It did not lift. They sat weightless and disoriented while the gyros precessed and the ship swung end by end and the steady pressure of the Feeling mounted up and up without relief. "It gets worse every hour," Vaughn said raggedly. "It's not a matter of time," Maxon said. "It's the distance. The Feeling grows stronger as we get farther from home." They sat for another time without talk, feeling the distance build up behind them and sensing through the unwindowed hull of the ship what the emptiness outside must be like. The ship was no longer an armored projectile bearing them snugly and swiftly to a first planetfall. It was a walnut shell without strength or direction. In the end they talked out their problem because there was nothing else they could do. "We're men," Maxon said, not as if he must convince himself but as if it were a premise that had to be made, a starting point for all logic. "We're reasoning creatures. If the trouble lies in ourselves we can find its source and its reason for being." He picked Vaughn first because Vaughn had been first to sense the wrongness and because the most sensitive link in a chain is also predictably its weakest. "Try," Maxon said. "I know there are no words to describe this thing, but get as close as you can." * * * * * Vaughn tried. "It isn't home-sickness. It's a different thing altogether from nostalgia. It's not just fear. I'm afraid--not of any _thing_, just afraid in the way a child is afraid of falling in his dreams, when he's really had no experience with falling because he's never fallen more than a few inches in his life.... When I think of my wife, it's not the same at all as if I were just in some far corner of the Earth with only land and water between us. Even if I were marooned on an uncharted island somewhere with no hope of seeing home again, I wouldn't feel this way. There wouldn't be this awful _pulling_." Ragan agreed with Vaughn that the Feeling was essentially a _pull_, but beyond agreement could add nothing. Ragan had covered the world without forming a tie to hold him; one place was as good as another and he felt no loss for any particular spot on Earth. "I only want to be back there," he said simply. "Anywhere but here." "I was born on a farm in New England," Walraven said. "Out of the land, like my father and his people before him. I'm part of that land, no matter how far from it I go, because everything I am came from it. I feel uprooted. I don't belong here." _Uprooted_ was the key for which they had hunted.