"Me?" he said. "I'm Captain Jones. Third Vector Spacefleet. Engineer rank. Who the galactic hellix are you, eh?"
Even from the bed, I could detect the smell of sweat and grease from his working uniform.
"I suppose you took up flight engineering at high school?" I suggested.
"Quite right," he snapped.
An early deviation, obviously. I remembered being enthralled with the arrival when I was a kid of the early space rockets, but my enthusiasm was daunted by old Birchall, who made us stick to airplanes. Obviously, his was not.
"How about you?" I asked, pointing to the thinnest me in the room.
"Penal colony on Arcetus," he said. "Eternal labor."
"Oh, I'm sorry. I wonder which time—well, how many physicists are there here, or physical chemists, or astronomers, or even general scientists?"
I walked around the room, detecting toothpaste brands A, B, C and Whitebrighter, and a range of toilet preparations with manly odors contributing to our popularity with friends, relatives, girls and bosses, but no other physicist. Not a trace of research in my line. And one or two of them were already showing signs of waking up elsewhere and disappearing from the room.
I was about to start tracing it back to the point when I abandoned a medical career, and I could still smell the formaldehyde, when Dr. Harold K. Jones appeared.