"According to plan, the _Quest III_ has reached its furthest point from Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more stars and stellar systems--but hope is small that any of those will prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined already. "But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead along the Milky Way. "On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away.... "Even so--by expending its remaining fuel freely, the _Quest III_ could achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey--even if enough fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory. "That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other _Quests_, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization--if the other expeditions failed also--will have reached a dangerously unstable phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from overpopulation. "Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be forgotten back there? "Would the crew be willing? I don't know--some of them still show signs of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that was once 'home' has probably been swept away.... "It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship." Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing. The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them once in translation from the ancient English.... ... for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. * * * * * Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to turn back. The stars had claimed his heart--but he was still a part of Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able to alter that.