“Professor—” Lindgren tried.

Reymont smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry, madame,” he said. “No fight will come of it. His words don’t diminish me.”

He inspected the other man. “Believe it or not,” he went on, “I knew what you’ve told us. I also knew you are, or were, an able fellow. You made innovations, designed gadgets, that were responsible for a lot of discoveries. You were doing a fine job for us till you quit. Why not put your brain to work on the problems we have?”

“Will you be so good as to condescend to suggest a procedure?” Nilsson sneered.

“I’m no scientist, nor much of a technician,” Reymont said. “Still, a few things look obvious to me. Let’s suppose we have entered our target galaxy. We’ve shed the ultra-low tau we needed to get there, but we have one yet of… oh, whatever is convenient. Ten to the minus third, maybe? Well, that gives you a terrifically long baseline and cosmic-time period to make your observations. In the course of weeks or months, ship’s time, you can collect more data on a given star than you had on any of Sol’s neighbors. I should think you could find ways to use relativity effects to give you information that wasn’t available at home. And naturally, you can observe a large number of Sol-type stars simultaneously. So you’re bound to find some you can prove— prove with exact figures that leave no reasonable doubt— have planets with masses and orbits about like Earth’s.”

“Assuming that, the question of atmosphere, biosphere, will remain. We need a short-range look.”

“Yes, yes. Must we stop to take it, though? Suppose, instead, we lay out a course which brings us hard by the most promising suns, in sequence, while we continue to travel near light-speed. In cosmic time, we’ll have hours or days to check whatever planet interests us. Spectroscopic, thermoscopic, photographic, magnetic, write your own list of clues. We can get a fair idea of conditions on the surface. Biological conditions too. We could look for items like thermodynamic disequilibrium, chlorophyl-reflection spectra, polarization by microbe populations based on L-amino acids… yes, I imagine we can get an excellent notion of whether that planet is suitable. At low tau, we can examine any number in a small stretch of our own time. We’ll have to use automation and electronics, in fact; we ourselves couldn’t work fast enough. Then, when we’ve identified the right world, we can return to it. That will take a couple of years, agreed. But they’ll be endurable years. We’ll know, with high probability, that we have a home waiting for us.”

Color mounted in Lindgren’s features. Her eyes grew less dull. “Good’Lord,” she said, “why didn’t you speak of this before?”

“I’d other problems on my mind,” Reymont answered. “Why didn’t you, Professor Nilsson?”

“Because the whole thing is absurd,” the astronomer snorted. “You presuppose instrumentation we do not have.”

“Can’t we build it? We have tools, precision equipment, construction supplies, skilled workmen. Your team has already made progress.”