Eventually the astronomers who tried to shift the title to the dim companion were all dead and the colonists got their way. Just as well, because that dim star, while a hair closer today, will soon be farther awayÄjust hold your breath a few millennia. Being "ballistically linked" it averages the same distance from Earth as the other two in the triplet.

Look at the second sketch, the one with "right ascension" across the top and "light-years" down the side.

I must be the only person out of the hundreds in this ship who did not know that our first stop on this voyage would not be Proxima. Mr. Lopez (who was showing me the bridge) looked at me as if I were a retarded child who had just made another unfortunate slip. (But that did not matter because he is not interested in my brain.) I didn't dare explain to him that I had been snatched aboard at the last moment; it would have blown my cover. However, Miss Rich Bitch is not required to be bright.

The ship usually stops at Proxima both going and coming. Mr. Lopez explained that this time they had little cargo and only a few passengers for Proxima, not enough to pay for the stop. So that cargo and those passengers were put off until the Maxwell warps next month; this trip the Forward will call at Proxima on the way home, with cargo and, possibly, passengers from the other seven ports. Mr. Lopez explained (and I did not understand) that traveling many light-years in space costs almost nothingÄmostly rations for passengersÄbut stopping at a planet is terribly expensive, so any stop has to be worthwhile on the balance sheet.

So here is where we are going this trip (see second sketch again):

first to Outpost, then to Botany Bay, then to The Realm, on to Midway, Halcyon, Forest, Fiddler's Green, Proxima (at last!), and on home to Earth.

I'm not unhappy about itÄquite the contrary! I will get rid of this "most valuable cargo in the galaxy" less than a month after warping away from Stationary StationÄthen the whole long trip home will be a real tourist trip. Fun! No responsibilities. Lots of time to look over these colonies squired around by eager young officers who smell good and are always polite. If Friday (or Miss Rich Bitch) can't have fun with that setup, it is time to cremate me; I'm dead.

Now see the third sketch, declination across the top, light-years down the side. This one makes the routing seem quite reasonableÄ but if you look back at the second sketch, you will see that the leg from Botany Bay to Outpost, which seems on the third sketch to skim the photosphere of Forest's sun, in fact misses it by many lightyears. Picturing this voyage actually calls for three dimensions. You can take the data from the sketches and from the table below and punch it into your terminal and pull out a three-dimensional hologram; it all makes sense seen that way. There is one on the bridge, frozen so that you can examine it in detail. Mr. Lopez, who made these sketches (all but Joe Centaur and the sad wolf) warned me that a flat plot simply could not portray three-dimensional cosmonautics. But it helps to think of these three sketches as plan view, side view, and front elevation, as in visualizing a house from its plans; that is exactly analogous.

When Mr. Lopez gave me a printout of this table, he warned me

that the data are of about grammar-school accuracy. If you aim a telescope by these coordinates, you will find the right star, but for science and for cosmonautics you need more decimal places, and then correct for "epoeh"Äa fancy way of saying you must bring the data up to date because each star moves. Outpost's sun moves the least; it just about keeps up with the traffic in our part of the galaxy. But the star of Fiddler's Green (Nu~2] Lupi) has a vector of 138 kilometers per secondÄenough that Fiddler's Green will have moved more than 1. 5 billion kilometers between two visits five months apart by the Forward. This can be worrisomeÄaccording to Mr. Lopez it can worry a skipper right out of his job because whether or not a trip shows a profit depends on how closely a master can bring his ship out of hyperspace to a port planet without hitting something (such as a star!). Like driving an APV blindfolded!

But I will never pilot a hyperspaceship and Captain van Kooten has a solid, reliable look to him. I asked him about it at dinner that night. He nodded. "Ve find it. Only once haf ye had to send some of de boys down in a landing boat to buy someting at a bakery and read de signs."

I didn't know whether he expected me to laugh or to pretend to believe him, so I asked what they bought at the bakery. He turned to the lady on his left and pretended not to hear me. (The bakeshop in the ship makes the best pastry I have ever tasted and should be padlocked.)

Captain van Kooten is a gentle, fatherly manÄyet I have no tron~ ble visualizing him with a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other, holding off a mob of mutinous cutthroats. He makes the ship feel safe.

Shizuko is not the only guard placed on me. I think I have identified four more and I am wondering if I have them all. Almost certainly not, as I have sometimes looked around and not spotted any of themÄyet the drill seems to be to have someone near me at all times.

Paranoid? It sounds like it but I'm not. I am a professional who has stayed alive through always noticing anything offbeat. This ship has six hundred and thirty-two first-class passengers, some sixty-odd

uniformed officers, crew also in uniforms, and the cruise director's staff of hosts and hostesses and dancing partners and entertainers and such. The latter dress like passengers but they ~re young and they smile and they make it their business to see to it that the passengers are happy.

The passengers: In this ship a first-class passenger under age seventy is a rarityÄme, for example. We have two teen-age girls, one teen-age boy, two young women, and a wealthy couple on their honeymoon. All others in first class are candidates for a geriatrics home. They are very old, very rich, and extremely self-centeredÄ save for a bare handful who have managed to grow old without turning sour.

Of course none of these old dodderers are my guards, and neither are the youngsters. The cruise staff I got sorted out in the first fortyeight hours, whether they were musicians or whatever. I might have suspected that some of the younger officers had been assigned to watch me were it not that all of them stand duty watches, usually eight hours out of twenty-four, and therefore can't take on another full-time job. But my nose does not play me false; I know why they follow me around. I don't get this much attention dirtside but there is an acute shortage of beddable young females in this shipÄthirty young male officers versus four young, single females in first class, other than Friday. With those odds a nubile female would have to have very bad breath indeed not to carry a train like a comet.

But, with all these categories accounted for, I found some men not accounted for. First class? Yes, they eat in the Ambrosia Room. Business travelers? MaybeÄbut according to the first assistant purser, business travelers go second class, not as swank but just as comfortable, at half the cost.