Maybe you, archeologist, wonder why. In your ultrasophisticated astronautics (if God has not closed down technological civilization, lest we make an idol of material progress) what could be simpler than to lay alongside, both vessels in superdrive, and transfer cargo? Why, you may know how to kill such speed and let its victims rejoin the human race.

  But we—Well, Uriel already had systems for recycling air and water. However, they were not completely adequate. Nobody had expected them to be in continuous use for half a century. They would degrade, poisonous organics would accumulate, unless we added refinements and ancilliaries. And we couldn’t simply plug in the new stuff. We had to do considerable rebuilding. Likewise, the ship had carried six months’ worth of food. We would install closed-ecology units that would feed the men indefinitely, indeed yield a large surplus. But this too we couldn’t merely dump aboard. It must be integrated with everything else. For a single example of our needful planning, remember that health and sanity required we leave the crew reasonable elbow room.

  And while we labored, we must take elaborate precautions to assure no substantial number of atoms from Uriel got aboard our own ship. A few nanograms would destroy us, the moment we reverted to normal state and they took off at their light-like intrinsic velocity. There wouldn’t be an explosion unless the mass was really gross, up in the milligrams or whatever. But from end to end of our hull would go a fatal wave of radiation.

  Obviously, Uriel can never leave the inertialess state. It must always keep moving at a quasispeed which outruns light—a modern incarnation of that eerie ancient legend, the Flying Dutchman. (What did its crew ever do, to merit their damnation?) Even if we invented a means to slow it, it would first have to enter normal state—would it not?—and our gift of supplies and machinery would annihilate it in a brief brilliance that might rival a nova.

  Fortunately, fuel is no problem. The demands of life support are modest, those of keeping an inertialess body moving are less. Tanks topped off by us ought to serve for more years of exploration than those men have left in their bodies.

  You may not believe me, in your hypothetical age of universal enlightenment, but fools have actually asked why Uriel didn’t backtrack, once its superdrive was operational again, and let the double star undo what was wrought. Evidently, for them the narration was futile when explaining that a velocity is a direction as well as a speed. And, to be sure, Asklund calculated that at the rate yon companions are moving apart, already then they could no longer accelerate an infalling object in anything near the fashion they handled him.

  Less crackpot was the suggestion that the ship find a safe, solitary and cold neutron star, go normal near its surface, and let gravity act as a brake, repeating this process until the intrinsic was down to a reasonable figure. But doubtless you need not do the arithmetic to estimate how many passes this would require. The limited food stocks would be exhausted years before an end was in sight.

  Another double of precisely the right characteristics, or any of several more exotic and hypothetical things, could reverse the effect, yes. While we have not publicized the fact, Uriel spent what months were possible on minimum rations, before reserves got hopelessly low, seeking just such a deliverance. The hunt was foredoomed, of course. Recall the sheer size of space, and guess at the probabilities. Then think what spirit was in those men, that they tried.

  Further search is pointless. The equipment of survival, which we have given our comrades, has a differential intrinsic of almost three hundred thousand kilometers per second: to the best of our present-day knowledge and imagination, irrevocable.

  Why is my dictascribe trudging through elementary physics? Don’t I want to remember how Daphne came back to me?

  She protested the two-week furlough granted our crew before departure. They were edging starvation in that ship. I told her the custom was vital. We dared not go to space tired, tense, unrefreshed by our loves. We would meet our deadline, which King and Cauldwell had determined between them a thousand light-years from home. Let her not fear.

  “Yes, I’ve been told,” she said. “I’m sorry I grew impatient.”

  “You have a downright duty to enjoy yourself.” I wagged a finger at her. “Where will you go, if I may ask?”

  “Well,” she said, “my parents have passed away, I haven’t anybody close, I’d like to, oh, bid Earth good-bye. Luna was magnificent but stark. Doesn’t the Corps maintain a wilderness resort?”

  “Aye,” I answered, and changed my mind about visiting my sons.

