 How did Gwar Den feel about his work?
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. 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. It won't be the same world we left, the world we knew and fitted in...." Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. 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. The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained. Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. 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. Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned back, an ironic smile touching his lips. 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. "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. Perhaps our effort will prove as futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to reduce pressure.... It would be a one-way journey—even if enough fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after more than forty thousand years.
 Proud that he was able to steer the ship home.
 Bored and depressed since the work wasn’t meaningful.  Ashamed since they didn’t find a hospitable planet.  Ready to retire because he had been traveling for so long.  Proud that he was able to steer the ship home.