Cochrane waited. Jones showed him a creased bit of paper, closely written.
"I wrote out the memo and put it in my pocket," said Jones, "and I forgot to give it to Babs. So we can't astrogate. We don't know how. We didn't get either star-charts or instructions. We're lost."
Cochrane waited.
"Apparently Al was mistaken in the star he spotted as our sun," added Jones. He referred to the pilot, whom Cochrane had not met before. "Anyhow we can't find it again. We turned the ship to look at some more stars, and we can't pick it out any more."
Cochrane said:
"You'll keep looking, of course."
"For what?" asked Jones.
He waved his hand out the four equally-spaced plastic blister-ports. From where he stood, Cochrane could see thousands of thousands of stars out those four small openings. They were of every conceivable color and degree of brightness. The Milky Way was like a band of diamonds.
"We know the sun's a yellow star," said Jones, "but we don't know how bright it should be, or what the sky should look like beyond it."
"Constellations?" asked Cochrane.