Einar, who was nine years old and getting interested in the microbooks we had from the Traveler—and so, ultimately, from Earth—looked at her and said: “Back at Sol you wouldn’t have to make food, Mother. You’d just set the au…autochef, and come out with us.”

  “I like to cook,” she smiled. “I suppose we could make autochefs, now that the more important semirobot machinery has been produced, but it’d take a lot of fun out of life for me.”

  Her eyes went past the house, down to the beach and out over the restless sun-sparked water. The sea breeze ruffled her red hair, it was like a flame in the cool shade of the trees. “I think they must miss a lot in the Solar System,” she said. “They have so much there that, somehow, they can’t have what we’ve got—room to move about, lands that never saw a man before, the fun of making something ourselves.”

  “You might like it if you went there,” I said. “After all, sweetheart, however wisely we may talk about Sol, we know it only by hearsay.”

  “I know I like what we have here,” she answered. I thought there was a faint note of defiance in her voice. “If Sol is just a legend, I can’t be sure I’d like the reality. Certainly it could be no better than Harbor.”

  “All redheads are chauvinists,” I laughed, turning down toward the beach.

  “All Swedes make unfounded generalizations,” she replied cheerfully. “I should’a known better than to marry a Thorkild.”

  “Fortunately, Mrs. Thorkild, you didn’t.” I bowed.

  The boys and I got out the sailboat. There was a spanking breeze, and in minutes we were scudding northward, along the woods and fields and tumbling surf of the coast.

  “We should put a motor on the Naughty Nancy, Dad,” said Einar. “Suppose this wind don’t hold.”

  “I like to sail,” I said. “The chance of having to man the sweeps is part of the fun.”

  “Me too,” said Mike, a little ambiguously.

  “Do they have sailboats on Earth?” asked Einar.

  “They must,” I said, “since I designed the Nancy after a book about them. But I don’t think it’d ever be quite the same, Einar. The sea must always be full of boats, most of them powered, and there’d be aircraft overhead and some sort of building wherever you made landfall. You wouldn’t have the sea to yourself.”

  “Then why’d you want to keep looking for Earth when ever’body else wanted to stay here?” he challenged.

  A nine-year-old can ask some remarkably disconcerting questions. I said slowly: “I wasn’t the only one who voted to keep on searching. And—well, I admitted it at the time, it wasn’t Earth but the search itself that I wanted. I liked to find new planets. But we’ve got a good home now, Einar, here on Harbor.”

  “I still don’t understand how they ever lost Earth,” he said.

  “Nobody does,” I said. “The Traveler was carrying a load of colonists to Alpha Centauri—that was a star close to Sol—and men had found the hyperdrive only a few years before and reached the nearer stars. Anyway, something happened. There was a great explosion in the engines, and we found ourselves somewhere else in the galaxy, thousands of light-years from home. We don’t know how far from home, since we’ve never been able to find Sol again. But after repairing the ship, we spent more than twenty years looking. We never found home.” I added quickly, “Until we decided to settle on Harbor. That was our home.”

  “I mean, how’d the ship get thrown so far off?”

  I shrugged. The principles of the hyperdrive are difficult enough, involving as they do the concept of multiple dimensions and of discontinuous psi functions. No one on the ship—and everyone with a knowledge of physics had twisted his brains over the problem—had been able to figure out what catastrophe it was that had annihilated space-time for her. Speculation had involved space warps—whatever that term means, points of infinite discontinuity, undimensional fields, and Cosmos knows what else. Could we find what had happened, and purposefully control the phenomenon which had seized us by some blind accident, the galaxy would be ours. Meanwhile, we were limited to pseudovelocities of a couple of hundred lights, and interstellar space mocked us with vastness.

  But how explain that to a nine-year-old? I said only: “If I knew that, I’d be wiser than anyone else, Einar. Which I’m not.”

  “I wanna go swimming,” said Mike.

  “Sure,” I said. “That was our idea, wasn’t it? We’ll drop anchor in the next bay—”

  “I wanna go swimming in Spacecamp Cove.”

