Birthright

So the pilots were conditioned again, and within a year theAndromeda I had left the orbit in which it had

been constructed and was hurtling through the intergalactic void at an unimaginable speed. Jesser had indeed been chosen to pilot the mission, and when he was two years out from port with no untoward incidents, four more Andromeda ships were launched, each responsible for charting a different section of the neighboring galaxy.

Bartol spent most of the next year in the Project Control Building, checking the daily readouts of the five Hunks, while Lavers did the same for the pilots. The ships were exactly on course and on schedule, the inhabitants were in perfect physical health, and the Director finally made news of the Andromeda Project available to the media.

The people ate it up. Once again a new sense of purpose, of competition, was stirred within them. Andromeda, most of them agreed, would do for starters, just as Sirius had done some millennia back. But Andromeda was just one galaxy, and not such a big and impressive one at that. There were more than fifty galaxies just in our local group, and then... “And then I noticed this fluctuation,” said one of the minor functionaries on the Andromeda staff. Lavers looked at the readout and shook his head. “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all.” “What seems to be the problem?” said Bartol, who had wandered over. “Encephalogram,” said Lavers.

“On who?”

“Jesser.”

“What does it mean?” asked Bartol.

“Perhaps nothing,” said Lavers. “But if you'll recall a wager we made some years back, I think if I were you I'd get my money ready.”

“Based on one slight deviation from the norm?” said Bartol. “When you're hooked into an alien being three hundred thousand light-years from the nearest star, there is no such thing as aslight deviation,” said Lavers. The deviation remained so long that it finally became accepted as a standard reading until the other pilots began showing the same deviation, all between two and three years into their flight. “But it isn't the same at all,” said Lavers grimly. “It's smaller, slighter. Jesser's has changed so minutely over the past couple of years that it's hardly seemed like a change at all, until you compare it to the other four.”

Bartol merely grunted, and expressed confidence in the basic self-preservational instinct of the five pilots. And then one day Jesser's encephalic reading went right off the scale and came back to his original