  Autumn descends early upon the Grand Tetons. Except for the lodge staff, we had this part of them to ourselves. During the days we tramped their trails, canoed on their lakes, dared their glaciers, found nooks of sunlit warmth and sat down to wonder at their birds, beasts, trees, and distances. Evenings we attacked dinner, surprised at how often we japed and laughed; afterward we took our ease before a stone fireplace, in dimness that burning pine logs made flickery fragrant, and talked more seriously, traded memories, thoughts, and—shyly at first—dreams.

  I will sketch a single hour, soon after we arrived. We left in the morning for a hike to the peak above. Our path took us through a wood where leaves glowed in crystalline sunlight, scarlet maple, golden birch, fallow aspen. Between their slim trunks we saw how the mountain slanted toward a dale where a brook went rushing, and how on the far side the range lifted anew in white and violet purity. The sky was like sapphire. The air was chill in our nostrils, smoky when we breathed out, sweetened by faint odors of soil and damp and life. Sometimes a raven went “Gruk!” or a squirrel streaked up a bole and chattered at us; twice a flock of geese passed overhead, their calls drifting down; else our footfalls resounded through holy quietness.

  We stopped a while to rest. The ground was soft beneath us. Daphne sat looking outward, arms clasped around knees, cheeks flushed from our climb. The warmth of her went over me in a wave. Her hair, tumbling from a headband and across her shoulders, shimmered as bronze does, or heavy silk.

  She said at last, low, maybe to herself, “Val spoke of this country a lot. We were going to pay a visit together. But something always made us postpone. We didn’t really understand that we weren’t immortal. So now it seems we never will come.”

  “You will,” I promised.

  “I…won’t be able to. I’m temporarily associated, not actually in the Corps.”

  “I can bring guests.”

  She turned her head and gave me a grave smile. “Thank you, Alec. You’re kinder to me than is right. But no. I’ve seen what it costs, and won’t have that sort of money.”

  “Eh?” I was startled, having read the dossier on her which Personnel compiled. “I thought your parents left you quite well off.”

  “They did. Everything’s gone for a bribe, though.”

  “What?”

  She chuckled. “Poor shockable Alec! Nobody told you? Oh, not strictly a bribe. I informed the Pastorate that if it would approve my going in your gang, and pressure an acceptance through secular channels, I’d donate my inheritance to the Church. I dropped a strong hint that otherwise I’d endow a synagogue. They huffed and puffed, but in the end—” She shrugged. “I’ll spare you the list of my other blackmails, browbeatings, bluffs, and deceits.”

  “Lass, lass,” I whispered, “how can it mean that much to you, squinting at him through a helmet visor?”

  “It does.”

  I gathered courage to say, “He himself begged you to put him behind you.”

  She looked back toward the snowpeaks. “I don’t think I can. ‘In plenty and in want; in joy and in sorrow; in sickness and in health; as long as we both shall live.’ ” Her hands, groping about, closed on a fallen dry branch. “I… suppose…I’m more of a monogamist…in my way…than he is.” The noise was startlingly loud when the branch snapped. “But he does love me!”

  A deer bounded into sight. Our gaze followed, enchanted. “He loves Earth also,” she ended, “and he’s been forever shut away. Shouldn’t I bring him what touch—what remembrance I can?”

  To hurt him the worse? Have you thought how selfish you maybe are? I barely halted my tongue, and hunched appalled. What good would lie in lashing out at her craziness? The fault was mine. I should have stood on my veto at the beginning. Now we were locked in. She was precision-fitted for a crucial role. Quite rightly, the directors would not allow me to substitute her backup for any reason less than a medical emergency. Nor would she ever forgive me.

  Whereas—Very well, keep silence, let her get that adieu out of her system. Afterward—

  “You find this a bonny land, do you not?” I asked rhetorically.

  She nodded. “I’ll never forget,” she murmured.

  “You need not hanker,” I told her. “When we return to Earth—” My heart slammed. “We can come here. Whenever we’re both free. No matter money. I draw a good wage, and nobody depends on me anymore.”

  “Oh, Alec!” For an instant I glimpsed tears. For another instant her arms were around me, her face buried in my shoulder. Then she leaped up. “C’mon, lazylegs!” she cried, and we were on our way again.

