 Who did the ship’s crew expect would meet them on arrival?
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. But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the Quest III's crew. 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. Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've sighted Earth." People pressed round the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might have happened to Earth? He had already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to 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. "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. Our generation's dream, humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...." "One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that that system, too, is devoid of planets. "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. 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. "Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and therefore signalize the beginning of the end.
 Maybe nobody
 The other Quest ships  Warships on attack  A parade  Maybe nobody