More than the wildly romantic adventures—which, after all, had been pretty dirty and bloody affairs at the time—we loved to remember the worlds themselves: a fiery sunset on the snowfields of Hralfar; a great brown river flowing through the rain forest which covered Atlang; a painted desert on Thyvari; the mighty disk of New Jupiter swelling before our bows; the cold and vastness and cruelty and emptiness and awe and wonder of open space itself. And, in our small clique of frank tramps, there had been the comradeship of the road, the calm unspoken knowledge of having friends who would stand firm—a feeling of belonging, such as men like Gustav had achieved only since coming here, and which we seemed to have lost.

  Lost—yes, why not admit it? We didn’t see each other very often any more, we were too scattered, too busy. And the talk of the others was just a little bit boring.

  Well, it couldn’t be helped—

  It was late that night when the party broke up. Alanna and I saw the guests out to their planes. When the last vehicle had whispered into the sky, we stood for a while looking around us. The night was very still and cool, with a high starry sky in which the moon of Harbor was rising. Its light glittered on the dew under our feet, danced restlessly on the sea, threw a dim silver veil on the dreaming land—our land.

  I looked down at Alanna. She was staring over the darkened view, staring as if she had never seen it before—or never would again. The moonlight was tangled like frost in her hair. What if I never see open space again? What if I sit here till I die? This is worth it.

  She spoke at last, very slowly, as if she had to shape each word separately: “I’m beginning to realize it. Yes, I’m quite sure.”

  “Sure of what?” I asked.

  “Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. You and Manuel and Ivan and Hideyoshi and the others who were here—except Angus and Gus, of course. And quite a few more. You don’t belong here. None of you.”

  “How—so?”

  “Look, a man who had been born and raised in a city, and had a successful life in it, couldn’t be expected to take to the country all of a sudden. Maybe never. Put him among peasants, and he’d go around all the rest of his life wondering vaguely why he wasn’t honestly happy.”

  “We—Now don’t start that again, sweetheart,” I begged.

  “Why not? Somebody’s got to. After all, Erling, this is a peasantry we’ve got, growing up on Harbor. More or less mechanized, to be sure, but still rooted to the soil, close to it, with the peasant strength and solidity and the peasant’s provincial outlook. Why, if a ship from Earth landed tomorrow, I don’t think twenty people would leave with it.

  “But you, Erling, you and your friends—you grew up in the ship, and you made a successful adaptation to it. You spent your formative years wandering. By now—you’re cosmopolites. For you, a mountain range will always be more than it really is, because of what’s behind it. One horizon isn’t enough, you’ve got to have many, as many as there are in the universe.

  “Find Earth? Why, you yourself admitted you don’t care whether Earth is ever found. You only want the search.

  “You’re a gypsy, Erling. And no gypsy could ever be tied to one place.”

  I stood for a long while, alone with her in the cold calm moonlight, and said nothing. When I looked down at her, finally, she was trying not to cry, but her lip was trembling and the tears were bright in her eyes. Every word was wrenched out of me:

  “You may be right, Alanna. I’m beginning to be horribly afraid you are. But what’s to be done about it?”

  “Done?” She laughed, a strangely desolate laugh. “Why, it’s a very simple problem. The answer is circling right there up in the sky. Get a crew who feel the way you do, and take the Traveler. Go roaming—forever!”

  “But…you? You, the kids, the place here…you—”

  “Don’t you see?” Her laughter rang louder now, echoing faintly in the light night. “Don’t you see? I want to go, too!” She almost fell into my arms. “I want to go, too!”

  There is no reason to record the long arguments, grudging acceptances, slow preparations. In the end we won. Sixteen men and their wives, with half a dozen children, were wild to leave.

  That summer blazed up into fall, winter came, spring, and summer again, while we made ready. Our last year on Harbor. And I had never realized how much I loved the planet. Almost, I gave up.

  But space, free space, the open universe and the ship come alive again—!

