fuel gives out they'd die with us. I think we'd go mad anticipating that. We can't even have each other. We're imprisoned here as they used to imprison criminals. For life. We can have no hope. There is nothing we can work at. We can't even try to do anything."

He clenched his hands inside his space-gloves. Dona looked at him.

"Are you going to give up, Kim?"

"Give up what?" Then he said bitterly, "No, Dona. I'm going to find some excuse for hoping. Some lie I can tell myself. But I'll know I'm simply trying to deceive myself."

There was a long silence. Hopelessness. Futility.

"I've been thinking, Kim," Dona said softly, at last. "There are three hundred million inhabited planets. There are trillions and quintillions of people in the Galaxy. If they knew about us, some of them at least would want to help us. There are some, probably, who'd hope we could help them. If we were to think of a new approach to the problem we face, and reach the people who would want to help us, it might mean eventual rescue."

"Signals travel at the speed of light," Kim said. "We'd be dead long before even a tight-beam signal could reach another star-cluster, if there were anybody there to receive or act on it. But there aren't any space-ships except the Starshine. It was the last ship used in the Galaxy."

Dona said stoutly:

"We've been regarding our predicament as if it were unique, as if nobody else in the Universe wanted to be free. As if there was only one problem—ours! I heard a story once, Kim. It was about a man who had to carry a certain particular grain of dust to another place. A silly story, of course. But this was the top grain in a dust-pile. The man tried to find something that would pick up the one grain of dust, and something that would hold it quite safe. But he couldn't solve the problem. There wasn't any box that would hold a single grain of dust. He couldn't even pick up a solitary dust-grain. And how could he carry it if he couldn't pick it up?"

"That's a fable," Kim said, harshly. "There's a moral?"

Dona smiled. "Yes," she said. "There is. He picked up the dust-grain. With a shovel. He picked up a lot of others, too, but that didn't matter. And he could find a box to hold a hundred thousand dust-grains, when he couldn't find a box to hold one."

Kim was 

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