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They said nothing, only stared at him for a few moments and then departed in opposite directions. Maclaren found him­self gazing stupidly at his guitar case. I’d better put that away till it’s requested, he thought. If ever. I didn’t stop to think, my own habits might possibly be hard to live with.

After a long time: Seems I’m the captain nOw, in fact if not in name. But how did it happen? What have I done, what have I got? Presently, with an inward twisting: It must be I’ve less to lose. I can be more objective because I’ve no wife, no chil­dren, no cause, no God. It’s easy for a hollow man to remain calm.

He covered his eyes, as if to deny he floated among a million unpitying stars. But he couldn’t hunch up that way for long. Someone might come back, and the captain mustn’t be seen afraid.

Not afraid of death. Of life.

XIV.

S

EEN from a view turret on the observation deck, the planet looked eerily like its parent star which had mur­dered it. Ryerson crouched in darkness, staring out to dark­ness. Against strewn constellations there lay a gigantic out­line with wan streaks and edgings of gray. As he watched, Ryerson saw it march across the Milky Way and out of his sight. But it was the Cross which moved, he thought, circling her hope in fear.

I stand on Mount Nebo, he thought, and down there is my Promised Land.

Irrationally—but the months had made them all odd, silent introverts, Trappists because meaningful conversation was too rare and precious to spill without due heed—he reached into his breast pocket. He took forth Tamara’s picture and held it close to him. Sometimes he woke up breathing the fragrance of her hair. Have a look, he told her. We found it. In a heathen adoration: You are my luck, Tamara. You found it.

As the black planet came back into sight, monstrously swal­lowing suns—it was only a thousand or so kilometers away— Ryerson turned his wife’s image outward so she could see what they had gained.

“Are you there, Dave?”

Maclaren’s voice came from around the cylinder of the living section. It had grown much lower in this time of search. Often you could scarcely hear Maclaren when he spoke. And the New Zealander, once in the best condition of them all, had lately gotten thinner than the other two, until his eyes stared from caves. But then, thought Ryerson, each man aboard had had to come to terms with himself, one way or another, and there had been a price. In his own case, he had paid with youth.

“Coming.” Ryerson pulled himself around the deck, between the instruments. Maclaren was at his little desk, with a clip­board full of scrawled paper in one hand. Nakamura had just joined him. The Saraian had gone wholly behind a mask, more and more a polite unobtrusive robot. Ryerson wondered whether serenity now lay within the man, or the loneliest circle of hell, or both.

“I’ve got the data pretty well computed,” said Maclaren.

Ryerson and Nakamura waited. There had been curiously little exultation when the planet finally revealed itself. I, thought Ryerson, have become a plodder. Nothing is quite real out here—there is only a succession of motions, in my body and my brain—but I can celebrate no victory, because there is none, until the final and sole victory: Tamara.

But I wonder why Terangi and Seiichi didn’t cheer?

Maclaren ruffled through his papers. “It has a smaller mass and radius than Earth,” he said, “but a considerably higher density suggesting it’s mostly nickel-iron. No satellite, of

course. And, even though the surface gravity is a bit more than Earth’s, no atmosphere. Seems to be bare rock down there

or metal, I imagine. Solid, anyhow.”

“How large was it once?” murmured Nakamura.

Maclaren shrugged. “That would be pure guesswork,” he said. “I don’t know which planet of the original system this is. One or two of the survivors may have crashed on the primary by now, you see. My personal guess, though, is that it was the 61 Cygni C type—more massive than Jupiter, though of less bulk because of core degeneracy. It had an extremely big orbit. Even so, the supernova boiled away all its hydrogen and prob­ably some of the heavier elements, too. But that took time, and the planet still had this much mass left when the star decayed into a white dwarf. Of course, with the pressure of the outer layers removed, the core reverted to normal density, which must have been a pretty spectacular catastrophe in itself. Since then, the residual stellar gases have been making the planet spiral slowly inward, for hundreds of megayears. And now—”