The gavel rapped sharply, and the murmur of conversation throughout the banquet room drifted into hushed silence. The occasion was the seventy-fifth meeting of RETSCAP, the organization of Retired Space Captains; the place, a banquet room in the Empire Club on the hundred and sixty-fourth floor of the New Empire State Building in Manhattan; the time, approximately nine thirty in the evening, August 9, 2231 A.D.; those present, the four hundred and eighteen members of RETSCAP—or rather, four hund