Wilson shook his head. “No one ever did. No one. The closest anyone ever comes to it are the guys on the transport ships who stand in front of the room full of new recruits and tell them that in ten years, most of them will be stone dead,” he said. “But even they don’t ever come back, really. They don’t leave the ships, at least not until they get back to Phoenix Station. When you’re gone, you’re gone. You’re gone forever.”

Wilson looked out the porthole. “It’s a hell of a thing, Hart,” he said. “At the time, it might not seem like a bad deal. When the Colonial Union takes you, you’re seventy-five years old, you’ve probably had some major health scare and a few minor ones, you might have bad knees and bad eyes and maybe you haven’t been able to get it up for a while. If you don’t go, then you’re going to be dead. Which means you’ll be gone anyway. Better to be gone and live.”

“It seems reasonable,” Schmidt said.

“Yes,” Wilson agreed. “But then you do go. And you do live. And the longer you live—the longer you live in this universe—the more you miss it. The more you miss the places you lived, and the people you know. The more you realize that you made a hard bargain. The more you realize you might have made a mistake in leaving.”

“You’ve never said anything about this before,” Schmidt said.

“What is there to say?” Wilson said, looking back at his friend. “My grandfather used to tell me that his grandfather told him a story about his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from some other country. What other country, he wouldn’t say; he never talked about the old country to anyone, Grandpa said, not even his wife. When they asked him why, he said he left it behind for a reason, and whether that reason was good or bad, it was enough.”

“It didn’t bother his wife not knowing where he came from?” Schmidt asked.

“It’s just a story,” Wilson said. “I’m pretty sure Grandpa embroidered that part. But the point is that the past is the past and you let things go because you can’t change them anyway. My grandfather many times over didn’t talk about where he came from because he was never going back. For better or worse, that part of his life was done. For me, it was the same thing. That part of my life was done. What else was there to say?”

“Until now,” Schmidt said.

“Until now,” Wilson agreed, and checked his BrainPal. “Quite literally now. We skip in ten seconds.” He turned his attention back to the porthole, silently counting off the seconds.