principles as made up the ship's power plant. Still it was a possible avenue of relief.

"It's worth trying," Maxon said, and they checked.

And checked, and checked.

"We worked for hours," Walraven said, "but nothing came of it. None of us, even Maxon, knew enough about the psi-drive to be sure, but we ended up certain that the trouble wasn't there. It was in us."

The drug was wearing thin, leaving him pale and shaken. His face had a glisten of sweat under the lowered lights.

The lead psych man chose a hypodermic needle, looked to Erwin and Costain for authority, and administered a second injection.

"You gave up searching," he said. "What then, Lieutenant?"

"We waited," Walraven said.

He relaxed, his face smoothing to impersonal detachment as his mind slipped back to the ship and its crew. Watching, Costain felt a sudden deep unease as if the man's mind had really winged back through time and space and carried a part of his own with it.

"There was only one more possible check," Walraven said. "We had to wait two days for that."

The check was Maxon's idea, simple of execution and unarguable of result. At halfway point acceleration must cease, the ship rotate on its gyros and deceleration set in. There would be a period of waiting when the power plant must be shut off completely.

If the Feeling stemmed from the psi-drive, it would lift then.

It did not lift. They sat weightless and disoriented while the gyros precessed and the ship swung end by end and the steady pressure of the Feeling mounted up and up without relief.

"It gets worse every hour," Vaughn said raggedly.

"It's not a matter of time," Maxon said. "It's the distance. The Feeling grows stronger as we get farther from home."

They sat for another time without talk, feeling the distance build up behind them and sensing through the unwindowed hull of the ship what the emptiness outside must be like. The ship was no longer an armored projectile bearing them snugly and swiftly to a first planetfall. It was a walnut shell without strength or direction.

In 

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