Ho Home

He still felt strange in the Observatory. It didn't rotate, so he was weightless. He was used to the artifi­cial gravity of the spinning, cylindrical Life Module, not to having none at all. More amazing was the sky. There wasn't any in the Life Module: the portholes were covered since the sight of the stars appearing to move past the ship under the floor made too many people dizzy. Here, black sky and stars that didn't move were all around. Nothing could be seen to move at all. There was nothing in his life that wasn't cramped like the ship or too vast to have a scale, and the sky was vast. He could not comprehend the distance of the tiny sharp points, except by thinking that for most the light had been traveling longer than the John Brunner. For many, far, far longer.

"It's quite distinct now." Great-Grand Parker emerged from his cabin, a tiny Life Module with no spin where he could live without weight. "It's starting to look like a landing beacon."

Jim didn't know how to answer. He had never seen a landing beacon. He simply said: "Good morning, Admiral," as he had been taught. His great-grandfa­ther was officially the most senior officer, the oldest and obviously most experienced, though in fact he played no part in the day-to-day running of the ship.

Great-Grand drifted slowly forward in his float-suit. It was padded with airbags in case he bumped into anything, and would turn itself into a vacuum suit if a collision with a meteorite caused the Observatory to depressurize. His face was very thin, and so, presum­ably was his real body, but the inflated suit was so big it made him look like the methane-man from Jupiter Rangers. He was over a hundred years old, the oldest person on the ship by nearly thirty years. All the rest had been born on board.

He indicated that Jim should float with him to the big optical telescope. It was early in the morning on the main shift, and none of the regular observers were about. Some of them had the information wired to labs in the Life Module. Great-Grand insisted it helped him under­stand the stars to be surrounded by them while he studied. Mind you, he did admit he lived in the Ob­servatory because he feared that spin-gravity would be too much for his old heart and brittle bones. He pointed at the eyepiece and Jim hesitantly looked through it.

Floating against the black sky and the stars was a dark disk with a silvery crescent down one side. There were colors in the silver, red, orange, and ocher: it looked like an impossibly perfect Christmas tinsel deco­ration. To one side was a tiny crescent, little larger than the stars, a satellite, he thought.

"It's... it's so beautiful!"

"That's Planet Three. We're looking at it and Two." Great-Grand changed the setting. The next planet showed a smaller disk but a larger, pure white cres­cent. There was a tiny point over the dark part. An­other satellite? Great-Grand went on: "Here's Two. Looks to be a bit hot and wet: lots of carbon dioxide, but not much free oxygen. What does that tell you?"

"Er ... young planet, could be plant life, not much animal?"

"That's most likely. Three is smaller, colder, older. Might be a better bet for a first landing, though. Either's possible if we do decide to colonize. It hasn't been decided."

Jim was shocked. "But I thought the whole purpose of the ... of this mission of the John Brunner was to found a colony!"

"Don't know if we did right by you lot! Wanted to! We didn't want our grandchildren living their whole lives on L5s ... we set out to find you a planet. I didn't expect to see it, none of us did, felt we were making a big sacrifice. Didn't think about our own kids who'd be old by the time we got here ... didn't have a way to ask if you wanted to grow up on a ship ... bit like an L5, come to think about it, except you can't talk to anyone off-ship without a twenty-year thumb-twiddle ... then expect you to go down to some unexplored place with no expe­rience of anything similar and live our dreams for us!"

Jim felt confused. Everyone else talked about the mission and the colony in which he would one day live. Great-Grand had an ability to disturb: he alone knew about life outside the ship. Jim was the smallest in his age group, short and thin, and recently most of the others had started growing even faster. To make up he worked hard and took extra lessons from people like Great-Grand. "Surely it's just... the way things have to be. The colony, I mean—what else could this ship do?"

Great-Grand made an agitated fluttering movement toward the control console for the telescopes. Though no one was there, figures were flashing on the display screens. He said in a thin voice: "Study. Collect data and make theories about it, send them back to Earth. People are saying, young people, old to you though, let's just take our time, study this system, refuel, service the ship, then if we don't like this one, maybe go on to another. Most of them won't live to see that, of course, but that doesn't seem to worry them ... dying on the ship."

"It would be awful, coming all this way, then not landing."

Great-Grand gave a bob halfway between a shrug and a laugh. "I never expected to land. I never ex­pected to get this far. This is a deep space vessel and someone's got to stay on it while the rest of you go down on shuttles. If you go down."