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  The one blessing was that few were affected. There were no acute phobes aboard Dove, and only two milder cases. In that, Dove was fortunate—according to one dispatch they had received, the Argonaut Heracles was limping along with nearly half its crew impaired.

  So neither technology nor psychology could account for the eagerness with which the approaching transition was awaited. What was special about Dove’s nineteenth craze was not how it was accomplished or how long it lasted but where it would end. After making visits to eighteen strange suns, Dove was finally going home.

  “One minute,” the navtech at the gravigation console called out, and nearly all eyes went to the imaging window at the front of the semi-darkened triangular compartment. The comtech hunched over his console, checking out instruments that had sat unused for sixteen days.

  “Transition.”

  In that moment, a crazy-quilt of radiation—light, radio, microwave, X-ray—began to impinge on the ship’s many eyes as Dove regained her senses. Neale looked up expectantly at the window, and when the dazzle cleared, found herself looking at a splendid circular starfield, the distortion a product of their still-tremendous velocity. As Dove continued to decelerate, the view would slowly come to resemble the view from the South Dakota pasture which had first captured her curiosity.

  I started out trying to find Orion in a winter sky for a teacher whose name I can’t remember. Look at me now, she thought with a rush of emotion.

  “Which one’s the Sun, damnit?” demanded a bearded sysawk standing with the onlookers. Several eagerly, if impatiently, answered him. “There! Right there! Dead on center!”

  “That’s the wrong color.”

  “We’re still blue-shifted,” Harrod reminded the awk gently.

  The navtech poked a spotting circle onto the screen, enclosing the small bluish star and settling the disagreement. “What year is it?” asked someone. “I make it A.R. 195,” said the navtech. “We’ll get confirmation once we start picking up our mail.”

  “A.R ?” asked the medtech, his face showing consternation.

  “After Reunion,” the comawk standing beside him answered. “They changed the calendar on us while we were gone.”

  “That’s 2205 for those of you still thinking in Gregorian calendar dates, like Bristol there,” the navtech added.

  That hushed the observers and the bridge crew alike. “A hundred and freezin’ fifty-seven years,” one said finally. “They better cook up some fine kind of reception for us.”

  “Speaking of which, we’ve got just eleven days to get this ship ready to hand over to the yard, and there’s a lot to be done,” Harrod said. “I’m sure no one wants to be hung up by scutwork when they could be off on leave, so let’s get to it.”

  “Amen to that,” said the bearded sysawk. “The Service’s already taken a bigger piece of my life than I’d planned on offering.”

  “Tell ’em, Waite,” cheered one onlooker.

  Harrod raised a questioning eyebrow. “Just don’t forget, there’s a whole new generation of ships being built, and they’ll be wanting to put some experience on all of them. Be thinking about it. Even you, Waite.”

  Waite laughed derisively. “I’ve got other plans.”

  Neale knocked lightly at Harrod’s cabin door. “Glen?”

  “Come on in.”

  She slid the door aside and stepped over the threshold. “Just wanted to tell you she’s ready for the hand-over—finally.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “It’s been hard to get much work out of them these last three days, with the Earth sitting there in all the screens and getting bigger by the minute.”

  “Understandable, though, eh? It’s been a long sixteen years—or hundred and fifty-seven, depending on how you like to count.”

  “I’ll count sixteen, if you don’t mind. Have you gotten word on how they’re handling the crew?” Harrod nodded. “Just came in about an hour ago. We’re only the second ship ever to come back—”

  “Who beat us in?”

  “Munin—twelve years ago. Anyway, there’ll be a fair amount of fuss. They’ve been tracking our relatives while we’re gone, and there’ll be somebody to greet each one of us. Except for Waite.” Harrod looked up. “Funny thing, eh?”

  “His won’t come?” she asked indignantly.

