"You have seen me on some newscast?" he inquired, ba.n.a.lly, for lack of anything else.

"No. I have only heard. Old Prabang down in the village has a nonvisual set. But who else could you be?

Please come in, sir."

Only later did he realize how she broke propriety. But then, she had declared herself free of Protectorate ways months ago. He found that out when he first tried to contact her at her father-in-law's.

The hut, within, was clean, austerely fur-nished, but a vase of early mutation-roses stood by David's picture.

Maclaren went over to the cradle and looked down at the sleeping infant. "A son, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes. He has his father's name."

Maclaren brushed the baby's cheek. He had never felt any-thing so soft. "h.e.l.lo, Dave," he said.

Tamara squatted at a tiny brazier and blew up its glow. Maclaren sat down on the floor.

"I would have come sooner," he said, "but there was so much else, and they kept me in the hospital-"

"I understand. You are very kind."

"I . . . have his effects . . . just a few things. And I will arrange the funeral in any way you desire and-"

His voice trailed off. The rain laughed on the thatch.

She dipped water from a jar into a tea kettle. "I gather, then," she said, "there was no letter that he wrote?"

"No. Somehow . . . I don't know. For some reason none of us wrote any such thing. Either we would all perish out there, and no one else would come for fifty or a hundred years, or we would get back. We never thought it might be like this, a single man." Maclaren sighed. "It's no use trying to foresee the fu-ture. It's too big."

She didn't answer him with her voice.

"But almost the last thing Dave said," he finished awk-wardly, "was your name. He went in there thinking he would soon be home with you." Maclaren stared down at his knees. "He must have . . . have died quickly. Very quickly."

"I have not really understood what happened," she said, kneeling in the graceful Australian style to set out cups. Her tone was flattened by the effort of self-control. "I mean, the 'cast reports are always so superficial and confused, and the printed journals so technical. There isn't any middle ground any more.

That was one reason we were going to leave Earth, you know. Why I still am going to, when our baby has grown just a little bit."

"I know how you feel," said Maclaren. "I feel that way my-self."

She glanced up with a startled flirt of her head that was beautiful to see. "But you are a technic!" she exclaimed.

"I'm a human being too, my lady. But go on, ask me your question, whatever you were leading up to.

I've a favor of my own to ask, but you first."

"No, what do you want? Please."

"Nothing very important. I've no claim on you, except the fact that your husband was my friend. I'm thinking of what you might do for his sake. But it will wait. What did you wonder about?"

"Oh. Yes. I know you tuned in the aliens' transceiver and didn't realize it. But-" Her fists clenched together. She stared through the open door, into the rain and the light, and cried forth: "It was such a tiny chance! Such a meaningless accident that killed him!"

Maclaren paused until he had all his words chosen. Then he said, as gently as might be:

"IT wasn't so wildly improbable. All this time we've known that we couldn't be the only race reaching for the stars. It was absurd to think so; that would have been the senseless unlikelihood. Well, theCross was farther out than men had ever gone before, and the alien s.p.a.ceship was near the aliens' own limit of expansion. It was also bound for Alpha Crucis. Odd what a sense of kinship that gives me, my brother mari-ner, with chlorine in his lungs and silicon in his bones, steer-ing by the same lodestar. Contact was certain eventually, as they and we came into range of each other's signals. Your David was the man who first closed the ring. We were trying call patterns we could not measure, running through combina-tions of variables. Statistically, we were as likely to strike one of their patterns as one of ours."

The water began to boil. She busied herself with the kettle. The long tresses falling past her face hid whether she was crying or not. Maclaren added for her, "Do you know, my lady, I think we must have called hundreds of other s.p.a.ce-traveling races. We were out of their range, of course, but I'm sure we called them."

Her voice was m.u.f.fled: "What did the aliens think of it?"

"I don't know. In ten years we may begin to talk to them. In a hundred years, perhaps we will understand them. And they us, I hope. Of course, the moment David . . . appeared . . . they realized what had happened. One of them came through to me. Can you imagine what courage that must have taken? How fine a people your man has given us to know? There was little they could do for me, except test theCross' web and rule out all the call patterns which they use. I kept on trying, after that. In a week I finally raised a human. I went through to his receiver and that's all. Our technicians are now building a new relay station on the black star planet. But they'll leave theCross as she is, and David Ryerson's name will be on her."

