Imperial Earth

And then, a thousand kilometers below, he saw the unmistakable evidence that Sirius was indeed breaking away from her orbit. The ship had been

driving 64 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 cloud scape 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 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 naive 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 as be 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 make 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 deLyrees above the Captain’s, anuounced languidly: “This is the Chief Steward. Will passengers kindly note that First Seating for lunch is at twelve hundred, Second Seating at thirteen hundred, Last Seating at fourteen hundred. Please do not attempt to make any changes without consulting me. Thank you.” A less peremptory

“Dong-ding-dong” 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.

Enioyin!~ the sensation of man-made weight which, barrina 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.

LAST WORDS

For onemomentmore, 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.