  “He hasn’t any. I’d have thought that if anybody had left a few genes behind it’d have been that rabbit. But he’s got no living relatives, not even a grandniece or nephew. So he’s going to be ‘adopted’—isn’t that considerate of the Flight Office?” His tone carried a burden of sarcasm.

  “What comes after? Do they just turn us loose?”

  “They’ve got a place set up in New Zealand where we can ‘resynchronize’. Benamira, I think’s the name. From the way they talk about it, I’m not sure whether they’re more afraid of the world shocking us or us shocking the world,” he said wryly. “They’ll want to know in sixty days whether we’re interested in another flight assignment—though it might be a year or two before they actually need us.”

  “Any idea what you’re going to do?”

  “Oh, this is it for me. I’ve already told them I plan to do a lot of low-tech fishing in a lot of very placid streams. Yourself?”

  “I’m going back out, if they treat me right.”

  Harrod nodded as though he had expected it. “You’ll probably get a command.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  Harrod nodded again, started to say something, stopped himself, and then started again. “What we’ve seen—where we’ve been—” He stopped and frowned, searching for the right words. “I guess I don’t understand, Ali. What’s out there except more of the same? I know we didn’t find any colonies ourselves, but—”

  “It’s not finding them that matters so much. You should know after all this time. Glen,” Neale answered, one hand on the door. “I want the answer to the colony problem.”

  “That bums in you, doesn’t it?”

  “You know it does. I want to know what makes a mother forget her children. Why did it take the Journans to tell us there had been a First Colonization? There’s no more important question for us to answer. I don’t know how you can sidestep it.”

  Harrod smiled a tired smile. “My instinct for self-preservation. Peace of mind.” He offered a hand and she clasped it, not as a handshake but as a hug. “You did a good job for me. I wish you the best. Command, without doubt. A colony, at least. Maybe even an answer to your question. You’ll have all three, if wanting matters.”

  “It does,” she assured him. “It does.”

  The broadcast of the welcoming ceremonies reached BT-09 Babbage midway between Ceres and home. The asteroid tug, its three-man crew, and its metal-rich, million-tonne catch were falling sunward in a graceful month-long spiral that would end at the Cluster B processing center trailing a half-million klicks behind Earth in solar orbit.

  —I think I see them now, Gregory.

  —Yes, Madia, here they come, the two-hundred-year-old space travelers, back home at last after visiting eighteen other star systems.

  —That’s right, Gregory. It’s important that our viewers realize that even though Dove did not discover any colonies, her crew is bringing back with them geophysical data on eighty-one different worlds, including samples from the twenty they actually set foot on.

  —And of course they were part of the historic Pathfinder mission to the Jouma colony, which started everything.

  —You’re right about that, Gregory. You know, the Unified Space Service tells us that Dove has rolled up more than 500 trillion miles since leaving Earth in A.R. 38.

  —That’s just amazing, Nadia. They’re twenty very brave men and women, that’s for certain.

  “I say they’re twenty crazy men and women,” systech Brian Hduna said with a yawn, looking up from the small screen set into the console before him. “What do you say, Thack? Lot of fuss over nothing?”

  Merritt Thacker
y was seated before an identical display at the opposite end of Babbage’s command console. “Hardly,” he said quietly without looking up.

  “Hell, what we do on this run counts for more than their whole mission. We’re bringing in iron, chromium, nickel—a quarter-million tonnes of it. Think there’ll be a band playing when we dock? Hell, no,” Hduna grumped.

  —Each of the voyagers will be greeted by a member of his own family, Gregory.

  —Gone but not forgotten, that’s the best way to describe it. We’re going to identify them for you as they come out of the shipway. The first out should be Commander Glen Harrod. Here he comes now. SC Glen Harrod, 192-year-old commander of the Dove, being greeted by his great-great-greatnephew Tony Harrod.

  —And there’s SC Alizana Neale, the bridge captain. She’ll turn 186 tomorrow, I understand. That’s her 85-year-old fourth cousin Randy Stovik waiting there for her.

