“It won’t blow up,” Rudy had said.

“Doesn’t matter. Anything short of an all-out success is going to make us look foolish. Why didn’t you talk to us before you started all this?”

Why indeed? “Because I knew you’d veto it,” he’d replied in a burst of indignant candor. “Because there are always people on the board who think we can’t get the job done and somebody else should take the risk. Joe, I wanted us to be the ones to do it. Because it would ultimately give us the inside track on using the system.”

“Good.” Hollingsworth sounded as if he was talking to a child. “For an ego trip, you risk everything. If it fails, as it will, it will be the end of the Foundation. Worse, it’ll be the end of the interstellar effort in our lifetime. Well done, Rudy.”

There were others. A substantial fraction of their contributors were unhappy. They demanded to know how much the project was costing and were warning him that if the experiment didn’t work, they would be withdrawing their support.

So sending Silvestri on a public relations tour was not a bad idea. Moreover, he surprised Rudy with his ability to charm his audiences. The references to quantum fluxes and spatial entanglement were gone. Instead, he told them what the Locarno would mean. Easy access to places that had been weeks and months away. The establishment of colonies would become practical, should we choose to go that route. Travel that had once been limited to people with large bank accounts would become available to everybody. “People will be able to vacation in the Pleiades the way we do on the Moon. It will be like replacing fifteenth-century sailing ships with jets.”

Nevertheless, it seemed too good to be true. Rudy told himself he’d feel better about it if he could understand it. None of it was Rudy’s specialty. He was an astrophysicist by trade. He understood the dynamics by which stars formed and died. But nuclear processes and stellar collapse and the rest of it all seemed fairly straightforward in contrast with this multidimensional talk. Had he been around in the last century when Ginny Hazeltine was claiming she was going to be able to get to Alpha Centauri in a few hours, he’d have been one of the skeptics.

ON FEBRUARY 19, a Monday, word came that the Itaki had found the Jenkins. On the twentieth, Rudy received a message from François, informing him they’d all been taken aboard the rescue ship and were on their way home. Everybody, he said, was in good spirits. “Sorry we lost your ship.”

The Itaki arrived at Serenity on March 1. “I thought they were closing the place down,” François reported. “But they’re telling us it’ll take years.”

The following day he sent another transmission: “Rudy, I know the Foundation is down to one ship now, and you have no need for two pilots. So I’m taking a job out here. Going to run shuttles around the station while they decommission the place. Ben and the others will be returning on the Itaki. I’ll miss working for you. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ll look forward to seeing you when I get back. In a couple of years.” He smiled and signed off.

THREE DAYS LATER, the Phyllis Preston returned from a mission. Rudy was there, of course, when she docked. He took Jon along.

The Preston had been poking around in the Hyades, 150 light-years out. The cluster was thought to be about 625 million years old. It was, like all clusters, changing over time as heavier stars sank toward the center and stars on the periphery were propelled outward after near collisions.

Like most of the relatively small bubble of space into which humans had ventured, it was basically unknown country.

The system consisted of slightly more than two hundred stars, or slightly fewer, depending on how you structured your count. The Preston, conducting a general survey, had been away almost six months. It had visited about a quarter of the systems. They had found one living world, on which the biological forms were still single-celled. Early reports indicated they would need another two billion years before multiple-cell forms appeared.

There was a gas giant that might be harboring life in its atmosphere. The mission wasn’t equipped to test for that. Which meant a second flight would be needed to make the determination. Everyone knew, of course, there would be no second flight.

You could tell how desperate the exploration effort had become by the ages of the researchers. You rarely saw young people on the flights anymore. With only a couple of privately supported organizations running missions, there was simply no space available. The research teams were inevitably department heads or award winners. No more postdocs, the way it had been in the old days.

Rudy missed the old days. He’d been out three times, for a total of about eight months. He’d twice been to local systems, and once to M44, the Beehive, where he’d awakened one morning to a magnificent view of the eclipsing binary, TX Cancri.

He remembered sitting in the operations room on that flight with Audrey Cleaver, from the University of Paris. Audrey had commented that the day would come when they would give almost anything to be able to come back and repeat that experience. At the time, he’d thought Audrey was talking as much about being young as she was about watching the binary.

But it was true. And not in the sense that he’d like to go back to that particular system, as that he wished he could return to that milieu, to live again in a world where everybody was going out to the stars, where the taxpayers happily supported the initiative, and even the politicians were excited. Where people cared.

RUDY AND JON greeted each of the Preston researchers as they came out of the tube, asked them how the flight had been, had the instruments performed okay, had it been worthwhile. They all seemed satisfied with the results of the mission but were tired and glad to be home. And of course, like every returning mission, they had one regret that nobody ever admitted to: no sign of a living civilization.

The last person off was Armand (Cap) Shinyu, its pilot. Rudy introduced Jon, and Cap’s eyes went wide. “You’re the guy with the Locarno,” he said.

“Yes.” Jon flashed a covert grin at Rudy. It’s nice to be recognized.

“Well, good luck,” said Cap. He expressed his regrets over the loss of the Jenkins (which he’d already done by hyperlink, but this was the first time he and Rudy had actually been together since the accident). “Thank God nobody was hurt,” he said.

“François couldn’t get them to leave the derelict.”

“Is that what happened?” Cap was an average-sized guy with huge shoulders, a beefy face, and thick white hair. And an extraordinary baritone. He sounded like a seven-footer. He’d once been a teacher of Eastern literature.

“That’s what happened.”

Cap shook his head. “For smart people,” he said, “some of them can be pretty dumb.”

“Yeah. Can we buy you dinner?”

They wandered down to the Quarter Moon. It was quiet, mostly empty, an off-hour. “I’ve been hearing from my wife,” Cap said.

“How’s Carrie doing?”

“She’s okay. But the business with the Jenkins shook her up a little.”

“I guess I don’t blame her.”

A bot arrived to take their orders. Cap studied the menu, decided he wasn’t very hungry, and settled for a salad. “Rudy,” he said, “she’s never been happy with this job.”

Rudy ordered a bottle of German wine. “I know.” He was surprised she’d put up with it at all. The Foundation didn’t pay that much, and her husband was away six and seven months at a time. He’d offered to arrange things so she could go along. But they had kids, and there was no way to manage it.

“She’d just like a normal life. Now she’s wondering how dangerous it is.”