Quibblers may shove dictionaries in my face till the end of the universe and I will always maintain that almost anything you can name is a matter of good luck or bad. Every great man owes his success to luck of some sort. What made him great is what he did with his luck after he got it.

Had I been born eleven years before Senator Clive Littlebrook, I might have been brilliant to the point of stupidity, as he was. Nobody planned that I should be 24 when he was 35, and a space pilot instead of a senator. He had eleven years to get smarter than me. But all of his brilliance and all of my youthful innocence couldn't have prevented our being spacewrecked on a lonely, uninhabited planet. We knew it was lonely and thought it was uninhabited, as it almost was.

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