Man Alone

The ship went out safely, came back safely. The pilot was unaware of anything wrong. Somewhere in the depths of his brain was locked the secret that made him
Phoenix I belled out smoothly in the region of a G-type star. There was a bright flare as a few random hydrogen atoms were destroyed by the ship's sudden appearance. One moment space had been empty except for the few drifting atoms, and the next—the ship was there, squat and ugly.
Inside, a bell chimed sweetly, signalling the return to a universe of mass and gravitation and a limiting velocity called C. Colonel Richard Harkins glanced briefly out his forward port, and saw no more than he had expected to see.
At this distance the G-type star was no brighter or yellower than many another he had seen. For a man it might have been hard to tell which star it was. But the ship knew.
Within one of the ungainly bulges that sprouted along the length of Phoenix I , a score of instruments mindlessly swung to focus their receptors on the nearest body of star-mass.
Harkins leaned contentedly back in the padded control seat and watched while the needles gradually found their final position on dials. A few scattered lights bloomed on the console ahead of him. He grunted once with satisfaction as the thermoneedle steadied at 6,000° C. After that he was silent.
He leaned forward and flipped up two switches, and a faint sound of a woodpecker came into the control room as the spectrograph punched its data on a tape. The end of the tape began to come out of a slot. Harkins tore it off when the spectrograph was finished with it, threaded it on the feeder spool of the ship's calculator, and inserted the free end in the input slot.
The calculator blinked once at him, as if surprised, and spat out a little card with the single word SOL neatly printed in the center.
Harkins whistled softly to himself, happily. I had a true wife but I left her , he whistled. Old song. Old when he first heard it. Had a true....