The ship was two hours out, beyond lunar orbit and still accelerating, when, trained for months against the moment, set each about his task. Readings occupied Maxon and Vaughn and Ragan while Walraven checked his communications and telemetering gear.

It was not until the transmitter slot had licked up its first coded tape—no plain text here, security before even safety—and reported all well, the predicted borne out, that they became aware of the Feeling.

The four of them sat in their unsqueaking gimbaled seats and looked at each other, sharing the Feeling and knowing that they shared it, but not why. Vaughn, who was given to poetry and some degree of soul-searching, made the first open recognition.

"There's something wrong," he said.

The others agreed and, agreeing, could add nothing of explanation to the wrongness. Time passed while they sat, seeing within themselves for the answer—and if not for answer, at least for identification—but nothing came and nothing changed except that with time the steady pressure of the Feeling grew stronger.

Vaughn, again, was first to react to the pressure. "We've got to do something." He twisted out of his seat and wavered in the small pseudogravity of the ship's continuing acceleration. "I've never in my life felt so desolate, so—"

He stopped. "There aren't any words," he said helplessly.

Less articulate than Vaughn and knowing it, the others did not try to help find the words. Only Ragan, professional soldier without family or close tie anywhere in the world, had a suggestion.

"The ship's power plant is partly psionic," Ragan said. "I don't understand the principle, but it's been drilled into us that no other system can give a one-directional thrust without reaction. The psi-drive is tied into our minds in the same way it's tied into the atomic and electronic components. It's part of us and we're part of it."

Even Maxon, crew authority on the combination drive, missed his meaning at first.

"If our atomic shielding fails," Ragan explained, "we're irradiated. If our psionics bank fails, we may feel anything. Maybe the trouble is there."

Privately they disagreed, certain that nothing so disquieting as the Feeling that weighted them down could be induced even by so cryptic a marriage of dissimilar 

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