"Fifty light-years anyway. Maybe two hundred. I can't tell. I think she's holding for dear life to a critical. If she loses it, we lose her for good."
"If she's lost, no, sir. She'll just keep on out there until--"
"Until her comptometers break down, until her drive is exhausted, until she makes a mistake. Until eternity."
"Sir," Kramer broke in. "Three minutes since pick-up. Her trajectory's whacky. She's sort of side-slipping in, but at the speed she's making, she's going to miss Barrier just by the width of her skin. She'll tangent off sure." Kramer thrust a hastily prepared three dimensional plot-check forward.
"To bring her in we've got to go out and pick her up, sir," Cragin said.
"Here, sir." Grimes came up with a similar plot-check, described on a regulation ship's form. The senior Patrol officer compared the two, the flight plan and the running trajectory laid out by Kramer, and Cragin's teeth glinted through his lips as they went slack in amazement.
"God, sir, that's impossible. It _ends_ at the square of light-speed!"
"Fowler Griffin is--was--one of Earth's topmost scientists. His work is beyond question, Mister Cragin. More so, perhaps, than that of any other. Your irreverence is out of order."
"Plot the difference between Griffin's planned return and the trajectory Kramer just tracked. Drive-room!"
The sleek Patrol ship quivered with the added thrust of her auxiliaries; her needle-tip nose swung a half-minute to her own three-quarter starboard axis.
"Then take over the panel, Mister Cragin. Kramer! Attempt return communication!"
Cragin's thin, sensitive fingers flicked over the flight control panel with a dexterity and familiarity that is born only of a million light years of intimate, sometimes desperate familiarity, and the Patrol ship's complex, high-strung nervous system responded as though it were a part of the man who held its throbbing life in harness.
To Randolph Cragin, born under a dying sun and of a mother dead from desert-parch even as her labor ceased, there had never been life worth the living anywhere but in the cold, clean loneliness of Deep Space.
He had bought odd second-hand parts from a junk dealer to build the first craft he had ever flown; he had made the moon with it before its jets blew and left him with the gray scar that ran from his left temple to the point of his square chin. He had been sixteen then, and too old to scare, too young to deter. From then on, there had been work in a lunar mine to pay for his next ship; then prospecting the asteroids to pay for a better, faster one. There were five years of hauling black muck from Venus and water crystal from the low ridges of Mars before he had the money he needed to build the ship that would take him into Deep Space for the first time, and a couple of years after that doing routine commission jobs of surveying outlying planetoid belts for the government to earn enough to keep his drive alive, and when he thought of it, his body.