  Hduna made a face. “Can you imagine making it with a 186-year-old woman?”

  “Fry out,” Thackery said angrily, his eyes burning into Hduna’s. “You couldn’t have done what they did.”

  “You make it sound like they’re better than we are,” Hduna said, squinting at Thackery.

  Thackery crossed his arms and looked away, saying nothing.

  “If you’re not proud of what you are and where you are, maybe you’d just better retire and wait for Survey to call. Wearing the yellow’s supposed to mean something,” he said, flicking a finger against the yellow ellipse pinned to his collar, the theater insignia for system crews.

  Thackery laughed brittlely, “It’s none of your damn business, but I transmitted my application this morning.”

  Hduna cocked an eyebrow, then let out a grunting laugh. “Huh. Well, now I know why you spend all your spare time studying. When’d they post the Notice of Opportunity?”

  “Last night. Sixty openings over the next three years.”

  “Well, well. So you want to wear the black ellipse.”

  “Everybody who’s honest with himself does.”

  Hduna shook his head. “Not me. Can’t see it. Too much to give up.” Thackery laughed. “What’s to give up? This billet? Where’s the challenge in it? What do we do that couldn’t be done just as well by hundreds of others? You used to do your own assays. Now there’s a whole team of geologists living in the Belt, tagging asteroids faster than we can haul them in. They’re turning the whole Belt into a warehouse, and you into a truck driver. The Council’s busy taking the rough edges off of everything, turning this into a finished world. I know. 1 spent two years being trained to help them.”

  Hduna snorted. “Hell, I don’t know what I’m arguing with you about. You won’t even make first call. You ought to know you’ve got to transfer down a grade to get into Survey.”

  “That’s not in the quals.”

  “That’s the way they do it, all the same. They turn Corns into techs and techs into awks. You’re only a awk with, what, six years’ experience? What are you going to transfer as?”

  “If I don’t make it this time, I’ll get other shots. They’ve got a lot of openings to fill, on the new ships and the old ones. I’ll make it,” Thackery said determinedly.

  Hduna laughed nastily. “They’re going to have a lot more than sixty openings to get down the list to you.”

  There was no room at the inn at the Eddington Yards. All five parallel shipways of the voluminous construction base were filled by hourglass-shaped hulls in various stages of completion. Dove stood off a kilometre away like a jilted suitor.

  Alizana Neale studied the survey ships from the bubble of the jitney. To her right and back a step, Alvarez, the supervisor of ship construction, waited respectfully for her questions.

  “How long before they can get on with refitting Dove?”

  “We’ll move the Tycho Brake out within the week so Commander Tamm can get on with preparing it for departure.”

  “That’s the Tycho on the far end?”

  “Yes—and left to right from there, the Aristarchus, Kepler, Herschel, and Huygens,” Alvarez said proudly. “We’re turning them out at ten-year intervals—the last of the astronomers series. Copernicus, Hubble, and Galileo are already on station.”

  “Am I misjudging, or is Tycho smaller than Dove?”

  “Just slightly. But you’ll find it actually has more interior volume. No weapons on this class, of course, which helps. And the K-series drive is half the size of that monster in Dove, so there’s an additional deck for both Operations and Survey. We’ve learned some lessons in the last two centuries.”

  “Haven’t we all,” Neale said, her voice heavy with irony.

  Alvarez crossed his arms over his chest and tucked his hands under his armpits. “I understand only four of you off the Dove are going back out?” She nodded. “Kislak, Tamm, Rogen, and I. Tamm gets Tycho and Kislak as his exec, I get Descartes and Rogen.”

  “I guess I’m a little surprised there are even that many—”

  “I’ll be surprised if there aren’t more by the time we leave,” she said shortly. “Let’s not drag this out, okay? I’ve got work to do back at Unity. Let me have a quick tour of the section my crew will occupy.”

  “Of course.”

