adaptation, and things would just look gray. And not too long after that, you'd stop 'seeing' entirely, as we think of seeing. Or, as a friend of mine once said, under those conditions you'd 'see' as much with your elbows as you would with your eyes. Funny, isn't it? We usually think of black as being the absence of light. And yet, in order to 'see' black, we've got to have at least a little light around every once in a while."

The watchman on the bridge droned out the time again. "Four minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."

Allen Hawkins gave a large sigh, then readjusted the cap on his head. He had the feeling that Broussard's little lecture on science, while factually accurate, was delivered more to obscure the facts than to illuminate. "I'd better get to the bridge now, Broussard. Not that they really need me, but ..." He left the sentence dangling, then turned and walked briskly out of the observation room.

Once in the control room, he gave the dials and the illuminated screens a rapid, practiced glance and then sat down in his chair to one side of the operations panel. There was actually no known danger to this shifting back and forth from one space to another. No ship had ever encountered any difficulties whatsoever in doing so; there had never been an accident of any kind during transition. The whole thing was as completely automatic as man could make it, and apparently entirely safe. But still Hawkins had never made the shift one way or another without feeling a telltale tightening of muscles deep inside him, and without wondering just what would happen if they got stuck in all that darkness.

"One minute, Captain," the watch officer reminded him. Hawkins nodded in reply, his face illuminated by the flashing lights on the control panel in front of him. He watched their changing signals calmly with knowing eyes.

"Thirty seconds ... all drives off," sang out a voice. The hands on the clock crept slowly around the dial.

"Zero...."

There was no sound, no feeling, no jerk nor jar, no noise to mark the transition—nothing at all different from the moment before except a slight increase in the total light flux in the room.

Stars.

Captain Allen Hawkins smiled softly to himself. Stars ... something to cling to, he whispered under his breath.

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