“With every ship that Starflight owns.”

“They won’t catch us,” Napier said confidently as the deck began to press up under their feet, signalling that the Bissendorf was accelerating out of orbit. “We’ll ride that wisp of dust up the hill to Uranus, and when we’ve caught the tide… Well, there’s a year’s supplies on board.”

“Thanks.” Garamond shook hands with Napier, yet — while comforted by the blunt human contact — he wondered how long it would be before either of them would refer openly to the bitter underlying reality of their situation. They were all dressed up with a superb ship. But a century of exploration by the vast Starflight armada had proved one thing.

There was nowhere to go.

They were able to put off the decision for three days.

During that time there was only one direction in which the Bissendorf could logically go — towards the galactic south, in pursuit of the single vagrant wisp of particles which lingered behind the retreating weather fronts. They had caught it, barely, and the vast insubstantial ramjets formed by the ship’s magnetic fields had begun to gather power, boosting it towards light-speed and beyond. It was the prototypes of starships such as the Bissendorf which, a century earlier, had all but demolished Einsteinian physics. On the first tentative flights there had been something of the predicted increase in mass, but no time dilation effect, no impenetrable barrier at the speed of light. A new physics had been devised — based mainly on the work of the Canadian mathematician, Arthur Arthur — which took into account the lately observed fact that when a body of appreciable mass and gravitic field reached speeds approaching .2c it entered new frames of reference. Once a ship crossed the threshold velocity it created its own portable universe in which different rules applied, and it appeared that the great universal constant was not the speed of light. It was time itself.

On his earlier missions Garamond had been grateful that Einstein’s work had its limitations and that time did not slow down for the space traveller — he would have had no stomach for finding his wife ageing ten years for his one, or having a son who quickly grew older than himself. But on this voyage, his last for Starflight, with Aileen and Christopher aboard, it would have resolved many difficulties had he been able to trace a vast circle across one part of the galaxy and return to Earth to find, as promised by Einstein, that Elizabeth Lindstrom was long dead. Arthurian physics had blocked that notional escape door, however, and he was faced with the question of where to go in his year of stolen time.

His thinking on the matter was influenced by two major considerations. The first was that he had no intention of condemning the 450-strong crew of the Bissendorf to a slow death in an unknown part of the galaxy in a year’s time. The ship had to return to Earth and therefore his radius of action was limited to the distance it could cover in six months. Even supposing he travelled in a straight line to one preselected destination, the six-month limitation meant he would not reach far beyond the volume of space already totally explored by Starflight. Chances of this one desperate flight producing a habitable world on which to hide had been microscopic to begin with; when modified by the distance factor they vanished into realms of fantasy.

The other major consideration was a personal one. Garamond already knew where he wanted to go, but was having trouble justifying the decision.

“Cluster 803 is your best bet,” Clifford Napier said. He was leaning back in a simulated leather chair in Garamond’s quarters, and in his hand was a glass of liqueur whisky which he had not yet tasted but was holding up to the light to appreciate its colour. His heavy-lidded brown eyes were inscrutable as he continued with his thesis.

“You can make it with time to spare. It’s dense — average distance between suns half a light-year — so you’d be able to check a minimum of eight systems before having to pull out. And it’s prime exploration territory, Vance. As you know, the S.E.A. Board recommended that 803 should be given high priority when the next wave is being planned.”

Garamond sipped his own whisky, with its warmth of forgotten summers. “It makes sense, all right.” The two men sat without speaking for a time, listening to the faint hum of the ship’s superconducting flux pumps which was always present even in the engineered solitude of the skipper’s rooms.

“It makes sense,” Napier said finally, “but you don’t want to go there. Right?”

“Well, maybe it makes too much sense. Admincom could predict that we’d head for 803 and send a hundred ships into the region. A thousand ships.”

“Think they could catch us?”

“There’s always that chance,” Garamond said. “It’s been proved that four flickerwings getting just ahead of another and matching velocities can control it better than its own skipper just by deciding how much reaction mass to let slip by.”

There was another silence, then Napier gave a heavy sigh. “All right, Vance — where’s your map?”

“Which map?”

“The one showing Pengelly’s Star. That’s where you want to go, isn’t it?”

Garamond felt a surge of anger at having his innermost thoughts divined so accurately by the other man. “My father actually met Rufus Pengelly once,” he said defensively. “He told me he’d never known a man less capable of trickery — and if there was one thing my father could do it was judge character just by…” He broke off as Napier began to laugh.

“Vance, you don’t need to sell the idea to me. We’re not going to find the third world, so it doesn’t matter where we go, does it?”

Garamond’s anger was replaced by a growing sense of relief. He went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out four large photoprints which appeared to be of greyish metallic or stone surfaces on which were arranged a number of darker spots in a manner suggestive of star maps. The fuzziness of the markings and the blotchy texture of the background were due to the fact that the prints were computer reconstructions of star charts which had been destroyed by fire.

A special kind of fire, Garamond thought. The one which robbed us of a neighbour.

Sagania had been discovered early in the exploratory phase. It was less than a hundred light-years from Sol, only a quarter of the separation the best statisticians had computed as the average for technical civilizations throughout the galaxy. Even more remarkable was the coincidence of timescales. In the geological lifespans of Sagania and Earth the period in which intelligent life developed and flourished represented less than a second in the life of a man, yet the fantastic gamble had come off. Saganians and Men had coexisted, against all the odds, within interstellar hailing distance, each able to look into the night sky and see the other’s parent sun without optical aid. Both had taken the machine-using philosophy as far as the tapping of nuclear energy. Both had shared the outward urge, planned the building of starships, and — with their sub-beacons trembling in the blackness like candles in far-off windows — it was inevitable that there would have been a union.

Except that one day on Sagania — at a time when the first civilizations were being formed in the Valley of the Two Rivers on Earth — somebody had made a mistake. It may have been a politician who overplayed his hand, or a scientist who dealt the wrong cards, but the result was that Sagania lost its atmosphere, and its life, in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction which surged around the planet like a tidal wave of white fire.

Archaeologists from Earth, arriving seven thousand years later, had been able to discover very little about the final phase of Saganian civilization. Ironically or justly, according to one’s point of view, the beings who had represented the peak of the planet’s culture were the ones who removed virtually all trace of their existence. It was the older, humbler Saganian culture which, protected by the crust of centuries, had been uncovered by the electronic probes. Among the artifacts turned up were fragments of star maps which excited little comment, even though a few researchers had noticed that some of them showed a star which did not exist.