  The construction manager brought the jitney in from above and berthed it at a work station inside the bay occupied by Tycho’s apparently finished hull. They went aboard via a flex tunnel attached to the aftmost crew portal, near the spherical bulge of one of the four lifepods. There seemed to be little activity aboard, on which Neale remarked.

  “We’re pretty much down to punch lists and failproofing,” Alvarez said as they moved downship on the three-sided climb-way ladder. “I’ve got a test team on the bridge and two mop-up crews working in the drive compartment, but you wanted to see your area. Step off here, please.”

  The climbway ended at the gig bay pressure hatch. On the other side was more of the same: corridors, bulkheads, and doorways. “I’m afraid you’ll find you have a little less elbow room here than the ship’s main quarters, but it should be adequate. You’ve got thirteen double cabins and four singles, your own edrec library, and a small exercise area.”

  “And all this will be pulled once we reach Advance Base Cygnus, I understand.”

  “Yes. It’s modular—three big sections sized to squeak through the bay’s space door. The Cygnus folk should be able to break it down and have it out of here and added to their own base in three working days. And because it’s intended for reuse, I think you’ll find it’s not as crude as you were afraid it would be.”

  “Where’s the ship’s gig and the rest of the gear that’d usually be in here?”

  “It’ll go piggyback in a pod amidships on the main hull, along with the new equipment for Descartes. You won’t be able to get at it until you reach Cygnus Base, but you won’t have need of it, either.”

  Neale poked her head inside one of the double cabins and gave it a cursory inspection.

  “I’ll have to admit I was a little dubious when they told me how they were going to ferry my crew out to Advance Base Cygnus, but this should be satisfactory,” she said, rejoining Alvarez.

  “Hitching twenty-five lights in a gig bay doesn’t sound very attractive,” he agreed. “Could be worse—they could have put you in the pod.” He shook his head abruptly. “Slitters. They’ve got the gain up again. Excuse me a moment, Commander.”

  Alvarez pressed a finger into the hollow behind his left ear and cocked his head slightly as if listening. “Understood,” he said as though to himself, and lowered his hand back to his side. “That was Unity, Commander. Your first call is starting to arrive.”

  She nodded. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go back.” She knitted her brows and added, “Is everybody wearing those implant relays now?”

  “Oh, yes,” he effused. “They’re awfully damn convenient. Not much to the operation—I’ll bet the medtechs could take care of you before Tycho heads out.”

  Neale shuddered. “No, th
anks. Being hardwired into the net doesn’t come under my definition of duty.”

  Rocking back in her chair, Neale studied the solemn-faced young awk as he made his way to the empty chair opposite her. “Commander,” he acknowledged with a bob of his head as he sat down.

  “God, does everyone here do that?” she exclaimed in annoyance. “Don’t presume. I’m not your Commander. My name is Neale. Use it.”

  Thackery nodded, taken aback. “Neale.”

  She glanced at the flat data-display slate lying on her lap. “So, Thackery, you want to be famous.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You watched Dove’s homecoming and you’d like to go out and become a conquering hero just like its crew.”

  Thackery’s face wound up into a look of puzzlement. “Is that in my file? I never—”

  “Oh, come now, it’s all right to admit it. I’m one of them, after all. I know what it’s like.”

  “Sir—”

  “You’re presuming again.”

  Thackery blinked. “I’d guess I’m more likely to end up forgotten here than famous. More of us will go out than will ever come back.”

  “Quite true,” Neale said, a hard edge to her voice. “Do you know why? Because coming back is a lot harder than leaving. Ask my shipmates from Dove, trying to adjust at Benamira. We would never have brought the Pathfinders back if we hadn’t promised the crews they’d see Earth again. And we might not have kept that promise if those ships hadn’t needed major refits to be useful during Phase II, refits that the advance bases aren’t yet equipped to handle. But this is the last time that’ll be true. From now on, the advance bases will be the staging points.”