“I’ve had enough adventures,” said Noxon, “to know that boredom is the closest thing to happiness. Boredom means that there’s nothing wrong. You’re not hungry, you’re not in pain. Nobody’s making any demands on you. Your mind is free to think whatever you want. The only thing that makes boredom unpleasant is if you’re impatient for something else to happen.”
“Which I am,” said Ram Odin.
“And I’m not,” said Noxon. “Because when we get there, I’ll find the nub of some path that’s two or twelve or a hundred years old, and I’ll attach to it, and then either the ship will come with me when I take us back to the forward timestream, or it won’t.”
“It will.”
“You don’t know that. If it doesn’t, then we’ll be up there in space, dead in seconds.”
“I do know,” said Ram Odin. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Supposedly, I caused the twenty-way leap in time—nineteen forward, one back.”
“You took the ship and the colonists through and out of the fold,” said Noxon. “The computers caused the duplications.”
“Didn’t the ships come along on every one of those jumps? And I wasn’t sitting there chanting, ‘Bring the ship, bring the ship,’ because I didn’t know there was going to be a shift in time.”
“The ship just came.”
“And I wasn’t even near a planet,” said Ram Odin. “My path was tied to the ship, you’ve proven that, so the ship was massive enough to hold on to my path the way planets usually do. Yet it still made the jump with me. So it’s going to make the time jump with you, too.”
“Maybe, yes, probably,” said Noxon. “Though there are a lot of variables that may or may not be significant.”
“So what? So we die. Poof, the ship disappears around us, and we become tiny momentary sparks of fire in the night sky as our corpses enter the atmosphere. We won’t be the only humans to die that day, because dozens of people die each second. It won’t even extinguish our identities, because you’ve got a copy of you under the name of Rigg back on Garden, and I’ve got a copy of me, only about forty years older.”
“But I’ll be gone.”
“You’ll be gone someday anyway. Get over it.”
“You’re not afraid to die?” asked Noxon.
“Of course I am,” said Ram Odin. “But I volunteered to be the pilot of the first human starship, the founder of the first colony in another solar system. I don’t let my fear of death keep me from doing the things that make my life interesting and, maybe, worth living.”
“You’re so brave,” said Noxon, sounding a little sarcastic, but also meaning it.
“Me? Nothing I’ve done compares with that business you did right after your mechanical father pretended to die. Leaping on rocks over a waterfall current that could have swept you to your death if anything went wrong. All to save a stupid kid whose idiocy was going to get him killed someday anyway. That was brave.”
“I was like a machine, acting by reflex. The job needed doing, I moved, I didn’t think. But this time I’ve done nothing but think.”
“And you want more time in order to do more thinking? That’s going to be helpful in some way?”
“And there’s more at stake,” said Noxon. “I was trying to save one kid back then. Now it’s a whole world.”
“You were trying to save somebody who wasn’t you, and you risked everything you had and ever would have—to wit: your life. Your life is the same thing you’re risking now, and all the people you’re maybe going to save are equally not you. It’s the same thing, except now you’re getting cold feet.”
“The point I’m making,” said Noxon, “is that I’ve been really tense and maybe it would be good for me to have a few more days as we approach Earth to maybe wind down a little. Read a book. Maybe watch that Wizard of Oz movie.”
“I don’t know if we even have it on board,” said Ram Odin.
“We do,” said the expendable.
“If you want the time, take the time,” said Ram Odin.
“Thank you,” said Noxon with exaggerated politeness.
Then they sat there for about five seconds, as Noxon realized how impossible it would be for him to concentrate on anything, knowing what he had to do as soon as they got to Earth.
“Silbom’s left elbow,” said Noxon. He picked up the box of mice. “I was forgetting the mice. I couldn’t very well ask them to wait inside that box for days on end. But I’m also not letting them out. So it’s only fair to speed things up.”
“For the sake of the mice,” said Ram Odin.