When the story appeared in the January 1972 issue of Analog my good and gentle friend, Ben Bova, was editor of the magazine. It isn't possible to fill John Campbell's shoes, but Ben is filling his own very successfully.

The next story was written as the result of a comedy of errors. In January 1971, as a result of a complicated set of circumstances, I promised Bob Silverberg that I would write a short story for an anthology of originals he was preparing.[You may be surprised that I don't explain the complicated set of circumstances, since I am such a blabbermouth, but Bob finds my version a little on the offensive side, so we’ll let it go.]

I wrote the short story but it turned out not to be a short story. To my enormous surprise, I wrote a novel, THE GODS THEMSELVES (Doubleday, 1972), my first science fiction novel in fifteen years (if you don't count FANTASTIC VOYAGE, which wasn't entirely mine).

It wasn't a bad novel at all, since it won the Hugo and the Nebula, and showed the science fiction world that the old man still had it. Nevertheless, it put me in a hole since there was the short story I had promised Bob. I wrote another, therefore, TAKE A MATCH, and it appeared in Bob's anthology New Dimensions II (Doubleday, 1972).

Take A Match

Space was black; black an around in every direction. There was nothing to be seen; not a star.

It was not because there were no stars-

Actually the thought that there might be no stars, literally no stars, had chilled Per Hanson's vitals. It was the old nightmare that rested just barely subliminally beneath the skin of every deep-spacer's brain.

When you took the Jump through the tachyon-universe, how sure were you where you would emerge? The timing and quantity of the energy input might be as tightly controlled as you liked, and your Fusionist might be the best in space, but the uncertainty principle reigned supreme and there was always the chance, even the inevitability of a random miss.

And by way of tachyons, a paper-thin miss might be a thousand light-years.

What, then, if you landed nowhere; or at least so distant from anywhere that nothing could possibly ever, guide you to knowledge of your own position and nothing, therefore, could guide you back to anywhere?

Impossible, said the pundits. There was no place in the universe from which the quasars could not be seen, and from those alone you could position yourself. Besides, the chance that in the course of ordinary Jumps mere chance would take you outside the galaxy was only one in about ten million, and to the distance of, say, the Andromeda galaxy or Maffei 1, perhaps one in a quadrillion.

Forget it, said the pundits.

So when a ship comes out of its Jump, and returns from the weird paradoxes of the faster-than-light tachyons to the healthy we-know-it-all of an the tardyons from protons down to protons up, there must be stars to be seen. If they are not seen nevertheless, you are in a dust cloud; it is the only explanation. There are smoggy areas in thegalaxy, or in any spiral galaxy, as once there were onEarth, when it was the sole home of humanity, rather than the carefully preserved, weather-controlled, life-preserve museum-piece it now was.

Hanson was tall and gloomy; his skin was leathery; and what he didn't know about the hyperships that ploughed the length and breadth of the galaxy and immediately neighboring regions-always barring the Fusionists' mysteries-was yet to be worked out. He was alone, now, in the Captain's Corner, as he liked to be. He had at hand all that was needed to be connected with any man or woman on board, and with the results of any device and instrument, and it pleased him to be the unseen presence.

– Though now nothing pleased him. He closed contact and said, “What else, Strauss?”

“We're in an open cluster,” said Strauss's voice. (Hanson did not turn on the visual attachment; it would have meant revealing his own face and he preferred his look of sick worry to be held private.)

“At least,” Strauss continued, “it seems to be an open cluster, from the level of radiation we can get in the far infrared and microwave regions. The trouble is we just can't pinpoint the positions well enough to locate ourselves. Not a hope.”

“Nothing in visible light?”

“Nothing at all; or in the near-infrared, either. The dust cloud is as thick as soup.”

“How big is it?”

“No way of telling.”

“Can you estimate the distance to the nearest edge?”

“Not even to an order of magnitude. It might be a light-week. It might be ten light-years. Absolutely no way of telling.”

“Have you talked to Viluekis?”

Strauss said briefly, “Yes!”

“What does he say?”

“Not much. He's sulking. He's taking it as a personal insult, of course.”

“Of course.” Hanson sighed noiselessly. Fusionists were as childish as children and because theirs was the romantic role in deep space, they were indulged. He said, “Isuppose you told him that this sort of thing is unpredictable and could happen at any time.”

“I did. And he said, as you can guess-'Not to Viluekis.' “

“Except that it did, of course. Well, I can't speak to him. Nothing I say will mean anything at all except that I'm trying to pull rank and then we'll get nothing further out of him. -He won't start the scoop?”

“He says he can't. He says it will be damaged.”

“How can you damage a magnetic field!”

Strauss grunted. “Don't say that to him. He'll tell you there's more to a fusion tube than a magnetic field and then say you're trying to downgrade him.”

“Yes, I know. -Well, look, put everyone and everything on the cloud. There must be some way to make some sort of guess as to the direction and distance of the nearest edge.” He broke connection.

Hanson frowned into the middle distance, then.

Nearest edge! It was doubtful if at the ship's speed (relative to the surrounding matter) they dared expend the energy required for radical alteration of course.

They had moved into the Jump at half-light speed relative to the galactic nucleus in the tardyon-universe, and they emerged from the Jump at (of course) the same speed. There always seemed an element of risk in that. After all, suppose you found yourself, on the return, in the near neighborhood of a star and heading toward it at half-light speed.

The theoreticians denied the possibility. To get dangerously close to a massive body by way of a Jump was not reasonably to be expected. So said the pundits. Gravitational forces were involved in the Jump and for the transition from tardyon to tachyon and back to tardyon those forces were repulsive in nature. In fact, it was the random effect of a net gravitational force that could never be worked out in complete detail that accounted for a good deal of the uncertainty in the Jump.

Besides, they would say, trust to the Fusionist's instinct. A good Fusionist never goes wrong.

Except that this Fusionist had Jumped them into a cloud.

– Oh, that! It happens all the time. It doesn't matter. Do you know how thin most clouds are. You won't even know you're in one.

(Not this cloud, O Pundit.)

– In fact, clouds are good for you. The scoops don't have to work so long or so hard to keep fusion going and energy storing.

(Not this cloud, O Pundit.)

– Well, then, rely on the Fusionist to think of a way out.

(But if there was no way out?)

Hanson shied away from that last thought. He tried hard not to think it. -But how do you not think a thought that is the loudest thing in your head?

Henry Strauss, ship's astronomer, was himself in a mood of deep depression. If what had taken place were undiluted catastrophe, it might be accepted. No one on the hyperships could entirely close his eyes to the possibility of catastrophe. You were prepared for that, or you tried to be. -Though it was worse for the passengers, ofcourse.