“Indeed. Indeed. Here we are.” Pereira waned Fedoroff into a cubbyhole with a desk and a filing cabinet. “I will show you a schematic of our layout.”

They talked business for half an hour. (Centuries passed beyond the hull.) The trace of geniality he had shown at first, which was once the usual face he turned to the world, had vanished from Fedoroff. He was short-spoken to the point of rudeness.

When he had stowed the drawings and notes, Pereira said quietly: “You do not sleep well these nights, do you?”

“Busy,” the engineer grunted.

“Old friend, you thrive on work. That is not what drew those smudges beneath your eyes. It is Margarita, no?”

Fedoroff jerked in his chair. “What about her?” He and Jimenes had lived steadily together for several months.

“In our village, no one can help noticing she has a grief.”

Fedoroff stared out the entrance, into the greenness. “I wish I could leave her without feeling like a deserter,” he said.

“M-m-m… you recall I was often with her before she settled down. Perhaps I have an insight you don’t. You are not insensitive, Boris, but you seldom resonate with the feminine mind. I wish you two well. Can I help?”

“The thing is, she refuses to take antisenescence. Neither Urho Latvala nor I can budge her. No doubt I tried too hard and made her think I was browbeating. She’ll scarcely speak to me.” Fedoroff’s tone harshened. He continued to watch the leaves outside. “I was never in love… with her. Nor she with me. But we became fond. I want to do anything I can for her. What, though?”

“She is a young woman,” Pereira said. “If our circumstances have made her, how shall I put it, overwrought, she might react irrationally to any reminder of age and death.”

Fedoroff swung about. “She’s not ignorant! She’s perfectly aware the treatment has to be periodic through a whole adulthood— or menopause will hit her fifty years before it needs to. She says that’s what she wants!”

“Why?”

“She wants to be dead before the chemical and ecological systems break down. You predicted five decades for that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. A slow, nasty way to go out. If we haven’t found a planet by then—”

“She remains Christian. Prejudices about suicide.” Fedoroff winced. “I don’t like the prospect either. Who does? She won’t believe it isn’t inevitable.”

“I suspect,” Pereira said, “the idea of dying childless is to her the true horror. She used to make a game of deciding on names for the large family she wants.”

“Do you mean— Wait. Let me think. Damn him, Nilsson was right the other day, about the unlikelihood of our ever finding a home. I have to agree, life in that case seems pretty futile.”

“To her especially. Facing that emptiness, she retreats— unconsciously, no doubt— toward a permissible form of suicide.”

“What can we do, Luis?” Fedoroff asked in anguish.

“If the captain was persuaded to make the treatments mandatory— He could justify that. Supposing we do reach a planet in spite of everything, the community will need each woman’s childbearing span at a maximum.”