Why can't you go home again after years in space? There had
to be an answer ... could he find it in time, though?
* * * * *
Sitting at his desk, Colonel Halter brought the images on the
telescreen into focus. Four booster tugs were fastening, like
sky-barnacles, onto the hull of the ancient derelict, _Alpha_.
He watched as they swung her around, stern down, and sank with her
through the blackness, toward the bluish-white, moon-lighted arc of
Earth a thousand miles below.
He pressed a button. The image of tugs and hull faded and the control
room of the old ship swam onto the screen.
Colonel Halter saw the crew, sitting in a half circle, before the
control panel.
The telescreen in the control room of old _Alpha_ was yet dark. The
faces watching it held no care lines or laugh lines, only a vague
expression of kindness. They could be faces of wax or those of people
dying pleasantly.
Colonel Halter shook his head. Brilliant--the finest space people in
the field seventy-five years back--and now he was to get them to come
out of that old hull. God almighty, how could you pull people out of
an environment they were perfectly adjusted to? Logic? Force? Reason?
Humoring? How could you know?
Talk to them, he told himself. He dreaded it, but the problem had to
be faced.
He flipped a switch on his desk; saw light jump into their screen and
his own face take shape there; saw their faces on his own screen, set
now, like the faces of stone idols.
He turned another dial. The picture swung around so that he was
looking into their eyes and they into his.