“Why not?” Reymont persisted. “What jobs we have aren’t hard, physically. Anyhow, you’re tough. Weightlessness never bothered you. You’re a machine-era boy, a practical chap, a lusty, earthy soul. Not one of those self-appointed delicates who have to be coddled every minute because their tender spirits can’t bear a long voyage.” He sneered. “Or are you one?”

Freiwald stirred. His unshaven cheeks darkened a trifle. “I am a man,” he said. “Not a robot. Eventually I start thinking.”

“My friend, do you imagine we would have survived this far if the officers, at any rate, did not spend every waking hour thinking?”

“I don’t mean your damned measurements, computations, course adjustments, equipment modifications. That’s from nothing but the instinct to stay alive. A lobster trying to climb out of a kettle has as much dignity. I ask myself, why? What are we really doing? What does it mean?”

“Et tu. Brute,” Reymont muttered.

Freiwald twisted about until his gaze was straight into the constable’s. “Because you are so callous… Do you know what year this is?”

“No. Neither do you. The data are too uncertain. And if you wonder what the year would be at Sol, that’s meaningless.”

“Be quiet! I know the whole simultaneity quacking. We have come something like fifty billion light-years. We are rounding me whole curve of space. If we returned this instant to the Solar System, we would not find anything. Our sun died long ago. It swelled and brightened till Earth was devoured; it became a variable, guttering like a candle in the wind; it sank away to a white dwarf, an ember, an ash. And the other stars followed. Nothing can be left in our galaxy but waning red dwarfs, if that. Otherwise clinkers. The Milky Way has gone out. Everything we knew, everything that made us, is dead. Starting with the human race.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then it’s become something we could not comprehend. We are ghosts.” Freiwald’s lips trembled. “We hunt on and on, monomaniacs—” Again acceleration thundered through the ship. “There. You heard. “His eyes were white-rimmed, as if with fear. “We passed through another galaxy. Another hundred thousand years. To us, part of a second.”

“Oh, not quite,” Reymont said. “Our tau can’t be that far down, can it? We probably quartered a spiral arm.”

“Destroying how many worlds? I know the figures. We are not as massive as a star. But our energy— I think we could pierce the heart of a sun and not notice.”

“Perhaps.”

“That’s one section of our hell. That we’ve become a menace to— to—”

“Don’t say it.” Reymont spoke earnestly. “Don’t think it. Because it isn’t true. We’re interacting with dust and gas, nothing else. We do transit many galaxies. They lie comparatively close together in terms of their own size. Within a cluster, the members are about ten diameters apart, often less. Single stars within a galaxy— that’s another situation altogether. Their diameters are such a microscopic fraction of a light-year. In a nuclear region, the most crowded part… well, the separation of two stars is still like the separation of two men, one at either end of a continent. A big continent. Like Asia.”