 What likely happens after the story is over?
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the Ajax in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. In no special hurry, we were taking the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the human period of gestation. Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the C. P. Sale no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West and back. All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite wore out. Each molecule of oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of squeamishness. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer, guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder. Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim is the Cook. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social hemorrhoid.
 The crew goes down in history, but not for the culinary feat
 The Doc has to treat the crew for food poisoning because they are not used to real meat  Bailey is renowned for his culinary breakthrough, and his future restaurant is a success  The crew goes down in history, but not for the culinary feat  Bailey decides not to open a restaurant so he can continue cooking on ships