"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the Quest III could achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other Quests, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths