spaceman n.

I too was dumbfounded when, some five Earth years ago, I first ran across the Space Men out there. (He waved his hand toward the west away from the sun.) But after I had studied them for a time, I knew that there was really nothing very remarkable or impossible about the nature of their living. It is actually quite similar to our own.

Why couldn’t these polar fish survive the cold of space? Simply because the protoplasm of their tissues, based on water, would instantly become solid, and in solids as I have said, there can be no real life except perhaps in the form of suspended animation. The Space Men face no such danger, for first, their bodies are protected by this heat-resisting outer covering; and second, the liquid in their veins freezes only at absolute zero, and since it is radio-active—producing heat from within itself—it cannot get that cold even in the void. And that, friends, is the whole stupendous simple explanation.

She pattered along a pace or two behind him, making no effort to keep up with his long strides, and though Smith—as men know from Venus to Jupiter’s moons—walks as softly as a cat, even in spaceman’s boots, the girl at his heels slid like a shadow over the rough pavement, making so little sound that even the lightness of his footsteps was loud in the empty street.

Helmuth knew now that it was not superstition that made spacemen shun Arisia.

At the moment the only human beings on Ganymede are a couple of dozen Corporation spacemen and scientists… Where’s the human interest in that?

These spacemen are crazy.

A ‘spaceman’ wanders in from stage right.

The spaceman, helmet in one hand, was shading his eyes from the sun’s vertical rays with his free hand while he scanned the horizon.