Well, Mr Renfrew was going to have the surprise of his pampered life when he awakened, and realised that his ‘dear friend’ had turned the vessel back toward Earth.

  It took him about an hour to make the initial reset. As he had it worked out, the ship would go into a shallow, curving turn, and, after approximately twelve hours, would be headed back toward Earth.

  Caxton sat in the control chair, and waited for the tiny tug that would indicate that the small light-motors were doing their job. … It needed only a little push for a rocketship to change course in space.

  Half an hour went by; and he felt nothing.

  He checked his figures and the dials. The needles recorded that the miniature drives were working.

  But he felt nothing. There was no sensation at all.

  The vessel continued its endless forward coasting motion. Its speed was augmented only by a series of small light-motors, which were designed to increase the forward impetus by one foot a second every three minutes.

  Almost infinitesimal, virtually imperceptible. But in deep space, that miniscule acceleration added to the enormous velocity attained by the machine on takeoff had, as anticipated, brought the craft to a satisfactory high speed at almost no cost in fuel. It was intended that at the halfway mark, the rear light-motors would cease operation, and similar engines in the front would start the slow reversal of the process.

  Another hour went by. Still nothing.

  Caxton was a badly worried man, when he suddenly had a shocking realisation: Those so-and-so’s. I’ll bet they expected this… I’ll bet the controls are disconnected, so nobody can turn around.

  It occurred to him now, belatedly, that if his insight was true, there would be written information to that effect in the logbook. In a few moments he had the book, had it opened, and was gazing palely down at Pelham’s fine, almost calligraphically beautiful handwriting. All that he had feared was there in black and white. He read:

  Dear Peter;

  Of course, it has been our hope that as you read this, you are feeling in good spirits, eager to go forward to the great adventure ahead. But just in case some kind of panic has got hold of you — you’ll agree, this would be a perfect moment for a real case of agoraphobia (fear of large spaces) - and, just in case that has happened, Jim, Ned, and I agreed that we would have to protect ourselves from any impulse on anyone’s part to return to Earth during the first half of the journey. So, Peter, I have to tell you that a concealed computer — one that is solidly welded in under the floor - is programmed to compensate for any alteration in direction. Our reasoning is that after 250 years, it will take as long to get back as to go forward, and so, since we’ll have to return to manual controls somewhere, that’s the point.

  Goodbye, for the present, my friend. As you know, I administered the drug to you, then to Jim, then to Ned, and I shall now, finally, do it to myself. So I’m writing this in a world of space where I am as alone in my time as you are in yours. You three are deep in your long sleep, and I shall now join you there. Au revoir and

  Love,

  Arthur

  Caxton reread the message; and his first reaction was a sarcastic rejection of the endearment that ended it. ‘Love,’ hell!

  You so-and-so, he cursed Pelham. You’ve just ruined my life. … That kind of love he could do without, thank you.

  The grim impulse toward bitter sarcasm passed.

  Suddenly, the appalled realisation hit him that he would now have to go ahead with the original purpose of the journey. Caxton felt an awful sinking sensation, and then - just like that - a strong anxiety. It struck him with a pang that he had been using up precious oxygen, acting as if it would not be needed later.

  He climbed shakily to his feet. … Get back to sleep! He ordered himself. Blankly, he headed for his little room. And he was actually sitting there with the needle ready on the bedside set of built-in drawers, when he remembered the others.

  Slowly, he stood up again, realising that he must do his duty. Look in on them. Make his entries in the logbook. Conceal what he had tried to do. Protect himself.

  Take them in a row, he thought. Pelham first.

  As he opened the airtight door of Pelham’s room, a sickening odor of decayed flesh tingled in his nostrils. With a gasp, he slammed the door, and stood there in the narrow hallway, shuddering.

  After a minute, there was still nothing but the reality.

  Pelham was dead.

  He was a man, standing there, who was now committed to a five-hundred-year journey in space. And the terror that seared through him had the awful thought that he would have to make that journey alone.

