I said, "Yes, but what's there to be sad about? You don't mind that part, do you?" To my knowledge, Mac hadn't left anything behind but his dirty laundry.
Hulbert was in his mid-thirties, slender, balding and normally as cheerful and stupidly optimistic as they come. Now he looked worse off than Larson.
"Yeah, I mind that," he said kind of resentfully. "I thought we'd have more time to—sort of get used to the idea of—well, outgrowing our generation. But think, by now many of my older buddies will be dead. A dozen World Series will be over. Who knows, maybe there's a war going on back there?"
Of all the morbid nonsense. Yearning for the obituary column, the sports page and the headlines. But then people are rarely sensible when something disturbs their tidy little universe that they take for granted.
It was a little terrifying, though, staring out into that smothering lamp-black. We were moving so fast and living so slowly that even the light-waves from the galaxies toward which we moved had disappeared. We were reversing the "redshift" effect of receding light sources. We approached the stars before us at such a velocity that their light impinged at a rate above the visible violet spectrum.
Mac blurted out, "It will never work out."
"What won't?"
"Colonization. Not at these unholy distances, even if we do find an earth-type planet or two. People won't leave everything behind them like this. I—I feel cut off. Something's gone, everything, everybody we knew back there. It's terrible to consider!"
I sat down beside him, stared out into the India-ink and faced a few over-due realities myself. Our chances of finding a habitable planet were remote. Finding intelligent life on it was even more unlikely. That such life would resemble men, was so improbable that the odds in favor were virtually nonexistent.