  I tried to hedge, but Einar was all over me, too. It was only a few kilometers farther up the coast, and its broad sheltered expanse, its wide sandy beach, and the forest immediately behind, made it ideal for such an expedition. And after all, I had nothing against it.

  Nothing—except the lure of the place.

  I sighed and surrendered. Spacecamp Cove it was.

  We had a good time there, swimming and picnicking, playing ball and loafing in the sand and swimming some more. It was good to lie in the sun again, with a cool wet wind blowing in from the sea and talking in the trees. And to the boys, the glamour of it was a sort of crown on the day.

  But I had to fight the romance. I wasn’t a child any more, playing at spacemen and aliens, I was the grown man with some responsibilities. The community of the Traveler had voted by an overwhelming majority to settle on Harbor, and that was that.

  And here, half hidden by long grass, half buried in the blowing sand, were the unmistakable signs of what we had left.

  There wasn’t much. A few plasticontainers for food, a couple of broken tools of curious shape, some scattered engine parts. Just enough to indicate that a while ago—ten years ago, perhaps—a party of spacemen had landed here, camped for a while, made some repairs, and resumed their journey.

  They weren’t from the fifth planet. Those natives had never left their world, and even with the technological impetus we were giving them in exchange for their metals they weren’t ever likely to, the pressures they needed to live were too great. They weren’t from Sol, or even some colony world—not only were the remains totally unlike our equipment, but the news of a planet like Harbor, almost a duplicate of Earth but without a native intelligent race, would have brought settlers here in swarms. So—somewhere in the galaxy, someone else had mastered the hyperdrive and was exploring space.

  As we had been doing—

  I did my best to be cheerful all the way home, and think I succeeded on the surface. And that in spite of Einar’s wildly romantic gabble about the unknown campers. But I couldn’t help remembering—

  In twenty years of spacing, you can see a lot of worlds, and you can have a lot of experience. We had been gods of a sort, flitting from star to star, exploring, trading, learning, now and again mixing into the destinies of the natives. We had fought and striven, suffered and laughed and stood silent in wonder. For most of us, the dreadful hunger for home, the weariness of the hopeless quest, had shadowed that panorama of worlds which reeled through my mind. But—before Cosmos, I had loved every minute of it!

  I fell into unrelieved moodiness as soon as we had stowed the Naughty Nancy in our boathouse. The boys ran ahead of me toward the house, but I followed slowly. Alanna met me at the door.

  “Better wash up right away,” she said. “The company will be here any minute.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She looked at me, for a very long moment, and laid her hand on my arm. In the long dazzling rays of the westering sun, her eyes were brighter than I had seen them before. I wondered if tears were not wavering just behind them.

  “You were at Spacecamp Cove,” she said quietly.

  “The boys wanted to go there,” I answered. “It’s a good place.”

  “Erling—” She paused. I stood looking at her, thinking how beautiful she was. I remembered the way she had looked on Hralfar, the first time I kissed her. We had wandered a ways from the camp of the detail exploring that frosty little world and negotiating with its natives for supplies. The sky had been dark overhead, with a shrunken sun casting its thin pale light on the blue-shadowed snow. It was quiet, breathlessly quiet, the air was like sharp fire in our nostrils and her hair, the only color in that white horizon, seemed to crackle with frost. That was quite a long time ago, but nothing had changed between us since.

  “Yes?” I prompted her. “Yes, what is it?”

  Her voice came quickly, very low so the boys wouldn’t hear: “Erling, are you really happy here?”

  “Why”—I felt an almost physical shock of surprise—“of course I am, dear. That’s a silly question.”

  “Or a silly answer?” She smiled, with closed lips. “We did have some good times on the Traveler. Even those who grumbled loudest at the time admit that, now when they’ve got a little perspective on the voyage and have forgotten something of the overcrowding and danger and weariness. But you—I sometimes think the Traveler was your life, Erling.”