  His next awareness was that he was running. He flung open Renfrew’s door, then Blake’s. The clean, sweet smell of their rooms, the sight of their silent bodies on their beds, brought a measure of sanity back to Caxton.

  It was a moment for an emotion that he had never had before in his adult life: grief. Incredibly, he felt a warm wetness on his cheeks.

  I’ll be damned, he thought. ME, crying.

  Still weeping, he went to the storeroom, and procured his personal spacesuit and a tarpaulin. But even with that help, it was a horrible business. The drug had preserved portions of the body, but pieces kept falling off as he lifted it.

  At last, he carried the tarpaulin and its contents to the airlock, and shoved it into space.

  After cleaning up, he went to the radio. It had been calculated that half a lightyear was the limit of radio reception, and they were very close to that limit. Hurriedly, though carefully, Caxton wrote his report out, then read it into a transcription record, and started sending. He set the record to repeat a hundred times.

  In a little more than five months, headlines would be flaring on Earth.

  He counted out fifty-five grains of Eternity drug, and dissolved them in the fluid provided. That was as close as he could get to the amount he felt would be required for one hundred and fifty years. He injected the dosage in five separate operations.

  In the moments before sleep came, Caxton found himself thinking about Renfrew and about the terrible shock that he would experience, on top of all the natural reactions to a deep space situation that Blake feared he would feel.

  Caxton tried to fight off the thought, strove to recapture a more personal feeling for himself and what he wanted.

  But the worry about Renfrew was still in his mind when darkness came.

  XIII

  Almost instantly, he opened his eyes. He lay thinking: The drug! IT hadn’t worked.

  The draggy feel of his body warned him of the truth. He lay very still, watching the clock overhead. This time it was easier to follow the routine except that, once more, he could not refrain from examining the chronometer as he passed through the galley.

  It read: 201 years, 1 month, 3 weeks, 5 days, 7 hours, eight minutes.

  He sipped his bowl of that super soup, then went eagerly to the big logbook.

  It was utterly impossible for Caxton to describe the thrill that coursed through him as he saw the familiar handwriting of Blake, and then, as he read what Renfrew had written. It was a report; nothing more: gravitometric readings, a careful calculation of the distance covered, a detailed report on the performance of the engines, and, finally, an estimate of speed variations, based on the seven consistent factors.

  It was a splendid mathematical job, a first-rate scientific analysis. But that was all there was. No mention of Pelham, not a word of comment on what Caxton had written or on what had happened.

  Renfrew had awakened; and, if his report was any criterion, he might as well have been a robot.

  Caxton knew better than that.

  So, Caxton saw as he began to read Blake’s report, did Blake.

  Peter;

  TEAR THIS SHEET OUT WHEN YOU’VE READ IT!

  Well, the worst has happened. We couldn’t have received from fate an unkinder setback. I hate to think of Pelham being dead. What a man he was, what a friend! But we all knew the risk we were taking, he more than any of us. So all we can say is, ‘Sleep well, good friend. We’ll never forget you.’

  But Renfrew’s case is now serious. After all, we were worried, wondering how he’d take his first awakening, let alone a bang between the eyes like Pelham’s death. And I think that the first anxiety was justified.

  As you and I know, Renfrew was one of Earth’s fair-haired boys. Just imagine any one human being born with his combination of looks, money, intelligence. His great fault was that he never let the future trouble him. With that dazzling personality of his, and the crowds of worshipping women and yes-men around him, he didn’t have much time for anything but the present.

  Realities always struck him like thunderbolts. That goodbye party was enough to put anyone into a sort of mental haze when it came to realities. To wake up a hundred years later, and realise that those he loved had withered, died and been eaten by worms - well!

  (I deliberately put it as baldly as that, because the human mind thinks of awfully strange angles, no matter how it censors speech.)

