"Apt question," I admitted. "Sure. I've decided that Anne is as unavailable to me as Mars is. I don't know which makes me more bitter, Firebird; losing Anne or being denied the chance at the stars. Now that the solar system is getting man's footprints all over it, now that the Orion ships are slamming out to Mars and back on a busline's schedule, and the biggest ship of all is being fitted for deep space at the back of the moon, the constellations don't seem much further off than Chicago. But not for me."
"You think you're bitter, bud, you should hear me with my hair down," the Firebird said. "But we've had dirges enough for one evening. Your whiskey should be filtered through by now. Let's go wet our Scotch apéritif, and have dinner."
"I'm not hungry," I said. "I just ate a turnip."
"Will turnips make you big and strong? You need solider food, like Scotch. That's my professional opinion, Doctor." She got up and tugged at my hand. "Come on, Johnny. I'm not about to let you sit here all evening and brood."
"Is this your prescription, sweet Firebird?" I asked. "That I'm to go back to the madding crowd, mingle with my twenty-eight fellows in aseptic togetherness? Well, you're probably right." I got up from my park-bench to walk with her, hand-in-hand, to the dining room, stopping en route at my room for a shirt. Dinner was a formal affair in the Big Tank, shirts for the gentlemen and shoes for all.
The other Lapins were already eating. They greeted me and especially the Firebird with jokes and fellowshippy sounds.
I felt very much at home with them. There was Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astrophysicist, his magnificent u.v.-blackened body a study in the surface musculature of the human male. At his table was Karl Fyrmeister, who has a practically complete collection of the airmail stamps of the world to console him on long winter evenings. All the stamps are quite sterile. Karl was talking with Gloria Moss, whose academic specialty was group dynamics. She demonstrated muscular dynamics so attractively that when she walked about the campus in her chastity-suit she drew whistles, a truly remarkable accolade when you consider that the c-suit is somewhat less faithful to the wearer's form than a poncho. Keto Hannamuri sat the four-place table with Bud and Karl and Gloria. He was my fellow-medic among McQueen's Beasts, a pediatrician. Kids loved him. Wearing his sterility-suit as he made his Ped Ward rounds, that Oriental smile showing through the face-plate of his mask, Keto seemed to the television-nurtured youngsters the very model of the friendly extra-solar alien, complete with space-suit. Besides his flair for showmanship, Keto was a remarkably fine doctor. As we passed his table, he slapped the Firebird's short-shorted callipygia in a kin-ship-gesture of the Flesh-Presser clan.
I felt a sudden overwhelming love for all these people, my brothers-and-sister-in-exile. I took my tray to sit down quick with the Firebird before my reserve, depleted by the emotional beating I'd taken at noon, gave way.
The menu featured radared steak. The meat was germ-free and somewhat tenderized by the high-energy beams. (A purist in culinary proteins might go so far as to say denatured.) The nearest any Lapin came to ingesting a bacterium was here at the table, where we ate billions of bacterial corpses. The bugs achieved a post-mortem revenge by triggering the production of faint bacterial antibodies in our blood.