Afterwards, though, in his own quarters, he began to laugh. Her presence was so incongruous, so fantastic...
His laughter became wild. Then it changed to great rasping hiccups. Too much that was unbelievable by old standards had happened around him. This was delayed reaction to space. He had heard of such a thing. But he had hardly thought that it [p. 150] could apply to him, anymore...! Well, he knew what to do... Tranquilizer tablets were practically forgotten things to him. But he gulped one now. In a few minutes, he seemed okay, again...
Yet he couldn't help thinking back to the Bunch, the Planet Strappers. To the wild fulfillment they had sought... So—most of them had made it. They had become men—the hard way. Except, of course, Eileen—the distaff side... They had planned, callowly, to meet and compare adventures in ten years. And this was still less than seven...
How long had it been since he had even beamed old Paul, in Jarviston...? Now that most of the Syrtis Fever had left him, it seemed futile even to consider such a thing. It involved memories buried in enormous time, distance, change, and unexpectedness.
Glen Tiflin—the sour, space-wild punk who had become a cop. Had Tiflin even saved his—Frank Nelsen's—life, once, long ago, persuading a Jolly Lad leader to cast him adrift for a joke, rather than to kill him and Ramos outright...?
Charlie Reynolds—the Bunch-member whom everybody had thought most likely to succeed. Well, Charlie was dead from a simple thing, and buried on Venus. He was unknown—except to his acquaintances.
Jig Hollins, the guy who had played it safe, was just as dead.
Eileen Sands was a celebrity in Serene, in Pallastown and the whole Belt.
Mex Ramos—of the flapping squirrel tails on an old motor scooter—now belonged to the history of exploration, though he no longer had real hands or feet, and, very likely, was now dead, somewhere out toward interstellar space.
David Lester, the timid one, had become successful in his own way, and was the father of one of the first children to be born in the Belt.