“We may not detect any that we can reach in less than years,” Nilsson warned.

“Well, then we don’t,” Reymont answered. “We can settle for a planet less well-endowed with iron and uranium than Earth was. That’s not crucial. We have the technology to make do with light alloys and organics. We have hydrogen fusion for power.

“The important thing is that we be about the first intelligent race alive in those parts.”

They stared at him.

He smiled in a way they had not seen before. “I’d like us to have our pick of worlds, when our descendants get around to interstellar colonization,” he said. “And I’d like us to become— oh, the elders. Not imperialists; that’s ridiculous; but the people who were there from the beginning, and know their way around, and are worth learning from. Never mind what physical shape the younger races have. Who cares? But let’s make this, as nearly as possible, a human galaxy, in the widest sense of the word ‘human.’ Maybe even a human universe.

“I think we’ve earned that right.”

Leonora Christine took only three months of her people’s lives from the moment of creation to the moment when she found her home.

That was partly good fortune but also due to forethought. The newborn atoms had burst outward with a random distribution of velocities. Thus, in the course of ages, they formed hydrogen clouds which attained distinct individualities. While they drifted apart, these clouds condensed into sub-clouds— which, under the slow action of many forces, differentiated themselves into separate families, then single galaxies, then individual suns.

But inevitably, in the early stages, exceptional situations occurred. Galaxies were as yet near to each other. They still contained anomalous groups. Thus they exchanged matter. A large star cluster might form within one galaxy, but having more than escape velocity, might cross to another (with stars coalescing in it meanwhile) that could capture it. In this way, the variety of stellar types belonging to a particular galaxy was not limited to those that it could have evolved at its own age.

Zeroing in on her destination, Leonora Christine kept watch for a well-developed cluster whose speed she could easily match. And as she entered its domain, she looked for a star of the right characteristics, spectral and velocital. To nobody’s surprise, the nearest of that sort had planets. She decelerated toward it.

The procedure differed from the original scheme, which had been to go by at high speed, making observations while she passed through the system. Reymont was responsible for it. This once, he said, let a chance be taken. The odds weren’t too bad. Measurements made across light-years with the instruments and techniques developed aboard ship gave reason to expect that a certain attendant of that yellow sun might offer a haven to man.

If not— a year would have been lost, the year required to reapproach c with respect to the entire galaxy. But if there actually was a planet such as lived in memory, no further deceleration would be called for. Two years would have been gained.