“That isn’t true!”

“Oh, I’m not as childish as some,” he said. “I’d help if I were able. But my mind is blank, I tell you. I haven’t had an original thought in weeks. Call it fear of death paralyzing me. Call it a sort of impotence. I don’t care what you call it. Because you don’t care either. No one has offered me friendship, company, anything. I have been left alone in the dark and the cold. Do you wonder that my mind is frozen?”

Lindgren looked away, hiding what expressions chased across her. When she confronted Nilsson again, she had put on calm.

“I can’t say how sorry I am, Elof,” she told him. “You are partly to blame yourself. You acted so, well, self-sufficient, we assumed you didn’t want to be bothered. The way Olga Sobieski, for instance, doesn’t want to. That’s why she moved in with me. When you joined Hussein Sadek—”

“He keeps the panel closed between our halves,” Nilsson shrilled. “He never raises if. But the soundproofing is imperfect. I hear him and his girls in there.”

“Now we understand.” Lindgren smiled. “To be quite honest, Elof, I’ve grown bored with my current existence.”

Nilsson made a strangled noise.

“I believe we have some personal business to discuss,” Lindgren said. “Do… do you mind. Constable?”

“No,” said Reymont. “Of course not.” He left the cabin.

CHAPTER 15

Leonora Christine stormed through the galactic nucleus in twenty thousand years. To those aboard, the time was measured in hours. They were hours of dread, while the hull shook and groaned from stress, and the outside view changed from total darkness to a fog made blinding and blazing by crowded star clusters. The chance of striking a sun was not negligible; hidden in a dust cloud, it could be in front of the ship in one perceived instant. (No one knew what would happen to the star. It might go nova. But certainly the vessel would be destroyed, too swiftly for her crew to know they were dead.) On the other hand, this was the region where inverse tau mounted to values that could merely be estimated, not established with precision, absolutely not comprehended.

She had a respite while she crossed the region of clear space at the center, like passing through the eye of a hurricane. Foxe-Jameson looked into the viewscope at thronged suns— red, white and neutron dwarfs, two- and three-fold older than Sol or its neighbors; others, glimpsed, unlike any ever seen or suspected in the outer galaxy— and came near weeping. “Too bloody awful! The answers to a million questions, right here, and not a single instrument I can use!”

His shipmates grinned. “Where would you publish?” somebody asked. Renascent hope was often expressing itself in a kind of gallows humor.

But there was no joking when Boudreau called a conference with Telander and Reymont. That was soon after the ship had emerged from the nebulae on the far side of the nucleus and headed back through the spiral arm whence she came. The scene behind was of a dwindling fireball, ahead of a gathering darkness. Yet the reefs had been run, the Journey to the Virgo galaxies would take only a few more months of human life, the program of research and development on planet-finding techniques had been announced with high optimism. A dance and slightly drunken brawl was held in commons to celebrate. Its laughter, stamping, lilt of Urho Latvala’s accordion drifted faintly down to the bridge.