"You can't be sure, Hugh." Nora McCann laid her hand on her husband's arm.
"No, of course I can't be sure."
The door from their quarters into the corridor was open. Several more people came in—young people who had been born on the ship. They were talking and laughing.
"Would it be so hard on the young ones, Hugh? They've never seen the Earth. They're used to finding nothing but lifeless worlds everywhere."
One of the young boys in the hall looked up at the corridor viewscreen and pointed at the star and then shrugged. The others turned away, not saying anything, and after a minute they left and the boy followed them.
"There's your answer," Hugh McCann said dully. "Earth's a symbol to them. It's home. It's the place where there are millions more like us. Sometimes I think it's the only thing that has kept us sane all these years—the knowledge that there is a world full of people, somewhere, that we're not alone."
Her hand found his and he gripped it, almost absently, and then he looked up at their own small viewscreen. The star was much bigger now. It was already a definite circle of yellow light.
A yellow G-type sun, like a thousand others they had approached and orbited around and left behind them. A yellow sun that could have been anywhere in the galaxy.
"Hugh," she said after a moment, "do you really believe that thousands of years have gone by, outside?"
"I don't know what to believe. I only know what the plates show."