Gehenna; it was perfect," somebody else said.

Kirbey was relighting his pipe. "Oh, I suppose it'll have to do," he
grudged, around the stem. He had gray hair and an untidy mustache,
and nothing was ever quite good enough to satisfy him. "I could have
made it a little closer. Need three microjumps, now, and I'll have
to cut the last one pretty fine. Now don't bother me." He began
punching buttons for data and fiddling with setscrews and verniers.

For a moment, in the screen, Trask could see the face of Andray
Dunnan. He blinked it away and reached for his cigarettes, and put
one in his mouth wrong-end-to. When he reversed it and snapped his
lighter, he saw that his hand was trembling. Otto Harkaman must have
seen that, too.

"Take it easy, Lucas," he whispered. "Keep your optimism under
control. We only think he might be here."

"I'm sure he is. He has to be."

No; that was the way Dunnan, himself, thought. Let's be sane about this.

"We have to assume he is. If we do, and he isn't it's a
disappointment. If we don't, and he is, it's a disaster."

Others, it seemed, thought the same way. The battle-stations board
was a solid blaze of red light for full combat readiness.

"All right," Kirbey said. "Jumping."

Then he twisted the red handle to the right and shoved it in
viciously. Again the screen boiled with colored turbulence; again
dark and mighty forces stalked through the ship like demons in a
sorcerer's tower. The screen turned featureless gray as the pickups
stared blindly into some dimensionless noplace. Then it convulsed
with color again, and this time Ertado's Star, still in the center,
was a coin-sized disk, with the little sparks of its seven planets
scattered around it. Tanith was the third--the inhabitable planet of
a G-class system usually was. It had a single moon, barely visible
in the telescopic screen, five hundred miles in diameter and fifty
thousand off-planet.

"You know," Kirbey said, as though he was afraid to admit it, "that
wasn't too bad. I think we can make it in one more microjump."

Some time, Trask supposed, he'd be able to use the expression
"micro-" about a distance of fifty-five million miles, too.

"What do you think about it?" Harkaman asked him, as deferentially
as though seeking expert guidance instead of examining his
apprentice. "Where should Guatt put us?"

"As close as possible, of course." That would be a light-second at
the least; if the _Nemesis_ came out of hyp