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telescript console one more time but resists, not wanting to give those transistorized swine in the Auditing Commission the pleasure of knowing her desperation. Vera still has her fierce pride. She didn’t leave that on the operating table.
    Skeets Kalbfleischer’s Auditor is a cerebromorph of some celebrity, a pioneer astronaut, the surviving member of the melancholy Aldebaran Expedition and the only resident of Level II born in the twentieth century.
    Philip Quarrels was flying a carrier-based F4 Phantom over the Mekong Delta at the time of the great Chicago disaster. The name Denton Kalbfleischer meant nothing to him; his interest in the accident was purely aeronautical. When Skeets’ brain made the cover of Life two years later, Quarrels was training for a future Apollo shot and read the article only because a former NASA member had been involved. Cerebrectomy was for crackpots, not the Space Program.
    The Space Program was Philip Quarrels’ life work. He was lunar module pilot on the final Apollo flight. Later he worked on the space-platform project and, because he was unmarried, Quarrels was chosen as the first long-term skipper on the U.S. Orbital Station Endeavor. He spent the next fifteen years in space, shuttling between platform assignments and desk jobs in the moon base at Clavius.
    Because he was largely indifferent to happenings on earth, Quarrels knew nothing of the worldwide public indifference to the Mars landing of 1985. People were bored with television coverage of the moon and pictures from yet another dead planet didn’t satisfy. Oceanography had replaced ecology as a trendsetter; films of undersea exploration earned an average twenty percentage points higher in the ratings than any broadcast from space. The following year, when the Venus Expedition was lost, Congress voted to cut the space budget in half.
    In 1990, the year Philip Quarrels was due to retire, Skeets Kalbfleischer made the headlines for a second time when Dr. Tibor deHartzman perfected the first neural communicator. NASA soon took another look at the work of Frank E. Sayre, Jr. A daring new mission to the Aldebaran binary system was announced. The voyage would take three hundred years, round trip. Cerebromorphs would compose the crew. The call went out for volunteers, men with long space experience and without families. Age was no handicap. Even retired astronauts were encouraged to apply. Eventually a crew of five was selected. Captain Philip Quarrels was named Executive Officer.
    A twentieth-century astronaut is a hero Skeets Kalbfleischer can admire and he is very impressed with his Auditor. Skeets means a lot to Quarrels as well. Fifty years of hard work. Each Auditor carries a caseload of ten lower-level residents and is in turn audited by a resident of the level above. Elevation comes with Awareness and Understanding. One Auditor audits another; reports are made to the Commission; Center Control sets the standards.
    Quarrels’ career in the navy has accustomed him to moving through the ranks. He is anxious for elevation, which he still unconsciously refers to as promotion. His Auditor is working hard on the problem. By bringing others to Understanding, one’s own Awareness grows.
    Skeets Kalbfleischer prepares an auditing report. He replays the memo file of his dream twice, editing those portions which appear to have no significance. As much as he enjoys the long blimp ride with a gondola full of starlets or his own erotic version of Sleeping Beauty, where he awakens the princess with something more emphatic than a kiss, he erases these reveries from the file without hesitation. Skeets is only interested in his nightmares.
    This particular nocturnal horror is nothing new. Skeets has suffered through it many times in the past, but because of its brevity he has never before attempted an analysis for the Auditing Commission. Not that it is very difficult to trace the origins of the dream; even after a fifty-year lapse, Skeets is