He chuckled, and said something loving in their private code, and switched off. His curiosity about Deez' discovery rivaled his excitement about seeing his friend again; in a hundred years of exploration, the space vessels of Illyri had merely confirmed the ancient belief that Life was a rare and precious gift. They had found slugs and lichen and moss on rocky, almost-airless worlds; they had seen wild plant growth in steaming alien jungles; the sea creatures of the Planet Vosa, despite their infinite variety, proved utterly lacking in intelligence. Once, on an unnamed world in the Acheos galaxy, the great space pioneer Val-Rion unearthed the artifacts of a dead civilization and stunned the people of Illyri by his announcement. He claimed to have found written language, works of art, implements and weapons. Val-Rion was a brave man and a mighty adventurer, but a poor scholar. In the time it took Illyri's double suns to rise and set, the Archeological Commission completed a study of his findings and declared it a not-too-clever hoax, perpetrated by students of the University of Space Sciences. To the end of his days, even after some of the students came forward to admit their deception, Val-Rion persisted in his belief that the finding was authentic, and squandered his fortune in an attempt to interpret the mysterious language. He failed, of course; the "language" was nonsense. Some of the students had been sensitive enough to regret their hoax; one of them, Deez-Cor, named his ship after the late explorer. But now the _Val-Rion_ and her crew were home, after an odyssey so long overdue that the Space Commission had officially declared the expedition lost. Ky-Tann had never mourned for his missing friend. Sense told him that the _Val-Rion_ was gone, atomized by its own engines, shriveled by some alien sun or demolished on the terrain of some unfriendly world. But he refused to make the admission, even after official hope was gone; he continued to envision Deez at the controls of his ship, grinning cockily into space, eyes challenging the void. He left the spaceworks early and flew his Sked home at just above the legal airspeed. If he had expected to find his wife excited by the prospect of Deez' visit, he was mistaken. Su-Tann had a new tooth, and Devia was more elated by the sight of the little white stump in the baby's mouth than she could be by all the extra-illyrian worlds in the known galaxies. But when Deez arrived as promised, right after the second sunset, she burst into tears at the sight of him. Ky-Tann himself swallowed hard as he embraced his friend. Deez was gaunt inside his spaceman's coveralls, the bones in his face pronounced. The skin of his right cheek and neck had been burned, and the hair whitened on that side, giving him a strangely off-balance look. He grinned as Deez always grinned, but when he stopped grinning his eyes were weary. "You must rest, Deez," Devia said sorrowfully. "It must have been awful for you."