* * * *

The ship throbbed softly, pulsating in the typical vibrations of low
speed drive. In the forward viewscreens the star grew larger. The
people didn't look at it very often. They moved about the corridors of
the ship, much as they usually moved, but quietly. They seemed to be
trying to ignore the star.

"You can't be sure, Hugh." Nora McCann laid her hand on her husband's
arm.

"No, of course I can't be sure."

The door from their quarters into the corridor was open. Several more
people came in--young people who had been born on the ship. They were
talking and laughing.

"Would it be so hard on the young ones, Hugh? They've never seen the
Earth. They're used to finding nothing but lifeless worlds
everywhere."

One of the young boys in the hall looked up at the corridor viewscreen
and pointed at the star and then shrugged. The others turned away, not
saying anything, and after a minute they left and the boy followed
them.

"There's your answer," Hugh McCann said dully. "Earth's a symbol to
them. It's home. It's the place where there are millions more like us.
Sometimes I think it's the only thing that has kept us sane all these
years--the knowledge that there is a world full of people, somewhere,
that we're not alone."

Her hand found his and he gripped it, almost absently, and then he
looked up at their own small viewscreen. The star was much bigger now.
It was already a definite circle of yellow light.

A yellow G-type sun, like a thousand others they had approached and
orbited around and left behind them. A yellow sun that could have been
anywhere in the galaxy.

"Hugh," she said after a moment, "do you really believe that thousands
of years have gone by, outside?"

"I don't know what to believe. I only know what the plates show."

"That may not even be Sol, up ahead," she said doubtfully. "We may be
in some other part of space altogether, and that's why the charts are
different."

"Perhaps. But either way we're lost. Lost in space or in time or in
both. What does it matter?"

"If we're just lost in space it's not so--so irrevocable. We could
still find our way back to Earth, maybe."

He didn't answer. He looked up at the screen and the circle of light
and his lips tightened. Whatever the truth was, they didn't have long
to wait. They'd be within gravitational range in less than an hour.

He wondered why he was reacting so differently from the others. He was
just