  We made rendezvous beyond Mars, where Uriel had lately been flying a prearranged exact circle. Knowing position and quasispeed of the exiles, my instruments, automatons, and I brought Gabriel carefully closing in. When the two counterinertial fields, extending a few kilometers beyond either hull, began to mesh, I saw ghostlike waverings across the Milky Way. As we neared, our objective solidified. Having reached the same phase, an optic screen showed it not far off, as real among the stars as we were…or as unreal, in this mass-annulled condition we shared.

  “Synchronism achieved,” I mumbled into the intercom, and sank back in my pilot chair. The process had been slow, trying, dangerous because of the short range within which mutual detection was possible; inside our fields, we still had inertia with respect to each other if not to the outside cosmos, and a collision could wreck us both. I smelled the sweat rank on me, heard breath and pulse rattle, felt the separate stiffnesses and aches in a body no longer young.

  “How are they?” rang Daphne’s voice. “May we see?”

  I decided I wasn’t ready for the boneyard yet, and switched the telereceivers aft into the visual compensator circuit. A buzz of excited talk reached me vaguely, from my men. They were five altogether besides her, excellent fellows, who had treated her with awkward chivalry while we rehearsed and at last ran outward from Earth orbit. I wish them well. But none of them especially matters.

  “Maintain stations,” I ordered. “I’ll try for contact.” Right off, I saw my mistake. “I’ll make contact,” I amended. They must not be dead or insane over there! My fingers stumbled across the com panel. “Gabriel to Uriel, come in.”

  “Uriel to Gabriel.” The screen flashed color. Matt King stared forth. His eyes and cheeks were sunken back among the bones of his face, and he spoke in a hoarse whisper; but he was clean, closely groomed, crisply uniformed. My worst fears drained out of me. “Welcome, welcome.” He managed a shaky smile. “You’re skippering the mission, are you, Alexander Sinclair, you old rascal? What a pleasant surprise.”

  “How is everybody?” I barked.

  “Basically healthy, praise God. Weak but functional, and we got out of the habit of hunger six months ago. Morale is, um, not bad. We do hope you’ve brought steaks and champagne! When do you expect you can board?”

  “We need rest, and I want a complete final checkout of every system…Let’s say in twenty-four hours. I’m sorry it cannot be sooner. Uh, I wonder if Valdemar Asklund could come to your pickup?”

  “Why, well, yes, if you wish.”

  “Will you report to the command bridge?” I said into the intercom. No reason to state who.

  She arrived just as Asklund’s hollowed-out countenance appeared. Through a minute or more, they were dumb. I might not leave my post until relieved by Roberts, my first officer; but I glowered at the optic screens. In one of them, its radiance stopped down for the sake of my vision, the sun looked shrunken and cold; in another, Earth shone deep blue, loveliest of the stars and somehow more distant-seeming than any else; in the rest gleamed inhuman hordes and the immensities between.

  Finally I heard Asklund sigh, “Daphne, why?”

  “To be with you,” she wept.

  “When we can’t even touch? I…we’re going away as soon as—Oh, my dearest, I worked for weeks on a message to record for you, and now—no words—” I heard him weep too.

  Presently she said, “I’ll be busy, you realize. I’m responsible for the core parts of your food-cycling equipment. But you can assist me, and—and Captain Sinclair did promise we’d have chances, a compartment where we’re by ourselves, or a private line—”

  To talk.

  We used no gang tube. A handful of air molecules, diffusing from Uriel to Gabriel, would bring the same doom on us. Instead, we kept the ships as far apart as synchronicity allowed, and jetted across in spacesuits which we wore during an entire shift. This handicapped us infernally. Sheer bulk got in its own way. Gloved fingers, being clumsy, must often operate specially designed manipulators. Speech was via sonic amplifiers, likewise a nuisance. But there was no help for it; and, to be sure, as we instructed them in the requirements, our outcast comrades became quite skillful teammates. Returning to our vessel to eat and sleep, we paused outside the entry lock and practiced elaborate rotations and contortions while an infrared beam boiled off whatever atoms might cling to our suits, and well-nigh baked us. Those were the more obvious, physical discomforts.

