"Can we pick her up, Cragin?"
"We'll have to go the limit."
"Then take over the panel, Mister Cragin. Kramer! Attempt return communication!"
"As she sails, sir."
Cragin's thin, sensitive fingers flicked over the flight control panel with a dexterity and familiarity that is born only of a million light years of intimate, sometimes desperate familiarity, and the Patrol ship's complex, high-strung nervous system responded as though it were a part of the man who held its throbbing life in harness.
To Randolph Cragin, born under a dying sun and of a mother dead from desert-parch even as her labor ceased, there had never been life worth the living anywhere but in the cold, clean loneliness of Deep Space.
He had bought odd second-hand parts from a junk dealer to build the first craft he had ever flown; he had made the moon with it before its jets blew and left him with the gray scar that ran from his left temple to the point of his square chin. He had been sixteen then, and too old to scare, too young to deter. From then on, there had been work in a lunar mine to pay for his next ship; then prospecting the asteroids to pay for a better, faster one. There were five years of hauling black muck from Venus and water crystal from the low ridges of Mars before he had the money he needed to build the ship that would take him into Deep Space for the first time, and a couple of years after that doing routine commission jobs of surveying outlying planetoid belts for the government to earn enough to keep his drive alive, and when he thought of it, his body.
In between jobs, when he flew until he was broken again, Cragin found out more about Deep Space and about the Barrier, beyond which only one other beside himself had ventured, than any other man who lived. His predecessor had not. To Cragin it was sort of a challenge—sometimes more than a daring wanderlust, sometimes a little less, when he picked new directions from sheer boredom. But beneath it all, there was something that rebelled; that bordered on resentment, and at the same time on awe. He had never known which was the cause of which, only that the men of Earth (and they were the only men in this lonely system of planets) were dying, and had long since ceased to be awed by anything, or to be stirred beyond the narrow limits of their own complacency. They had achieved all there was to achieve; death was to be their reward. Hope had become folly; work a means to avoid insanity; science the only comfort and pleasure, because it had been thoroughly mastered.
Except, perhaps, for the Barrier itself. Beyond it, Earth science had little hold, its concepts little validity. It was therefore a worthless waste, for it did not adhere to the facts that men said were true. And Cragin had found it difficult to decide why it was that he had chosen to let himself get swallowed up in it. Maybe for the sheer pleasure of laughing because it was so easy (the comptometers did all the work of plotting the warp paths and keeping the ship at the right critical speeds so it wouldn't leave them and go plunging off into dimensions from which there would be no return) maybe because he hadn't been as positive as he was supposed to be that what was beyond the Barrier was such a waste after all.