"What the devil—" he began huskily.
Makvern stood up. "We just went out of overdrive. We've reached the Task Force. Come on Wyatt—for you, this is it."
CHAPTER IV
Here in the windowed bridge, the background was all stars.
Clouds of stars, rivers of them, chains and globes of them, and drawn across them here and there like curtains of the most glorious fire ever imagined were the shining nebulae. They were all colors. Red, blue, smoky yellow, green, diamond white. Some of them, Wyatt realized, were not stars at all but galaxies, scattered out in careless millions through the apparently infinite universe. To an earthbound, skybound man like himself, this was almost too much to take. Look at ten billion stars and a million galaxies and all the empty space between for them to roam around in, and realize that this is the universe, you are in the middle of it, not standing on the edge looking up the way you do on Earth but right in the middle of it, the nothingness and allness of it without end, amen. If you have no religion you get one in a hurry, because obviously only God could have made this.
Wyatt was dimly aware that someone—Makvern—was talking to him. Alpha Centauri. A hand pointed, guiding him back from the infinite to the particular.
Ahead, still very far away but close enough to stand out from among the more distant stars like a beacon lamp, was a yellow sun.
"There's a companion," Makvern said, "but it's insignificant and did not prevent the formation of a stable planetary system around the primary. Alpha Centauri has eight planets—it's very much like your own Sol. The two inner planets are too hot, and the outer ones are too cold, but the third and fourth support life. The third is closer to the sun than Earth and is still in a comparatively primitive stage of evolution. We can pick up minerals there but nothing else. The fourth world is our target."
Wyatt shut his eyes against the blaze of suns and nebulae and wheeling galaxies and tried to concentrate on Alpha Centauri, its fourth planet, and himself.