He laid his hand on the crossing of two marked lines on the chart, and looked at them.
"That's our destination, Joris. If we're right, the ship of Orthis is there. If we're wrong—well, somebody else will have to try again in another thousand years."
He remained standing, silent, his hands braced on the table, too tired to move. Joris rubbed his bleary eyes and began to read the coordinates aloud from the chart. Mechanically the Second Officer set up the combination on the finder.
Joris moved heavily back to the pilot chair. When the finder clicked off the new course, he set the Mirzim on it. Then he spoke over the intercom to Radar. "What's the position of that cruiser?"
A croaking voice answered him. He listened, and then turned to the others. "Closer," he said. "Always closer."
Trehearne's mind turned back to its constant half-waking nightmare. The cruiser, following, hanging on, dogged, persistent, relentless. He lived over painfully every maneuver, every trick by which Joris had managed to delay their pursuer, to grasp a little more time, a little more distance.
He remembered the last-minute plunge into a dark nebula when the cruiser was almost close enough to range them. He remembered the turning and twisting and doubling inside the blackness of the cloud, where the absorptive cosmic dust fogged the radar. They had lost the cruiser there. They had got clear away and for a time they had hoped. They had made it to this fringe sector—and then the red spark showed again on the screen, coming closer, always closer.
There were times when Trehearne forgot the physical fact of the cruiser, a ship of ordinary metal officered and manned by ordinary Vardda spacemen. At such times it seemed to him that the Mirzim was pursued by a demoniac nemesis striding naked across the plunging gulfs—a nemesis wearing Kerrel's face with Kerrel's hands outstretched to grasp them.
Sometimes Shairn's face was there beside Kerrel's, white, unreadable, a misty cloud that blotted out the stars.
The hoarse voice of the radar man croaked at intervals. The ship fled on toward the dark star.