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At this time John William Washington, who is usually called “Sandy” by his old nursemaid and his six friends, is biologically twenty-two years and eleven months old. He thinks of himself as roughly a twenty-two-year-old, although timekeeping in the Hakh’hli interstellar ship does not go by Earth years. His age doesn’t really reflect the elapsed time since his birth anyway. Time dilation has cooked the clocks; the ship has spent much of its time traveling at relativistic speeds. Sandy is an excellent physical specimen—not counting such minor problems as deafness (but that is easily remedied by the hearing aid his shipmates have made for him) and a certain squatness of form. He stands only five feet five inches tall, but he masses two hundred pounds—on Earth he would have weighed that, though in the gravity of the Hakh’hli ship he weighs thirty percent more—and he is strong enough to support his own weight in each hand, with his arms outstretched. But Albert Einstein had been right about that, as about many other things. Everything was relative. Among the Hakh’hli on their huge interstellar spaceship Sandy is as frail as a puppy, and his other nickname among his peers—the one they use when they are mad at him—is “Wimp.”

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