Larry sat in his living quarters, in the dark. It was a single compartment, barely big enough for a bunk, a desk, and a chair. The bunk and desk were molded into the curving walls of the compartment. Drawers and sliding partitions to the closet and sanitary blended almost invisibly with the silvery metal of the walls.

In the darkness, as he sat in the only chair and stared at nothing, there was only the residual glow of the viewscreen at the foot of the bed and the faint fluorescence of the wall painting that Valery had done for him years ago, when he had first been assigned a compartment of his own.

So you’ve lost a father you’ve never known, Larry still argued with himself. You’re not the only one. Every one of those fifty frozen people was a father or mother to somebody aboard the ship. Look at Dan; it’s hit him a lot harder.

But as he thought about it, slowly Larry began to realize that something else was bothering him. It wasn’t the deaths. Not really. That left nothing but a cold emptiness inside him. It was something else—

What caused the fire?

According to the ship’s computer records, they had been crawling through the huge gulf of space for nearly fifty years. Twenty-some thousand human beings, exiles from Earth, on their way to Alpha Centauri in a giant pinwheel of a ship. Nearly fifty years. Almost there.

But the ship was starting to die.

The men and women who had started on this long, long voyage were exiles.