I don’t know why I’m recording this,” said George Takeo Pickett slowly into the hovering microphone. “There’s no chance that anyone will ever hear it. They say the comet will bring us back to the neighbourhood of Earth in about two million years, when it makes its next turn around the sun. I wonder if mankind will still be in existence then, and whether the comet will put on as good a display for our descendants as it did for us? Maybe they’ll launch an expedition, just as we have done, to see what they can find. And they’ll find us…

“For the ship will still be in perfect condition, even after all those ages. There’ll be fuel in the tanks, maybe even plenty of air, for our food will give out first, and we’ll starve before we suffocate. But I guess we won’t wait for that; it will be quicker to open the air lock and get it all over.

“When I was a kid, I read a book on polar exploration called Winter Amid the Ice. Well, that’s what we’re facing now. There’s ice all around us, floating in great porous bergs. Challenger’s in the middle of a cluster, orbiting round one another so slowly that you have to wait several minutes before you’re certain they’ve moved. But no expedition to Earth’s poles ever faced our winter. During most of that two million years, the temperature will be four hundred and fifty below zero. “We’ll be so far away from the sun that it’ll give about as much heat as the stars. And who ever tried to warm his hands by Sirius on a cold winter night?”

That absurd image, coming suddenly into his mind, broke him up completely. He could not speak because of memories of moonlight upon snowfields, of Christmas chimes ringing across a land already fifty million miles away. Suddenly he was weeping like a child, his self-control dissolved by the remembrance of all the familiar, disregarded beauties of the Earth he had forever lost.