  We left the colony a complete set of plans, in the unlikely event that they should ever want to build a starship of their own, and a couple of spaceboats and duplicates of all the important automatic machinery carried by the Traveler. We would make astrogating tables, as our official purpose, and theoretically we might some day come back.

  But we knew we never would. We would go traveling, and our children would carry the journey on after us, and their children after them, a whole new civilization growing up between the stars, rootless but tremendously alive. Those who wearied of it could always colonize a planet; we would be spreading mankind over the galaxy. When our descendants were many, they would build other ships until there was a fleet, a mobile city hurtling from sun to sun. It would be a culture to itself, drawing on the best which all races had to offer and spreading it over the worlds. It would be the bloodstream of the interstellar civilization which was slowly gestating in the universe.

  As the days and months went by, my boys grew even more impatient to be off. I smiled a little. Right now, they only thought of the adventure of it, romantic planets and great deeds to be done. Well, there were such, they would have eventful lives, but they would soon learn that patience and steadfastness were needed, that there was toil and suffering and danger—and life!

  Alanna—I was a little puzzled. She was very gay when I was around, merrier than I had ever seen her before. But she often went out for long walks, alone on the beach or in the sun-dappled woods, and she started a garden which she would never harvest. Well—so it went, and I was too busy with preparations to think much about it.

  The end came, and we embarked on the long voyage, the voyage which has not ceased yet and, I hope, will never end. The night before, we had Angus and Gustav in for a farewell party, and it was a strange feeling to be saying good-bye knowing that we would never see them again, or hear from them. It was like dying.

  But we were alone in the morning. We went out to our carplane, to fly to the landing field where the gypsies would meet. From there, a boat would take us to the Traveler. I still could not fully realize that I was captain—I, captain of the great ship which had been my world, it didn’t seem real. I walked slowly, my head full of the sudden universe of responsibility.

  Alanna touched my arm. “Look around, Erling,” she whispered. “Look around at our land. You’ll never see it again.”

  I shook myself out of my reverie and let my eyes sweep the horizon. It was early, the grass was still wet, flashing in the new sun. The sea danced and glittered beyond the rustling trees, crying its old song to the fair green land, and the wind that blew from it was keen and cold and pungent with life. The fields were stirring in the wind, a long ripple of grass, and high overhead a bird was singing.

  “It’s—very beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes.” I could hardly hear her voice. “Yes, it is. Let’s go, Erling.”

  We got into the carplane and slanted skyward. The boys crowded forward with me, staring ahead for the first glimpse of the landing field, not seeing the forests and meadows and shining rivers that slipped away beneath us.

  Alanna sat behind me, looking down over the land. Her bright head was bent away so I couldn’t see her face. I wondered what she was thinking, but somehow I didn’t want to ask her.

  MARIUS

  It was raining again, with a bite in the air as the planet spun toward winter. They hadn’t yet restored the street lights, and an early dusk seeped up between ruined walls and hid the tattered folk dwelling in caves grubbed out of rubble. Etienne Fourre, chief of the Maquisard Brotherhood and therefore representative of France in the Supreme Council of United Free Europe, stubbed his toe on a cobblestone. Pain struck through a worn-out boot, and he swore with tired expertness. The fifty guards ringing him in, hairy men in a patchwork of clothes—looted from the uniforms of a dozen armies, their own insignia merely a hand-sewn Tricolor brassard—tensed. It was an automatic reaction, the bristling of a wolf at any unawaited noise, long ago drilled into them.

  “Eh, bien,” said Fourre. “Perhaps Rouget de l’Isle stumbled on the same rock while composing the ‘Marseillaise.’”

  One-eyed Astier shrugged, an almost invisible gesture in the murk. “When is the next grain shipment coming?” he asked. It was hard to think of anything but food above the noise of a growling belly, and the Liberators had shucked military formalities during the desperate years.

  “Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day, if the barges aren’t waylaid by river pirates,” said Fourre. “And I don’t think they will be, this close to Strasbourg.” He tried to smile. “Be of good cheer, my old. Next year there should be an ample harvest. The Americans are shipping us a new blight-preventive.”

