As it developed, he didn't get all the way there. En route he was arrested and placed in one of the ship's prison cages. It was there that Gourdy came to him. His coal-black eyes stared at Lesbee through the bars. He said grimly, 'All right, Mr. Lesbee, tell me all about the speed of this ship.'

Lesbee took the chance that his conversation with Miller had not been monitored – and pretended to be totally unaware of what Gourdy was talking about. It seemed to him that his only hope was to convince this terrible little man that he was absolutely innocent.

Gourdy was taken aback. And because the entire situation was so fantastic, he was half-inclined to believe Lesbee. He could imagine that a technician had simply not grasped what had happened.

But he also found himself inexorably analyzing the other possibility: that Lesbee had known the facts and had planned to stop the ship, get off, and leave those who remained aboard to solve the mystery for themselves. The mere contemplation of it enraged him.

'O.K. for you!' he said balefully. 'If you won't talk, I have no alternative but to treat you like a liar and a saboteur.'

But he returned to his cabin, shocked and unhappy, no longer a well and confident man, conscious that the new development threatened him only and that he must act quickly.

With his strong sense of personal danger, Gourdy let his feelings guide him. The need to take all necessary precautions – that was first. And so, as the sleep period began, he led an expedition down to the lower decks and arrested eighteen persons, including Miller and Tellier. All eighteen were placed under separate lock and key.

Gourdy spent the second hour of the sleep period in a sleepless soul-searching, and there was presently no doubt in his mind that his actions – particularly the executions – had been geared to a thirty-year journey.

'I might as well face the truth,' he thought. 'I can't take the chance of returning to Earth.'

As he planned it then, he would have Lesbee slow the ship to a point where it would require thirty years to get to the solar system. Then, when he had worked out a good propaganda reason for doing so, he would execute Lesbee, Miller, Mindel, and the other real suspects. The reason, of course, would be basically that they were plotting to take over the ship, but the details needed to be carefully thought about so that people would either believe the story or at least be half-inclined to believe it.

He was still lying there an hour later, considering exactly what he would do and say when, under him, the ship jumped as if it had been struck. There followed the unmistakable sensation of acceleration.

Lesbee had been tensely awake as the fateful hour approached. On the dot the forward surge caught him and pressed him back against the belt that partly encased his body. According to his programming, the preliminary gap between acceleration and artificial gravity would be three g's, enough to hold everyone down until they crossed light-speed.

He felt a sickening fear as he realized that at this very instant time and space must already be telescoping at an astronomical rate.

'Hurry, hurry!' he thought weakly.

Although there was no way of sensing it that he knew of, since both acceleration and artificial gravity were increasing together, he braced himself for the fantastically compressed period light-inches before and beyond light-speed. His hope was that it would pass by in a tiny fraction of an instant.

The bracing action was like a signal. As he lay there, expecting agony, he had a fantasy that was gone so quickly that he forgot what it was. Then another fantasy, a face – never seen before – instantly gone. Then he began to see images. They were all going backward: himself and other people aboard, actually walking backward as on a film in reverse. The scenes were fleeting; thousands streamed by and, presently, there were images from his childhood.

The pictures faded into confusion. He was aware of a floating sensation, not pleasant, but not the agony he had expected. And then -

He must have blacked out.

22

Averill Hewitt hung up the phone, and repeated aloud the message he had just been given: 'Your spaceship, Hope of Man, is entering the atmosphere of Earth.'

The words echoed and re-echoed in his mind, a discordant repetition. He staggered to a couch and lay down.

Other words began to join the whirlpool of meaning and implication that was the original message: After six years... the Hope of Man... after six years, when by even his minimum estimates he had pictured it a good fifth of the way to the Centaurus suns... re-entering the atmosphere of Earth...

Lying there Hewitt thought: 'And for ten years I've accepted Astronomer John Lesbee's theory that our sun is due to show some of the characteristics of a Cepheid Variable – within months now!'

Worse, he had spent the greater part of his huge, inherited fortune to build the giant vessel. The world had ridiculed the West's richest sucker; Joan had left him, taking the children; and only the vast, interstellar colonizing plan had finally won him government support for the journey itself -

All that was now totally nullified by the return of the Hope of Man, on the eve of the very disaster it had been built to avoid.

Hewitt thought hopelessly, 'What could have made John Lesbee turn back-?'

His bitter reverie ended, as the phone began to ring. He climbed off the couch, and as he went to answer, he thought, 'I'll have to go aboard and try to persuade them. As soon as they land, I'll-'

This time, his caller was an official of the Space Patrol. Hewitt listened, trying to grasp the picture the other was presenting. It had proved impossible to communicate with those aboard.

'We've had men in space suits at all the observation ports, Mr. Hewitt, and on the bridge. Naturally, they couldn't see in, since it's one-way-vision material. But they pounded on the metal for well over an hour, and received no response.'

Hewitt hesitated. He had no real comment to make, but said finally, 'How fast is the ship going?'

'It's overtaking the earth at about a thousand miles an hour.'

Hewitt scarcely heard the reply. His mind was working faster now. He said, 'I authorize all expense necessary to get inside. I'll be there myself in an hour.'

As he headed for his private ship, he was thinking, 'If I can get inside, I'll talk to them. I'll convince them. I'll force them to go back.'

He felt remorseless. It seemed to him that for the first time in the history of the human race, any means of compulsion was justified.

Two hours later, he said, 'You mean, the airlock won't open?'

He said it incredulously, while standing inside the rescue ship, Molly D, watching a huge magnet try to unscrew one of the hatches of the Hope of Man. Reluctantly, Hewitt drew his restless mind from his own private purposes.

He felt impatient, unwilling to accept the need to adjust to the possibility that there had been trouble aboard. He said urgently, 'Keep trying! It's obviously stuck. That lock was made to open easily and quickly.'

He was aware that the others had let him take control of rescue operations. In a way, it was natural enough. The Molly D was a commercial salvage vessel, which had been commandeered by the Space Patrol. Now that Hewitt was aboard, the representative of the patrol, Lieutenant Commander Mardonell, had assumed the role of observer. And the permanent captain of the vessel took instructions, as a matter of course, from the man paying the bills.

More than an hour later, the giant magnet had turned the round lock-door just a little over one foot. Pale, tense, and astounded, Hewitt held counsel with the two officers.