  I personally counted on Pelham’s acting as a sort of psychological support to Renfrew, and we both know that Pelham recognised the extent of his influence over Renfrew. That influence must be replaced. Try to think of something, Peter, while you’re charging around doing the routine work. We’ve got to live with that guy after we all wake up at the end of the five hundred years.

  Tear out this sheet. What follows is routine.

  Ned.

  Caxton burned the letter in the incinerator, examined the two sleeping bodies - how deathly quiet they lay - and then returned to the control room.

  In the plate, the sun was a very bright star, a jewel set in black velvet, a gorgeous, shining brilliant.

  Alpha Centauri was brighter. It was a radiant light in that panoply of black and glitter. It was still impossible to make out the separate suns of Alpha A, B, and Proxima, but their combined light brought a sense of awe and majesty.

  Well, he thought, here I am on this fantastic trip; and simultaneously trying to not be on it.… He realised the internal conflict. He was fighting excitement, and fighting being involved. The excitement came from the obvious fact that he was involved.

  Perhaps, as Blake was urging, he even ought to worry about Renfrew. Yet, though he realised the glory of this trip - here they were, the first men to head for far Centaurus, the first men to aspire to the fixed stars - though he realised all that, somehow, he clung to his own purpose.

  He told himself that the immense time involved was too meaningless for emotion. Better stick to his own goals; never forget that he was Peter Caxton who knew exactly - well, almost - what he was doing.

  He did his work, took his third dose of the drug, and went to bed. The sleep found him still without a plan about Renfrew.

  His third awakening was routine, except that as he read the logbook, he saw there was no Renfrew entry at all. And Blake’s entry showed that Blake didn’t know what to make of that, but he was intensely worried.

  ‘At least,’ Blake wrote, ‘he gave himself the correct dosage, because I counted the capsules. Think hard, Peter, and destroy this note, also.’

  Later, as Caxton lay waiting for the final dosage of the trip to take effect, he thought: What am I supposed to think? If Renfrew really went off his rocker, they’d undoubtedly have to do something about it. But it would be Renfrew’s problem, basically.

  Nonetheless, he was aware of a tension in his body. Which he regretted, because on another level it was kind of exciting to think: This is it. This time when I awaken, we’ll be there.

  Something of that excitement must have bridged that final 150 years of time. Because, when Caxton awakened, he thought: We’re here! It’s over, the long night, the incredible journey. We’ll all be seeing each other, and seeing the great Centaurus suns.

  The strange thing, it struck him as he lay there exulting, was that the time seemed long. And yet… yet he had been awake only three times, and only once for the equivalent of a full day.

  In the truest sense of meaning, he had seen Blake and Renfrew - and Pelham - no more than a day and a half ago. He had had only thirty-six hours of consciousness since takeoff.

  Then why this feeling that millennia had ticked by, second on slow second? Why this eerie, empty awareness of a journey through fathomless, unending night?

  Was the human mind so easily fooled?

  It seemed to Caxton, finally, that the answer was that he had been alive for those five hundred years, all his cells and his organs had existed, and it was not even impossible that some part of his brain had been horrendously aware throughout the entire unthinkable period.

  And there was, of course, the additional psychological fact that he knew now that five hundred years had gone by, and that -

  He saw with a start that his ten minutes were up. Cautiously, he turned on the massager.

  The gentle, padded hands had been working on him for about fifteen minutes, when his cabin door opened, the light clicked on, and there stood Blake.

  The too-sharp movement of turning his head to look at the other man made Caxton dizzy. He closed his eyes, and heard Blake walk across the room toward him. After a minute, he was able to look at Blake again without seeing blurs. Caxton saw then that Blake was carrying a bowl of the soup. He stood staring down at Caxton with a strangely grim expression.

  At last his countenance relaxed into a wan smile.’ ‘Lo, Peter,’ he said. ‘Ssssh!’ he hissed immediately. ‘Now, don’t try to speak. I’m going to start feeding you this soup while you’re still lying down. The sooner you’re up, the better I’ll like it.’

