“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 He’s calm, competent—rather withdrawn, I think.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?

  And what else had they to do in the years that remained, but range the galaxy, and, from time to time, bring us tales of their discoveries? A radio capsule, shot free of the counterinertial field, could summon our people to a meeting. Though we dared not accept any physical record, we could make copies.

  But we could merely request and recommend, never command. They were untouchable.

  “A shakedown cruise,” he answered. “To the Orion Nebula. You know what a lot of unsolved puzzles it holds, and…we’d like to see new suns being formed. Then, when we’re reasonably sure of our ship and ourselves—the long jump. Clear to galactic center.”

  I was not altogether surprised. Nevertheless—“Already?” For that would be a voyage of years; and opinion continues divided as to whether, beyond the vast dust clouds which hide it from our probings, the heart of the Milky Way is a hell of radiation or—

  “The Elders,” he capped my thought.

  Surely we are not the solitary species who fare between the stars. God is too generous for that. Far out in this fringe of a spiral arm, barely starting to fumble around off our home shores, we must be like cavemen on a raft, compared to races ahead of us which, maybe, are not burdened by original sin, not plagued by the Devil or a myriad lunacies. Half our astronomers think the middle regions are clear, the suns close together but old and benign, the likeliest hearths of beings whose recorded history runs for multiple millions of years—

  —and who might even know how to lift the curse off Uriel.

  “What have we to lose?” King said.

  To that same room came Daphne, at the close of our mission.

  When I heard her knock, I soared from the chair where I had been grinding at return-trip calculations, hit my knee on the desk, and in the pain swore at myself for a lubberly old gowk. Aloud, I called, “Enter.” She came through in her pride and gentleness, and I forgot about hurting.

  “The captain summoned me,” she uttered formally. Her eyes were the green of Earth’s living seas.

  “Aye. Please shut the door. Sit down.” I gestured her to the chair. As she brushed past, touching me, I scented her warmth afresh, after these many days in spacesuits or a crowded mess or a bunk alone. When she was seated, her gaze must travel too far to meet mine. So I perched on a corner of my desk, swung the foot that was free of the deck, and speculated at the back of my mind whether this made me seem younger.

  Did she, regardless, bear dread behind her face? I studied closely. She blinked, drew a long breath, then eased back and smiled. “Everything I’ve worked on checks out swab-O,” she said. “And my fellows tell me they’re satisfied.”

  I nodded, while fighting my throat.

  “What can I do further?” she asked, neither wondering nor defying but quietly helping me along.

  “You—” I tried again. “You are in a, an unco situation, lass. I couldna but see—Well, tomorrow mornwatch we go to Uriel for…we canna call’t a celebration—a speech or twa—and—”

  She said (how kindly!), “You wonder if Val and I have any special last request, don’t you, Alec?”

  “I’ve seen your glove seek him.”

  She laid her hand across mine where it clenched the desk edge. Is not a woman’s hand twice beautiful on the knobbly hairy paw of a man? “If we could go off by ourselves, to Matt King’s cabin or wherever, a while, we’d be grateful.”

  “You know you can that,” I snapped after air. “Why I called you here…I’m not quite sure. I thought, ’twill be a hard farewell. And he, Val, he does trust you’ll build a life of your own afterward. I want you to, to know you have a friend here who cares for you very much, Daphne. How can I be of service?”

  “Oh, Alec, Alec.” Suddenly she kissed me, and fled crying.

  At last I slept.

  We would have been mad to leave Gabriel long unattended, on automatics. Nor could anybody stand much ceremony. But rightness required that, together, we see directly through our visors our comrades for whom we had toiled and clasp them good-bye in our armored arms, and wish them godspeed till death or a miracle delivered them.

  Crossing over, I flew as near as might be to Daphne. She was half a shadow, half a shimmer, amidst the stars and silence around. I heard naught save a radio hiss in my earphones, a thrum of thrust, my heart knocking. At breakfast, some of us had been boisterous and some bleak; she had been unreadable; now none talked. Did we feel guilt, that soon we would know blueness, clouds, rain, leaves in the wind? Myself, did I do wrong to hope?

  The sternest realism I could muster warned she would remarry, if she did, for convenience and companionship. Well, I dared not want more.

  My boots thudded on Uriel’s hull.

  We cycled through the lock. At the inner valve waited Matthew King, Jesse Smith, Blaise Policard, Nikolai Kuzmin, Ioannes Venizelos, Sugiyama Kito, Valdemar Asklund. No longer grimy in coveralls, no longer starved, and no longer looking forward to human advent, they stood in dress uniforms as if on parade; and I saw that these brave, decent men were unsure how they might comfort us.

