Babies cuddling in a mother's arms. Babies prattling old storied rhymes on the nursery floor.
And some of the rhymes were truer than they knew.
It had been spoken that when the Mutter came and the stars stood still the End was near at hand.
And that was true enough, for the stars had moved because the ship was spinning on its longitudinal axis to afford artificial gravity.
But when the ship neared the destination, it would automatically halt the spin and resume its normal flight, with things called gyroscopes taking over to provide the gravity.
Even now the ship was plunging down toward the star and the solar system at which it had been aimed. Plunging down upon it if—and Jon Hoff sweated as he thought of it—if it had not already overshot its mark.
For the people might have changed, but the ship did not. The ship did not adapt. The ship remembered when its passengers forgot. True to the taped instructions that had been fed into it more than a thousand years before, it had held its course, it had retained the purpose, it had kept its rendezvous and even now it neared its destination.
Automatic, but not entirely automatic.[3]
It could not establish an orbit around the target planet without the help of a human brain, without a human hand to tell it what to do. For a thousand years it might get along without its human, but in the final moment it would need him to complete its purpose.
And I, Jon Hoff told himself, I am that man. One man. Could one man do it?