“Heh? Uh… I’m with Ingrid Lindgren.”

“Already?” The mood dropped from her. “Forgive me. I should not pry.”

“No, I’m the one who owes the apology,” he said. “Making you wait here with nothing to do, as if you couldn’t manage in free fall.”

“You can’t make exceptions.” Chi-Yuen was altogether serious again. She extended her bed, floated onto it, and started harnessing in. “I want to lie awhile alone anyway and think.”

“About Earth?”

“About many things. We are leaving more than most of us have yet understood, Charles Reymont. It is a kind of death— followed by resurrection, perhaps, but nonetheless a death.”

CHAPTER 3

“—zero!”

The ion drive came to life. No man could have gone behind its thick shielding to watch it and survived. Nor could he listen to it, or feel any vibration of its power. It was too efficient for that. In the so-called engine room, which was actually an electronic nerve center, men did hear the faint throb of pumps feeding reaction mass from the tanks. They hardly noticed, being intent on the meters, displays, readouts, and code signals which monitored the system. Boris Fedoroff’s hand was never distant from the primary cutoff switch. Between him and Captain Telander in the command bridge flowed a mutter of observations. It was not necessary to Leonora Christine. Far less sophisticated craft than she could operate themselves. And she was in fact doing so. Her intermeshing built-in robots worked with more speed and precision— more flexibility, even, within the limits of their programming— than mortal flesh could hope for. But to stand by was a necessity for the men themselves.

Elsewhere, the sole direct proof of motion that those had who lay in their cabins was a return of weight. It was not much, under one tenth gee, but it gave them an “up” and “down” for which their bodies were grateful. They released themselves from their beds. Reymont announced over the hall intercom: “Constable to personnel off watch. You may move around ad libitum— forward of your deck, that is.” Sarcastically: “You may recall that an official good-by ceremony, complete with benediction, will be broadcast at Greenwich noon. We’ll screen it in the gymnasium for those who care to watch.”

Reaction mass entered the fire chamber. Thermonuclear generators energized the furious electric arcs that stripped those atoms down to ions; the magnetic fields that separated positive and negative particles; the forces that focused them into beams; the pulses that lashed them to ever higher velocities as they sped down the rings of the thrust tubes, until they emerged scarcely less fast than light itself. Their blast was invisible. No energy was wasted on flames. Instead, everything that the laws of physics permitted was spent on driving Leonora Christine outward.

A vessel her size could not accelerate by this means like a Patrol cruiser. That would have demanded more fuel than she could hold, who must carry half a hundred people, and their necessities for ten or fifteen years, and their tools for satisfying scientific curiosity after they arrived, and (if the data beamed by the instrumented probe which had preceded her did actually mean that the third planet of Beta Virginis was habitable) the supplies and machines whereby man could begin to take a new world for himself. She spiraled slowly out of Earth orbit. The dwellers within her had ample chances to stand at her viewscreens and watch home dwindle among the stars.