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six of us. Suppose only four of us had qualified, and we had to run a ship that way?”
    There was a brief, stunned silence. Moira said, into it, “I want to check the drives, and I suppose Ching wants to look at the computer hardware.”
    Ching said, “We can't all go in there; I'll survey it from outside. Computers are temperamental things, and too many strange bodies around them can make them do peculiar things. Nobody goes in there except under absolute necessity; and then, wearing anti-electrostatic garments, and special shoes. I'll be running it from here.”
    “The drives are ready to go,” Moira said. Peake, watching her, thought she touched the controls of the drive mechanism as if they had been the frets of her cello — or the body of a lover. “So when do we leave?”
    “As far as I know,” Peake said, “it's up to us. When we're ready, we go — and that's all there is to it.”
    And the six members of the crew looked at one another, stunned, realizing that after twelve years of rigid structure, that really was all there was to it. No one would give them orders. No one would tell them where to go, or what to do.
    Fontana looked out through the huge window with the blaze of billions of stars, the tiny blinking lights of the control panels reflecting, small and somehow lost, against the hugeness of the unknown Galaxy; as if in answer to the sudden terror of it, Ching touched something that closed them in again, the window opaque,
    so that they were again sealed in the control cabin with only the winking lights and their reflections.
    “There's no hurry,” Fontana said, and her voice was shaking, so that she clung to a bulkhead. “Let's go back to the main cabin, and look over our living quarters, and find out who's going to sleep where. And have something to eat.”

Survey Ship

CHAPTER THREE
    There was a window in the main cabin, but it was one of reasonable proportions, not a wall of glass that opened naked on the empty universe of Chaos; and as they watched, the familiar form of the space station, revolving slowly end-over-end (from their point of view) and trailing its little cone of shadow, came into view, trundled majestically across their window, and disappeared again. Against its known contours, the six could put themselves into human perspective again. . Fontana, trained to self-understanding because of her specialization in psychology, realized that they had all suffered their first attack of a kind of culture shock; the transfer from the orderly and rigid world of the Academy into the knowledge of a universe literally at their feet. Deliberately, searching for another touch of the familiar and banal, she went to the food console, and dialed herself a snack and a cold fruit drink.
    “They stocked us with three months' supply of ready food; after that, we'll have to start synthesizing proteins and carbohydrate equivalents,” she said. “We might as well enjoy it while we have it. With all these heavy scientific specialties on the crew, I don't suppose there's anyone who can cook?”
    “I can,” Ching said, “but I don't want to be stuck to
     do it all the time.”
    “I think once a day would be enough for anyone to do it,” Moira said. “Surely we can all fix our own breakfasts and lunches — even if we're not all on different schedules. I can cook, too — I'll do it once in a while.”
    “So what do we do? Set up a roster?”
    Moira said, “I think we'd all get fed up with too much togetherness. Surely one meal a day together would be enough, if not too much?”
    Ravi said, “I think we should share as many mealtimes as possible, considering duty rosters. We are the only human contacts any of us is going to have, for a long, long time; I think we should retain a — a base of closeness. To keep in touch. Make ourselves into a family.”
    “I'd go stir-crazy,” Ching said. “I'd say, why not let everybody fix their own meals unless they really crave company; have dinner together