Jessica turned away from the port. “It reminds me of Odin and his two ravens.”

  “He had two ravens?”

  “Sure,” said Jessica, “Thought and Memory. Hugin and Mugin.”

  “Fine. We’ll name the star Odin, and the planets whatever you just said. I’m sure glad I have you. You’re a lot better at this than I am.”

  Jessica laughed. She looked forward to exploring the planets. It would be the first break they had in the monotony of the journey. Neither Leslie nor Jessica anticipated finding life on the two desolate worlds, but they were glad to give them a thorough examination. They wandered awe-struck over the bleak, lonely landscapes of Hugin and Mugin, completing their tests, and at last returned to their orbiting craft. They sent their findings back to Earth, set out the first of the transmission gates, and, not yet feeling very disappointed, left the Odin system. They both felt that they were in contact with their home, regardless of the fact that their message would take a long time to reach Earth, and they were moving away too quickly ever to receive any. But they both knew that if they wanted, they could still turn around and head back to Earth.

  Their need to know drove them on. The loneliness had not yet become unbearable. The awful fear had not yet begun.

  The gates were for the use of the people who followed the Gillettes into the unsettled reaches of the galaxy; they could be used in succession to travel outward, but the travelers couldn’t return through them. They were like ostrich eggs filled with water and left by natives in the African desert; they were there to make the journey safer and more comfortable for others, to enable the others to travel even farther.

  Each time the Gillettes left one star system for another, through null space, they put a greater gulf of space and time between themselves and the world of their birth. “Sometimes I feel very strange,” admitted Gillette, after they had been outbound for more than two years. “I feel as if any contact we still have with Earth is an illusion, something we’ve invented just to maintain our sanity. I feel like we’re donating a large part of our lives to something that might never benefit anyone.”

  Jessica listened somberly. She had had the same feelings, but she hadn’t wanted to let her husband know. “Sometimes I think that the life in the university classroom is the most desirable thing in the world. Sometimes I damn myself for not seeing that before. But it doesn’t last long. Every time we go down to a new world, I still feel the same hope. It’s only the weeks in null space that get to me. The alienation is so intense.”

  Gillette looked at her mournfully. “What does it really matter if we do discover life?” he asked.

  She looked at him in shocked silence for a moment. “You don’t really mean that,” she said at last.

  Gillette’s scientific curiosity rescued him, as it had more than once in the past. “No,” he said softly, “I don’t. It does matter.” He picked up the three kittens from Ethyl’s litter. “Just let me find something like these waiting on one of these endless planets, and it will all be worthwhile.”

  Months passed, and the Gillettes visited more stars and more planets, always with the same result. After three years they were still rocketing away from Earth. The fourth year passed, and the fifth. Their hope began to dwindle.

  “It bothers me just a little,” said Gillette as they sat beside a great gray ocean, on a world they had named Carraway. There was a broad beach of pure white sand backed by high dunes. Waves broke endlessly and came to a frothy end at their feet. “I mean, that we never see anybody behind us, or hear anything. I know it’s impossible, but I used to have this crazy dream that somebody was following us through the gates and then jumped ahead of us through null space. Whoever it was waited for us at some star we hadn’t got to yet.”

  Jessica made a flat mound of wet sand. “This is just like Earth, Leslie,” she said. “If you don’t notice the chartreuse sky. And if you don’t think about how there isn’t any grass in the dunes and no shells on the beach. Why would somebody follow us like that?”

  Gillette lay back on the clean white sand and listened to the pleasant sound of the surf. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe there had been some absurd kind of life on one of those planets we checked out years ago. Maybe we made a mistake and overlooked something, or misread a meter or something. Or maybe all the nations on Earth had wiped themselves out in a war and I was the only living human male and the lonely women of the world were throwing a party for me.”

  “You’re crazy, honey,” said Jessica. She flipped some damp sand onto the legs of his pressure suit.

  “Maybe Christ had come back and felt the situation just wasn’t complete without us, too. For a while there, every time we bounced back into normal space around a star, I kind of half-hoped to see another ship, waiting.” Gillette sat up again. “It never happened, though.”

  “I wish I had a stick,” said Jessica. She piled more wet sand on her mound, looked at it for a few seconds, and then looked up at her husband. “Could there be something happening at home?” she asked.

  “Who knows what’s happened in these five years? Think of all we’ve missed, sweetheart. Think of the books and the films, Jessie. Think of the scientific discoveries we haven’t heard about. Maybe there’s peace in the Mideast and a revolutionary new source of power and a black woman in the White House. Maybe the Cubs have won a pennant, Jessie. Who knows?”

  “Don’t go overboard, dear,” she said. They stood and brushed off the sand that clung to their suits. Then they started back toward the landing craft.

  Onboard the orbiting ship an hour later, Gillette watched the cats. They didn’t care anything about the Mideast; maybe they had the right idea. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to his wife. “I’ll tell you who does know what’s been happening. The people back home know. They know all about everything. The only thing they don’t know is what’s going on with us, right now. And somehow I have the feeling that they’re living easier with their ignorance than I am with mine.” The kitten that would grow up to be Benny’s mother tucked herself up into a near little bundle and fell asleep.

