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holocaust, especially since there was no longer any prejudice or nuclear bombs. Eric had once asked Sammy what he liked about her and Sammy had said he was still working on the computer program that would tell him. Like Strem, her attraction was her energy, but unlike him, she worked too hard trying to get it across. A life-threatening interstellar journey was probably just what she needed to settle her down.
    “Hello, Strem,” Cleo responded sweetly. “How many years are we going to get on Mercury for this?”
    “Let’s discuss that when we’re all together,” Sammy said, obviously concerned about who might be listening. “You’ll be here soon.”
    Soon was twenty minutes later. Eric was grateful she hadn’t brought her serpent, though her quarter-ton suitcase of costumes and makeup might have unlooked-for-surprises inside it. Her dress was unusually conservative, a pink plastic pantsuit dotted with tiny purple spiders, and her hair was its natural red colour. He was mildly curious how a pair of opants would respond to her legs.
    “Give me a kiss,” Cleo commanded Sammy, draping her arms around him and plopping in his lap as he sat before his controls. He managed to obey while keeping an eye glued to his screens. Cleo nuzzled her nose against his ear. “I missed you, honey,” she said.
    “You saw me two days ago.”
    “Didn’t you miss me?”
    “To a degree, I suppose.” You couldn’t fault Sammy his honesty.
    Cleo stood, slightly offended, and turned to Strem. “Give me a real hug, would you, big boy?” Strem was quick to oblige. Jeanie and Cleo even exchanged a brief embrace. The risk they were taking might have been responsible for the tenderness. Normally Jeanie and Cleo moved in separate social circles and were not very close. Cleo even squeezed Eric hello and he squeezed her back.
    Sammy requested and received permission to leave orbit. Mars went the way of Earth, seemingly falling into a bottomless hole. What was different this time was their direction in relationship to the plane of the solar system. They were not heading out toward Jupiter and Saturn, but were arcing ‘upward’ (figuratively speaking, there is no up and down in space) where the planets never traveled.
    As the empty miles grew into numbers the human mind could not properly grasp, the sun shrank and faded, their chatter began to die down. The vastness of the space around them began to cast its spell. The five of them stared silently out the windows, each in his or her way trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, the possibility that they might soon be ‘out there’.
    Eric teetered on a narrow strip of joy and uncertainty. Yet, beneath the conflicting emotions, he had a quiet feeling that he was about to reach a point in his life he had waited a long time to meet. He was unable to fully explain the intuition, or shake it, and it grew stronger the longer he looked at the stars.
    Even travelling at a third of the speed of light, Excalibur needed roughly twelve hours to reach Central Control’s Customs Line. When Strem suggested taking a nap, Eric thought it would be impossible to sleep not knowing whether they were going to make history or end up with criminal records. But when the others greeted the suggestion with approval – except for Sammy, who could not be pried from the controls – he decided to give it a try and headed for his quarters, a sparse cubicle that had not been designed for the claustrophobic.
    Turning off the light and lying down, the tightness in his neck and the pressure beneath his eyes began to flow out of Eric as if he had just drunk from a narcotic draught. The silent sense that he was about to cross a line drawn by destiny persisted and began to weave rich images as he started to doze. He saw swelling stars that were far older than the sun, consuming in a few violent hours the reserves of a fuel supply that had lasted many eons. And arid planets where people walked that were not really people at