Between the dark and the daylight

By DAVID C. HODGKINS
Illustrated by DAN ADKINS
All they wanted was to see their own children. How could Brendan refuse?
A curved section of the dome, twenty feet thick with the stubs of re-inforcing rod rusty and protruding through the damp-marked concrete, formed the ceiling and back wall of Brendan's office. There was a constant drip of seepage and condensation. Near the mildew-spotted floor, a thin white mist drifted in torn swirls while the heating coils buried in the concrete fought back against the cold. There was one lamp in the windowless dark, a glowing red coil on Brendan's desk, well below the eye level of the half-dozen men in the room. The heavy office door was swung shut, the locking bars pushed home. If it had not been, there would have been some additional light from the coils in the corridor ceiling, outside the office. Brendan would have had to face into it, and the men in front of him would have been looming shadows to him.
But the door was shut, as Brendan insisted it must be, as all doors to every room and every twenty-foot length of corridor were always shut as much of the time as possible—at Brendan's insistence—as though the dome were a sinking ship.
Conducted by the substance of the dome, there was a constant chip, chip, chip coming from somewhere, together with a heartless gnawing sound that filled everyone's head as though they were all biting on sandpaper.
Brendan growled from behind his desk: I'm in charge.
The five men on the opposite side of the desk had tacitly chosen Falconer for their spokesman. He said: But we've all got something to say about it, Brendan. You're in charge, but nothing gives you the power to be an autocrat.
No?
Nothing. The Expedition Charter, in fact, refers to a Board of Officers—
The Expedition Charter was written four hundred years ago, a thousand light-years away. The men who drew it up are dust. The men who signed it are dust.
You're in the direct line of descent from the first Captain.