Fugitive of the Stars

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To fall with a soundless scream through an empty chaos of contending forces, to be riven right out of your own dimensions and hurled quaking through alien continua… that was how it was, if you looked at it one way.

But not, thought Horne, if you looked at it his way. It was a voyage through enchanted isles on the shores of the universe, through the great lamps of foreign suns, where pale planets rose up in colored sunlight like mysterious new Hesperides, and dropped behind you, and you went on and on, mystery into mystery.

"The trouble with me,” he thought wryly, “is that I've still got a little of the romantic fourteen-year-old in me."

He was a long way from being a boy in a Connecticut city who had dreamed of stars. Eighteen years of time and a hundred-odd light-years of space. A long way, but he still got a bit of the old thrill when he looked out ahead through the pilot room windows. And this was nice, not only for his own sake but because he could share the thrill with Vinson, the young Second Pilot, who was making his first trip out here. Vinson spent most of his time staring out the windows as though he wanted to absorb into himself, everything that he saw, so that he might keep it forever, unchanged.

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