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He grew accustomed to the regular turn around the planet every fourteen hours. For two out of every three seconds he faced out into space and that was always changing. Yet, all poetry aside, the change was always the same.

He didn’t have to worry about keeping on a schedule. He kept on one automatically.

And he didn’t like it.

So he kept retreating further and further from it....

“We couldn’t leave him there!”

What? Who? Barnhart thought along with at least seven other double-yous. He returned to himself and found that he was standing in the airlock of a spaceship, faced by his first mate Simmons and his stooge York.

“We couldn’t leave him there,” Simmons repeated with feeling. “That would be the nastiest kind of murder. We might maroon him. But none of us are killers.”

“It’s not the punishment we will get for the mutiny,” York complained. “It’s having to go back to his old routine. That time-schedule mind of his was derailing mine. He was driving the whole crew cockeyed. Even if he wasn’t going to kill us all by the rule book, I think we would have had to maroon him just to get rid of him.”