e. We visited every planetary system
within a hundred light years of Sol the first year."

Carhill laughed. "What's there to remember about this hunk of rock?
Tiny, airless, mountainless--the most monotonous piece of matter we've
landed on in years."

Hugh shrugged and turned to the next chart. The others clustered
around him, checking, comparing the chart with the photographic plates
of their position, finding nothing familiar in the star pattern.

"I still think we would have remembered this planet," Hugh said. "Just
because it _is_ so monotonous. After all, what have we been looking
for, all these years? Life. Other worlds with living forms, other
types of evolution, types adapted to different environments. This
particular planet is less capable of supporting life than our own
Moon."

Martha Carhill looked up from the charts. Her face was as tense and
strained as her husband's, and the lines about her mouth deeply
etched. "We've got to be near Earth. We've just got to. We've got to
find people again." Her voice broke. "We've been looking for so
long--"

Hugh McCann sighed. The worry that had been growing in him ever since
they first left the rim of the galaxy and turned homeward deepened
into a nagging fear. He didn't know why he was afraid. He too hoped
that they were near Earth. He almost believed that they would soon be
home. But the others, their reactions--He shook his head.

They no longer merely hoped. With them, especially with the older,
ones, it was faith, a blind, unreasoning, fanatic faith that their
journey was almost over and they would be on Earth again and pick up
the lives they had left behind fifty-three years before.

"Look," Amos Carhill said. "Here are our reference points. Here's
Andromeda Galaxy, and the dark nebula, and the arch of our own Milky
Way." He pointed to the places he had named on the plates. "Now we can
check some of these high magnitude reference stars with the charts."

Hugh let him take the charts and go through them, checking, rejecting.
Carhill was probably right. He'd find Sol soon enough.

It had been too long for one shipful of people to follow a quest,
especially a hopeless one. For fifty-three years they had scouted the
galaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. A check on diverging
evolutions, they had called it--uncounted thousands of suns without
planets, bypassed. Thousands of planetary systems, explored, or merely
looked at and rejected. Heavy, cold