“By the Emperor, may it be so,” Reffet said. He and Atvar cast down their eyes again. Then, half talking to himself, Reffet went on, “But what if it is not so?”

“That is my nightmare,” Atvar told him. “That has been my nightmare since we first discovered the Big Uglies’ true nature. They change faster than we do. They grow faster than we do. They are still behind us, but not by so much as they were when we came to Tosev 3. If they, or some of them, remain hostile, if they look like they are passing us…” His voice trailed away.

“Yes?” Reffet prompted. “What then?”

“We may have to destroy this world, and our own colony on it,” Atvar answered unhappily. “We may have to destroy ourselves, to save the Race.”

Under an acceleration of.01g, Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson had to wear a seat belt to stay in his chair. His effective weight was just over a pound and a half-not enough for muscles used to Earth’s robust gravity to notice. Any fidgeting at all would have sent him bouncing around the Lewis and Clark’s control room. Bouncing around in a room full of instruments wasn’t recommended.

He turned to Colonel Walter Stone, the American spaceship’s chief pilot. “This is the best seat in the house,” he said.

“You’d best believe it, Johnson,” Stone answered. The two of them might have been cousins: they were both lean, athletic men in their early middle years; both crew cut; both, by coincidence, from Ohio. Johnson had started in the Marines, Stone in the Army Air Corps. Each looked down his nose at the other because of that.

At the moment, though, Johnson wasn’t interested in looking anywhere except out through the panoramic window. It was double-coated to reduce reflection; peering out through it was about as close as a man could come to looking out on bare space. He saw more stars than he had since another guy after the same girl sucker-punched him in high school.

The Lewis and Clark was aimed roughly in the direction of Antares, the bright red star at the heart of Scorpio.