"Warping space?" asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.
"Sure," said Gary. "Anything peculiar about it?" "No," she said, "I don't suppose there is.”
Then: "I wouldn't exactly call that a victory.”
"That's what the histories call it." Gary shrugged. "They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they've been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter's moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.
"It's just one of them things," Herb decided for them.
The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.
Gary shivered to himself. Alone, she had taken her gamble and had won. Won against time and space and the brutality of man and the great indifference of the mighty sweep of stars.
What had she thought of during those long years? What problems had she solved? What kind of a person could she be, with her twenty-year-old body and her thousand-year-old brain?
Gary nursed the hot bowl of his pipe between his hands, studying the outline of her head against the vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead, the braided strands wrapped around her head.
What was she thinking now? Of that lover who now would be forgotten dust?