Serendipity

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson."

When Jim and Betty visit Adzel, their problems are almost over. John Riefenstahl calls on Adzel's holvid phone to inform his daughter that the Festival of Man board has vetoed all his most recent proposals. When Adzel moves into scanner range, Riefenstahl is startled because, as he puts it, he had been thinking of Wagner and now sees Fafner. Jim and Betty, who have just been realizing that Adzel resembles a Chinese dragon, make eye contact and yell. Everything has come together. That was the moment of realization. All that remains is the execution, which requires two and a half more pages. This is an extremely compact problem story, Heinleinian in theme? - problem-solving young protagonists aiming for the interstellar frontier. The title character of Starman Jones makes it to the stars and so does Jim Ching.