding sleepy, answered: "Better hold onto yours. Who are the Kassids, and what if they're back? I didn't even know they were gone. Over."

"Who are the Kassids! Just the big medicine men of Slices 42, 43, 102 and 103, is all! See your manual, page 9581 et seq. They landed on KenilFour ten days ago; I just got the message. It seems the local boys told them about me as soon as they got past the language difficulty, and they're anxious to meet me. I'm going over there now—call you back in about six hours. Over."

"Give them a big, juicy kiss for me," said Harlow. "Clearing."

His voice began again immediately: "You can look up the Kassids in the manual; I had to. They're a legend, a group of legends, fifteen thousand years old. At that point, my opinion was either that a gang of backwoods Messiahs were passing themselves off as 'Kassids' in hopes of gain and glory, or else that some of Jackson's charges were playing a big fat joke on him. So I rolled over and went back to sleep. The only thing is, Jackson never called back.