Though the auditorium was uncrowded, Daphne sat next to me. As the room went dark and the showing started, she caught my hand and did not let go.

  Our proppas had used minimum fake effects, where necessary to bridge gaps. They had ample real data to work with. Men aboard the associated vessels, Abdiel, Raphael, and Zephon, had taken excellent shots both before and after the catastrophe. In Uriel they kept cameras going too, and later transmitted what these recorded. Aimed almost at random, the lenses were cruelly honest. Our producers had not much more to do than choose sequences and add occasional explanatory narration.

  I see, hear, all but feel and taste and smell the story around me now.

  A thousand light-years hence, stars throng blackness, jewel-hued, icy sharp, marshalled in alien constellations. The galactic band and the clouds that cleave its silver are less changed to sight—except dead ahead, where a haze grows as the ships near, until it fills a quarter of heaven. White and flame-blue at its heart, the nebula roils outward to edges which are a lacework formed of molten rainbows.

  Instruments take over, seeing and projecting what vision cannot. In the middle of that majestic chaos, two things which have been suns whirl crazily about each other. One, hardly bigger than Earth although more massive than Sol, has no light of its own, but flings back the fury of its huge companion’s death. There are no words to tell of this. And yet the image is a ghost, a mathematical construct. Men who looked straight upon the reality would die before they knew they had been blinded.

  Narrator: “Here crews have stood watch and watch for a score of years, ever since astronomers predicted that the blue giant would soon explode. Here was our chance to observe a supernova close at hand. Who could tell what we might learn? And what about its companion, a neutron star orbiting almost in contact? How was this possible? It must once have undergone the same throes, perhaps even more violent. But an outburst like that should drive the members of a pair apart, not together.

  “We think probably there was a third member, also a giant, which blew up at about the same former time. Itself escaping, it took such a path that the second body was drawn close in toward the still steadily shining first. Friction with expelled gases must have helped shorten the orbit.

  “Our investigators have searched for that third object. Its remnants cannot have traveled far, in cosmic terms. But they must be very feebly shining, or altogether dark, collapsed into a ball the size of a planet. We have not found them. God made the universe too big; let us put down our pride.”

  The tone cools: “Now that the last of the trio has erupted, the system is indeed breaking apart. Losing immense quantities of mass, the supernova must spiral away from the neutron star, and vice versa, to conserve angular momentum. But friction, again, hinders this retreat. It had scarcely begun when Uriel arrived, to relieve Zophiel on the regular three-month rotation plan.

  “Certain persons question the sense of traveling a light-millennium, weeks at top quasispeed, for so short a season of duty. But we have no choice. The radiation around a recent supernova is too intense. Even under superdrive, a ship gets some of it, and a percentage of that comes through the heaviest shielding. Nor can the crew make accurate studies, entirely while moving faster than light. Much of their work must be done in normal state, at true velocity. Of course, then they extend magnetohydrodynamic fields well beyond the hull, control a plasma cloud, and enjoy quite effective protection. But no protection is perfect, unless it be divine. In view of probable cumulative dosage, the rule has been that three months is the maximum safe exposure time.

  “In Uriel’s case, the period was greatly lessened.”

  The screen has been carrying diagrams and cartoons to clarify this physics for the layman. Next leaps forth a view from the observation bridge of a craft already on station, yes, I glimpse an officer whom I recognize, Ludwig Taube, aboard Abdiel. Cameras always record arrivals, to have information should misfortune occur. The scanning is Solward, whence the newcomer is expected. Those who wait will get no advance warning—what signal could outpace light?—but they have no reason to think King is off schedule, give or take a few hours. And, in a corner of the screen, see! The lean shape flashes into sight, into existence within the framework of relativity. It drifts off scene. Tracking, the camera catches and centers it. Stars appear to stream past; Uriel is moving swiftly across their field. Those in a cone ahead of the vessel show a flicker, their light rippled by its thrust drive as it decelerates. Taube’s words: “What a hellbat of an intrinsic. I wonder why.”