  “I liked the ship, of course.” I had a somewhat desperate sense of defending myself. “After all, I was born and raised on her. I never really knew anything else. Our planetary visits were so short, and most of the worlds so unterrestrial. You liked it too.”

  “Oh, sure, it was fun to go batting around the galaxy, never knowing what might wait at the next sun. But a woman wants a home. And—Erling, plenty of others your age, who also had never known anything else, hated it.”

  “I was lucky. As an officer, I had better quarters, more privacy. And, well, that ‘something hid behind the ranges’ maybe meant more to me than to most others. But—good Cosmos, Alanna! you don’t think that now—”

  “I don’t think anything, Erling. But on the ship you weren’t so absentminded, so apt to fall into daydreams. You didn’t sit around the place all day, you were always working on something…” She bit her lip. “Don’t misunderstand, Erling. I have no doubt you keep telling yourself how happy you are. You could go to your cremation, here on Harbor, thinking you’d had a rather good life. But—I sometimes wonder!”

  “Now look—” I began.

  “No, no, nothing more out of you. Get inside and wash up, the company’ll be coming in half a minute.”

  I went, with my head in a whirl. Mechanically, I scrubbed myself and changed into evening blouse and slacks. When I came out of the bedroom, the first of the guests were already waiting.

  MacTeague Angus was there, the old first mate of the Traveler and captain in the short time between Kane’s death and our settling on Harbor. So was my brother Thorkild Gustav, with whom I had little in common except a mutual liking. Tokogama Hideyoshi, Petroff Ivan, Ortega Manuel, and a couple of others showed up a few minutes later. Alanna took charge of their wives and children, and I mixed drinks all around.

  For a while the talk was of local matters. We were scattered over quite a wide area, and had as yet not produced enough telescreens for every house, so that communication was limited to direct personal travel by plane. A hailstorm on Gustav’s farm, a minor breakdown in the vehicle factory superintended by Ortega, Petroff’s project of a fleet of semirobot fishing boats—small gossip. Presently dinner was served.

  Gustav was rapturous over the steak. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Some local animal I shot the other day,” I said. “Ungulate, reddish-brown, broad flat horns.”

  “Oh, yes. Hm-m-m—I’ll have to try domesticating some. I’ve had pretty good luck with those glug-gugs.”

  “Huh?” Petroff stared at him.

  “Another local species,” laughed Gustav. “I had to call them something, and they make that kind of noise.”

  “The Traveler was never like this,” said Ortega, helping himself to another piece of meat.

  “I never thought the food was bad,” I said.

  “No, we had the hydroponic vegetables and fruits, and the synthetic meats, as well as what we picked up on different planets,” admitted Ortega. “But it wasn’t this good, ever. Hydroponics somehow don’t have the flavor of Earth-grown stuff.”

  “That’s your imagination,” said Petroff. “I can prove—”

  “I don’t care what you can prove, the facts remain.” Ortega glanced at me. “But there were compensations.”

  “Not enough,” muttered Gustav. “I’ve got room to move, here on Harbor.”

  “You’re being unjust to the Traveler,” I said. “She was only meant to carry about fifty people for a short voyage at that. When she lost her way for twenty years, and a whole new generation got jammed in with their parents, it’s no wonder she grew crowded. Actually, her minimum crew is ten or so. Thirty people—fifteen couples, say, plus their kids—could travel in her in ease and comfort, with private apartments for all.”

  “And still…still, for over twenty years, we fought and suffered and stood the monotony and the hopelessness—to find Earth.” Tokogama’s voice was musing, a little awed. “When all the time, on any of a hundred uninhabited terrestroid planets, we could have had—this.”

  “For at least half that time,” pointed out MacTeague, “we were simply looking for the right part of the galaxy. We knew Sol wasn’t anywhere near, so we had no hopes to be crushed, but we thought as soon as the constellations began to look fairly familiar we’d be quickly able to find home.” He shrugged. “But space is simply too big, and our astrogational tables have so little information. Star travel was still in its infancy when we left Sol.

