Ching felt, still, that there ought to be more to it than this - some formal report to the Space Station that Survey Ship #103 was on its way, some acknowledgement, some formal leave-taking.  But they had had all that when they were chosen as a crew... it was foolish to wish for more.  She kept her eyes down on the steady familiar console of the Bridge computer, the numbers and letters which appeared as she touched buttons.  She had done this on a similar console many times during her training, and since they had decided to take their course toward the most recent of the colonies, even the course was one she had plotted before.  It seemed almost too simple.

Since there was no other formality possible, she made her voice formal.

"Colonies one and two are in the system of Barnard's Star, at six light-years distance.  Colony Three is at Cygni 61; eleven light-years distance.  Colony Four is in the Sirius double-star system, eight point eight light-years, and Colony Six is established in the T-5 cluster, nine point three light-years distance."

"And," said Teague, "it's very probable that when we get to the T-5 cluster, if that's where we are going, we will find Colonies Seven through Eleven - maybe through twenty or twenty-four - established there, with no planets left for us."

Peake shrugged.  "Then we start hunting from there, I suppose."

Moira said, "If we leave the Solar System in that direction, that means we'll be off the plane of the ecliptic and we'll miss the asteroids.  No way we're maneuverable enough to get through the asteroid belt without being crashed by a minor asteroid.  We could program the ship to avoid the bigger, better-known ones, the more predictable ones, but there are hundreds of thousands of them - maybe millions."

"I have the precise number of known bodies in the computer," Ching said, "but does anyone really care?"

"I do," said Teague, "but it's irrelevant right now."

Peake looked at the readout from Ching's computer on the panel before him.  He frowned, flicking buttons on the pocket calculator at his belt, then started to lay in a course in the general direction of the T-5 cluster.  It was still day-shift; Ravi sat behind him, with nothing, at the moment, to do except watch Peake's huge, clumsy-looking hands on the buttons and switches.  The fingers were so long, and so large, that they obscured the switches at times.

It was almost frightening to contemplate this kind of freedom, this kind of distance.  He did not mind the vista of stars outside the transparent glass dome... although he noticed that Moira kept her eyes carefully turned away from it.

Navigating on the surface of the Earth, there were three-hundred-and-sixty directions in which you could go, and some of that was limited by features of the terrain - mountains, water, heavy undergrowth pre-existing roads.  In the air you had the fuull three hundred sixty degrees; he'd grown used to that, flying a light plane.