  “You’re feeling cut off,” said Jessica.

  “Of course I am,” said Gillette. “Remember what you used to say to me? Before we were married, when I told you I only wanted to go on with my work, and you told me that one human being was no human being? Remember? You were always saying things like that, just so I’d have to ask you what the hell you were talking about. And then you’d smile and deliver some little story you had all planned out. I guess it made you happy. So you said, ‘One human being is no human being, and I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and you went on about how if I were going to live my life all alone, I might as well not live it at all. I can’t remember exactly the way you put it. You have this crazy way of saying things that don’t have the least little bit of logic to them but always make sense. You said I figured I could sit in my ivory tower and look at things under a microscope and jot down my findings and send out little announcements now and then about what I’m doing and how I’m feeling and I shouldn’t be surprised if nobody gives a damn. You said that I had to live among people, that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get away from it. And that I couldn’t climb a tree and decide I was going to start my own new species. But you were wrong, Jessica. You can get away from people. Look at us.”

  The sound of his voice was bitter and heavy in the air. “Look at me,” he murmured. He looked at his reflection and it frightened him. He looked old; worse than that, he looked just a little demented. He turned away quickly, his eyes filling with tears.

  “We’re not truly cut off,” she said softly. “Not as long as we’re together.”

  “Yes,” he said, but he still felt set apart, his humanity diminishing with the passing months. He performed no function that he considered notably human. He read meters and dials and punched buttons; machines could do that, animals could be trained to do the same. He felt discarded, like a bad spot on a potato, cut out and thrown away.

  Jessica prevented his depression from deepening into madness. He was far more susceptible to the effects of isolation than she. Their work sustained Jessica, but it only underscored their futility for her husband.

  “I HAVE STRANGE thoughts, Jessica,” he admitted to her, one day during their ninth year of exploration. “They just come into my head now and then. At first I didn’t pay any attention at all. Then, after a while, I noticed that I was paying attention, even though when I stopped to analyze them I could see the ideas were still foolish.”

  “What kind of thoughts?” she asked. They prepared the landing craft to take them down to a large, ruddy world.

  Gillette checked both pressure suits and stowed them aboard the lander. “Sometimes I get the feeling that there aren’t any other people anywhere, that they were all the invention of my imagination. As if we never came from Earth, that home and everything I recall are just delusions and false memories. As if we’ve always been on this ship, forever and ever, and we’re absolutely alone in the whole universe.” As he spoke, he gripped the heavy door of the lander’s airlock until his knuckles turned white. He felt his heart speeding up, he felt his mouth going dry, and he knew that he was about to have another anxiety attack.

  “It’s all right, Leslie,” said Jessica soothingly. “Think back to the time we had together at home. That couldn’t be a lie.”

  Gillette’s eyes opened wider. For a moment he had difficulty breathing. “Yes,” he whispered, “it could be a lie. You could be a hallucination, too.” He began to weep, seeing exactly where his ailing mind was leading him.

  Jessica held him while the attack worsened and then passed away. In a few moments he had regained his usual sensible outlook. “This mission is much tougher than I thought it would be,” he whispered.

  Jessica kissed his cheek. “We have to expect some kind of problems after all these years,” she said. “We never planned on it taking this long.”

  The system they were in consisted of another class-M star and twelve planets. “A lot of work, Jessica,” he said, brightening a little at the prospect. “It ought to keep us busy for a couple of weeks. That’s better than falling through null space.”

  “Yes, dear,” she said. “Have you started thinking of names yet?” That was becoming the most tedious part of the mission—coming up with enough new names for all the stars and their satellites. After eight thousand systems, they had exhausted all the mythological and historical and geographical names they could remember. They now took turns, naming planets after baseball players and authors and film stars.

  They were going down to examine a desert world they had named Rick, after the character in Casablanca. Even though it was unlikely that it would be suitable for life, they still needed to examine it firsthand, just on the off-chance, just in case, just for ducks, as Gillette’s mother used to say.

  That made him pause, a quiet smile on his lips. He hadn’t thought of that expression in years. That was a critical point in Gillette’s voyage; never again, while Jessica was with him, did he come so close to losing his mental faculties. He clung to her and to his memories as a shield against the cold and destructive forces of the vast emptiness of space.

  Once more the years slipped by. The past blurred into an indecipherable haze, and the future did not exist. Living in the present was at once the Gillettes’ salvation and curse. They spent their time among routines and changeless duties that were no more tedious than what they had known on Earth, but no more exciting either.

  As their shared venture neared its twentieth year, the great disaster befell Gillette: on an unnamed world hundreds of light-years from Earth, on a rocky hill overlooking a barren sandstone valley, Jessica Gillette died. She bent over to collect a sample of soil; a worn seam in her pressure suit parted; there was a sibilant warning of gases passing through the lining, into the suit. She fell to the stony ground, dead. Her husband watched her die, unable to give her any help, so quickly did the poison kill her. He sat beside her as the planet’s day turned to night, and through the long, cold hours until dawn.

