His chair creaked beneath the astromoner’s shifting weight. “I am a scientist,” he declared waspishly. “I have not only the right but the obligation to state what is true.”

Lindgren regarded him with disfavor. He was letting a scraggly beard grow on his chins, had not bathed of late, and was in grimy coveralls.

“You don’t have the right to spread horror stories,” Reymont said. “Didn’t you notice what you were doing to some of the women, especially, when you talked the way you did at mess? That’s what decided me to intervene; but you’d been building up the trouble for quite a while before, Nilsson.”

“I merely brought out into the open what has been common knowledge from the start,” the fat man retorted. “They hadn’t the courage to discuss it in detail. I do.”

“They hadn’t the meanness. You do.”

“No personalities,” Lindgren said. “Tell me what happened.” She had recently been taking her meals alone in her cabin, pleading busyness, and was not seen much off watch.

“You know,” Nilsson said. “We’ve raised the subject on occasion.”

“What subject?” she asked. “We’ve talked about many.”

“Talked, yes, like reasonable people,” Reymont snapped. “Not lectured a tableful of shipmates, most of them feeling low already.”

“Please, Constable. Proceed, Professor Nilsson.”

The astronomer puffed himself up. “An elementary thing. I cannot comprehend why the rest of you have been such idiots as not to give it serious consideration. You blandly assume we will come to rest in a Virgo galaxy and find a habitable planet. But tell me how. Think of the requirements. Mass, temperature, irradiation, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere… the best estimate is that 1 per cent of the stars may have planets which are any approximation to Earth.”

“That,” Lindgren said. “Why, certainly—”

Nilsson was not to be deprived of his platform. Perhaps he didn’t bother to hear her. He ticked points off on his fingers. “If 1 per cent of the stars are suitable, do you realize how many we will have to examine in order to have an even chance of finding what we seek? Fifty! I should have thought anyone aboard would be capable of that calculation. It is conceivable that we will be lucky and come upon our Nova Terra at the first star we try. But the odds against this are ninety-nine to one. Doubtless we must try many. Now the examination of each involves almost a year of deceleration. To depart from it, in search elsewhere, requires another year of acceleration. Those are years of ship’s time, remember, because nearly the whole period is spent at velocities which are small compared to light’s and thus involve a tau factor near unity: which, in addition, prevents our going above one gravity.

“Hence we must allow a minimum of two years per star. The even chance of which I spoke— and mind you, it is only even— the odds are as good that we will not find Nova Terra in the first fifty stars as they are that we will— this chance requires a hundred years of search. Actually it requires more, because we shall have to stop from time to time and laboriously replenish the reaction mass for the ion drive. Antisenescence or no, we will not live that long.