Roped together, clinging with frantic bondsoles to the ship’s metal (curious, the horror one felt of getting somehow pitched loose— extinction would be the same as if that had happened in the lost little spaceways of the Solar System— but the thought of blazing across gigayears as a stellar-scale meteor was peculiarly lonely), the engineer detail made their way along the hull, past the spidery framework of the hy-dromagnetic generators. Those ribs seemed terribly frail.

“Suppose we can’t fix the decelerator half of the module,” came a voice. “Do we go on? What happens to us? I mean, won’t the laws be different on me edge of the universe? Won’t we turn into something awful?”

“Space is isotropic,” Reymont barked into the blackness. “ ’The edge of the universe’ is gibberish. And let’s start by supposing we can fix the stupid machine.”

He heard a few oaths and grinned like a carnivore. When they halted and began to secure their lifelines individually to the ion drive girders, Fedoroff laid his helmet against Reymont’s for a private talk carried by conduction.

“Thanks, Constable,” he said.

“What for?”

“Being such a prosaic bastard.”

“Well, we have a prosaic job of repair to do. We may have come a long way, we may by now have outlived the race that produced us, but we haven’t changed from a variety of proboscis monkey. Why take ourselves so mucking seriously?”

“Hm. I see why Lindgren insisted I let you come along.” Fedoroff cleared his throat. “About her.”

“Yes.”

“I… I was angry… at your treatment of her. It was mainly that. Of course, I was, uh, humiliated personally. But a man should be able to get over that. I cared for her, though, very much.”

“Forget it,” Reymont said.

“I cannot do that. But maybe I can understand a little better than I let myself do in the past. You must have hurt too. And now, for her own reasons, she has gone from both of us. Shall we shake hands and be friends once more, Charles?”

“Surely. I’ve wanted this myself. Good men are hard to come by.” Gauntlets groped to find each other in the murk and clasp.

“All right.” Fedoroff switched his transmitter back on and pushed clear of the ship. “Let’s get aft and have a look at the problem.”

CHAPTER 17

Light began to glimmer ahead, a scattering of starlike points which waxed, in numbers and brightness, toward glory. Their dominion widened; presently the viewscope showed them occupying nearly half of heaven; and still that area grew and brightened.

They were not stars forming those strange constellations. They were, at first, entire families of galaxies making up a clan. Later, as the ship advanced, they broke into clusters and then into separate members.

The viewscope’s reconstruction of this stationary-observer sight was only approximate. From the spectra received, a computer estimated what the Doppler shift, and thus the aberration, must be, and made corresponding adjustments. But these were nothing except estimates.