ll not disappoint Dad.

It is plain the colonel is not filled with joy; far from it, he did
not enjoy revealing a Departmental secret however obvious, but he
likes the next item even less.

"We shall detour to an uninhabited system twelve days' transit time
from here and make contact with another ship, the _Gilgamesh_."

* * * * *

At which Lennie DiMaggio who has been silent till now brings his fist
down on the table and exclaims, "You _can't_!"

Lennie is much upset for some reason; Delano-Smith gives him a
peculiar look and says what does he know about it? and Lennie starts
to stutter.

Cray remarks that Lennie's childhood hobby appears to have been
spaceships and he suffers from arrested development.

B says it is well known Lennie is mad about the Space Force and why
not? It seems to have uses Go on and tell us Lennie.

Lennie says "_G-Gilgamesh_ was lost three hundred years ago!"

"The flaw in that statement," says Cray after a pause, "is that this
may be another ship of the same name."

"No," says the colonel. "Explorer Class cruiser. They went out of
service two hundred eighty years back."

The Space Force, I remember, does not re-use names of lost ships: some
says Very Proper Feeling some say Superstitious Rot.

B says, "When was she found again?"

[Illustration]

Lennie says it was j-just thirty-seven revolutions of his native
planet which means f-f-fifty-three Terrestrial years ago, she was
found by an Interplanetary scout called _Crusoe_.

Judging by the colonel's expression this data is Classified; he does
not know that Lennie's family come from one of the oldest settled
planets and are space-goers to a man, woman, and juvenile; they pick
up ship gossip the way others hear about the relations of people next
door.

Lennie goes on to say that the Explorer Class were the first official
exploration ships sent out from Earth when the Terries decided to find
out what happened to the colonies formed during the Exodus.
_Gilgamesh_ was the first to re-make contact with Garuda, Legba,
Lister, Cor-bis and Antelope; she vanished on her third voyage.

"Where was she found?" asks Eru.

"Near the p-p-pole of an uninhabited planet--maybe I shouldn't say
where because that may be secret, but the rest's History if you know
where to look."

* * * * *

Maybe the colonel approves this discretion; anyway his face thaws very
slightly unless I