  “An error of, say, one percent could throw us light-years off in the course of several hundred parsecs. And the galaxy is lousy with GO-type suns, which are statistically almost certain to have neighbors sufficiently like Sol’s to fool an unsure observer. If our tables had given positions relative to, say, S Doradus, we could have found home easily enough. But they used Sirius for their bright-star point—and we couldn’t find Sirius in that swarm of stars! We just had to hop from star to star which might be Sol—and find it wasn’t, and go on, with the sickening fear that maybe we were getting farther away all the time, maybe Sol lay just off the bows, obscured by a dark nebula. In the end—we gave it up as a bad job.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” said Tokogama. “We realized all that, you know. But there was Captain Kane and his tremendous personality, his driving will to success, and we’d all come to rely more or less blindly on him. As long as he lived, nobody quite believed in the possibility of failure. When he died, everything seemed to collapse at once.”

  I nodded grimly, remembering those terrible days that followed—Seymour’s mutinous attempt to seize power, bringing home to us just how sick and weary we all were; the arrival at this star which might have solved it all, might have given us a happy ending, if it had been Sol; the rest on Harbor, a rest which became a permanent stay—

  “Something else kept us going all those years, too,” said Ortega quietly. “There was an element among the younger generation which liked to wander. The vote to stay here wasn’t unanimous.”

  “I know,” said MacTeague. His level gaze rested thoughtfully on me. “I often wonder, Erling, why some of you don’t borrow the ship and visit the nearer stars, just to see what’s there.”

  “Wouldn’t do any good,” I said tonelessly. “It’d just make our feet itch worse than ever—and there’d always be stars beyond those.”

  “But why—” Gustav fumbled for words. “Why would anyone want to go—stargazing that way? I…well, I’ve got my feet on ground now, my own ground, my own home…it’s growing, I’m building and planting and seeing it come to reality before my own eyes, and it’ll be there for my children and their children. There’s air and wind and rain, sunlight, the sea, the woods and mountains—Cosmos! Who wants more? Who wants to trade it for sitting in a sterile metal tank, riding from star to star, homeless, hopeless?”

  “Nobody,” I said hastily. “I was just trying—”

  “The most pointless existence—simply to be a…a spectator in the universe!”

  “Not exactly,” said Tokogama. “There was plenty we did, if you insist that somebody must do something. We brought some benefits of human civilization to quite a number of places. We did some extensive star-mapping, if we ever see Earthmen again they’ll find our tables useful, and our observations within different systems. We…well, we were wanderers, but so what? Do you blame a bird for not having hoofs?”

  “The birds have hoofs now,” I said. “They’re walking on the ground. And”—I flashed a glance at Alanna—“they like it.”

  The conversation was getting a little too hot. I steered it into safer channels until we adjourned to the living room. Over coffee and tobacco it came back.

  We began reminiscing about the old days, planets we had seen, deeds we had done. Worlds and suns and moons, whirling through a raw dark emptiness afire with stars, were in our talk—strange races, foreign cities, lonely magnificence of mountains and plains and seas, the giant universe opening before us. Oh, by all the gods, we had fared far!

  We had seen the blue hell-flames leaping over the naked peaks of a planet whose great sun almost filled its sky. We had sailed with a gang of happy pirates over a sea red as new-spilled blood toward the grotesque towers of a fortress older than their history. We had seen the rich color and flashing metal of a tournament on Drangor and the steely immensity of the continental cities on Alkan. We had talked philosophy with a gross wallowing cephalopod on one world and been shot at by the inhumanly beautiful natives of another. We had come as gods to a planet to lift its barbaric natives from the grip of a plague that scythed them down and we had come as humble students to the ancient laboratories and libraries of the next. We had come near perishing in a methane storm on a planet far from its sun and felt then how dear life is. We had lain on the beaches of the paradise world Luanha and let the sea sing us to sleep. We had ridden centauroids who conversed with us as they went to the aerial city of their winged enemies—