The deceleration phase of an interstellar journey is normally passed in cold sleep. While the human passengers are unconscious, on-board computers perform the task of matching velocity and position with the target. They awaken the sleepers only upon final arrival.

The alternatives to cold sleep are limited: a move to normal space, followed by full consciousness during lengthy deceleration and final maneuvers; or an immobilized and dizzying ride in S-space. Neither is recommended.… Without discussion, Sy had chosen cold sleep during their approach to Sol. He was planning on using suspended animation techniques extensively in his future travels, and he was keen to gain more experience with them as soon as possible. Peron and Elissa had far more difficulty making a decision. After dreaming for so long of a return to Sol and to Earth, the idea that they would close their eyes, then suddenly find themselves there, was not at all attractive. It missed the whole point of the trip. Earth was a legend, and every experience connected with it should be savored. They had studied the Solar System during the journey from Sector Headquarters, and now they wanted to witness the whole approach. But that meant over a month of subjective travel time during deceleration, or a nauseating hour of slowing and orbit adjustment, tightly strapped in and unable to move a muscle…

They had discussed it over and over, and at last made their decision. Now they lay side by side, tightly cocooned in restraining nets. As a special favor, Olivia Ferranti had placed screen displays so that Peron and Elissa would have frequency-adjusted views both ahead of and behind the ship as it neared Sol. They had entered the nets before deceleration began, when they were still nearly fifty billion kilometers from Sol and the Sun was nothing more than an exceptionally bright star on the displays.

At first, they both felt that all their studies would be wasted. The Sun had grown steadily bigger and more brilliant, gyrating across the sky as their trajectory responded to the System-wide navigation control system. But it looked disappointingly like any other star. In the last five minutes of travel they caught a glimpse of Saturn, and had one snapshot look at the ring structure; but it was a long way off, and there was little detail to be seen of surface or satellites. All the other planets remained invisible.

They could not talk to each other, but they independently decided that the nausea and discomfort were definitely not worth it. Until, quite suddenly, Earth showed in the screen off to one side. The planet rapidly swung to loom directly ahead for the last stages of their approach.

And their sufferings were suddenly of no consequence.

They had been conditioned by the ship’s stored viewing tapes to expect a blue-green clouded marble and attendant moon, hanging isolated in space. Instead, the whole sphere of Earth shone girdled by a necklace of bright points of light, whirling around the central orb like an electron cloud about the central nucleus. There were so many of them that they created the illusion of a bright, continuous cloud, a glittering halo about the planet’s equator. As they watched, smaller units darted like fireflies between Earth and the orbiting structures.

Space stations. They were at all heights, some almost grazing the atmosphere, an entire dense ring at synchronous altitude, others wandering out beyond the Moon. And to be visible from this distance, many of them must be kilometers across. Peron and Elissa were looking at the result of twenty-five thousand years of continuous development of Earth orbit. The asteroid-moving and mining operations that began at the dawn of Earth’s space age had yielded a rich harvest. Before Peron and Elissa had more than a minute or two to absorb the scene, they were homing in on one of the larger structures. It was in synchronous orbit, hovering above a great landmass shaped like a broad arrowhead. A shining filament extended downward from the station toward Earth, finally to vanish from sight within the atmosphere.

Their final approach was compressed to an anxious few S-seconds of blurred motion, twisting a way in through a moving labyrinth of other spacecraft and connecting cables and tunnels. All at once they were docked, and the ship motionless. They were trying to release themselves from the cocoons when a man materialized in the cabin and stood looking down at them.

He was short, pudgy, gray-haired, and precisely dressed, with elaborate jewelled rings on most of his fingers. He wore a flower in his lapel — the first blossom of any kind that they had seen since they left Pentecost. The stern look on his face was contradicted by a pattern of laughter lines around his button-bright eyes and small mouth.

“Well,” he said briskly, after a thorough inspection of Peron and Elissa. “You look normal enough. I’ve been waiting for your arrival with some interest. Neither of you appears to be quite the degenerate monster that Sector reports suggest, and Olivia Ferranti speaks well of you. So let us proceed on the basis of that assumption. Command. Remove the cocoons.”

The restraining nets vanished, and the little man calmly extended a hand to help Elissa to her feet.

“My name is Jan de Vries,” he said. “It is my melancholy duty to approve — or veto — all trips to and from Earth by certain persons living in S-space. Do you still wish to visit Earth, as you had requested?”

“Of course we do,” said Elissa. “Will you be going down there with us?” De Vries looked pained. “Hardly. My dear young lady, my duties are various and sometimes odd, but they have not to date included the function of tour guide. I can, however, dispose of certain formalities for you that would normally be handled otherwise. When were you last in normal space?”

“Not since we were on the way to Sector Headquarters,” said Peron. He was becoming increasingly uneasy. He had been preparing himself for a great clash with the secret rulers of the Immortals, and instead here he was chatting with some apparent bureaucrat.

“Very good,” said de Vries. “Then you can be prepared at once for your visit to Earth. By the way, you will find that the robot services ignore your commands until we have your voice patterns keyed into the station’s computer. That is part of a larger data transfer. It will be complete upon your return here, and we will talk again then. But for the moment you will need my assistance. Command: prepare them for the standard Earth visit.”

“But we don’t — “ Peron stopped. De Vries had disappeared. Then the walls spun about Peron and he caught a glimpse of a long corridor. As the scene steadied again he felt a sharp pain in his thigh. Suddenly it was as though he were back on Whirlygig, experiencing that familiar and disquieting fall into blackness. His last thought was an angry one. It wouldn’t happen again, he had sworn — but it was happening now! Things were out of control. And he had no idea what came next.

Peron and Elissa emerged from the suspense tanks together, into a room filled with a noisy, excited crowd. They knew at once that they were again in normal space — S-space couldn’t offer the sharpness of vision or the bright colors. There was an exhilarating taste to the air, and a feeling of well-being running through their veins. They looked around them curiously.

A loud, metallic voice was booming out directions. “Single file into the cars, please. Take your seats, and don’t overload them — there will be another one along every ten minutes.”

The crowd took little notice, pushing and surging forward down a long broad hall toward a loading area.