“Oh, Dad.”

“Come on, let’s go look at it.”

“Bring it here, you mean.”

He laughed, “Where’s your imagination, kid?” He dialed it over — I went straight through a lith — and we were standing at its center, near the plaque commemorating the Davydov Expedition. We circled slowly, necks craned back to look up. We inspected the broken column and its scattered pieces, then looked closely at the brief inscription.

“It’s a wonder they didn’t all sign their names,” said Father.

Then the whole scene disappeared and we were standing in the bare holo room. Father caught my forlorn expression, and laughed. “You’ll see it again before you’re through. Come on, let’s go get some ice cream.”

Soon after that, when I was just fourteen, he got a chance to go to Terra. Friends of his were buying and taking a small boat all the way back, and they needed one more crew member. Or perhaps they didn’t absolutely need one, but they wanted him to come.

At that time we had just moved back to Ganymede, and I had a job at the atmosphere station. We had lived there nearly a year, off and on, and I didn’t want to move again. I had written a book describing the deep space adventures of the Davydov expedition, and with the money I was saving I planned to publish it. (For a fee anyone can put their work in the data banks, and have it listed in the general catalogue; whether anyone will ever read it is another matter, but I had hopes, at the time, that one of the book clubs would buy the rights to list it in their index.)

“See, Dad, you’ve lived on Terra and Mars, so you want to go back there so you can be outside and all. Me, I don’t care about that stuff. I’d rather stay here.”

Father stared at me carefully, suspicious of such a sentiment, as well he might be — for as I understood much later, my disinclination to go to Terra stemmed mainly from the fact that Hjalmar Nederland had said in an interview (and implied in many articles) that he didn’t like it.

“You’ve never been there,” my father said, “else you might not say that. And it’s something you should see, take my word for it. The chance doesn’t come that often.”

“I know, Dad. But the chance has come for you, not me.”

He scowled at me. In a world with so few children, everyone is treated as an adult; and my father had always treated me as an equal, to a degree that would be difficult to describe. Now he didn’t know what to say to me. “There’s room for you too.”

“But only if you make it. Look, you’ll be back out here sailing in a couple of years. And I’ll get down there someday. Meanwhile I want to stay here. I got a job and friends.”

“Okay,” he said, and looked away. “You’re your own man, you do what you want.”

I felt bad then, but not nearly so much as I did later, when I remembered the scene and understood what I had done. Father was tired, he was going through a hard time, he needed his friends. He was about seventy then, and he had nothing to show for his efforts, and he was tired. In the old days he’d have been near the end, and I suppose he felt that way — he hadn’t yet gotten that second wind that comes when you realize that, far from being over, the story has just begun. But that second wind didn’t come from me, or with my help. And yet that, it seems to me, is what sons are for.

So he left for Terra, and I was on my own. About two years later I got a letter from him. He was in Micronesia, on an island in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. He had met some Marquesan sailors. There were fleets of the old Micronesian sailing ships, called wa’a kaulua, crisscrossing the Pacific, carrying passengers and even freight. Father had decided to apprentice himself to one of the navigators from the Carolines, one of those who navigate as they did in the ancient times, without radio or sextant, or compass, or even maps.

And that’s what he has been doing, from that day to this: forty-five years. Forty-five years of learning to gauge how fast the ship is moving by watching coconuts pass by; memorizing the distances between islands; reading the stars, and the weather; lying at the bottom of the ship during cloudy nights, and feeling the pattern of the swells to determine the ship’s direction… I think back to the hand to mouth times of our brief partnership, and I see that he has, perhaps, found what he wants to do. Occasionally I get a note from Fiji, Samoa, Oahu. Once I got one from Easter Island, with a picture of one of the statues included. The note said, “And this one’s not a fake!”

That’s the only clue I’ve gotten that he knows what I’m doing.

So I stayed on Ganymede and lived in dormitories, and worked at the atmosphere station. My way of life had been learned in the years with my father; it was all I knew, and I kept to the pattern. Dorm mates were my family, and that was never a problem. After my name came up on the hitchhiker’s list I moved out to Titan, and while waiting for a job with the weather company I joined the laborer’s guild, and swept streets, and pushed wheelbarrows, and unloaded spaceships. I liked the work, and quickly became quite strong.

I got a room in a boarding house that had advertised at the guild, and found that most of my housemates were also laborers. It was a congenial crowd: the meals were rowdy affairs, and the parties sometimes lasted through the night — our landlady loved them. One of the older boarders, a woman named Angela, liked to argue philosophy — to “discuss ideas,” as she called it. On cold nights she would call a few of us on the intercom and invite us down to the kitchen, where she would brew endless pots of tea, and badger me and three or four other regulars with questions and provocations. “Don’t you think it is well established that all of the assassinated American presidents were killed by the Rosicrucians?” she would demand, and then tell us how John Wilkes Booth had escaped the burning barn to live on, take on another identity, and shoot both Garfield and McKinley…

“And Kennedy too?” John Ashley asked. “Are you sure this isn’t Ahasuerus the Assassin you’re discussing here?” John was a Rosicrucian, you see, and was naturally incensed.

“Ahasuerus?” Angela inquired.

“The Wandering Jew.”

“Did you know that originally he wasn’t a Jew at all?” George asked. “His name was Cartaphilus, and he was Pontius Pilate’s janitor.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s get back to the point. Booth was identified by his dental records, so the body they found in the barn was definitely his. Dental records are pretty conclusive. So your whole idea falls apart right at the start, Angela.”

She would contest it every time, and we would move on to the nature of evidence, and then the nature of reality, while pot after pot of tea was brewed and consumed. I would argue Aristotle against Plato, Hume against Berkeley, Peirce against the metaphysicals, Allenton against Dolpa, and the warm kitchen echoed with our fierce talk. Many was the time when I vanquished the rest with my mishmash of empiricism, pragmatism, logical positivism, and essentialist humanism — or I thought I did, until late in the night when I went up to my tiny book-walled room on the fourth floor, and lay on my bed and stared at the books and wondered what it was all about. Could it really be true that all we knew was what our senses told us?

Once John Ashley brought down to our kitchen group a volume called Sixty-six Crystals on the Ninth Planet, by a Theophilus Jones. After he had explained it to us, I couldn’t have been more scathing. I was familiar with Jones’s earlier works, and this new argument did nothing to bolster his case. “Don’t you see how illogical he’s being there? He has to contradict the whole picture of human history, the work of hundreds of scientists using thousands of pieces of evidence, just to establish the possibility that a prehistoric highly advanced civilization existed. Which by no means would prove that they flew out to Pluto of all places to set up a temple, I mean, why would they do that?”