But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears were forgotten and exaltation prevailed. Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment. He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do _you_ feel, Lesra?" She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer.... He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years." "That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone by--_there_--and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world we left, the world we knew and fitted in...." The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't worry. Things may have changed--but we'll manage." But his face had hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge. There's a new course to be set now--for Earth." He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes gleamed with unshed tears. Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to Earth. Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted before we get that far." Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?" Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any of the other _Quests_ returned successful, or if they returned at all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's possible--not likely, though--that something has happened to break civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been forgotten altogether." * * * * *