  More drawings and narration explain: “—conservation of energy. A ship about to enter superdrive has a certain definite velocity—speed and direction—with respect to any other given object in the universe, including its destination. Crossing space with inertia nullified does not change that velocity, nor do gravitational wells affect it significantly…as a rule. In ordinary procedure, we try to match this so-called intrinsic to the intrinsic of the target, as closely as feasible, before staring the nonrelativistic part of our journey. Else we might have to spend too much fuel at the far end of the trip, where it can’t readily be replaced. Not even the tanks of a fusion engine can carry enough for more than about five thousand kilometers per second of delta-V—that is, total velocity changes, both speedups and slowdowns, added together in the course of a mission…” Old hat. I noticed acutely how warm and tightly gripping was Daphne’s hand.

  Switch back to intership transmission. Matt King’s blocky face appears, reporting to over-commander Cauldwell aboard Zephon. “Sorry about our excess V. I thought I had our vector well calculated.”

  “Don’t fret,” his superior smiles. “You’re within acceptable limits—barely, but nevertheless within, praise God. Given the uncertainty and variability of parameters, you’ve done OK.”

  Jump to a date weeks later, Cauldwell before the board of inquiry on Earth. His features are worn and strained, a tic plagues his mouth, he speaks roughly: “Gentlemen, the guilt is mine. I should have weighed the possibility that the trouble was due to a fault developing within Uriel, worsening till a breakdown must occur.”

  “But nothing ominous had registered on their gauges en route, had it?” says the presiding officer. I know him. He is a man who, in the fear of the Lord, strives to be just. “We realize how intricate a thing a spaceship is. The least carelessness in maintenance can plant the seed of a terrible surprise.”

  “Father, forgive me,” Cauldwell groans toward the infinite. “I should have thought seriously about that and ordered them straight home.”

  “Thus canceling their scientific projects: forever, because the stellar system would not have remained long in that particular state,” declares the president. “No, Admiral, your decision was correct. Note well that King did not request an abort, nor any of his men. Our task is to track down whatever technician homeside was negligent, and find out what he did wrong.” Pause. “The Pastorate will set his penance.”

  Narrator: “Seven men aboard Uriel—”

  Singly, they go past us. Captain Matthew King, commanding. Lieutenant Commander Valdemar Asklund, navigator and first officer. Lieutenant Jesse Smith, chief engineer. Lieutenant Blaise Policard, second engineer and supervisor of life-support systems. That is all the crew which one of our marvelous wanderers needs, and each has been taught in addition how to assist the scientists. Those are not members of the Corps, though naturally in fine physical shape and sent through basic astronautical training. Nikolai Vissarionovich Kuzmin has planned especially to study nuclear reactions as they gutter out in the bared kernel of the ruptured star, Ioannes Venizelos gas and radiation dynamics in the nebula, Sugiyama Kito the gravity waves as configurations change. We see their lives, wives, parents, children—

  Daphne, and I because of her, saw Valdemar Asklund as if he were alone.

  He is a tall young man, lean, blond, narrow-faced, crinkly-eyed, readily smiling. His grays always seem the least bit rumpled, tunic open at the throat and bare of the ribbon to which he is entitled for his role in the daring rescue of Michael. His English carries the rise and fall of surf against the cliffs of that fjord where he was born. He was an indifferent student and barely got accepted into the Corps, but thereafter did brilliantly. Yet he is no spacegoing machine. He loves what remains of Earth’s outdoors; he reads widely, with a special fondness for the comedies of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Holberg, and Yarbro; he paints, plays chess and tennis, can cook a tasty meal or mix a powerful drink (that’s a minor point against him, of course), is a genial host and sought-after guest; influenced by his wife, he is deep into the music of Beethoven and has been learning the piano; he has likewise been pondering and quoting old American writings like the Declaration of Independence (good), though he omits the Churchly glosses upon them (bad); he keeps a seemingly unlimited supply of jokes for both stag gatherings and polite company; the more I see, the better I like him. And…those glimpses of him and Daphne which the filmmakers were able to dig out of this newsfile or that private album…appearances, frolics, the little possessions which turned their series of apartments into a single home—how happy they made each other!

