“I think I can understand,” said Veda. “I was once on the tiny Polynesian islands that are lost in the ocean. There, standing by the sea in a moment of loneliness, you are overcome by a profound sorrow that is like a nostalgic song merging with the deadly monotony of great distances. Perhaps that is a memory of the distant past, n memory of the primordial isolation of his consciousness telling man how weak and helpless he formerly was, shut up in his own little cage of a soul. The only cure was common work and common thoughts — a boat came, smaller, even, than the island, but it was enough to change the ocean. A handful of companions and a ship is a world of its own striving towards distant objectives that they can reach and subordinate to their will. The same is true of the Cosmic vessel, the spaceship. In that ship you are together with strong and brave companions! But alone in the Cosmos,” Veda shuddered, “I don’t suppose a man could stand it!”

Nisa clung still more closely to Veda.

“How well you said that, Veda! That’s why I want everything at once….”

“Nisa, I’m getting very fond of you. Now I can sense the meaning of your decision but at first I thought it was sheer madness. For a ship to be able to return from such a long flight your children will have to take your places on the return journey — two Ergs, or maybe, more.”

Nisa squeezed Veda’s hand and pressed her nose against her cheek, cold from the wind.

“Do you think you can stand it, Nisa? It’s impossibly difficult!”

“What difficulties are you talking about, Veda?” asked Erg Noor, turning round on hearing her last exclamation. “Have you come to an agreement with Darr Veter? For the last half-hour he’s been trying to persuade me to give the youth the benefit of my experience as an astronaut and not to set out on a flight from which I shall never return.”

“Has he persuaded you?”

‘‘No. My experience as an astronaut is still more necessary to pilot Lebed to her destination, up there,” said Erg pointing to the bright starless sky, to the place where Achernar should be seen, lower than the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and just below Tucana and the Hydra, “to pilot her where no ship from Earth hag ever been before!”

As Erg Noor spoke those last words the edge of the rising sun came in a burst of fire over the horizon, its rays driving away all the mystery of the white dawn.

The four friends walked down to the water. A cold breeze came towards them from the ocean and the heavy swell of the stormy Antarctic seas came in mighty surfless rollers that raced up the beach. Veda Kong looked at the steel-grey water with interest, it grew rapidly darker in the depths and in the rays of the low sun took on the violet hue of the ice.

Nisa Greet was standing beside her in a blue fur coat and round cap from which her dark auburn curls escaped in profusion. The girl held her head up in her usual pose. Darr Veter could not help but admire her but frowned as he did so.

“Veter, don’t you like Nisa?” exclaimed Veda with exaggerated indignation.

“You know I’m very fond of her,” answered Darr Veter moodily, “but at the moment she seems to me so small and fragile in comparison with….”

“With what awaits me?” asked Nisa with a note of challenge in her voice. “Are you transferring the attack from Erg to me now?”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything of the sort,” answered Darr Veter, seriously and sadly, “but my grief is natural. A beautiful creature of my wonderful Earth must disappear into Cosmic void, into the darkness and frightful cold. It’s not pity that I feel, Nisa, but grief over a loss!”

“You feel the same about it as I do,” agreed Veda. “Nisa, a bright spark of life… and dead, icy space.”

“You think I’m a delicate flower?” asked Nisa and there was a strange intonation to the question that made Veda hesitate to agree that that was what she did think.

“Who, more than I, enjoys the struggle against the cold?” and the girl took off her cap and her fur coat and shook out her auburn curls.

“What are you doing?” asked Veda, the first to guess her intention. She ran to get hold of the girl.

But Nisa ran to the edge of the cliff, threw her fur coat to Veda and stood poised over the water.

The cold waves closed over Nisa and Veda shivered as she tried to imagine the sensation of such a bath. Nisa calmly swam out to sea, cutting through the waves with strong strokes. As she rose on a crest she waved to those on shore, inviting them to join her in the water.

Veda Kong watched with growing admiration.

“Veter, Nisa would be a better mate for a polar bear than for Erg. How can you, a man of the north, admit yourself beaten?”

“I am a northerner by ancestry but still I prefer the warm southern seas,” admitted Darr Veter plaintively as he walked unwillingly towards the edge of the sea. He took off his clothes and touched the water with his toe and then, ouch! he plunged into an approaching steel-grey wave. With three powerful strokes he reached the crest of a wave and dived into the trough of another. Darr Veter’s reputation was saved by his many years of training and his habit of bathing all the year round. His breath was checked and there were red rings before his eyes. A few brisk dives and leaps in the water returned to him the ability to breathe freely. He returned shivering and blue with the cold and ran up the hill together with Nisa. A few minutes later they were enjoying the warmth of their fur clothes. It seemed that even the icy wind brought with it a breath of the coral seas.

“The more I get to know you, the more I’m convinced that Erg hasn’t made any mistake in his choice,” whispered Veda. “You, better than anybody else, will be able to encourage him in a moment of difficulty, to bring him joy and take care of him.”

Nisa’s cheeks, devoid of any sunburn, were flushed a rosy red.

At breakfast on a high crystal terrace that vibrated in the wind, Veda met the girl’s gentle, pensive glance several times. All four ate in silence, unwilling to talk as people usually are on the eve of parting for a long time.

“It’s hard to have to part from such people when you have only just got to know them,” Darr Veter suddenly exclaimed.

“Perhaps you…” began Erg Noor.

“My free time is over. It’s time for me to get up into the sky. Grom Orme’s waiting for me!”

“And it’s time for me to get down to work, too,” added Veda. “I’m going down into the depths, into a recently discovered cave, a treasure repository of the Era of Disunity.”

“Lebed will be ready to take off in the middle of next year and we’re going to start preparations in six weeks from now,” said Erg Noor, softly. “Who’s directing the Outer Stations at the moment?”

“So far Junius Antus has been, but he doesn’t want to give up his job with the memory machines and the Council has not yet confirmed the candidacy of Embe Ong, an engineer and physicist from the Labrador F station.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Few people do, he’s working for the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge on questions of megawave mechanics.”

“What may that be?”

“The powerful rhythms of the Cosmos, huge waves that spread slowly through space. The contradiction between colliding light velocities producing negative values greater than the absolute unit, for example, finds expression in the megawave. The problem has not yet been developed.”

“And what is Mven Mass doing?”

“He’s writing a book on emotions. He, too, has very little time left to himself, the Academy of Stochastics and Prognostication has appointed him to a consultative job in connection with the flight of your Lebed. As soon as they have enough material for him he’ll have to give up his book.”

“That’s a pity, it’s an important subject. It’s time we had a proper understanding of the reality and strength of the world of emotions,” said Erg Noor.