gh laugh of
hysteria. James silently walked to a water hydrant and filled a plastic
cup. He brought Gregory a small white pill.

"You wouldn't take this with the rest of us at supper. You'd better take
it now. You need it."

Gregory nodded bleakly, sobering at once, and swallowed the pellet. He
made a face after the water.

"Distilled," he spat. "Distilled ... no flavor ... no life ... like
us ... distilled."

"If only we could have blasted off again." Frankston's voice came
muffled through his hands. "It wouldn't have made any difference where.
Anywhere or nowhere. No, our fine ship is obsolete and we're old, much
too old. They have the spacedrive now. Men don't make thirty-year
junkets into space and come back allergic to Earth. They go out, and in
a month or two they're back, with their hair still black and their eyes
still bright and their uniforms still fit. A month or two is all. Those
crowds that cheered us, they were proud of us and sorry for us, because
we'd been out thirty years and they never expected us back at all. But
it was inconvenient for Spaceport." Bitter sarcasm tinged his voice.
"They actually had to postpone the regular monthly Trans-Galactic run
to let us in with this big, clumsy hulk."

"Why didn't we ever see any of the new ships either going out or coming
back?" asked Gregory.

* * * * *

Frankston shook his head. "You don't see a ship when it's in spacedrive.
It's out of normal space-time dimensions. We had a smattering of the
theory at cadet school ... anyway, if one did flash into normal
space-time--say, for instance, coming in for a landing--the probability
of us being at the same place at the same time was almost nil. 'Two
ships passing in the night' as the old saying goes."

Gregory nodded, "I guess Trippitt was the lucky one."

"You didn't see Trippitt die," replied James.

"What was it?" asked Frankston. "What killed Trippitt? So quickly, too.
He was only outside a few minutes like the rest of us, and eight hours
later he was dead."

"We couldn't be sure," answered James. "Some virus. There are countless
varieties. People live in a contaminated atmosphere all their lives,
build up a resistance to them. Sometimes a particularly virulent strain
will produce an epidemic, but most people, if they're affected, will
have a mild case of whatever it is and recover. But after thirty years
in space, thirty years of breathing perfectly pure, uncontamina