Gingerly Kennon opened the ancient book. The sheets inside were brittle--crumbling with age--but he could make out the title U.N.S.S. Wanderer with the date of launching and a lower line which read “Ship’s Log.” Kennon was thankful for his medical training. The four years of Classical English that he had despised so much were essential now. Stumbling over unfamiliar words and phrases, he moved slowly through the log tracing the old ship’s history from pleasure craft to short-haul freight tractor to obsolescence in a space dump orbiting around a world called Heaven. There was a gap of nearly ten years indicated by a blank page before the entries resumed. “Ah--this is it!” Kennon said. “What is it?” Copper said curiously. “I can’t read the writing.” “Of course you can’t. It’s in English--a language that became obsolete during the Interregnum. I had to learn it, since most medical terminology is based on it.” “What is an Interregnum?” Copper interrupted. “I’ve never heard that word before.” “It’s a period of confusion when there is no stable government. The last one came after the Second Galactic War--but never mind that--it happened long ago and isn’t important now. The important thing that did happen was the Exodus.” “What was that?” “A religious revival and a tremendous desire to see what was happening beyond the next star. During that century men traveled wider and farther then they ever have before or since. In that outward explosion with its mixed motivations of religion and practicality, colonists and missionaries went starward to find new worlds to tame, and new races to be rescued from the darkness of idolatry and hell. Almost any sort of vehicle capable of mounting a spindizzy converter was pressed into service. The old spindizzies were soundly engineered converters of almost childlike simplicity that could and did carry ships enormous distances if their passengers didn’t care about subjective time-lag, and a little radioactivity. “And that’s what happened to this ship. According to this log it was bought by Alfred and Melissa Weygand--a missionary couple with the idea of spreading the Christian faith to the heathen.