to have a human to shoot the bull with.
Sit down and make yourself comfortable and have a bite to eat."

* * * * *

Looking behind him, Garth saw that a table and chair had appeared in
the otherwise unfurnished room.

"The chair was made for people built just a little different than
you," said The Visitor. "You may have to turn it back-to-front and
straddle it to keep your tail out of the way. The food on the table's
good, though, and so's the drink. Have a snack while I talk."

"Thank you, my Lord," said Garth, lifting his long tail with its
paddlelike tip out of the way and sitting down carefully.

"Comfortable?" asked The Visitor. "Well, then. I was on a routine
flight from old Earth to a star you've never heard of, a good many
light-years from here. We had pulled away from TransLunar Station on
ion drive and headed for deep space. They trusted me, all those men
and women, both passengers and crew. They knew that I was careful and
accurate. I'd made a thousand flights and had never had any trouble.

"In six hours of flight, we were clear enough from all planetary
masses and my velocity vector was right on the nose, so I shifted over
into hyper-space. You won't ever see hyper-space, my boy, and your
kids and their kids won't see it for another two hundred years or
more, but it's the most beautiful sight in the Universe. It never
grows old, never grows tiresome."

His thin voice faded away for a few moments.

"It's a sight I haven't seen for seven thousand years, boy," he said
softly, "and the lack of it has been a deep hurt for every minute of
all that time. I wish I could tell you what it's like, but that can't
be done. You will never know that beauty." He was silent again, for
long minutes.

"The long, lazy, lovely days of subjective time passed," he said
finally, "while we slid light-years away from Earth. Everything worked
smoothly, the way it always did, until suddenly, somehow, the
near-impossible happened. My hydrogen fusion power sphere started to
oscillate critically and wouldn't damp. I had only seconds of time in
which to work.

"In the few seconds before the sphere would have blown, turning all of
us into a fine grade of face powder, I had to find a star with a
planet that would support human life, bring the ship down out of
hyper-space with velocity matched closely enough so that I could land
on the planet, and jettison the sphere that was going wild.

"Even wh