rgled. The language was rich in glottal
stops, clicks and guttural strangling sounds. Ihjel stayed in a
different part of the ship when Brion used the voice mirror and
analysis scope, claiming that the awful noises interfered with
his digestion.

Their ship angled through jump-space along its calculated course. It
kept its fragile human cargo warm, fed them and supplied breathable
air. It had orders to worry about Brion's health, so it did,
checking constantly against its recorded instructions and noting
his steady progress. Another part of the ship's brain counted
microseconds with moronic fixation, finally closing a relay when
a predetermined number had expired in its heart. A light flashed
and a buzzer hummed gently but insistently.

Ihjel yawned, put away the report he had been reading, and started
for the control room. He shuddered when he passed the room where
Brion was listening to a playback of his Disan efforts.

"Turn off that dying brontosaurus and get strapped in," he called
through the thin door. "We're coming to the point of optimum
possibility and we'll be dropping back into normal space soon."

The human mind can ponder the incredible distances between the
stars, but cannot possibly contain within itself a real
understanding of them. Marked out on a man's hand an inch is a large
unit of measure. In interstellar space a cubical area with sides
a hundred thousand miles long is a microscopically fine division.
Light crosses this distance in a fraction of a second. To a ship
moving with a relative speed far greater than that of light, this
measuring unit is even smaller. Theoretically, it appears impossible
to find a particular area of this size. Technologically, it was a
repeatable miracle that occurred too often to even be interesting.

Brion and Ihjel were strapped in when the jump-drive cut off
abruptly, lurching them back into normal space and time. They didn't
unstrap, but just sat and looked at the dimly distant pattern of
stars. A single sun, apparently of fifth magnitude, was their only
neighbor in this lost corner of the universe. They waited while the
computer took enough star sights to triangulate a position in three
dimensions, muttering to itself electronically while it did the
countless calculations to find their position. A warning bell chimed
and the drive cut on and off so quickly that the two acts seemed
simultaneous. This happened again, twice, before the brain was
satisfied it had