Ten days remained until they were swimming in the debris cloud. Perhaps a fortnight before they reached Cleft. He wondered if he would live to see it. Quite obviously, he had cancer. Diagnostic facilities were lacking, but the first undeniable symptoms had been in his digestive tract, and since then his liver had become swollen by metastases. Now he was feeling some weird stuff in his lungs. It had grown slowly. It might have been natural causes—something that had been seeded on Old Earth, before he had even come to space—or it might have been a piece of fallout that had made its way into his food and gotten caught in his gut. No matter. The main question on his mind was whether he would live to see Cleft. He actually didn’t feel that bad, and so the naive answer would be yes, of course; but cancer growth was something of an exponential phenomenon, and he knew how tricky those could be.