  “Always next year,” grumbled Astier. “Why don’t they send us something to eat now?”

  “The blights hit them, too. It is the best they can do for us. Had it not been for them, we would still be skulking in the woods sniping at Russians.”

  “We had a little something to do with winning.”

  “More than a little, thanks to Professor Valti. I do not think any of the free people could have won without all the others.”

  “If you call this victory.” Astier’s soured voice faded into silence. They were passing the broken cathedral, and it was known that childpacks often hid there. The little wild ones had sometimes attacked armed men with their jagged bottles and rusty bayonets. But fifty soldiers were too many, of course. Fourre thought he heard a scuttering among the stones; but it might only have been the rats. Never had he dreamed there could be so many rats.

  The thin sad rain blew into his face and weighted his beard. Night rolled out of the east, as if it were a message from Soviet lands plunged into chaos and murder. But we are rebuilding, he thought defensively; each week the authority of the Strasbourg Council reached a civilizing hand farther into the smashed lands of Europe. In ten years, five perhaps—automation was so fantastically productive, if only you could get hold of the machines in the first place—the men of the West would again be peaceful farmers and shopkeepers, their culture again a going concern.

  If the multinational Councilors made the right decisions. And they had not been making them. Valti had finally convinced Fourre of that. Therefore, he walked through the rain, hugging an old bicycle poncho to his sleazy jacket, and men in barracks were quietly estimating how many jumps it would take to reach their racked weapons. It would be necessary to overpower those who did not agree.

  A wry thought, that the ancient feudal principle of personal loyalty to a chief should have to be invoked to enforce the decrees of a new mathematics that only some thousand minds out of all the world understood. But you wouldn’t expect the Norman peasant Astier or the Parisian Apache Renault to bend the scanty spare time of a year to learning the operations of symbolic sociology. You would merely say, “Come,” and they would come because they loved you.

  The streets resounded hollow under his feet. It was a world without logic, this one. Only the accidents of survival had made the village apothecary Etienne Fourre into the de facto commander of Free France. He could have wished those accidents had taken him and spared Jeanette, but at least he had two sons living, and some day, if they hadn’t gotten too much radiation, there would be grandchildren. God was not altogether revengeful.

  “There we are, up ahead,” said Astier.

  Fourre did not bother to reply. He had never been under the common human necessity of forever mouthing words.

  Strasbourg was the seat of the Council because of its location and because it was not too badly hit. It had been a conventional battle with chemical explosives which rolled through it, eighteen months ago. The University had almost completely escaped destruction, so Jacques Reinach had his headquarters there. His men prowled about on guard; one wonders what Goethe would have thought, could he have returned to the scene of his student days. And yet it was men such as this, with dirty hands and clean weapons, who were civilization. It was their kind who had harried the wounded Russian colossus out of the West and who would restore law and liberty and wind-rippled fields of grain. Some day. Perhaps.

  There was a machine-gun nest at the first check point. The sergeant in charge recognized Fourre and gave a sloppy salute. (Still, the fact that Reinach had extorted so much discipline from his horde spoke for the man’s personality.) “Your escort must wait here, general,” he said, half apologizing. “It is the new regulation.”

  “I know,” said Fourre. Not all of his guards did, and there was a snarling which he shushed. “I have an appointment to see the Commandant.”

  “Yes, sir. Please stay to the lighted paths. Otherwise you might be shot by mistake for a looter.”

  Fourre nodded and walked through, onto the campus. His body wanted to get in out of the rain, but he went slowly, delaying the moment. Jacques Reinach was, after all, not only his countryman but his friend. He was nowhere near as close to, say, Helgesen of the Nordic Alliance, or the Italian Totti, or Rojansky of Poland, and he positively disliked the German Auerbach.

  But Vaki’s matrices were not concerned with a man’s heart. They simply told you that given such-and-such conditions, this-and-that would probably happen. It was a cold knowledge to bear.