  He was grim again, as he finished, almost as if it were an afterthought; ‘I’ve been up for two weeks.’ He sat down on the edge of the bed, and ladled out a spoonful of soup. There was silence then, except for the rustling sound of the massager. Slowly, strength flowed through Caxton’s body; and with each passing second he became more aware of the grimness of Blake.

  ‘What about Renfrew?’ he managed, finally, hoarsely. ‘He awake?’

  Blake hesitated, then nodded. His expression darkened with a frown; he said simply, ‘He’s mad. He’s stark, staring mad. I had to tie him up. I’ve got him now in his room. He’s becoming quieter, but at the beginning he was a gibbering maniac’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Caxton whispered at last. ‘Renfrew was never so sensitive as that. The mere passage of time, abrupt awareness that all his friends are dead, couldn’t make him go insane.’

  Blake was shaking his head. ‘It isn’t only that, Peter.’ He paused, then, ‘Peter, I want you to prepare your mind for the greatest shock it’s ever had.’

  Caxton stared up at him with an empty feeling inside ‘What do you mean?’

  Blake went on, grimacing, ‘I know you’ll be able to take it. So don’t get scared. You and I, Peter, are kind of outside things; not quite involved.’

  Caxton whispered, ‘Get to the point. What’s up?’

  Blake rose to his feet.

  ‘Peter, the Alpha suns were pretty close two weeks ago, only about six months away at our average speed of five hundred miles a second. I thought that I would see if I could tune in some of their radio stations.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they came in all over the dials, with bell-like clarity.’ He paused; he stared down at Caxton, and his smile was a sickly thing. ‘Peter,’ he groaned, ‘we’re the prize fools of creation. When I told Renfrew the truth, he folded up like ice melting into water.’

  Once more he paused; the silence was too much for Caxton’s straining nerves.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, man - ‘ he began. And stopped. And lay there, very still. Just like that, the lightning of understanding flashed. His blood seemed to thunder through his veins. At last, weakly, he said, ‘You mean -’

  Blake nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it is. And they’ve already spotted us with their super radar. A ship will be coming out to meet us as soon as I report that you’ve come to. I only hope,’ he finished gloomily, ‘they can do something for Jim.’

  Caxton was sitting in the control chair an hour later when he saw the glint in the darkness. There was a flash of bright silver that exploded into size. The next instant, an enormous spaceship had matched velocity with them, less than a mile away.

  Caxton smiled a sick smile. He said to Blake, ‘Did they say that that ship left its hangar ten minutes ago?’

  Blake nodded. ‘They can make the trip from Earth to Centaurus in three hours,’ he said.

  Caxton hadn’t heard that before. Something happened inside his brain. ‘What!’ he shouted. ‘Why, it’s taken us five hund - ‘ He stopped; he sat there. ‘Three hours!’ he whispered. ‘How could we have forgotten human progress?’

  In the silence that followed then, Caxton watched a dark hole open in the cliff-like wall that faced them. Into this cavern Caxton directed their ship.

  The rearview plate showed that the cave entrance was closing. Ahead, lights flashed on, and focused on a door. As he eased the craft to the metal floor, a face flickered on to the radio plate.

  ‘Cassellahat!’ Blake whispered to Caxton. ‘The only person who’s talked directly to me so far.’

  It was a distinguished, scholarly looking head and face that peered from the plate. Cassellahat smiled, and said, ‘You may leave your ship, and go through the door you see.’

  XIV

  Caxton had a sense of empty spaces around them as they climbed into the vast receptor chamber.

  A silent duo, they filed through the doorway into a hallway that opened into a very large, luxurious room.

  It was such a room as a king or a movie actress on set might have walked into without blinking. It was hung with gorgeous tapestries, that is, for a moment he thought they were tapestries then he saw they weren’t. They were - he couldn’t decide.

  He had seen expensive furniture in the office and house of Renfrew. But these settees, chairs and tables glittered as if they were made of a matching design of differently colored fires. No, that was wrong; they didn’t glitter at all. They -