must have hoped ... some day the mutineers ... or their descendants ... would come back ... at the head of a liberating fleet!"

"No!" she cried. Wrath reddened her pale skin. "Your filthy propaganda has had some results among the crew, yes, but to make them all active traitors—the stars will grow cold first!"

Holbrook heard himself speaking fluently; the words sprang out like warriors. "Why not be honest with yourself?" he challenged. "Look at the facts. The expedition was to have spent a total of perhaps fifty years, at the most, getting to Alpha Centauri, surveying, planting a colony if feasible, and returning to glory. To Earth! Suddenly, because of a handful of rebels, every soul aboard found himself headed for another sun altogether. It would be almost six decades before we even got there. Not one of our friends and kin at home would be alive to welcome us back, if we tried to return. But we wouldn't. If Tau Ceti had no suitable planet, we were to go on, maybe for centuries. This generation will never see home again.

"So why did you, why did all of them, not heed the few fanatics like Grushenko, rise up and throw themselves on our guns? Was death too high a price, even the death of the whole ship? Or if so, you still had many years in which to engineer a counter-mutiny; all of you were awake from time to time, to stand watches. Why didn't you even conspire?

"You know very well why not! You saw women and grown men crying with joy, because they were free." Bitterness seared his tongue. "Even you noisy Red loyalists have cooperated—under protest, but you have done your assigned duties. Why? Why not set the crew an example? Why haven't you even gone on strike? Isn't it because down inside, not admitting it to yourself, you also know what a slave pen Earth has become?"

Her hand cracked across his face. The blow rang in him. He stood gaping after her, inwardly numbed, as she flung from the control cabin into the passageway beyond.

Grushenko nodded, not without compassion. "They may claim all the equality they will, Eben Petrovitch," he said. It was the first time he had offered that much friendship. "But they remain women. She will make a good wife for the first man who fully comprehends this is true in her own case too."

"Which I don't?" mumbled Holbrook.

Grushenko shook his head.

And the world Zolotoy grew. They decelerated, 

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