  He buried her on that world, which he named Jessica, and left her there forever. He set out a transmission gate in orbit around the world, finished his survey of the rest of the system, and went on to the next star. He was consumed with grief, and for many days he did not leave his bed.

  One morning Benny, the kitten, scrabbled up beside Gillette. The kitten had not been fed in almost a week. “Benny,” murmured the lonely man, “I want you to realize something. We can’t get home. If I turned this ship around right this very minute and powered home all the way through null space, it would take twenty years. I’d be in my seventies if I lived long enough to see Earth. I never expected to live that long.” From then on, Gillette performed his duties in a mechanical way, with none of the enthusiasm he had shared with Jessica. There was nothing else to do but go on, and so he did, but the loneliness clung to him like a shadow of death.

  He examined his results, and decided to try to make a tentative hypothesis. “It’s unusual data, Benny,” he said. “There has to be some simple explanation. Jessica always argued that there didn’t have to be any explanation at all, but now I’m sure there must be. There has to be some meaning behind all of this, somewhere. Now tell me, why haven’t we found Indication Number One of life on any of these twenty-odd thousand worlds we’ve visited?”

  Benny didn’t have much to suggest at this point. He followed Gillette with his big yellow eyes as the man walked around the room. “I’ve gone over this before,” said Gillette, “and the only theories I come up with are extremely hard to live with. Jessica would have thought I was crazy for sure. My friends on Earth would have a really difficult time even listening to them, Benny, let alone seriously considering them. But in an investigation like this, there comes a point when you have to throw out all the predicted results and look deep and long at what has actually occurred. This isn’t what I wanted, you know. It sure isn’t what Jessica and I expected. But it is what happened.”

  Gillette sat down at his desk. He thought for a moment about Jessica, and he was brought to the verge of tears. But he thought about how he had dedicated the remainder of his life to her, and to her dream of finding an answer at one of the stellar systems yet to come.

  He devoted himself to getting that answer for her. The one blessing in all the years of disappointment was that the statistical data were so easy to comprehend. He didn’t need a computer to help in arranging the information: there was just one long, long string of zeros. “Science is built on theories,” thought Gillette. “Some theories may be untestable in actual practice, but are accepted because of an overwhelming preponderance of empirical data. For instance, there may not actually exist any such thing as gravity; it may be that things have been falling down consistently because of some outrageous statistical quirk. Any moment now things may start to fall up and down at random, like pennies landing heads or tails. And then the Law of Gravity will have to be amended.”

  That was the first, and safest, part of his reasoning. Next came the feeling that there was one over-riding possibility that would adequately account for the numbing succession of lifeless planets. “I don’t really want to think about that yet,” he murmured, speaking to Jessica’s spirit. “Next week, maybe. I think we’ll visit a couple more systems first.”

  And he did. There were seven planets around an M-class star, and then a G star with eleven, and a K star with fourteen; all the worlds were impact-cratered and pitted and smoothed with lava flow. Gillette held Benny in his lap after inspecting the three systems. “Thirty-two more planets,” he said. “What’s the grand total now?” Benny didn’t know.

  Gillette didn’t have anyone with whom to debate the matter. He could not consult scientists on Earth; even Jessica was lost to him. All he had was his patient gray cat, who couldn’t be looked to for many subtle contributions. “Have you noticed,” asked the man, “that the farther we get from Earth, the more homogeneous the universe looks?” If Benny didn’t understand the word homogeneous, he didn’t show it. “The only really unnatural thing we’ve seen in all these years has been Earth itself. Life on Earth is the only truly anomalous factor we’ve witnessed in twenty years of exploration. What does that mean to you?”

  At that point, it didn’t mean anything to Benny, but it began to mean something to Gillette. He shrugged. “None of my friends were willing to consider even the possibility that Earth might be alone in the universe, that there might not be anything else alive anywhere in all the infinite reaches of space. Of course, we haven’t looked at much of those infinite reaches, but going zero for twenty-three thousand means that something unusual is happening.” When the Gillettes had left Earth two decades before, prevailing scientific opinion insisted that life had to be out there somewhere, even though there was no proof, either directly or indirectly. There had to be life; it was only a matter of stumbling on it. Gillette looked at the old formula, still hanging where it had been throughout the whole voyage. “If one of those factors is zero,” he thought, “then the whole product is zero. Which factor could it be?” There was no hint of an answer, but that particular question was becoming less important to Gillette all the time.

  AND SO IT had come down to this: Year 30 and still outward bound. The end of Gillette’s life was somewhere out there in the black stillness. Earth was a pale memory, less real now than last night’s dreams. Benny was an old cat, and soon he would die as Jessica had died, and Gillette would be absolutely alone. He didn’t like to think about that, but the notion intruded on his consciousness again and again.

  Another thought arose just as often. It was an irrational thought, he knew, something he had scoffed at thirty years before. His scientific training led him to examine ideas by the steady, cold light of reason, but this new concept would not hold still for such a mechanical inspection.