Ingrid Lindgren entered the bridge, caught a handhold, and poised in mid-air. “Reporting for duty, Mr. Captain,” she announced formally.

Lars Telander turned about to greet her. In free fall, his gaunt and gawky figure became lovely to watch, like a fish in water or a hawk on the wing. Otherwise he could have been any gray-haired man of fifty-odd. Neither of them had bothered to put insignia of rank on the coveralls that were standard shipboard working attire.

“Good day,” he said. “I trust you had a pleasant leave.”

“I certainly did.” The color mounted in her cheeks. “And you?”

“Oh… it was all right. Mostly I played tourist, from end to end of Earth. I was surprised at how much I had not seen before.”

* * *

Lindgren regarded him with some compassion. He floated alone by his command seat, one of three clustered around a control and communications console at the middle of the circular room. The meters, readout screens, indicators, and other gear that crowded the bulkheads, already blinking and quivering and tracing out scrawls, only emphasized his isolation. Until she came, he had not been listening to anything except the murmur of ventilators or the infrequent click of a relay.

“You have nobody whatsoever left?” she asked.

“Nobody close.” Telander’s long features crinkled in a smile. “Don’t forget, as far as the Solar System is concerned, I have almost counted a century. When last I visited my home village in Dalarna, my brother’s grandson was the proud father of two adolescents. It was not to be expected that they would consider me a near relative.”

(He was born three years before the first manned expedition departed for Alpha Centauri. He entered kindergarten two years before the first maser messages from it reached Farside Station on Luna. That set the life of an introverted, idealistic child on trajectory. At age twenty-five, an Academy graduate with a notable performance in the interplanetary ships, he was allowed on the first crew for Epsilon Eridani. They returned twenty-nine years later; but because of the time dilation, they had experienced just eleven, including the six spent at the goal planets. The discoveries they had made covered them with glory. The Tau Ceti ship was outfitting when they came back. Telander could be the first officer if he was willing to leave in less than a year. He was. Thirteen years of his own went by before he returned, commander in place of a captain who had died on a world of peculiar savageries. On Earth, the interval had been thirty-one years. Leonora Christine was being assembled in orbit. Who better than him for her master? He hesitated. She was to start in barely three years. If he accepted, most of those thousand days would be spent planning and preparing… But not to accept was probably not thinkable; and too, he walked as a stranger on an Earth grown strange to him.)

“Let’s get busy,” he said. “I assume Boris Fedoroff and his engineers rode up with you?”