"I thought," she whispered, still hiding her face, "that you I mean, that quarantine rules-"

"Oh, yes, the Protectorate tried to invoke them. Anything to delay what is going to happen. But it was useless. Nothing from the aliens' planet could possibly feed on Terrestrial life. That's been established already, by the joint scientific commis-sion; we may not be able to get the idea behind each other's languages yet, but we can measure the same realities! And of course, the aliens know about us. Man just can't hide from the universe. So I was released." Maclaren accepted the cup she offered him and added wryly: "To be sure, I'm not exactly welcome at the Citadel any more."

She raised large eyes to him. He saw how they glimmered. "Why not?" she asked. "You must be a hero to-"

"To s.p.a.cemen, scientists, some colonials, and a few Earthmen glad of an end to stagnation. Not that I deserve their grat.i.tude. There are three dead men who really did all this. But at any rate, my lady, you can foresee what an up-heaval is coming. We are suddenly confronted with-Well, see here, the aliens must be spread through at least as large a volume of s.p.a.ce as man. And the two races don't use the same kind of planets. By pooling transceiver networks, we've dou-bled both our territories! No government can impose its will on as many worlds as that."

"But more. There are sciences, technologies, philosophies, religions, arts, insights they have which we never imagined. It cannot be otherwise. And we can offer them ours, of course. How long do you think this narrow little Protectorate and its narrow little minds can survive such an explosion of new thought?"

Maclaren leaned forward. He felt it as an upsurge in himself. "My lady, if you want to live on a frontier world, and give your child a place where it's hard and dangerous and challenging-and everything will be possible for him, if he's big enough-stay on Earth. The next civilization will begin here on Earth herself."

Tamara set down her cup. She bent her face into her hands and he saw, helpless, how she wept. "It may be," she said to him, "it may be, I don't know. But why did it have to be David who bought us free? Why did it have to be him? He didn't mean to. He wouldn't have, if he'd known. I'm not a sentimental fool, Maclaren-san, I know he only wanted to come back here. And he died! There's no meaning in it!"

THE North Atlantic rolled in from the west, gray and green and full of thunder. A wind blew white manes up on the waves. Low to the south gleamed the last autumnal daylight, and clouds ma.s.sed iron-colored in the north, brewing sleet.

"There," pointed Tamara. "That is the place."

Maclaren slanted his aircar earthward. The sky whistled around him. So Dave had come from here. The island was a grim enough rock, harshly ridged. But Dave had spoken of gorse in summer and heather in fall and lichen of many hues.

The girl caught Maclaren's arm. "I'm afraid, Terangi," she whispered. "I wish you hadn't made me come."

"It's all we can do for David," he told her: "The last thing we'll ever be able to do for him."

"No." In the twilight, he saw how her head lifted. "There's never an end. Not really. His child and mine, waiting, and-At leastwe can put a little sense into life."

"I don't know whether we do or whether we find what was always there," he replied. "Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose-order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it-does exist."

"Here on Earth, yes," she sighed. "A flower or a baby. But then three men die beyond the sun, and it so happens the race benefits a little from it, but I keep thinking about all those people who simply die out there. Or come back blind, crippled, broken like dry sticks, with no living soul the better for it. Why? I've asked it and asked it, and there isn't ever an an-swer, and finally I think that's because there isn't any why to it in the first place."

Maclaren set the car down on the beach. He was still on the same search, along a different road. He had not come here simply to offer David's father whatever he could: reconcilia-tion, at least, and a chance to see David's child now and then in the years left him. Maclaren had some obscure feeling that an enlightenment might be found on Skula.

Truly enough, he thought, men went to s.p.a.ce, as they had gone to sea, and s.p.a.ce destroyed them, and still their sons came back. The lure of gain was only a partial answer; s.p.a.cemen didn't get any richer than sailors had. Love of ad-venture . . . well, in part, in some men, and yet by and large the conquerors of distance had never been romantics, they were workaday folk who lived and died among sober realities.

When you asked a man what took him out to the black star, he would say he had gone under orders, or that he was getting paid, or that he was curious about it, or any of a hundred reasons. Which might all be true. And yet was any of them the truth?

