Who is it brings the night when day is done?

Who hangs the stars and lights them one by one?

And when it's time for night to turn to dawn,

Who takes them down and lights again the Sun?

Be you and me, it might, said Prester John.

-1-

Bernie Forester stood in the dimly lit crew lounge of the merchant ship Lady of Antares, looking out through the big observation port at the blazing display of translight space. The old nursery rhyme was running through his head, stirring memories within him.

His shipmates, if asked, might have said he was a man driven by an obsession. Everything he did, including his deck watches and his turns on the crew duty roster, were done with an urgency that left little room for the small pleasantries that eased the tedium of shipboard life for his crew mates. But to himself, standing wrapped in the web of star trails with the words of the old rhyme echoing in his mind, he was only his father's son.

He remembered when his father first repeated that rhyme to him years before. He had been a small boy then, but in memory he could still feel the body warmth of his father crouching beside him, shielding him from the chill night breeze that blew across the broad expanse of the spaceport tarmac to where they stood just outside its perimeter, looking up at the flickering stars, waiting and watching for the flash and glare of starship boats coming to land.

He remembered the many other times they had stood there through the years, his father pointing out the stars he had sailed to, naming the planets he had docked at; Durgin, Lassiter, Shelby, Allen Two, Komura, Johnsworld. On each occasion his father had recited that same rhyme, and toward the last he had spoken of the legend of Prester John, and he had talked about how there was always truth at the heart of a legend.

Bernie remembered the last time they had stood there, and he remembered how excited his father had been that time, as he told him he had signed on to crew a ship to Johnsworld again. He remembered too how his father had not come home from Johnsworld, how he had left Bernie and his mother waiting and waiting in their little apartment at the edge of the spaceport, until there could be no more waiting, because the money his father had left for them was gone. His mother had had to take a second job then, and they had had to move to an even smaller apartment down in the city, and there could be no more nights at the edge of the spaceport then either, watching the stars, wondering which one his father might be visiting now.

The truth at the heart of the legend. Bernie remembered his own trip to Johnsworld, following the father who had followed the legend, hoping to find that truth.

Johnsworld had been discovered by and named for Dr. John Prester, the same Prester who had also discovered the translight drive that made interstellar travel practical. Perhaps predicted it; no one knew for sure. That was only one of the mysteries surrounding the name of Doctor John, as he had been called in his own time, or Prester John, as he was often called now, since his name had become confused with the Prester John of ancient legend.

Certainly Prester had been a man of many talents, a genius and a generalist, and he had been on board the first ship to go translight. Some reports had it that he had designed the drive for that ship, and that he had somehow predicted the inertia reduction phenomenon inherent in the subatomic vortex of the ram drive at relativistic speeds. Others insisted that no evidence or mathematics available before the discovery could have predicted the effect, that it required the relativistic frame of reference for the phenomenon to be observed.

Most agreed, however, that it was Dr. John Prester who had understood the phenomenon as it occured on that early flight, and been bold enough to push the ship into translight. And all agreed that he had driven the expedition on to visit the Antares system, and had found the earthlike planet in that system. And too, in naming that planet Johnsworld, a precident had been set for naming habitable planets for the leader of the first expedition to visit them, a precedent rarely broken in the naming of later discoveries.

After that first interstellar exploratory expedition returned to Earth, Dr. John had declared his intention to lead a colonizing expedition back to Johnsworld. Persuasiveness was not lacking among his many talents, and he succeeded in gathering a following to his purpose. Another first for him; a huge colonizing ship was built, a massive vortex drive designed to propel it, and Johnsworld was successfully colonized. Some had said Dr. John lived out his years on Johnsworld, others that he moved on, looking for an even more ideal planet to colonize.

That is where the old legend and the new began to merge, for the original Prester John had been said to be a Christian king, ruler of a fabulous kingdom somewhere in the Far East of the then heathen and mysterious continent of Asia. His existence had been variously reported by a number of the early European explorers to visit those exotic lands.

Now stories were told among ships' crews and adventurers of a fabulous world discovered and colonized by Dr. John, whose genius was extended to the invention of an ideal planetary government and social structure. It was said anyone who arrived there would be welcomed, and allowed to join in the plenty and perfection as a full citizen. The existence and location of this utopian planet were kept quiet only to prevent an excessive inrush of new people from causing disruption. Someday, when it was fully developed, this ideal form of society would be spread to other worlds, but for now there was only the one.

That was the legend Bernie's father had followed, the one he had whispered to his son on those last long nights under the stars, and now Bernie followed his father. He would come back, he had told them, so that Bernie and his mother too could share with him in the perfection and plenty of the world of Prester John. But nine years had gone by, and he had not returned. Nine years of increasing hardship for Bernie and his mother, nine years of growing obsession with the legend that had taken his father from him for Bernie.

So at last Bernie had joined the merchant marine, and signed on as a deck hand on a freighter bound for Johnsworld. Like father, like son, his mother said. She could not seem to share in the hope he tried to give her that he would find his father and bring him back to her, but she did not try to prevent him from going. The years of struggle had driven her into an apathy so deep that even the prospect of losing her son to the stars that had robbed her of her husband did not seem to affect her in any way.

Now Bernie stood in the crew lounge of another freighter, outbound from Johnsworld. Johnsworld had taught him much. He had shared in the lives of people there who had also known his father, and he had learned from them something of the nature of his father's quest that he could not have understood as a boy. He had learned other things, too. Mesmerized by the translight star trails that seemed to be tracing arrows into his future, he lost himself in reminiscences of that recent past, and relived some of those moments.