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technology had homogenized it. What romance there was left was all in space. Thousands lived under the domes of Luna now. On Mars, terraforming projects were in full swing, and new immigrants flooded Lowelltown and Bradbury and Burroughs City every day. There was a lab on Mercury, toehold colonies on Ceres, Ganymede, Titan. And out at the Komarov Wheel, the third starship was a-building. The first was twenty years gone, with a crew who knew they’d die on board so their children could walk another world.
    Yes, it was a common dream.
    But they were most uncommon dreamers.
    And they were lucky. They were born at the right time. They were still children when the Hades Expedition, bound for Pluto, came upon the blinkies. Then the darks came upon the Hades Expedition.
    Twelve men had died, but Brand felt only a child’s thrill, a delicious shiver.
    Three years later, he and Melissa had followed the news avidly when the Second Hades Expedition, the lucky one, the one with the first primitive energy screens, made its astonishing discoveries. And a crewman named Chet Adams became immortal.
    He remembered a night. They’d walked hand in hand, up a winding outside staircase atop one of the city’s tallest towers. The lights, the glaring ceaseless lights, were mostly below. They could see the stars, sort of. Brand, a younger, smooth-faced Brand with long curling hair, wrapped his arm around Melissa and gestured.
    Up. At the sky.
    “You know what this
means
?” he said. The news had just come back from Hades II; dreamers were everywhere. “We can have the stars now. All of them. We won’t have to die on a starship, or settle down on Mars. We’re not trapped.”
    Melissa, whose hair was reddish gold, laughed and kissed him.
    “You think they’ll find out how it’s done? How the darks go ftl?”
    Brand just hugged her and kissed her back. “Who cares? I suppose ftl ships would be nice. But hell, we can have more now. We can be like
him
, like Adams, and the stars can all be ours.”
    Melissa nodded. “Why fly an airplane, right? If you could be a bird?”
    For five long years they loved, and dreamed of stars. While the Changling Jungle swelled, and the fast-friends sailed the void.
* * *
    Robi returned to the bridge just as Brand activated the main viewscreen. Surprise flashed across her face. She looked at him and smiled. Above, the picture was alive with a million tiny lights, pinpoints of sparkling green and crimson and blue and yellow and a dozen other colors. Not stars, no; they shifted and danced mindlessly, constantly, blinking on and off like fireflies and making the scanners
ping
whenever they touched the ship.
    She floated herself to her chair, strapped down. “You kept my course,” she said, pleased. “I’m sorry I got so angry.” She put a hand on his arm.
    Brand shook it off. “Don’t give me any credit. We’re dead on. The blinkies came to us.”
    “Oh,” she said. “I might have known.”
    “They’re all around us,” he said. “A huge swarm. I’d guess a couple cubic miles, at least.”
    Robi looked again. The viewscreen was thick with blinkies in constant motion. The stars, those white lights that stood still, could hardly be seen. “We’re going right into the swarm,” she said.
    Brand shrugged. “It’s in our way.”
    Robi leaned forward, spread her hands over the instruments, punched in a few quick orders. Seconds later, a line of flashing red print began to run across the face of her scanner. She looked up at Brand accusingly. “You didn’t even check,” she said. “Darks, three of them.”
    “This is not a trap run,” Brand said, unemotionally.
    “If they come right up to us and ask to be trapped, I suppose you’ll tell them to go away? Besides, they could eat right through us.”
    “Hardly. The safe-screen is up.”
    Robi shook her head without comment. The darks would avoid a ship with its safe-screen up. So, naturally, you couldn’t trap them that way. But Brand wasn’t