And why, Maclaren wondered, did man, the race, spend youth and blood and treasure and all high hopes upon the sea and the stars? Was it only the outcome of meaningless forces-economics, social pressure, maladjustment, myth, whatever you labeled it-a set of chance-created vectors with the sar-donic resultant that man broke himself trying to satisfy needs which could have been more easily and sanely filled at home?

If I could get a better answer than that,thought Maclaren,I could give it to Tamara. And to myself And then we could bury our dead.

He helped her out of the car and they walked up a path toward an ancient-looking cottage. Light spilled from its win-dows into a dusk heavy with surf. But they had not quite reached it when the door opened and a man's big form was outlined.

"Is that you, Technic Maclaren?" he called.

"Yes. Captain Magnus Ryerson?" Maclaren stepped ahead of Tamara and bowed. "I took the liberty, sir, of bringing a guest with me whom I did not mention when I called."

"I can guess," said the tall man. "It's all right, la.s.s. Come in and welcome."

As she pa.s.sed over the uneven floor to a chair, Tamara brushed Maclaren and took the opportunity to whisper: "How old he's grown, all at once!"

Magnus Ryerson shut the door again. His hands, ropy with veins, shook a little. He leaned heavily on a cane as he crossed the room and poked up the fire. "Be seated," he said to Mac-laren. "When I knew you were coming, I ordered some whiskey from the mainland. I hope it's a good make. I drink not, you see, but be free to do so yourself."

Maclaren looked at the bottle. He didn't recognize the brand. "Thank you," he said, "that's a special favorite of mine."

"You've eaten?" asked the old man anxiously.

"Yes, thank you, sir." Maclaren accepted a gla.s.s. Ryerson limped over the floor to give Tamara one.

"Can you stay the night? I've some extra beds in the garret, from when the fisher lads would come by.

They come no more, there's no reason for it now, but I've kept the beds."

Maclaren traded a look with Tamara. "We would be hon-ored," he said.

Magnus Ryerson shuffled to the bob, took the tea kettle, poured himself a cup and raised it. "Your health." He sat down in a worn chair by the fire. His hands touched a leather-bound book lying on its arm.

THERE was silence for a while, except that they could all hear the waves boom down on the strand.

Maclaren said finally: "I . . . we, I mean . . . we came to-offer our sympathy. And if there was anything I could tell you . . . I was there, you know."

"Aye. You're kind." Ryerson groped after a pipe. "It is my understanding he conducted himself well."

"Yes. Of course he did."

"Then that's what matters. I'll think of a few questions later, if you give me time. But that was the only important one."

Maclaren looked around the room. Through its shadows he saw pilot's manuals on the shelves, stones and skins and G.o.ds brought from beyond the sky; he saw the Sirian binary like twin h.e.l.ls upon darkness, but they were very beautiful. He offered: "Your son was in your own tradition."

"Better, I hope," said the old man. "There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers."

Tamara stood up. "But that's what there isn't!" she cried all at once. "There's no sense! There's just dying and dying and dying. What for? So that we can walk on another planet, learn another fact? What have we gained? What have we really done? And why? What did we do that your G.o.d sends our men out there now?"

She clamped her hands together. They heard how the breath rasped in her. She said at last, "I'm sorry,"

and sat back down.

Magnus Ryerson looked up. And his eyes were not old. He let the surf snarl on the rocks of his home for a while. And then he answered her:"For that is our doom and our pride."

"What?" She started. "Oh. In English. Terangi, he means-" She said it in Interhuman.

Maclaren sat quite still.

Ryerson opened his book. "They have forgotten Kipling now," he said. "One day they will remember.

For no people live long, who offer their young men naught but fatness and secu-rity. Tamara, la.s.s, let your son hear this one day. It is his song too, he is human."

The words were unknown to Maclaren, but he listened and thought he understood.

"We have fed our sea for a thousand years And she calls us, still unfed, Though there's never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead: We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest, To the shark and the sheering gull, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord G.o.d, we ha' paid it in full!-"

When Ryerson had finished, Maclaren stood up, folded his hands and bowed."Sensei," he said, "give me your blessing."

"What?" The other man leaned back into shadows, and now he was again entirely old. You could scarcely hear him under the waves outside. "You've naught to thank me for, lad."

"No, you gave me much," said Maclaren. "You have told me why men go, and it isn't for nothing. It is because they are men."

end