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"Mass detectors, Dr. Marchand," said Eisele cheerfully pointing to the charts. "Good thing
they're not much closer, or they wouldn't have mass enough to show." Marchand understood: the same
detectors that would show a sun or a planet would also show a mere million-ton ship if its speed
was great enough to add sufficient mass. "And a good thing," added Eisele, looking worried, "that
they're not much farther away. We're going to have trouble matching their velocity now, even
though they've been decelerating for nine years.
Let's get strapped in."
From the hammock Marchand braced himself for another surge of acceleration. But it was not
that; it was something different and far worse.
It was a sausage-grinder, chewing his heart and sinews and spitting them out in strange
crippled shapes.
It was a wine-press, squeezing his throat, collapsing his heart.
It was the giddy nausea of a roller coaster, or a small craft in a typhoon. Wherever it
took them, the stars on the proffle charts slipped and slid and flowed into new positions.
Marchand, absorbed in the most crushing migraine of all but a century, hardly knew what
was happening, but he knew that in the hours they found the Tycho Brahe, after giving it a thirty-
year start.
IV
The captain of the Tycho Brahe was a graying, yellow-fanged chimp named Lafcadio, his
brown animal eyes hooded with shock, his long, stringy arms still quivering with the reaction of
seeing a ship-a ship-and human beings.
He could not take his eyes off Eisele, Marchand noted. It had been thirty years in an
ape's body for the captain. The ape was old now. Lafcadio would be thinking himself more than half
chimp already, the human frame only a memory that blurred against the everyday reminders of furry-
backed hands and splayed prehensile feet. Marchand himself could feel the ape's mind stealing
back, though he knew it was only imagination.
Or was it imagination? Asa Czerny had said the imposition would not be stable_something to
do with the phospholipids-he could not remember. He could not, in fact, remember anything with the
clarity and certainty he could wish, and it was not merely because his mind was ninety-six years
old.
Without emotion, Marchand realized that his measured months or weeks had dwindled to a few
days.
It could, of course, be the throbbing pain between his temples that was robbing him of
reason. But Marchand only entertained that thought to dismiss it; if he had courage enough to
realize that his life's work was wasted, he could face the fact that pain was only a second-order
derivative of the killer that stalked his ape's body. But it made it hard for him to concentrate.
It was through a haze that he heard the talk of the captain and his crew-the twenty-two smithed
chimpanzees who superintended the running of the Tycho Brahe and watched over the three thousand
frozen bodies in its hold. It was
over a deep, confusing roar that he heard Eisele instruct them in the transfer of the FTL unit
from his tiny ship to the great, lumbering ark that his box could make fleet enough to span the
stars in a day's journey.
He was aware that they looked on him, from time to time, with pity.
He did not mind their pity. He only asked that they allow him to live with them until he
died, knowing as he knew that that would be no long time; and he passed, while they were still
talking, into a painful, dizzying reverie that lasted until-he did not know the measure of the
time-until he found himself strapped in a hammock in the control room of the ship and felt the
added crushing agony that told him they were once again slipping through the space of other
dimensions.
"Are you all right?" said a familiar thick, slurred voice.
It was the other, last victim of his blundering, the one called Ferguson. Marchand managed
to say that he was.
"We're almost there," said Ferguson. "I thought you'd like to know. There's a planet.
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Inhabitable, they think."
From Earth the star called Groombridge 1618 was not even visible to the naked eye.
Binoculars might make it a tiny flicker of light, lost among countless thousands of farther but
brighter stars. From Groombridge 1618 Sol was not much more.
Marchand remembered struggling out of his hammock, overruling the worry on Ferguson's
simian face, to look back at the view that showed Sol. Ferguson had picked it out for him, and
Marchand looked at light that had been 15 years journeying from his home. The photons that
impinged on his eyes now had paused to drench the Earth in the colors of sunset when he was in his
seventies and his wife only a few years mourned. He did not remember getting back to his hammock.
He did not remember, either, at what moment of time someone told him about the planet they
hoped to own. It hung low around the little orange disk of Groombridge 1618-by solar standards, at
least. The captain's first approximation made its orbit quite irregular, but at its nearest
approach it would be less than ten million miles from the glowing fire-coal of its primary. Near
enough. Warm enough. Telescopes showed it a planet with oceans and forests, removing the lingering
doubts of the captain, for its orbit could not freeze it even at greatest remove from its star, or
char it at closest-or else the forest could not have grown. Spectroscopes, thermocouples,
filarometers
showed more, the instruments racing ahead of the ship, now in orbit and compelled to creep at
rocket speeds the last little inch of its journey. The atmosphere could be breathed, for the ferny
woods had flushed out the poisons and filled it with oxygen. The gravity was more than Earth's-a
drag on the first generation, to be sure, and an expense in foot troubles and lumbar aches for
many more-but nothing that could not be borne. The world was fair.
Marchand remembered nothing of how he learned this or of the landing or of the hurried,
joyful opening of the freezing crypts, the awakening of the colonists, the beginning of life on
the planet. . . he only knew that there was a time when he found himself curled on a soft, warm
hummock, and he looked up and saw sky.
V
The protuberant hairy lip and sloping brows of a chimpanzee were hovering over him.
Marchand recognized that young fellow Ferguson. "Hello," he said. "How long have I been
unconscious?"
The chimp said, with embarrassment, "Well-you haven't been unconscious at all, exactly.
You've been-" His voice trailed off.
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