 Which word least describes Charlie?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. One man's retreat is another's prison ... and it takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home! How can I tell you what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing fear—a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an evil jack-in-the-box at night. Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning.... The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after spawning its first-born. For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight. Below us was a beach of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New Mexican sunlight. They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up at them and feel humility—for mankind needs humility." Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time, for I was thinking: He's already reached Mars and Venus. Mickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. My parents had died in a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those "You are cordially invited" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie Taggart. Stardust Charlie, we called him, although I never knew why.
 regretful
 proud  sick  experienced  regretful