The third apprentice isn’t up to much either. She’s a blonde named Jan Mortenson, with a B.S. from Stockholm University, with a cute figure and lots of big white teeth. She seems friendly but not very bright. Her father’s somebody big at Galaxy Central, which is probably how she got into the expedition — these diplomats are always pulling rank on deals like this. I haven’t had a whole lot to do with her, though: she’s got her eye on our chronology man, Saul Shahmoon.

Saul doesn’t have his eye on her, but that’s her problem. I don’t think he’s very interested in girls. He’s about forty, comes from Beirut, has been working for the last five or six years at Fentnor U. on Venus. Small, dark, intense, single, reputation for good but uninspired work. His big passion in life is collecting stamps. He brought his collection along and it fills up his whole cabin, album after album, going right back to the nineteenth century. He’s had us all in there to look at it. Remember when we were saving stamps? Saul’s got the things we just used to daydream about, the Marsport five-credit with the ultraviolet overprint, the Luna City souvenir sheet perforate and imperforate, the Henry XII coronation set — everything. And all the galactic stamps, stuff from fifty or a hundred planets. Jan’s with him half the time, listening to his lectures on the postal system of Betelgeuse V, or wherever, or helping him get Denebian stamps off their envelopes with acid, and Saul goes on and on and on and never catches a hint. Poor Jan!

Next we have Leroy Chang, who is Associate Professor of Paleoarchaeology at Harvard, and who is very much interested in Jan, or Kelly, or anything else female. I think Leroy would try to make time with Steen Steen if he got hard up enough. Or Mirrik. Leroy says he’s Chinese, but of course his genes are as mixed up as anyone else’s from Earth, and he doesn’t look any more Chinese than I do; he’s got red hair and sort of maroon skin and a deep voice, and would probably have much success with women if he didn’t come on looking so frantically eager. You don’t have to be right out of adolescence to be foolish about that sort of thing, as Leroy proves; he’s in his forties and still goopy. Professionally he’s so-so, I understand. Why this expedition is so full of duds, I can’t imagine.