"You look physically fit, but there must be an examination." He checked a card in his hand. "You know something of astronomy and navigation?"
"Once I sailed the hull of a smashed seaplane a thousand miles across the Indian Ocean."
The big head nodded, slowly.
"You could leave at once, for an—indefinite time?"
I said yes.
"Dependents?"
"I've a son, four years old." The bitterness must have shadowed my voice. "But he's not dependent on me. His mother is dead, and her people convinced the courts that a footloose explorer wasn't the proper guardian for little Barry."
Dona Carridan was again before me, tall and proud and lovely. The one year I had known her, when she had tempestuously left her wealthy family to go with me to Mesopotamia, had been the happiest of my life. Suddenly I was trembling again with the terror of the plane crash in the desert; our son born in an Arab's tent; Dona, far from medical aid, dying in agony....
"Then, Horn," Crosno was asking, "you're ready to cut loose from—everything?"
"I am."