It was. She had never before left a ship when it was in the sack. Didn’t know anybody who had. “We might be making history,” she said.

He blinked and looked away, over her shoulder. “Something moved over there,” he said, pointing. “In the cloud bank.”

“It’s an illusion. It’s the reason we don’t usually run the view panels during transition. People see things. They get unnerved.”

“I wasn’t getting unnerved.” He started setting up his easel. There were magnetic caps on the legs.

She looked around at the fog, moving slowly across the hull, front to rear. “What can you possibly make of this?”

He weaved a little, back and forth, a kind of half dance step, inspecting her, inspecting the mist. “It just takes a little talent. Is it always like this? Always this dense?”

“Yes,” she said. “Pretty much.”

He produced his trademark charcoal and sketched, in a single movement, a section of the ship’s hull. He studied Hutch for a few seconds, and drew her eyes and a slice of jawline, the silhouette of her hair, and added some haze.

“It’s quite nice,” she said. He’d come a long way since the old days in Arlington.

He smiled, yes, it is pretty good, isn’t it? And he kept working. Filling in details. The fog in the sketch grew damp, the ship solid, the eyes luminous. When he’d finished, he signed his name, Tor, and stepped back to see whether anything additional needed to be done. To give her a better view.

She thought he was going to tear the sheet off and give it to her. But he simply stood admiring it, and then removed a cover from his vest and pulled it over the sketch.

“Are we finished?” she asked.

“I think that about does it.” He pulled the easel free of the hull and looked toward the airlock.

Disappointed, Hutch hesitated. In that moment, she wanted to embrace him. But he turned away, and the moment was gone.

He dug into his vest with his free hand and produced a coin. A nickel-plated dollar. He glanced at her and out into the mist and she saw what he was going to do. “Make a wish,” she said.

He nodded. “I already have.” He lobbed the coin into the fog.

She watched it disappear, and felt a sense of loss for which she couldn’t account. “You know, Tor,” she said, “we’ll be traveling a little bit faster when we come out of our jump.”

He looked amused. She was kidding him.

“No. Seriously.”

“Why’s that?”

“You ever hear of the Greenwater Effect?”

“No. I can’t say I have.”

“But you know who Jules Greenwater was?”

“He had something to do with transdimensional travel.”

“He was one of the pioneers. He established the principle that linear momentum is always preserved during hyperflight. Whatever momentum you have going in, you have coming out.”

He looked off in the direction the coin had gone. “I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying.”

“The momentum of the coin is preserved. It gets transferred to the Memphis. So the ship is traveling that much faster when it makes the jump back into sublight.”

“By a dollar.”

“Yes.”

“How much does that come to?”

“I doubt we’d want to measure it.”

NEAR THE END of the third day, the Memphis slipped from the transdimensional mists and coasted back out into sublight space. They were well away from the local sun, which was a small yellow-orange main sequence star.

Hutch duly reported their arrival to Outpost. At about the same time, she was informed that the John R. Sentenasio, a survey yacht, had been dispatched to Point B. They would record everything they could about Safe Harbor, the moonbase, and the satellites. When they had completed their mission, they would be available to follow the Memphis, if there was a reason for them to do so.

She finished with her duties on the bridge and strolled down to mission control, where Pete had been trying once again to explain to George and the others that a planetary system was a big place, and that finding the associated worlds could take time. They’d apparently all agreed that this was so, but they nevertheless seemed to think that Hutch should be able to work miracles. I mean, that’s what all this super technology is for, right? But even planets weren’t easy to locate in those immense reaches. So her passengers became increasingly impatient when the first afternoon wore on into night, and then into a second day, with no results.

They didn’t even know what the system looked like. No one had ever been there before. Bill estimated a biozone between 75 and 160 million kilometers out, and that became their search area. The first object they identified, other than the sun, was a comet, inbound, its tail trailing millions of kilometers behind it.

While they waited, they played chess and bridge and hunted through the Lost Temple for the Crown of Mapuhr. And they grumbled at Bill, who took it all very well. “At this point,” he told George cheerfully, “it’s hit or miss. We just have to be patient.”

George complained about the AI’s good humor and asked whether Hutch couldn’t tune it down a bit. “Damned thing chatters on, drives me crazy,” he said.

Bill, who had to have overheard, did not respond. Later, when Hutch tried to reassure him, he commented that he understood about humans. He did not elaborate, and she did not press him.

“We have a target,” he reported near the end of the second night, meaning he had found a world in the biozone. “It’s on the inner edge, eighty million klicks out.”

They used another day and a half moving into position to intercept. Meanwhile, Bill located a second possibility. But it didn’t matter: As they slipped onto a line between the inner world and Point B, the speakers came alive.

KM 449397-II WAS a small world, not much bigger than Mars, but it had broad blue oceans and the continents were green and the skies were filled with cumulus.

A summer world. Diamond bright in the sunlight. Hutch could hardly bring herself to believe it. Almost every planet she had ever seen was sterile. It might have sunlight, and it might have broad blue seas, but inevitably nothing walked, or crawled, across its surface, or lived in its oceans. The overwhelming majority of worlds were quiet and empty.

Yet here, twice in the same mission, they had come across life. Not that much of it was left at Safe Harbor. Should have named it Hardscrabble.

George was beaming, watching the images on screen, his hands clasped behind his back like Nelson at the Nile.

Bill reported a stealth satellite. “I’ll scan for others,” he said. “I assume there will be two more.”

Mountain chains ranged everywhere. Volcanoes poured out smoke along the shore of an inland sea. Great rivers divided the land. There were storms and ice caps, and a blizzard worked its way down from the north. Two continents were visible, bathed in sunlight.

“It doesn’t look as if anybody lives there, though,” said Herman. “I don’t see any sign of cities.”

“We’re still too far out,” said Pete.

An hour later Hutch eased them into orbit and they approached the terminator and passed onto the night side.

And there they were! Not the rivers of light they’d hoped for, not London or Paris, but lights nonetheless. Scattered haphazardly across the face of the planet. They flickered, they were dim, and they were few in number.

Campfires. Oil lamps, maybe. Torches. But certainly no moving spotlights. No electrically illuminated rooftop restaurants.

Nonetheless, they were lights.

They stayed in mission control, doing nothing other than absorbing their good fortune, enjoying the warmth of success. Hutch was finally able to throw off the dark mood that had descended on her with the loss of the Condor. She walked among them, patting people on the back, trading toasts, exchanging embraces, and thoroughly enjoying herself. At one point she saw Tor looking at her longingly and she thought, Now’s the moment, took the initiative, and kissed him.