Stopping at Slowyear

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The ship was called the Nordvik (though no one aboard it remembered why), and it was a big one.

Even if you didn’t count the thrusters on the outriggers astern, or the projectors for the Bussard collection cone at the bow, it was more than a hundred meters long; if just the habitable part of Nordvik had set down on any football field on Earth it would have lapped over at both ends. That would never happen, though. It had been a good many centuries, Earth time, since Nordvik had been anywhere near its home planet, and there was very little chance that it would ever return.

It also wouldn’t happen because Nordvik, or any ship like it, could never set down on any planet anyway. All those ancient starships were built in space and lived all their lives in space mostly interstellar space, at that and sooner or later they all died in space.

More likely it would be sooner, thought Mercy MacDonald as she slammed her door in the face of Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. What MacDonald didn’t want to do was die when the ship did. She had lived aboard Nordvik for twenty-seven years, ship’s time never mind the time the outside universe went by; she didn’t want to think about that twenty-seven years and eight planetary systems, and it was time to find some comfortable place to settle down. With some suitable man, she hoped. But not just any man.

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