  “Welcome,” King said. Walking down the corridor, he took me around the waist. After half a second I was ashamed that I was shocked. He did have woman-less years before him, but I was his old friend, and muffled away from the very air he breathed, and due to depart in an hour. Next I noticed that, while Daphne and Asklund were side by side, they had not embraced as they did when first she boarded. Their faces were as shut as her helmet.

  What had she told him, in the privacies we gave them?

  Though we fourteen had fractional room to move around in the mess, we quickly took places at its table. By prearrangement, Uriel’s crew had set out glasses and the last bottle of champagne. They would drink for both and we, homeward bound after this was done, would pray for both.

  King stood up, klinged thumbnail on goblet, and said: “Mrs. Asklund and gentlemen, we cannot reckon or repay what we owe you. I speak less of your help which will let us live on—that was rendered in the tradition of the Corps—than of your spirit, your generosity—”

  I, rising to respond, said: “Brothers, forgive a, a wee bit of dramatics. From your wives, children, parents, your kin and closest well-wishers on Earth, we brought what they gave us to bring you. But we held back one small thing for each till now, whatever they felt would be extra special—”

  We tried together to stay calm, and even I hardly saw the Asklunds excuse themselves and leave.

  “—we will never forget,” I was saying; “mankind will never forget,” when they made re-entry, bare hand in hand. She wore her undergarb, and carried high her head and the unbound ruddy hair.

  I am a starship captain, therefore disciplined into command of myself. I roared the chaos around the table back to order. Matt King came to my help. Daphne and Valdemar waited calmly.

  Jezebel, harlot of outlaws, wandering Jewess—what pain did the curses give her, give them, when Uriel returned for the first and last time to report wonders? What freedom have they found to keep them away ever since, if death does not? And what interior victory, readiness of both to give ungrudging love, must he and she have won before at last, in sight of us all, she kissed her man full upon the mouth?

  GYPSY

  From afar, I caught a glimpse of the Traveler as my boat swung toward the planet. The great spaceship looked like a toy at that distance, a frail bubble of metal and air and energy against the enormous background of space. I thought of the machines within her, humming and whirring and clicking very faintly as they pursued their unending round of services, making that long hull into a living world—the hull that was now empty of life—and I had a sudden odd feeling of sympathy. As if she were alive, I felt that the Traveler was lonely.

  The planet swelled before me, a shining blue shield blazoned with clouds and continents, rolling against a limitless dark and the bitterly burning stars. Harbor, we had named that world, the harbor at the end of our long journey, and there were few lovelier names. Harbor, haven, rest and peace and a sky overhead as roof against the naked blaze of space. It was good to get home.

  I searched the heavens for another glimpse of the Traveler, but I couldn’t find her tiny form in that thronging wilderness of stars. No matter, she was still on her orbit about Harbor, moored to the planet, perhaps forever. I concentrated on bringing the spaceboat down.

  Atmosphere whistled about the hull. After a month in the gloom and poisonous cold of the fifth planet, alone among utterly unhuman natives, I was usually on fire to get home and brought my craft down with a recklessness that overloaded the gravity beams. But this time I went a little more carefully, telling myself that I’d rather be late for supper than not arrive at all. Or perhaps it was that brief chance vision of the Traveler which made me suddenly thoughtful. After all, we had had some good times aboard her.

  I sent the boat slanting toward the peninsula in the north temperate zone on which most of us were settled. The outraged air screamed behind me as I slammed down on the hard-packed earth that served us for a landing field. There were a few warehouses and service shops around it, long low buildings of the heavy timbers used by most of the colonists, and a couple of private homes a kilometer or so away. But otherwise only long grass rustled in the wind, gardens and wild groves, sunlight streaming out of a high blue sky. When I stepped from the boat, the fresh vivid scent of the land fairly leaped to meet me. I could hear the sea growling beyond the horizon.

  Tokogama was on duty at the field. He was sitting on the porch of the office, smoking his pipe and watching the clouds sail by overhead, but he greeted me with the undemonstrative cordiality of old friends who know each other too well to need many words.

  “So that’s the portmaster,” I said. “Soft touch. All you have to do is puff that vile-smelling thing and say hello to me.”

  “That’s all,” he admitted cheerfully. “I am retained only for my uncommonly high ornamental value.”

  It was, approximately, true. Our aircraft used the field with no formality, and we only kept this one space vessel in operation. The portmaster was on hand simply to oversee servicing and in the unlikely case of some emergency or dispute. But none of the colony’s few public posts—captain, communications officer, and the rest—required much effort in as simple a society as ours, and they were filled as spare-time occupations by anyone who wanted them. There was no compensation except getting first turn at using the machinery for farming or heavy construction which we owned in common.

  “How was the trip?” asked Tokogama.

  “Pretty good,” I said. “I gave them our machines and they filled my holds with their ores and alloys. And I managed to take a few more notes on their habits, and establish a few more code symbols for communication.”

