"Why is it that you seem so unhappy about our being accepted as the _Zeta's_ crew?" she asked. "After all, you've been given the duty of training us to take her between stars. That's a pretty important assignment, isn't it, even for a bird colonel?" "You're right, Miss Damien," Colonel Barrett said. "My new assignment is a vital one. You must forgive me if I seemed curt and unfriendly." He paused. "I've been trying to hide my feelings, but evidently I failed. You see, Miss Damien, my wife and I had headed the previous list of volunteers--the contaminated crew." * * * * * Looking from the ports of the rocket that had brought us from Memorial Orbital Station, I'd thought von Weizsäcker Crater the most impressive sight I'd ever seen. The _Orion Zeta_ looked from our height like nothing so much as a miniature silver cocktail-shaker, glinting at the center of the vast circle of von Weizsäcker. Later, standing a few hundred feet from _Zeta's_ base, I'd found the order of impressiveness reversed. The great ship was a tower of fifteen hundred feet, blacking out the stars like a geometric mountain; while the crater's twenty-thousand-foot ringwall, so far away in all directions, was no more obtrusive than a decorative hedge. This ship, I thought, is the intelligent comet on which we'd be passengers until the day we died, some two and a fraction light-years away from home. We were guaranteed immortality, though, in our offspring. Our descendants would very literally become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, as our bodies were resurrected to vegetable life in the hydroponic tanks of the ship. We Lapins clustered close together on the moon-dust, staring up the sides of our ship. Her upper reaches were hidden by the globular bulge of the enormous thrust-chamber, where kiloton capsules of nuclear fuel would be fired, three a second, to blast us into space. In this great ship our children would be born and would die, and our grandchildren as well. From the _Zeta_, our aged great-grandchildren, limping down long ladderways to the exit-hatches on the arms of their teen-aged grandsons, would step onto the soil of a planet that circled Alpha Centauri. One hundred and twenty-five years from now, I thought, clasping the Firebird's hand in mine. So little in history, so big in human lives! One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Brooklyn Bridge had been brand-new. U.S. Grant, defrauded and cancer-ridden, was gritting his teeth against the pain to write his memoirs. President Chester A. Arthur had just signed into law a bill prohibiting polygamy in the territories. As far away as those things lay our goal.