now where you'll find people
on a world somewhere nobody's ever named or knows about. Places where
a lost ship's landed and never got up again, or wrecked itself so far
off the lanes they'll never be found except by accident for millions
of years. That's what this world is, boys. Must have been a ship load
of beautiful people, maybe actresses and people like that being hauled
to some outpost to entertain. They're like angels now, living in a
land all free from care. Every place you see green forests and fields
and blue lakes, and at nights there's three moons that come around the
sky in a thousand different colors. And it never gets cold ... it's
always spring, always spring, boys, and the music plays all night,
every night of a long long year...."

Russell suddenly shouted. "Keep quiet, Dunbar. Shut up will you?"

Johnson said. "Dunbar--how long'll it take us?"

"Six months to a year, I'd say," Dunbar yelled happily. "That is--of
our hereditary time."

"What?" croaked Alvar.

Johnson didn't say anything at all.

Russell screamed at Dunbar, then quieted down. He whispered. "Six
months to a year--out here--cooped up in these damn suits. You're
crazy as hell, Dunbar. Crazy ... crazy! Nobody could stand it. We'll
all be crazier than you are--"

"We'll make it, boys. Trust ole' Dunbar. What's a year when we know
we're getting to Paradise at the end of it? What's a year out here ...
it's paradise ain't it, compared with that prison hole we were rotting
in? We can make it. We have the food concentrates, and all the rest.
All we need's the will, boys, and we got that. The whole damn Universe
isn't big enough to kill the will of a human being, boys. I been over
a whole lot of it, and I know. In the old days--"

"The hell with the old days," screamed Russell.

"Now quiet down, Russ," Dunbar said in a kind of dreadful crooning
whisper. "You calm down now. You younger fellows--you don't look at
things the way we used to. Thing is, we got to go straight. People
trapped like this liable to start meandering. Liable to start losing
the old will-power."

He chuckled.

"Yeah," said Alvar. "Someone says maybe we ought to go left, and
someone says to go right, and someone else says to go in another
direction. And then someone says maybe they'd better go back the old
way. An' pretty soon something breaks, or the food runs out, and
you're a million million miles from someplace you don't care about any
more because you're dead