  Return our scene to space. Vessels extrude gang tubes, men cross between and cheerily fraternize, the chaplain aboard Zephon holds a special service for these seven who have gone weeks without hearing the Word from an ordained mouth. But time is fleeting. Captains and scientists confer. The four vessels will proceed in formation to the fringes of the nebula. Thence Uriel will plunge further, to conduct its first set of planned experiments.

  The little fleet glides on superdrive to the initial goal. The three which will wait there, making different observations as they free-float in normal state, are sufficiently distant from the core—a quarter light-year—that their hulls and low-intensity MHD fields guard personnel from harm. Fading fast as it expands, today the burst sun gives them hardly more heat and X-rays than they would get in the orbit of Venus; the blast of leptons has already gone past this region, the baryons and ions have not yet reached it, the thin light-haze around is mainly due to excited interstellar gas.

  Uriel leaves them. The recorded transmission includes sight of Asklund at his work. He reads off a string of figures, then abruptly grins, his head haloed in stars, waves, calls, “So long and cheerio.”

  Daphne’s nails bit blood out of my hand. I did not stir.

  Briefly back under superdrive, Uriel slips close, close to the inferno before reverting to normal state, visibility, vulnerability. From protector nozzles gushes a cloud of plasma, which a heightened field wraps around the hull like a faintly shimmering cocoon. This will ward off not only the hurricane of charged particles, but the lethal photons…most of them. Should the dose aboard approach a safe limit, the ship will flee, faster than light.

  These events must be shown in reconstruction. No outside lens, were any that close, could have spied a work of man against the nebular blaze. No message beam, were any receiver that close, could have pierced the wild electricity around. What we see is an impressionistic view, the craft large till it suddenly whirls off, dwindles to sight, vanishes amidst fire. Next, as if given the eyes of angels, we see the greater globe white-hot and still collapsing, the lesser burnt-out and compressed though now ashimmer, whipping in seconds through their orbit. And we see a dot which images Uriel. That dot plunges in.

  Closeups: Needles abruptly aswoop across dials, numbers in screens changing too fast to follow, frantic chatter of printout; afterward men, whose resoluteness is a cage for horror.

  Narrator: “Without warning, power failed. Engineers Smith and Policard could barely squeeze out the ergs to maintain radiation shielding. Nothing could be spared for either thrust or superdrive. The collapse of the MHD field for half an instant would mean death. There was nothing to do but work—find the cause of the trouble and make repairs—while Uriel, helpless, was hauled in like a comet by the gravity of two suns both heavier than Sol itself.

  “The orbit had been established beforehand, to swing safely wide of the hot companion, slightly nearer the cold. Nobody had expected to continue in the path for long—certainly not till it almost grazed the sun-clinker. But this is what happened.”

  A scarlet thread grows behind the dot, marking its track through space. At first, time on the screen is compressed. Uriel had a high intrinsic in the direction of the double, whose mass accelerated it ever more furiously. Nevertheless the ship took days, terrible days to reach apastron.

  Later, time is necessarily stretched. For close in, speed increases, increases, increases, dizzily beyond what the simple attraction of matter for matter can wreak. Uriel sweeps around the side of the neutron star opposite the late supernova, a moment in shadow which saves the men, since radiation is forcing itself past their screens in such amounts that every danger signal shrills. Acceleration climbs to better than half a million gees, five hundred kilometers per second per second. Thus the ship departs spaceward in the wink of a quantum, too swiftly for its re-exposure to the starblast to kill. The acceleration tumbles down again; but by then, Uriel is coursing on the heels of light.

  Narrator: “Bodies as massive as these two, spinning as fast, generate forces according to the laws of general relativity which act like a kind of negative gravity. That is what seized our unhappy men. They felt no drag, no pressure; they were in free fall throughout, and did not come within the effective tidal action zone. But their intrinsic mounted to more than fifty times what their thrust drive could possibly shed before fuel was exhausted. They were, they are trapped in the speed they have gained.”

