 Where was the Quest III coming home from?
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. But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the Quest III's crew. For the Quest III was coming home; the sun ahead was the Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning. After all, it's only been nine hundred years." He had already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to Earth. As the Quest III's fuel stores and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the strength had gone out of him. Weeks and months had passed for the Quest III in interstellar flight while years and decades had raced by on the home world. 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. If Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time. If success comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth; friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the Quest ships will be long since dead. "We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we may complete our search without finding even one new Earth. This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids, or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the twentieth century.
 An expedition
 A dying star  Procyon  Capella  An expedition