The narrator introduces us to a new character, Alexander "Matta" Namba, the brother of the protagonist's hero, Ulysses "Ulysses." Alexander is a young man who has been working on the launch of the Saturn V capsule, which is scheduled to lift off today. He tells us that this is the same place where he and his father, Ulysses's father, used to work on rockets and other space-related devices. He explains that he is now a "thing of the past" because he has stopped working on such things. He says that his brother, Ulysses, has been looking up at the sky all this time, but now he is looking only at space.