"Thanks, Kettleman. You and everybody seems to be pretty helpful to me. I don't know exactly what I've done to deserve it."
"We get tired of looking at the same faces out there month after month. It's a treat to have somebody new on hand."
It sounded reasonable to him, but he felt there was something more to it than that. Well, he was an ethnologist, or almost one. He could figure out group behavior. All he had to do was take time to think about the problem for a little while....
Only he didn't have time to think.
He discovered why everybody was in their bunks.
The spaceship fired its atomic drive.
Starbuck tried to lift a tranquil to his lips. He didn't make it.
Painfully, he found out why a man would prefer to go through a spaceship takeoff in a tranquilized condition.
"Come," the captain said.