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of the human mind that it would occur seemingly as the result of another chain of associations, and he would not remember the original connection at all.
    He lay there, staring at the stars. The dark mass of the Virgin’s chin rose up beside him, hiding half the sky. He should have felt forlorn, frightened even. But he did not. He felt safe, secure. For the first time in many years he knew contentment.
    There was an unusual constellation almost directly overhead. More than anything else, it made him think of a man astride a horse. The man carried an elongated object on his shoulder, and the object could have been any one of a number of things, depending on the way you looked at the stars that comprised it—a rifle, perhaps, or a staff; maybe even a fishing pole.
    To Marten, it looked like a scythe. . . .
    He turned on his side, luxuriating in his tiny oasis of warmth. The Virgin’s chin was soft with starlight now, and the night slept in soft and silent splendor. . . . That was one of his own lines, he thought drowsily—a part of that fantastic hodgepodge of words and phrases he had put together eleven years ago under the title of Rise Up, My Love! A part of the book that had brought him fame and fortune—and Lelia.
    Lelia . . . She seemed so long ago, and in a way she was. And yet, in another way, a strange, poignant way, she was yesterday.
    The first time he saw her she was standing in one of those little antique bars so popular then in Old York. Standing there all alone, tall, dark-haired, Junoesque, sipping her mid-afternoon drink as though women like herself were the most common phenomena in the galaxy.
    He had been positive, even before she turned her head, that her eyes were blue, and blue they proved to be; blue with the blueness of mountain lakes in spring, blue with the beauty of a woman waiting to be loved. Boldly, he walked over and stood beside her, knowing it was now or never, and asked if he might buy her a drink.
    To his astonishment, she accepted. She did not tell him till later that she had recognized him. He was so naïve at the time that he did not even know that he was a celebrity in Old York, though he should have known. His book certainly had been successful enough.
    He had knocked it off the preceding summer—the summer the Ulysses returned from Alpha Virginis IX; the summer he quit his berth as cabin boy, forever cured of his ambition to be a spaceman. During the interim consumed by the voyage, his mother had remarried again; and when he found out, he rented a summer cottage in Connecticut as far away from her as he could get. Then, driven by forces beyond his ken, he sat down and began to write.
    Rise Up, My Love! had dealt with the stellar odyssey of a young adventurer in search of a substitute for God and with his ultimate discovery of that substitute in a woman. The reviewers shouted “Epic!” and the Freudian psychologists who, after four centuries of adversity, still hadn’t given up psychoanalyzing writers shouted “Death-wish!” The diverse appraisals combined happily to stir up interest in the limited literary world and to pave the way for a second printing and then a third. Overnight, Marten had become that most incomprehensible of all literary phenomena—a famous first-novelist.
    But he hadn’t realized, till now, that his fame involved physical recognition. “I read your book, Mr. Marten,” the dark-haired girl standing beside him said. “I didn’t like it.”
    “What’s your name?” he asked. Then: “Why?”
    “Lelia Vaughn . . . Because your heroine is impossible.”
    “I don’t think she’s impossible,” Marten said.
    “You’ll be telling me next that she has a prototype.”
    “Maybe I will.” The bartender served them, and Marten picked up his glass and sipped the cool blueness of his Martian julep. “Why is she impossible?”
    “Because she’s not a woman,” Lelia said. “She’s a symbol.”
    “A symbol of what?”
    “I—I don’t