  “Which is a very notable brick added to the walls of science, but in view of the fact that you’re the only one who ever goes there it really makes no odds.” Tokogama’s dark eyes regarded me curiously. “Why do you keep on making those trips out there, Erling? Quite a few of the other boys wouldn’t mind visiting Five once in a while. Will and Ivan both mentioned it to me last week.”

  “I’m no hog,” I said. “If either of them, or anyone else, wants a turn at the trading job, let ’em learn space piloting and they can go. But meanwhile—I like the work. You know that I was one of those who voted to continue the search for Earth.”

  Tokogama nodded. “So you were. But that was three years ago. Even you must have grown some roots here.”

  “Oh, I have,” I laughed. “Which reminds me I’m hungry, and judging by the sun it’s the local dinner time. So I’ll get on home, if Alanna knows I’m back.”

  “She can’t help it,” he smiled. “The whole continent knows when you’re back, the way you rip the atmosphere coming in. That home cooking must have a powerful magnetic attraction.”

  “A steak aroma of about fifty thousand gauss—” I turned to go, calling over my shoulder: “Why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow evening? I’ll invite the other boys and we’ll have an old-fashioned hot air session.”

  “I was sort of hinting in that direction,” said Tokogama.

  I got my carplane out of the hangar and took off with a whisper of air and a hum of grav-beam generators. But I flew low over the woods and meadows, dawdling along at fifty kilometers an hour and looking across the landscape. It lay quietly in the evening, almost empty of man, a green fair breadth of land veined with bright rivers. The westering sun touched each leaf and grass blade with molten gold, an aureate glow which seemed to fill the cool air like a tangible presence, and I could hear the chirp and chatter of the great bird flocks as they settled down in the trees. Yes—it was good to get home.

  My own house stood at the very edge of the sea, on a sandy bluff sloping down to the water. The windy trees which grew about it almost hid the little stone and timber structure, but its lawns and gardens reached far, and beyond them were the fields from which we got our food. Down by the beach stood the boathouse and the little dock I had made, and I knew our sailboat lay waiting there for me to take her out. I felt an almost physical hunger for the sea again, the mighty surge of waves out to the wild horizon, the keen salt wind and the crying white birds. After a month in the sterile tanked air of the spaceboat, it was like being born again.

  I set the plane down before the house and got out. Two small bodies fairly exploded against me—Einar and Mike. I walked into the house with my sons riding my shoulders.

  Alanna stood in the doorway waiting for me. She was tall, almost as tall as I, and slim and red-haired and the most beautiful woman in the universe. We didn’t say much—it was unnecessary, and we were otherwise occupied for the next few minutes.

  And afterward I sat before a leaping fire where the little flames danced and chuckled and cast a wavering ruddy glow over the room, and the wind whistled outside and rattled the door, and the sea roared on the nighted beach, and I told them of my fabulous space voyage, which had been hard and monotonous and lonely but was a glamorous adventure at home. The boys’ eyes never stirred from my face as I talked, I could feel the eagerness that blazed from them. The gaunt sun-seared crags of One, the misty jungles of Two, the mountains and deserts of Four, the great civilization of Five, the bitter desolation of the outer worlds—and beyond those the stars. But we were home now, we sat in a warm dry house and heard the wind singing outside.

  I was happy, in a quiet way that had somehow lost the exuberance of my earlier returns. Content, maybe.

  Oh, well, I thought. These trips to the fifth world were becoming routine, just as life on Harbor, now that our colony was established and our automatic and semiautomatic machines running smoothly, had quieted down from the first great riot of work and danger and work again. That was progress, that was what we had striven for, to remove want and woe and the knife-edged uncertainty which had haunted our days. We had arrived, we had graduated into a solid assurance and a comfort which still held enough unsureness and challenge to keep us from getting sluggish. Grown men don’t risk their necks climbing the uppermost branches of trees, the way children do; they walk on the ground, and when they have to rise they do so safely and comfortably, in a carplane.

  “What’s the matter, Erling?” asked Alanna.

  “Why—nothing.” I started out of my reverie, suddenly aware that the children were in bed and the night near its middle. “Nothing at all. I was just sitting thinking. A little tired, I guess. Let’s turn in.”

  “You’re a poor liar, Erling,” she said softly. “What were you really thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” I insisted. “That is, well, I saw the old Traveler as I was coming down today. It just put me in mind of old times.”

  “It would,” she said. And suddenly she sighed. I looked at her in some alarm, but she was smiling again. “You’re right, it is late, and we’d better go to bed.”

  I took the boys out in the sailboat the next day. Alanna stayed home on the excuse that she had to prepare dinner, though I knew of her theory that the proper psychodevelopment of children required a balance of paternal and maternal influence. Since I was away so much of the time, out in space or with one of the exploring parties which were slowly mapping our planet, she made me occupy the center of the screen whenever I was home.