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comes after? Do they just turn us loose?”
    “They’ve got a place set up in New Zealand where we can ‘resynchronize’. Benamira, I think’s the name. From the way they talk about it, I’m not sure whether they’re more afraid of the world shocking us or us shocking the world,” he said wryly. “They’ll want to know in sixty days whether we’re interested in another flight assignment—though it might be a year or two before they actually need us.”
    “Any idea what you’re going to do?”
    “Oh, this is it for me. I’ve already told them I plan to do a lot of low-tech fishing in a lot of very placid streams. Yourself?”
    “I’m going back out, if they treat me right.”
    Harrod nodded as though he had expected it. “You’ll probably get a command.”
    “That’s what I want.”
    Harrod nodded again, started to say something, stopped himself, and then started again. “What we’ve seen—where we’ve been—” He stopped and frowned, searching for the right words. “I guess I don’t understand, Ali. What’s out there except more of the same? I know we didn’t find any colonies ourselves, but—”
    “It’s not finding them that matters so much. You should know after all this time. Glen,” Neale answered, one hand on the door. “I want the answer to the colony problem.”
    “That bums in you, doesn’t it?”
    “You know it does. I want to know what makes a mother forget her children. Why did it take the Journans to tell us there had been a First Colonization? There’s no more important question for us to answer. I don’t know how you can sidestep it.”
    Harrod smiled a tired smile. “My instinct for self-preservation. Peace of mind.” He offered a hand and she clasped it, not as a handshake but as a hug. “You did a good job for me. I wish you the best. Command, without doubt. A colony, at least. Maybe even an answer to your question. You’ll have all three, if wanting matters.”
    “It does,” she assured him. “It does.”
    The broadcast of the welcoming ceremonies reached BT-09 Babbage midway between Ceres and home. The asteroid tug, its three-man crew, and its metal-rich, million-tonne catch were falling sunward in a graceful month-long spiral that would end at the Cluster B processing center trailing a half-million klicks behind Earth in solar orbit.
    —I think I see them now, Gregory.
    —Yes, Madia, here they come, the two-hundred-year-old space travelers, back home at last after visiting eighteen other star systems.
    —That’s right, Gregory. It’s important that our viewers realize that even though Dove did not discover any colonies, her crew is bringing back with them geophysical data on eighty-one different worlds, including samples from the twenty they actually set foot on.
    —And of course they were part of the historic Pathfinder mission to the Jouma colony, which started everything.
    —You’re right about that, Gregory. You know, the Unified Space Service tells us that Dove has rolled up more than 500 trillion miles since leaving Earth in A.R. 38.
    —That’s just amazing, Nadia. They’re twenty very brave men and women, that’s for certain.
    “I say they’re twenty crazy men and women,” systech Brian Hduna said with a yawn, looking up from the small screen set into the console before him. “What do you say, Thack? Lot of fuss over nothing?”
    Merritt Thackery was seated before an identical display at the opposite end of Babbage’s command console. “Hardly,” he said quietly without looking up.
    “Hell, what we do on this run counts for more than their whole mission. We’re bringing in iron, chromium, nickel—a quarter-million tonnes of it. Think there’ll be a band playing when we dock? Hell, no,” Hduna grumped.
    —Each of the voyagers will be greeted by a member of his own family, Gregory.
    —Gone but not forgotten, that’s the best way to describe it. We’re going to identify them for you as they come out of the shipway. The first