breaking away from her orbit. The ship had been driving into night on its final circuit of Titan, and the wan sunlight had been swiftly fading on the sea of clouds far below. But now a second dawn had come,
in a wide swathe across the face of the world he was soon to leave. For a hundred kilometers behind the accelerating ship, a column of incandescent plasma was splashing untold quintillions of candlepower out into space and across the carmine cloudscape of Titan. Sirius was falling sunward in greater glory than the sun itself.
"Ten minutes after ignition. All drive checks complete. We will now be increasing thrust to our
cruise level of point two gravities — two hundred centimeters second squared."
And now, for the first time, Sirius was showing what she could do. In a smooth surge of power, thrust
and weight climbed twenty-fold and held steady. The light on the clouds below was now so strong that it hurt the eye. Duncan even glanced at the still-rising disc of Saturn to see if it too showed any sign of this fierce new sun. He could now hear, faint but unmistakable, the steady whistling roar that would be the background to all life aboard the ship until the voyage ended. It must, he thought, be pure coincidence that the awesome voice of the Asymptotic Drive sounded so much like that of the old chemical rockets
that first gave men the freedom of space. The plasma hurtling away from the ship's reactor was moving a thousand times more swiftly than the exhaust gases of any rocket, even a nuclear one; and how it created that apparently familiar noise was a puzzle that would not be solved by any naïve mechanical intuition.
"We are now on cruise mode at one-fifth gee. Passengers may unstrap themselves and move about
freely — but please use caution until you are completely adapted."
That won't take me very long, thought Duncan s he unbuckled himself; the ship's acceleration gave
him his normal, Titan weight. Any residents of the Moon would also feel completely at home here, while Martians and Terrans would have a delightful sense of buoyancy.
The lights in the lounge, which had been dimmed almost to extinction for better viewing of the
spectacle outside, slowly brightened to normal. The few first-magnitude stars that had been visible
disappeared at once, and the gibbous globe of Saturn became bleached and pale, losing all its colors.
Duncan could restore the scene by drawing the black curtains around the observation alcove, but his eyes would take several minutes to readapt. He was wondering whether to made the effort when the decision
was made for him.
There was a musical "Ding-dong-ding," and a new voice, which sounded as if it came from a social stratum several degrees above the Captain's, announced languidly: "This is the Chief Steward. Will passengers kindly note that First Seating for lunch is at twelve hundred. Please do not attempt to make any changes without consulting me: Thank you." A less peremptory "Dong-ding-doing" signaled end of message.
Looking at the marvels of the universe made you hungry, Duncan instantly discovered. It was already
1150, and he was glad that he was in the First Seating. He wondered how many starving passengers were
now converging upon the Chief Steward, in search of an earlier time slot.
Enjoying the sensation of man-made weight which, barring accidents, would remain constant until the
moment of mid-voyage, Duncan went to join the rapidly lengthening line at the cafeteria. Already, his
first thirty years of life on Titan seemed to belong to another existence.
12
Last Words
For one moment more, the achingly familiar image remained frozen on the screen. Behind Marissa
and the children, Duncan could see the two armchairs of the living room, the photograph of Grandfather (as usual, slightly askew), the cover of the food-distribution hatch, the door to the main bedroom, the bookcase with the few but priceless treasures that had survived two centuries of interplanetary
wandering... This was his universe. It held everything he loved, and now he was leaving it. Already, it lay in his past.
It lay only three seconds away, yet that was enough. He had traveled a mere million kilometers in less than half a day; but the sense of separation was already almost complete. It was intolerable to wait six seconds for every reaction and every answer. By the time a reply came, he had forgotten the original
question and had started to say something else. And so the attempted conversation had quickly
degenerated into a series of stops and starts, while he and Marissa had stared at each other in dumb
misery, each waiting for the other to speak... He was glad that the ordeal was over.
The experience brought home to him, as nothing else had yet done, the sheer immensity of space. The
Solar System, he began to suspect, was not designed for the convenience of Man, and that presumptuous