et some sleep, and report the consensus at the next
meeting."

"_Sixteen hours?_" yelped someone. "Do you know how much return time
that adds?"

"You heard me," said Coffin. "Anybody who wants to argue may do so from
the brig. Dismissed!"

He snapped off the switch.

Kivi, temper eased, gave him a slow confidential grin. "That
heavy-father act works nearly every time, no?"

Coffin pushed from the table. "I'm going out," he said. His voice
sounded harsh to him, a stranger's. "Carry on."

He had never felt so alone before, not even the night his father died.
_O God, who spake unto Moses in the wilderness, reveal now thy will._
But God was silent, and Coffin turned blindly to the only other help he
could think of.

* * * * *

Space armored, he paused a moment in the air lock before continuing. He
had been an astronaut for twenty-five years--for a century if you added
time in the vats--but he could still not look upon naked creation
without fear.

An infinite blackness flashed: stars beyond stars, to the bright
ghost-road of the Milky Way and on out to other galaxies and flocks of
galaxies, until the light which a telescope might now register had been
born before the Earth. Looking from his air-lock cave, past the radio
web and the other ships, Coffin felt himself drown in enormousness,
coldness, and total silence--though he knew that this vacuum burned and
roared with man-destroying energies, roiled like currents of gas and
dust more massive than planets and travailed with the birth of new
suns--and he said to himself the most dreadful of names, _I am that I
am_, and sweat formed chilly little globules under his arms.

This much a man could see within the Solar System. Traveling at half
light-speed stretched the human mind still further, till often it ripped
across and another lunatic was shoved into deepsleep. For aberration
redrew the sky, crowding stars toward the bows, so that the ships
plunged toward a cloud of Doppler hell-blue. The constellations lay
thinly abeam, you looked out upon the dark. Aft, Sol was still the
brightest object in heaven, but it had gained a sullen red tinge, as if
already grown old, as if the prodigal would return from far places to
find his home buried under ice.

_What is man that thou art mindful of him?_ The line gave its accustomed
comfort; for, after all, the Sun-maker had also wrought this flesh, atom
by atom, and at the very least would thi