There were a thousand things he wanted to tell her. They were all the things he had thought about as he followed the frontier. If he could get it all down right, he could make her see why he had to follow the frontier as long as there was anything left inside of him. Maybe the rest of the people out here were that way, too. Maybe he had seen it in Doris' eyes tonight. Maybe that was why society broke down in the stars and civilization came only when men and women like him were gone. He did not want to know how the rest felt. He did not know whether it would be more terrifying to learn that he was alone, or that he was not alone. But just for tonight, he could tell the alien creature beside him. It would be safe to tell her--if the idea had not rusted inside of him so long that there were no longer any words to fit it. But first he had to make her see his home planet and the great cities and the landscaped valleys and the majestic mountains and the people. He had to make her see the vast sweep of the explorers who first carried the race to a million planets, who devised faster-than-light ships and metals to make the ships out of, metals to hold their forms in the crucible beyond normal space. He had to make her see the colonists who tied all the world together with spans of steel commerce and then moved on in ever-widening circles. He wanted to give her the whole picture. Then he wanted to explain the surge, the restlessness of the men at the frontier. Different men, he thought; from the womb of civilization, but unlike their brothers. The men who pushed out and out. Searching, always searching. He was afraid to find out if their reasons were the same as his. For himself, he had seen a thousand planets and a thousand new life-forms. But it was not enough. There were the vast, blank, empty, indifferent reaches of space beyond him, and that was what drove him on. This he wanted to say to Hertha: No matter how far you go, the thing that gets you is that there's nothing that cares; no matter how far, the thing is that nothing cares; the thing is that nothing cares. It gets you. And you have to go on because some day, somewhere, there may be--something. But he lost the trend of his thoughts completely, and he had another drink. "Decent people come out here...." What was he going to say about decent people? "Stupid!" he cried, slapping her in the face. She rubbed her cheek. "Stupid?" He wanted to cry, for he had not known that he was brutal. "Can't you see?" he screamed, and it was necessary to explain it to her; and then it was not necessary. "You're like the awful, indifferent, mindless blackness of space, unreasoning!" "Unreasoning," she repeated carefully. "You're _Hertha_!" "I'm Hertha," she said. * * * * * The period of calmness that returned after the fever was crystal and lucid, preceding, he knew, a severe, prolonged seizure. "I'm afraid," she told him, shivering, "but I will go."