Earthman, Come Home

(I bought a copy of this edition of Earthman, Come Home in the early 1960s. It cost three shillings and sixpence.)

Genesis, PART TWO, III.

Wayfarer enters the Solar System:

"The eagerness, the bittersweet sense of homecoming, that flickered around his calm logic were Christian Brannock's. Imagine long-forgotten feelings coming astir in you when you return to a scene of your early childhood." (p. 124)

How often do we remember something that we have never once thought about during the intervening years or decades? Christian Brannock returns home after a billion years - although he has not been a conscious individual for all that time.

In a similar scene, James Blish's characters pass through the Solar System but do not stop:

"...it was, inarguably, the home sun. There was a curious thickness in Amalfi's throat as he looked at it."
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 411.

"Amalfi could not understand why the tiny, undistinguished yellow spark floating in front of him in the helmet made his eyes sting and water so intolerably."
-Blish, op. cit., p. 412.

He will never see it again.