“The news may not be that bad,” Nilsson said.

Reymont snatched at him, missed and hung with a raw noise in his throat. “We have some hope?” he managed finally.

The fat man spoke with a briskness that turned his pedantry into a sort of bugle call:

“Perhaps. I have no worthwhile data. The distances are too vast. We cannot choose another specific galactic clan and aim for it. We would see it with too great an inaccuracy, and across too many millions of years” of time. However, I do believe we can base a hope on the laws of chance.

“Someplace, eventually, we could meet the right configuration. Either an especially large clan through whose galaxy-densest portions we can lay a course; or else two or three clans, rather close to each other, more or less along a straight line, so that we can pass through them in succession; or else one whose velocity with respect to us happens to be favorable. Do you see? If we could come upon something like that, we would be in reasonable shape. We would be able to brake in a few years of ship’s time.”

“What are the odds?” Reymont’s words clanked.

Now Nilsson shook his head. “I cannot say. Perhaps not too bad. This is a big and varied cosmos. If we continue sufficiently long, I should imagine we have a finite probability of encountering what we need.”

“How long is sufficiently long?” Reymont made a gesture to halt. “don’t bother answering. I can tell. It’s on the order of billions of years. Tens of billions, maybe. That means we’ve got to have a lower tau yet. A tau so low that we can actually circumnavigate the universe… in years or in months. And that, in turn, means we can’t start slowing as we enter this clan up ahead. No. We accelerate again. After we’ve passed through— well, we should have a shorter period of ship’s time in free fall than the current one has been, until we strike another clan. Probably there, too, we’ll find it advisable to accelerate, running tau still lower. Yes, I know, that makes it still harder to find a place where we can come to rest; but anything else gives us no measurable chance at all, right?”

“I expect we’ll be taking every opportunity to accelerate that we come upon, till we see a journey’s end we can make use of, if we ever do. Agreed?”

Telander shuddered. “Can any of us hold to it?” he said.

“We must,” Reymont stated. Once more he spoke crisply.’TU figure out a tactful way to announce your news. It was among the possibilities that have been discussed by nearly everyone. That helps. I’ll have the few men I can trust ready… no, not for violence. Ready with leadership, steadiness, encouragement. And we’ll embark on a general training program for weightlessness. No reason why it has to cause trouble. We’ll teach every last one of those groundlub-bers how to handle himself in zero gee. How to sleep. By God, how to hope!” He smote his palms together with a pistol sound.