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man h’ain’t got the right to take a few risks with his own brain—a brain I trained into shape without no help from any man in this vessel, I warrant—than what rights has he got?”
    Sarmento i Illa d’Or spoke next. He was from the Hispanosphere, and, by the agreed-upon conventions governing in-cabin speech, he had waited until each of the Indosphere members had spoken. He had been a wrestler, a weightlifter, the only person other than Menelaus willing to use the Camp ring in the gym. It was only because Menelaus fought dirty, using illegal blows and holds, that the gym circuits had halted their matches. He and Menelaus, grimacing, smiling, and growling at each other, had privately agreed to finish the match some day, but that day never came. Sarmento i Illa d’Or won his berth for his work in the topology of algebraic curves and surfaces, particularly valuable since topology and knot-theory was the main avenue of approach of most of the Monument symbolism so far translated.
    “Anglo, you go too far!”
    “Ain’t I got the right to go as far as I can take me?” answered Menelaus.
    “What is ‘right’? What is ‘wrong’? These are but airy words for pleasant and unpleasant. What you are attempting may well make life more difficult for us. You might be willing to risk, but we are not! We are mountain-climbers are roped together in one rope, and you might want to topple into the cold, but not I. With your brain damaged, you will be a burden to the expedition, to our cause.”
    The voice of Sarmento i Illa d’Or held a strange note of relish. It was almost as if he were trying to say the exact thing to urge Montrose onward, while seeming to say the opposite.
    He was also one of the younger men, a member of Del Azarchel’s clique. He had also been there, at that wild night of drinking and dancing and laughing, before the launch. He was the one, in fact, who had brought up Chandrapur’s analysis while they sat in a circle, drinking toasts and talking long into the night. When Menelaus proposed a toast to the intelligence augmentation—“we all know some poor bastard will have to risk afore we can read the Monument”—it had been Sarmento who had slapped him on the back (a little harder than strictly friendly) and said, “It will not be you! I will be the first to take the Promethean Formula! You Anglos do not have the cojones , eh?” Menelaus had pushed the cork back into his bottle, and hefted it upside down in his fist for a little glass bludgeon, and stood, but Del Azarchel pulled him back down into his chair, laughing, and told him it was just a joke.
    Narcís D’Aragó spoke. He was the only other military veteran at Space Camp. The man had fought in the North African campaigns, beneath the skies gray with deathclouds. Montrose and D’Aragó had shared the unspoken bond that men in uniform had even when out of uniform, even when among civilians. He had been included on the expedition for his breakthroughs in the Linear Programming problem, particularly regarding strongly polynomial time-performance in the number of constraints and variables.
    Menelaus was confident that this grim young soldier would back him.
    “On the one hand,” D’Aragó spoke in a voice as colorless as ice, “anyone brave enough to bollix his own brain does not need to listen to anyone less brave. If we are not willing to face his needle ourselves, we don’t have a say in how he spends or wastes his life.”
    But then Menelaus was disappointed to hear him continue, with no change of tone, “On the other hand, we are still a unit. Let us not waste a man whom the expedition needs. These things should be done in the proper order, controlling the variables, with a medical crew standing by. Captain Grimaldi is the senior expedition officer: He had not given permission.”
    Montrose said, “By the letter of the law, he ain’t got no jurisdiction until we rendezvous.”
    Narcís D’Aragó made an noise in his throat like