ean black frame in place
and beat one fist softly into the palm of another. "Yes, it is an
emotional issue," he said, the words carving the thoughts to shape.
"Logic has nothing to do with it. There are some who want so badly to go
to Rustum and be free, or whatever they hope to be there, that they'll
dice with their lives for the privilege--and their wives' and children's
lives. Others went reluctantly, against their own survival instincts,
and now that they think they see a way of retreat, something they can
justify to themselves, they'll fight any man who tries to bar it. Yes.
It's a ghastly situation.

"One way or another, the decision has got to be made soon. And the facts
can't be hidden. Every deepsleeper must be wakened and nursed to health
by someone now conscious. The word will pass, year after year, always to
a different combination of spacemen and colonists, with always a
proportion who're furious about what was decided while they slept. No,
furious is too weak a word. Onward or backward, whichever way we go,
we've struck at the emotional roots of people. And interstellar space
can break the calmest men. How long before just the wrong percentage of
malcontents, weaklings, and shaky sanities goes on duty? What's going to
happen then?"

He sucked in an uneven breath. "I'm sorry," he faltered. "I should
not--"

"Blow off steam? Why not?" she asked calmly. "Would it be better to keep
on being the iron man, till one day you put a pistol to your head?"

[Illustration]

"You see," he said in his misery, "I'm _responsible_. Men and women ...
all the little children--But I'll be in deepsleep. I'd go crazy if I
tried to stay awake the whole voyage; the organism can't take it. I'll
be asleep, and there'll be nothing I can do, but these ships were given
into my care!"

He began to shiver. She took both his hands. Neither of them spoke for a
long while.

* * * * *

When he left the _Pioneer_, Coffin felt oddly hollow, as if he had
opened his chest and pulled out heart and lungs. But his mind functioned
with machine precision. For that he was grateful to Teresa: she had
helped him discover what the facts were. It was a brutal knowledge, but
without such understanding the expedition might well be doomed.

Or might it? Dispassionately, now, Coffin estimated chances. Either they
went on to Rustum or they turned back; in either case, the present
likelihood of survival was--fifty-fift