For lack of anything better to do, he began turning over in his mind all the possible things that could have happened to Thomas and Wilmer. The names of the missing pilots were seldom mentioned at the Base anymore, but nothing is more conducive to idle speculation than prolonged isolation during a manned space flight. He had logged not quite three years’ flight time—two years and four months, to be precise—and already he thought of himself as an old pro. Even so, this time the astro-boredom was beginning to get to him, though he was the last person to advertise it.

Patrol flights have been compared, and aptly so, to waiting one’s turn at the dentist’s—the difference being that here the dentist never shows. Stars that never move, an Earth that either can’t be seen at all or, if you’re extremely lucky, looms as big as the tiny crescent of a bruised fingernail—during the first two hours of flight, that is, after which it assumes the same appearance as any star, in this case a moving one. And staring into the Sun, as everyone knows, is not too advisable, either. It’s times like these that a Chinese puzzle or a brain-teaser becomes an absolute must.

Still, it was a pilot’s duty to hang suspended in a cocoon of belts, to monitor each and every screen—both radar and video—to check the reactor’s idling gauge, and to radio back at regular intervals. Once in a great while, it’s true, he might pick up a distress call—even an SOS!—coming from somewhere inside his sector, and off he’d go, at breakneck speed; but a pilot could count himself lucky if this happened more than once or twice a year.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly astonishing that pilots are subject to myriad fantasies, fantasies which from the point of view of Earth, or of ordinary passengers, might seem wicked, but which in fact are quite normal. When you’re out there, surrounded by 1.5 trillion cubic kilometers of empty space, without so much as a flake of cigarette ash for company, the desire for action—be it even some hideous calamity—can grow to a genuine obsession.