A year passed. Two. Malenson knew he was safe now. No patrol ship could follow his aimless wanderings. But the ten year statute of limitations remained uppermost in his mind. He realized that he was assigning an arbitrary value to his days and months, thus he decided that he must stay in space for the full time allowed by his supplies. He could not risk a miscalculation. * * * * * The solitude did not affect him. Malenson had no desire for companionship. And the library of the ship absorbed much of his time. He read great tomes and thin monographs, passionate novels and cold texts. And he could _feel_ time slipping by. At the end of his fourth calculated year, Malenson noticed his feverishness. It was a slight thing. He felt perfectly well. But his temperature stood at 100.6. His curiosity aroused, he confined himself to the ship's infirmary for a month. Except for a periodical trip to the control room for a star sight, he remained under the UV lamps. He took large doses of streptomycin XXV. But he did not feel in the least alarmed when the fever refused to leave him. He merely adapted himself.... In his eighth year in space Malenson abandoned any hope of finding a habitable planet. He had located five planetary systems among some nine hundred stars. But none of the globes were even remotely suitable for the support of humanoid life. Mostly they were great gassy worlds of frozen methane and ammonia. The few low gravity planets were generally so close to their primaries as to be parched wastelands with surface temperatures near the melting point of lead. It was at this point in his odyssey that Malenson's thoughts began to drift homeward. Many sleeps were spent in calculations and trial and error navigation before the ship's nose was turned inward toward the center of the galactic lens. Finally, Malenson was ready to begin the long voyage home. The loneliness had changed him, he knew. Not that he had once missed the nearness of mere people. Malenson felt himself above such a need. And there was the money in the hold to keep him company. More and more of his time was spent down there, fondling his wealth. The feel of the coins and the crisp irridium certificates more than made up for the solitude. Uncounted hours would slip by while he sat contentedly in the midst of his loot ... or was it days? Malenson had stopped trying to discover. The library had lost its appeal for him now. He had finished the majority of the books now, and strangely the reading tapes and recordings seemed to drag unbearably. It was getting so that he could hardly understand the mouthings that emanated from the speakers, and the vision screens were turgid masses of dark, muddy colors. Something, he decided, had gone wrong with the projection apparatus.