A minute later Gerry Vaughn, the copilot, shot up through the hatch from the mid-deck and grabbed the back of the command chair to slow down. He looked out the forward windows, then floated closer and looked overhead, then down. He turned and kicked off toward the aft windows, looked around in every direction, and finally backed away. Then, very quietly, he said, “Son of a bitch.”

Allen beamed.

“Where are we?”

Allen lost some of his smile. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “We’re supposed to be two and a half light-minutes from Earth in the direction of Vega, but we either missed the signal or went too far.”

“Signal?”

“Before we jumped, I transmitted a coded pulse. When the pulse catches up, we’ll know our distance. Next time we jump I’ll send another pulse, and as long as we jump beyond the first one then we can triangulate our position when they arrive. That way I can calculate the aiming error as well as the distance error.”

“Oh,” Gerry said. He looked out the windows again as if to assure himself that the Earth was really gone. Finally he said, “Look at the sun.”

“What?”

“The sun.”

Judy looked. It was shining in through the forward windows. She had to squint to keep it from burning her eyes, but not much, and now she could see what Gerry was talking about. The solar disk was about a fourth the normal size.

Carl, floating just above the mid-deck hatch, looked too. He made a strangling sound, looked over at Judy as if he was pleading for help, then his eyes rolled up and he went slack.

“Catch him!” Judy yelled, but it was hardly necessary. People don’t fall when they faint in free-fall.

Neither do they faint. Blood doesn’t rush away from the brain without gravity to pull it. So what had happened to him?