  I meant to write down everything we saw, the pictures taken on board, the forlorn gallantry of men who toiled, suffered, prayed, endured, never really expecting survival nor, maybe, really wanting it. But I cannot.

  I will merely write of scenes toward the end, that Daphne and I watched while she wept, my arm around her. The faulty power plant has been repaired. The medication against radiation exposure is taking effect. The interior of the ship is cool again, scorch and sweat are gone from the air, pseudogravity generators once more provide stable weight, guardian fields scoop interstellar gas aside in an invisible bow wave so that rays no longer seethe through bodies; and a great silence has fallen.

  In awe, the seven stand on their observation bridge. Lengths are shrunken, masses swollen, time dilated. Doppler shift has muffled nearly all stars fore and aft, though a few glint wanly still. Aberration has turned the rest into a single eldritch constellation girdling enormous night.

  By no other light than that, Captain King leads his men in thanksgiving. “The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handy-work… For I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained. What is man, that thou art mindful of him: and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”

  But Asklund stands erect, looking outward as if into the face of a foe.

  Afterward they resume stations, start the superdrive; automatic optical compensators give them an illusion of being back in a familiar universe; they run toward rendezvous with their fellows.

  Narrator: “In the inertialess condition, a difference of intrinsic does not manifest itself. Taking due precautions, crews from the spared vessels boarded Uriel, offered consolation, taped messages to bring home.”

  Some words are stammered, some stilted, some tearful. Asklund smiles almost wryly into the camera, though tenderness dwells in his voice: “—Daphne, darling, do you remember that old, old ballad I translated for you, about the dead knight who returns to his sweetheart? Do you remember what he tells her?

  For every time you’re weeping

  And sad your mood.

  Then is my coffin filled inside

  With clotted blood…

  But every time you’re singing

  And have no grief,

  Then is my coffin filled inside

  With rose and leaf…

  “Please give me that gift. Live. Let me know and be glad that you’re happy. Because I’ll be alive myself, don’t forget. This is no coffin. We can have good and useful lives, if people will help. If you will help, Daphne, by not mourning but living—” There is a little more.

  Narrator: “Uriel stayed on cruise while the men recovered fully from their ordeal. Meanwhile the Astronautic Corps debated what is best for them. A plan is ready, a mission in progress.”

  Daphne swallowed hard before she whispered in my ear: “And Sinclair, I’m going too!”

  Not till she returned from training did I learn, in part, how she got her way. The recommendation she magicked out of me was not enough, however hard I wrangled.

  Director Jarvis: “Nonsense. The trouble and expense of teaching a one-shot rookie, when we’ve got career men? And a woman? Great Scott, just imagine the plumbing problems!”

  Secretary Wardour: “Well, yes, it wouldn’t hurt the Corps to perform a well-publicized act of compassion. But what kind of mercy is this, letting them meet for a couple of weeks in a crowded hull, her spacesuit always between them?”

  Pastor Benson: “Propriety first. It would be extremely difficult, at best, for a sole woman to travel and work among men, in close quarters, without occasionally revealing what should not be revealed. Morality second. She could not help arousing lust. Oh, I realize nothing untoward would happen. But minds would stray from godliness—from concentration on temporal duties also, perhaps, in that dangerous environment. Religion third but foremost. Might not the unexpected, stunning sight of her, an attractive female, briefly among men condemned to lifelong celibacy—not only her husband but the whole seven, young and virile—might that not weaken their resolve to accept the will of God? Might the memory not haunt them until at last they despair of his grace and fall into the Devil’s claws?”

  I was astounded when the OK came through. But I had been too busy to see much of Daphne or hear her schemes. And she was promptly whisked off to Luna base for two intensive months, while the load on me redoubled. You don’t casually gather a crew, hop into a craft, and take off for the deeps. Look what happened to Uriel, where everybody supposed that everything had been checked out. The operation which I headed involved more unknowns yet.