Birthright

not indomitable. Earth was his, remade in his own image, yet Man was not satisfied.

He reached the moon, and in short order had erected settlements on Mars and the inner planets. The asteroid belt came next, and by the dawn of the twenty-fifth century his ingenuity had allowed him to place metropolis after metropolis on the moons of the outer planets. And there he came to a halt. A trip to the moon took a mere ten hours; even a journey to Pluto, while it required four years, was conceivable. Conceivable and possible, as three growing cities gave testimony. But the stars were another problem altogether. The nearest was almost five light-years from Earth, an inconceivable distance even for this technically oriented century. Not only would the trip require half a dozen long-lived generations, but the ship would need an enormous amount of room for oxygen-giving plants, making the venture both financially and physically unfeasible. So Man looked elsewhere for a solution. The concept of hyperspace was tackled by every scientific mind in the Solar System for more than a century; the sole conclusion, reached countless times in countless experiments, was that hyperspace was a myth. And then, in the early years of the twenty-seventh century, a young Tritonian scientist devised a theory for an engine that would propel a ship at a faster-than-light speed. The scientific community scoffed at him, citing the long-standing theories that made a Tachyon Drive impossible; but the Solar Government, in overpopulated desperation, funded his project. Within two years the ship was complete. It was taken out into space some 75 million miles beyond Pluto and set into motion. It disappeared immediately, and neither ship nor pilot were ever seen again. However, the total transmutation of mass into energy and subsequent explosion predicted by the men of science was also undetected, and more ships were built around the faster-than-light principle. As Aristotle's earth, air, fire, and water had kept Man from discovering the true nature of atoms and molecules for an extra thousand years, so had Einstein kept him from the stars for half a millennium. But no longer!

There were immense problems at first. Forty-three ships disappeared from the sight and knowledge of Man forever before one returned; and the one that did come back plunged into the sun—and continued right on through it.

It was another century and a half before an acceptable braking system was developed, and sixty additional years before the ships could maneuver and change directions in terms of mileage rather than light-years.

But by the advent of the thirtieth century, Man was ready for his rendezvous with the stars. Proxima Centauri was the first star he visited. It turned out to have no planets. Neither did Alpha Centauri, Polaris, or Arcturus.

Man discovered planetary bodies in the Barnard and Capella systems, but they were huge, cold, ancient worlds, totally devoid of life.

He made his first alien contact on the fifth planet of the Sirius system. The inhabitants were small, fuzzy little fluffballs with no sensory organs whatsoever. Since the Sirians had neither eyes nor ears nor, apparently, brains, Man couldn't ask them for living space on the planet, so he simply took it. It was only