  The Headquarters building was a loom of darkness, but a few windows glowed at him. Reinach had had an electric generator set up—and very rightly, of course, when his tired staff and his tired self must often work around the clock.

  A sentry admitted Fourre to an outer office. There were half a dozen armed men picking their teeth in it and dicing for cartridges while a tubercular secretary coughed over files written on old laundry bills, flyleaves, any scrap of paper that came to hand. They all stood up, and Fourre told them he had an appointment with the Commandant, chairman of the Council.

  “Yes, sir.” The officer was still in his teens, fuzzy face already shriveled into old age, and spoke very bad French. “Just check your weapons with us and go on in.”

  Fourre unbuckled his guns, reflecting that this latest requirement, disarming commanders before they could see Chairman Reinach, was what had driven Alvarez into fury and the conspiracy. Yet the regulation was not unreasonable—Reinach must know of gathering opposition, and all the people had grown much too used to settling disputes with weapons. Ah, well, Alvarez was no philosopher but he was boss of the Iberian Irregulars and you had to use what human material was available.

  The officer frisked him, and that was a wholly new indignity which heated Fourre’s own skin. He choked his anger, thinking that Valti had predicted as much.

  Down a corridor then, that smelled moldy in the autumnal dankness, and to a door where one more sentry was posted. Fourre nodded at him and opened the door.

  “Good evening, Etienne. What can I do for you?”

  The big blond man looked up from his desk and smiled. It was a curiously shy, almost a young smile, and something wrenched within Fourre.

  This had been a professor’s office, before the war. Dust was thick on the books that lined the walls. Really, they should take more care of books, even if it meant giving less attention to famine and plague and banditry.

  There was a window closed at the rear, with a dark wash of rain flowing across miraculously intact glass. Reinach sat with a lamp by his side and his back to the night.

  Fourre lowered himself, the visitor’s chair creaked under a gaunt-fleshed but heavy-boned weight. “Can’t you guess, Jacques?” he asked.

  The handsome Alsatian face, one of the few clean-shaven faces left in the world, turned to study him for a while. “I wasn’t sure you were against me, too,” said Reinach. “Helgesen, Totti, Alexios…yes, that lot…but you? We have been friends for many years, Etienne. I didn’t think you would turn on me.”

  “Not on you.” Fourre sighed and wished for a cigarette, but tobacco was a remote memory. “Never you, Jacques. Only your policies. I am here, speaking for all of us—”

  “Not quite all,” said Reinach. His tone was quiet and unaccusing. “Only now do I realize how cleverly you maneuvered my firm supporters out of town. Brevoort flying off to Ukrainia to establish relations with the revolutionary government; Ferenczi down in Genoa to pick up those ships for our merchant marine; Janosek talked into leading an expedition against the bandits in Schleswig. Yes, yes, you plotted it carefully, didn’t you? But what do you think they will have to say on their return?”

  “They will accept a fait accompli, if they must,” answered Fourre. “This generation has had a bellyful of war. But I said I was here to speak to you on behalf of my associates. It was hoped you would listen to reason from me, at least.”

  “If it is reason.” Reinach leaned back in his chair, cat-comfortable, one palm resting on a revolver butt. “We have threshed out all the arguments in council. If you bring them up again…”

  “…It is because I must.” Fourre sat looking at the scarred bony hands in his lap. “After all, Jacques, we understand that the chairman of the Council must have supreme power for the duration of the emergency. We all agreed to give you the final word. But not the only word.”

  A paleness of anger flicked up in the blue eyes. “I have been maligned enough,” said Reinach coldly. “They think I want to set myself up as a dictator. Etienne, after the Second War was over and you went off to become a snug civilian, why do you think I elected to make the Army my career? It was not because I had any taste for militarism. It was only that I foresaw our land would again be in danger, within my own lifetime, and I wanted to hold myself ready. Does that sound like…like some new kind of Hitler?”