For the six young ones in the crew, the voyage was a sort of class trip to an exciting freak show. They bled Aunt Mommy dry of every scrap of geography she could remember, and pestered Uncle Ghost, when they could find him, for stories and sidelights and gossip. When those ran out, they quarreled with each other for amusement; and the long trip grew longer.
Although they never said so, Aunt Eve and Uncle Ghost shared a certain purpose. The first part was clear. The climax less so. It was to find Dirty Dieter, if he still lived, and—and—and do something, though what that something was was the unclear part. Even Jeron carried that unwritten purpose in a corner of his heart—even the younger ones, sometimes—for their childhood lessons had taken. Diabolical Dieterl Kneffie the ineluctably badl Thinking of him as they drifted off to sleep, the little ones sometimes growled in their throats, and when they realized how terminally tedious the long voyage was, it was Dieter von Knefhausen they blamed. When Jeromolo Bill was three years old—old enough to be worth persecuting—the other children invented the game of "Do It to Dieter" and made Bill their quarry in long whooping chases all around the ship. Even Jeron sometimes joined in, out of boredom, while Uncle Ghost retreated to invisibility and Aunt Eve to her latest crop of malt-nuts. They consoled themselves by thinking that the exercise, at least, was good for the young muscles.
Hopes of revenge could carry one just so far. Dreams of curiosity satisfied, not much farther; the concept of delayed gratification takes long to learn, and longer to be felt as real. The voyage was far too long for tiny tots. The good part of that was that, out of boredom, they were willing to learn anything that anyone was willing to teach, and so on good days Aunt Eve sobered up and demonstrated knitting and plant husbandry, and lectured on the subject of The Good Old Days on Earth. Uncle Will Becklund could not demonstrate much of anything, but he explained the casting of the bones for the I Ching and taught the true meaning of The Moon in Water. It was not enough. Shef had designed the ship for speed and efficiency, not for pleasure. It was a golden globe a hundred yards through, with two smaller globes bulging from its poles like snowball ears on a snowman's face for landing craft; inside half of it was for living, and storage of the dormant seeds they were bringing to Earth as gifts, and for machinery; and the other half bare floors as big as skating rinks.
When they were only local commuting distance from Earth—the Sun no longer a star but a Sun; the biggest planets now visible with disks—there was work to do at last. So they fed Aunt Eve coffee and kept her sober for a few weeks, while Molomy lashed the littler kids into pulling out the first lots of seeds and cuttings and planting them in the tanks on what had been bare floors. But then it was back to the malt nuts for Eve, not so much from boredom anymore as from fear. The closer Earth got, the scarier the idea of returning there became.
By the end of the trip even the youngest, Jeromolo Bill, was six years old. It was notable that no children had been born on all the long voyage. Partly it was prudence. No one wanted a squalling brat to tie him down when they embarked on the heart-stopping adventure of exploring old Earth. It was also for earthier reasons. In the close quarters of Shef's speedster for four long years they couldn't even stand themselves, much less each other. Their sexual contacts were short, infrequent, and without issue. For Aunt Eve there was no sex at all in the four-year trip, because with the children she wouldn't and with Uncle Ghost she really couldn't, and therefore the malt-nuts. She spent most of her time in her flowered sleeping sack. It took a great deal to get her out of it.
What did it, just as they were about to round the Sun for final deceleration, was a ninety-decibel shout.
It didn't just wake Eve. It woke everyone who was asleep, and pierced the ears of everyone who was awake. Jeron came running into Eve's cubicle, and it was several seconds before either of them realized that the yell was a message from Uncle Ski. "What's he saying?" Eve cried in terror.
"Attenuate it, Eve! Hold your hands over your ears like this!" And when she followed her son's orders, she could make out the words. It was a kind of shopping list!
"—fly agaric, henbane, bladderwort, belladonna, parsley, parsnips—"
"Can't you turn it down?" she yelled over the noise, and Jeron yelled back grimly: "fie installed it himself—I don't know how. That message has been chasing us for four years."
It went on for minutes: "—Venus fly-trap, madder, yucca, Jack-in-the-pulpit, skunk cabbage—"
Eve moaned, shrugged a shoulder up to an ear to release one hand, and reached for another malt-nut. She popped it open with the dagger that lay beside her bed and took a long drink of the milky fluid. Jeron scowled impartially at the malt-nut and the yelling, and then he had an idea. Wincing, he took his hands away from his ears long enough to pull blossoms from Eve's bower bed. He rolled them into fingertip-sized balls, did something with two of them, then reached for Eve's head while holding two more. She ducked away; he snarled at her, and she perceived what he intended, and allowed him to insert the cool, moist plugs in her ears. Thus diluted, the roar from the communicator was merely loud, and she was able to identify, the voice. It wasn't Ski, or Shef or Jim; of course it wasn't, for that much plain English prose would have tied any one of them up in knots for hours. The voice cataloguing plants, flowers, and even lichens and ocean plankton belonged to a fifth-cohort son of Ann and Shef named Araduk.
At last it ended: "Under no circumstances," it howled, "are you to fail to return viable samples of all the foregoing!" There was no good-bye; it just stopped.
Cautiously Eve pulled the plug out of her ear, and Jeron stood up, flexing his knees in the pull of the 1.5 gravity. "I suppose you're going to drink yourself back to sleep now," he said.
"Is there any reason not?"
He shrugged. "Sightseeing," he said disdainfully. "We're about to scoot around the Sun."
"For me," she said, reaching for the malt-nut, "that's just a rerun. I caught it first time around."
But she did not mean it, did not mean most of the things she said to Jeron when he took that contemptuous, cold tone to her, any more than, she hoped, he meant it to her.
Shef had built their ship with many eyes and, though most of them were hooded for the perihelion approach, through the multiply filtered smallest of them the entire chip's crew gazed wonderingly at the immense sea of flame below.
The ship whipped around the Sun, shedding velocity, and eased back to Earth's orbit from the inside. Quittyyx and Jeromolo Bill were relieved of their responsibilities for a time—the ship was no longer relativistic, and had not yet begun orbiting maneuvers. Jeron took command. Since they had done their job well, he had little to do. The ship crept toward the point in Earth's orbit where Earth would be when they got there; and there it was, old green Terra, the mottled blue and white marble with its honey-colored child spinning beside it.
By the time they were half a million miles away—only twice as far as the Moon—their speed had dropped to two hundred miles a second. They were well within the safety margins for the ballistic program. They entered a low-Earth orbit, killed the rest of their surplus velocity, and shut down the drive.
All Shef's built-in eyes were open now. The most powerful of them, visible from outside only as a slotted patch on the gleaming gold sphere, gave them magnification enough to make out surface objects only a few hundred yards across. The difficulty was that most of the objects were usually covered by clouds. All of them had heard of "clouds." None but Eve and the late Will Becklund had ever seen them; in the habitat, moisture was leached out of the air by condensation and rain rarely fell.