The pattern search had been most thorough. The random search teams had cut curlicues and looping curves back and forth through the grid. Their coverage had not been perfect, by far, but it was good enough for a random search. The volume covered by the infrawave detector spacer was spotty, but adequate.
The equipment was still breaking down every five or ten minutes, still delivering a horde of spurious responses. Scoutships still were being sent scurrying back and forth to investigate.
He faced the grid unhappily. He was gaunt from lack of sleep, from hastily snatched meals, or meals missed completely, from chain smoking, from watching what had started as a chance to make a good mark turn into drab failure. Worse, a failure that in no man's mind could be blamed upon Ted Wilson. For he had found one lifeship, and the fluke would be forgotten.
So would his failure. By every man but Wilson.
Somewhere back in that vast black volume of nothing, outlined by imperfect mathematical concepts in a larger field of nothing, was a lifeship, lost. A tiny cold mote of iron twenty-odd feet tall and nine feet in diameter across its widest point.
Wilson tried to draw his mind from it, but could not. Hysteria crept in but was quickly subdued.
In his mind he saw her as he had last seen her, pert and happy, with her light spacebag on the floor of the waiting room beside her slender ankles. He saw her before him, taut with thrill and excitement, vibrant and alive. He remembered her parting kiss, and the warmth of her body pressed against him.
Alice had been filled with anticipation, wanting to share her excitement with him, but unable to share what was a brand-new experience to her of going to space with a man who had been a-spacing for years. A man who knew all too well how space could be boring, lonely, and incredibly monotonous.
Not like travel across land, where there is scenery to watch, and although a tree is a tree, no two trees are ever alike, just as no one mountain ever looks the same at two o'clock in the morning as it had four hours earlier at ten in the evening.
Not even like travel on water, across the broad ocean where the scenery is water, whipped into waves of some similarity. For no two waves are ever the same exactly, and there is always the chance of a whitecap or a surfacing fish. The motion of the waves is incessant, at some times as soothing to the nerves as a lullaby.