Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth; friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the Quest ships will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream, humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another, later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that that system, too, is devoid of planets.