"There'd better not be!"
"Don't worry. How could I get to see any girls down here? Every time I look away from my work all I can see is Bikini swim suits."
"Cut that out!" she snickered, and put Cleary on the line.
There came a final day when the mission chief called me in to his office.
"Come in, Mike. Come in," he said shortly. "Sit down." He leaned back against his desk and started talking to me, like they say, straight from the shoulder:
"I'll give it to you straight, Mike. We've tried every legal way to wash you out of this mission. There isn't a one of us here at the Cape that wants any part of taking an armchair theorist and slapping him into space—into the kind of a mission you've cooked up. Somebody's going to get hurt out there, because you aren't fit for the job. Now, physically, yes, you have the capacity. But emotionally and environmentally, you simply don't add up. You're looking at this thing as an extension of your laboratory, and instead it is an enormous physical and mental hazard that you are undertaking. This country has never lost a man in space—and you'll be the cause of our first casualty, as well as being one yourself. I'm asking you man to man to disqualify yourself."
"And put an end to this mission?"
"We'll train one of our men," he said.
"In two or three years your best man might be barely capable," I said. "I don't think COMCORP is prepared to waste that much time. After all," I said ingratiatingly, "all you have to do is refuse the mission. Say I'm a built-in hazard and let it go at that." I grinned at him. I was learning from Paul Cleary. I figured how space-jockeys would react to that.