Innelda and Julia and Giovanna begin to speak all at once. But it is Sylvia’s light, clear voice that carries through the hubbub:

“You’re an idiot, Paco. One live womb more or less, as you so prettily put it, one instrument of embryo nurture, won’t make any statistical difference in the long run. The handful of fertile men and women aboard this ship aren’t going to be a significant factor in populating New Earth, and you know it. What really matters is the gene bank downstairs and theex utero genetic machinery. We’ve got barrels of fertile ova stored safely away down there. And plenty of sperm too, thank you. That’s where the genetic diversity of New Earth is going to come from, not from us. Naturally we don’t want to lose any members of the expedition, but to claim that the women of the voyage are such sacred and special carriers of life that it’s folly to risk them in a planetside mission is nonsense, Paco, downright stupid nonsense!”

“So you’ll volunteer for the first landing, then?” Paco asks her.

“Has anybody called for volunteers? I would go if I were asked. Of course I would. But you who worry so much about our precious genetic heritage and our irreplaceable instruments of embryo nurture might stop and think a little about the logic of risking one of the two people on board who have a thorough understanding of how to operate our gene bank.”

“I take it that what you’re saying is that you aren’t willing to go,” Paco says cheerfully. It is apparent to everyone now, by the light in his eyes and the lopsided smile on his face, that he is simply goading her for the sake of a little fun.

Sylvia is a small and fairly timid woman, and this is an unusual situation for her. The stress of it is already beginning to show. “Isaid I would go if I were asked! But it would be idiotic to ask me. You go, Paco. All you’re good for is navigating and producing sperm. You said yourself that we have plenty of sperm available, so we can get along without yours in case you get killed down there. And if it’s a planet good enough to settle on, we won’t need a navigator any more anyway.”

Julia and Giovanna applaud. So do Heinz and David, after a moment. Even Paco grins.

Huw, who can be an extremely patient man, has been waiting with extreme patience while all this takes place. Now he says doggedly, as though the entire Paco-Sylvia interchange had never taken place, “If I may continue, then: three of us make up the landing party. The year-captain is the biologist. Marcus or Innelda will do the planetographic analysis, I suppose. And, naturally, I will drive the surface vehicle in which we will travel, and look after it in case of a breakdown. What do you think?”

“What the year-captain thinks is a better question,” Heinz says. “But your list sounds good to me. Why don’t you go down the hall right now and let him know that you’ve picked his landing crew for him?”

“I mean to,” Huw replies. “Just as soon as I finish this game.”

He puts down his next stone. Leon stares sadly at the board and offers a countermove into Huw’s territory, but Huw heads it off with three quick moves that leave Leon’s stones encircled in a sea of black. Heinz and Paco come over to watch. Leon is one of the most experienced players on board, and Huw is still regarded as a novice; but Huw is murdering him with the aplomb and panache of an expert. He is playing now with the unsparing swiftness of the formidable Roy; he is playing almost on the extraordinary level that Noelle herself, the ship’s unquestioned champion these days, has attained. Leon seems rattled. He makes his moves too hastily, and Huw replies to each one with some crushing new onslaught. Two new enclosures sprout on the board, black stones throttling white. Leon peers at them for a time and shakes his head.

“I resign,” he says. “This is hopeless.”

“Indeed,” Huw agrees. He offers Leon his hand. “A good game, doctor. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Leon says, not very cordially.

“You will all excuse me, please,” says Huw. “I will speak with the year-captain now.”

Huw rises to go out of the lounge. He is a big, thickly built man, rumpled and inelegant-looking, who walks with the ponderous but confident rolling stride of someone accustomed to walking the deck of a seagoing vessel. As he crosses the room, he pauses to pat Paco appreciatively on the back, as though expressing admiration for his clowning. But also he blows a kiss in Sylvia’s direction. Then he proceeds down the corridor to the control cabin, where the year-captain is usually to be found.

Huw and the year-captain are old friends, if anyone can be said to be a friend of the year-captain’s. They are the only two members of the expedition who actually have worked together in any sort of way before they were chosen for the voyage.

Unlike the year-captain, who has chosen to reinvent himself every ten or twelve years with an entirely new career, Huw has devoted himself single-mindedly to planetary reconnaissance since he was a very young man. He is by nature an explorer. Some vagrant gene in his makeup has sparked an insatiable curiosity in him, not at all typical of his era: he seeks to move outward, ever outward, journeying through the realms of the universe, seeing everything that is there to be seen. The moons and planets in the vicinity of Earth first, of course. But it had always been his intention to be part of the first interstellar mission, which was already in the planning stages before he was born, and so he has spent his life designing, building, and testing equipment for use in the exploration of unfamiliar environments. Huw is a descendant, so he likes to claim, of Prince Madoc of Wales, who in the twelfth century set out with two hundred followers westward into the Atlantic and came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things. And returned to Wales and recruited colonists, and went back to the land on the far side of the Atlantic to found a settlement of God-fearing Welshmen in the New World and to convert the Aztecs and other heathen to Christianity.

Was it so? Of course it was, Huw would say. The account of Madoc’s voyage was right there in the chronicle of Caradoc of Llancarfan, theHistorie of Cambria, now called Wales, and who was he to call the learned Caradoc a liar? It was well known, Huw would tell you, it was a fact beyond question, that certain Aztec words were much like Welsh, and that Indians as far north as the Great Plains had been found to be speaking the pure Welsh tongue like true Silurians when the later European explorers arrived. And did Madoc’s blood truly run in Huw Morgan’s veins? Who could say it did not? There wasn’t a Welshman alive who couldn’t trace his ancestry, one way or another, to the glorious kings of olden days, and Madoc had been one of the greatest of those kings: there was no questioning of that.

And so this jovial ruddy-faced son of Madoc had gone up from the green and placid precincts of happy Earth to ride in a silver bullet across the sun-blasted plains of Mercury, he had prowled the parched wastelands of Mars, he had risked even the corrosive atmosphere of Venus. He was a designer and builder of the equipment that protected him, the sealed and armored land-rovers, the doughty spacesuits. When he was done with Venus the moons of the outer worlds attracted him. Outward, ever outward: and it was on Ganymede of Jupiter that his path and that of the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan first intersected.

They knew of each other, of course. Earth’s population in these latter days was so small, and the number of those of their particular cast of mind so few, that they could hardly not have heard of each other. But even a small world like Earth is quite big enough for two roving men to move about freely without bumping into one another, especially if they are periodically making excursions to adjacent planets.