Institute had
long since fossilized in their patterns. It was a waste of breath to
argue with them.

Discouraged, he moved on, pausing in Vienna to hear the opera--Max had
always intended to spend a vacation with him in Vienna, listening to
Mozart, and Alan felt he owed it to Hawkes to pay his respects. The
operas he saw were ancient, medieval in fact, better than two thousand
years old; he enjoyed the tinkly melodies but found some of the plots
hard to understand.

He saw a circus in Ankara, a football game in Budapest, a nullgrav
wrestling match in Moscow. He journeyed to the far reaches of Siberia,
where Cavour had spent his final years, and found that what had been a
bleak wasteland suitable for spaceship experiments in 2570 was now a
thriving modern city of five million people. The site of Cavour's camp
had long since been swallowed up.

Alan's faith in the enduring nature of human endeavor was restored
somewhat by his visit to Egypt--for there he saw the pyramids, nearly
seven thousand years old; they looked as permanent as the stars.

The first anniversary of his leaving the _Valhalla_ found him in South
Africa; from there he travelled eastward through China and Japan, across
the highly industrialized islands of the Far Pacific, and from the
Philippines he returned to the American mainland by jet express.

He spent the next four months travelling widely through the United
States, gaping at the Grand Canyon and the other scenic preserves of the
west. East of the Mississippi, life was different; there was barely a
stretch of open territory between York City and Chicago.

It was late in November when he returned to York City. Jesperson greeted
him at the airfield, and they rode home together. Alan had been gone a
year; he was past eighteen, now, a little heavier, a little stronger.
Very little of the wide-eyed boy who had stepped off the _Valhalla_ the
year before remained intact. He had changed inwardly.

But one part of him had not changed, except in the direction of greater
determination. That was the part that hoped to unlock the secret of
faster-than-light travel.

He was discouraged. His journey had revealed the harsh fact that nowhere
on Earth was research into hyperdrive travel being carried on; either
they had tried and abandoned it as hopeless, or, like the Zurich people,
they had condemned the concept from the start.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" Jesperson asked.

Alan slowly shoo