The Grad was catching fire. "Get them growing just above the tuft. It might work. Sure I'd like to go on. I want to see what it's like when there isn't any tidal force at all."

"We already know what Merril would say. Anyone else?"

Alfin grunted. Nobody else spoke.

"We go on," Clave said.

Chapter Five - Memories

IT WAS THERE AGAIN. THERE WAS A SPECIAL FREQUENCY OF

light that Sharis Davis Kendy had sought for five hundred years. He had found it fifty-two years ago, and forty-eight, and twenty, and .

six certain sightings and another ten probable. The locus moved about. This time it was west of his position, barely filtering through the soup of dust and gas and dirt and plant life: the light of hydrogen burning with oxygen.

Kendy held his attention on a wavering point within the Smoke Ring.

Rarely did the CARM even acknowledge that his signal had penetrated the maelstrom but he never considered not trying. "Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State."

The CARJvI's main motor would run for hours now. It would accelerate slowly, too slowly: pushing something massive. What were they doing in there?

Had they entirely forgotten Discipline and Sharls Davis Kendy?

Kendy had forgotten much, but what remained to him was as vivid as the moment it had happened. These futile attempts at contact needed little of his attention. Kendy took refuge in memory.

The target star was yellow-white, with a spectrum very like Sol's, circling an unseen companon. At 1.2 solar masses, T3 was minutely brighter and bluer than Sol: about GO or 01. The companion, at half a solar mass, would be a star, not a planet. It should at least have been visible.

The State bad telescopic data from earlier missions to other stars. There was at least a third, planet-sized body in this system. There might be a planet resembling the primordial Earth; in which case Discipline would fulfill its primary mission by seeding its atmosphere with oxygenproducing algaes. On a distant day the State.would return to find a world ripe for colonization.

But someone would have come anyway, to probe the strangeness of this place.

Discipline was a seeder ramship, targeted for a ring of yellow stars that might host worlds like the primordial Earth. Its secondary mission was a secret known only to Kendy; but exploration was a definite third on the list; Discipline would not stop here. Kendy would skim past T3, take pictures and records, and vanish into the void. He might slow enough to drop a missile with a warhead of tailored algae, if a target world could be found.

Four of the crew were in the control module. They had the telescope array going and a watery picture of a yellow-white star on the big screen, with a pinpoint of fierce blue-white light at its edge. Sam Goldblatt had a spectrum of T3 displayed on a smaller screen.