  And they were not what made us long to finish and be gone. No, it was what Uriel ’s men said, generally with Spartan mildness, and their eyes upon us, and the way they handled the letters, pictures, tapes, mementos we brought them.

  I remember a talk out of many which King and I had. We were off duty, seated in our cabins, using an exclusive frequency. This is standard on spacecraft, whose captains may have to reach a grim decision. We let Daphne and her husband into these cubicles at a regular hour out of the twenty-four.

  King poured whiskey from a bottle, my smuggled gift, raised the tumbler, and toasted. “Here’s to our noble selves.” I responded in kind. He didn’t show it, really—indeed, having begun to flesh out since we brought abundant food, he looked better than erstwhile—but he had let himself become a trifle drunk.

  “Or skoal, my navigator would say,” he added.

  I let the drink glow down my throat. The leastmost cheer felt large. What had I around me? Three meters by two of room, gray-painted metal, bunk, locker, chair, desk, reference works, Bible, a file of favorite books and a microreader for them, a small musical library and player, a harmonica that I occasionally tootled on, pipes and tobacco, photographs of Meg who was dead and our sons who were grown—that, and starriness outside.

  But I could go walk on planets of yon suns, including a planet named Earth.

  “Your pronunciation is wrong, Matt,” I tried to laugh.

  “How do you know?” he bridled. A ventilator muttered around his words.

  “Well, ah, Daphne Asklund told me I had it wrong, and taught me a closer approximation.” I took a second swallow, much sooner than I had intended.

  He peered at me. “Why did she make you bring her?”

  “What? Why did I? I’ve explained. She told you herself. She saw how to join her husband this brief while—unless when you return to the Solar System—and since she could in fact carry her share of the load, I had no heart to refuse her.”

  The image of his head shook from side to side in the cramped screen. “Don’t evade my question, Alec. It wasn’t about your motive—that’s pathetically obvious—but hers. Nobody who wasn’t…terrifyingly…strong and clearheaded could have swung what she did. I know how these things work as well as you do; I can make the same estimate of the barriers she had to break down, the powerful men she had to outface and outsmart. Such a person doesn’t do such a thing for an orgy of sentimentalism that can only agonize her man. Then why?”

  “Who knows what drives a soul?” I counterattacked. “Do you understand yours? I don’t mine. How is Asklund taking it?”

  “How does he strike you? I’ve been meaning to get your outside opinion, Alec, to check my impression. We’ll spend the rest of our mutual life together; I’d better have an accurate judgment of him.”

  I needn’t stop to ponder, having done that in uncounted wakeful nightwatch hours. “He was knocked off his orbit at first, I’d say. But he appears to have recovered fast. I don’t see him much, you ken, and almost always in public, at work. He’s calm, competent—rather withdrawn, I think. They both are.”

  “He wears a stout mask.” The lines deepened around King’s mouth. “I gauge him as being under the tightest, breaking-point control.”

  “Is that uncanny?”

  “No, I suppose not. My other men—she’s causing them trouble too, not as intense but nevertheless trouble.”

  “Psychological disturbance was foreseen and allowed for. Still, what is she to them? A bulgy suit like everybody’s from Gabriel. A face in the visor, a voice out of a speaker, aye, those are female. But men throughout history, in military units or monasteries, have seen more of women, and not been tantalized beyond endurance.”

  “Soldiers expected to get home; monks expected to keep vows they’d made. We’re neither. Already Blai—an astronaut has admitted to me being in love with her. I myself—” King tossed off a mouthful and quirked a smile. “Oh, we’ll get over our emotions, our itch, that is. But frankly, I’m thankful this will soon end. Please don’t let her join in the next rendezvous.”

  Wordlessness hummed between us.

  “Have you decided where you will go first?” I blurted. We’d brought a bundle of recommendations from different scientists, but the Uriel crew had taken no opportunity thus far to study these. King had mentioned how, in the months of their hunt for a savior star, they discussed every imaginable possibility and contingency. What else was there for them?