 What is the overall shift in tone from the start of the passage to the end of the passage?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1949. In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes, and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's radial velocity changed relative to the Quest III , as for forty hours the ship had decelerated. They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the Quest III drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. The grownups talked in low voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might lie at the long journey's end. The great chamber, a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread out from its original cramped quarters. Zost Relyul has identified it—no more." After all, it's only been nine hundred years." It won't be the same world we left, the world we knew and fitted in...." Someone switched off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. From his private office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he sat idle, alone with his thoughts. That was the foreshortening along the time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. It was one he had made shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. "One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time since leaving Earth. "Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. If Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time. We go on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons.
 From calm to frantic
 From calm to frantic  From happy to calm  From frenzied to calm  From depressed to hopeful