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clear that a more ambitious effort to locate and explain the worlds of man was called for. The shipyards went to work, turning out five new survey ships of the Argo series. USS strategists went to work, drawing up a plan to visit each star system within twenty-five light-years of Earth.
    Phase I proceeded largely as planned. The inbound Pathfinders and outbound Argonauts recorded visits to more than 130 star systems over a span of a century and a half. And Commander Yabovsky of Castor earned permanent fame when his crew discovered an extinct human colony on a cold world orbiting a dim star in the constellation Virgo.
    But despite these labors, the colony problem remained impervious to solution. So even as the aging Pathfinders and their Van Winkled crews neared Earth, Survey brass were planning for them not rest but a role in an even more ambitious Phase II…

Chapter 2
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Ambition
    No announcement was made, but everyone on Dove nevertheless knew when it was time for the ship to come of out the craze. Those pulling duty away from the bridge listened in on the shipnet, while the others drifted by ones and twos into the contact lab, edrec compartment, or onto the bridge itself.
    Among those who came to the bridge was SC Glen Harrod, commander of the Dove . But he made no move to displace bridge captain Alizana Neale from the pedestal, choosing instead to stand in the back with the talkative, almost childishly giddy techs and awks.
    Dove had come out of craze eighteen times before, and there was no technical reason why the nineteenth should prove any more eventful than the others. “Craze” was a fanciful description of what the D-series Avidsen-Lopez drive did to the local fabric of space. Only a few Service researchers claimed to fully understand the “why” of the AVLO power plant. It was commonly known that it was a gravity gradient drive (dubbed the pushmi-pullyu because of the twin bow and stern field projectors). It was also commonly known that to go beyond that casual description, it was necessary to deal with Driscoll’s abstruse grand unified field theorem.
    The drive’s effect, however, was easy to describe. The ship, accelerated beyond the speed of. light, and the rest of the universe disappeared. No chronometers ran backward, no one’s gray hair turned black again, no theatrical pyrotechnics punctuated the transitions past c, but when you got to your destination the numbers always added up so that you were there sooner than Einstein said you should have been. A fifteen light-year craze in a Pathfinder-class ship extracted barely a month from the crew’s biological calendar. When such a ship crazed, nothing in the Universe could catch it—not even the electromagnetic radiation on which all sensing and communication depended.
    That fact contributed to the secondary meaning of the term “craze.” To some surveyors, referred to unsympathetically as “the phobes,” the blank screens and dead air meant an enforced isolation in a universe that ended at the ship’s hull. Craze fear had elements of cabin fever, Gansel’s syndrome, and prisoner’s psychosis. Unmoderated by drugs, victims of mild cases suffered from anxiety, poor concentration, and irritability: those more seriously afflicted experienced sexual dysfunction, insomnia, and panic.
    The one blessing was that few were affected. There were no acute phobes aboard Dove , and only two milder cases. In that, Dove was fortunate—according to one dispatch they had received, the Argonaut Heracles was limping along with nearly half its crew impaired.
    So neither technology nor psychology could account for the eagerness with which the approaching transition was awaited. What was special about Dove ’s nineteenth craze was not how it was accomplished or how long it lasted but where it would end. After making visits to eighteen strange suns, Dove was finally going home.
    “One minute,” the navtech at the gravigation console called out, and nearly all