The clock showed its hours and days, but although you accepted its figures as a working basis you didn’t really believe them. Between blast-off and reentry there was a weightless, timeless suspension in nothingness. The ship didn’t seem to move. You went through regular checks and routines, but there was no sensation of their having any effect on anything. Some of the pioneers went a bit odd after months of it—months on a set course, without any feeling that they were getting anywhere, sometimes panicking from the conviction that the ship had stopped, the stars in their courses weren’t on course any more, nothing was happening or would ever happen again. And me... old pioneer Kemp... had I gone a few degrees off orbit in my old, old age? Well, my middle age... Well... I found I was getting a whole lot more irritable than I used to be. One word could set me off. The mere presence of other people on board rasped on my nerves. It wasn’t the silence—I’d coped with the silence a long while ago, in the past, and learned how to conquer it—but the fidgetings and mutterings and mannerisms of other men in this confined area: that was what scratched at me.
