* * * * *
The _Invincible_ was nearing Mars, heading for Earth, which was still a
greenish sphere far to one side of the flaming Sun.
Russ watched the little green globe, thinking.
Earth was home. To him it always would be home. But that would be
changed soon. Just a few more generations, and, to millions upon
millions of human beings, Earth no longer would be home.
With the new material energy engines, life on every planet would be
possible now, even easy. The cost of manufacture, mining, shipping
across the vast distances between the planets would be only a fraction
of what it had been when man had been forced to rely upon the unwieldy,
expensive accumulator system of supplying life-giving power.
Now Mars would have power of her own. Even Pluto could generate her own.
And power was ... well, it was power. The power to live, the power to
work, to establish and maintain commerce, to adjust gravity to Earth
standard or to any standard. The power to remake and reshape and rebuild
planetary conditions to suit man exactly.
Earthmen and Earthwomen would be moving out en masse now to the new and
virgin fields of endeavor--to the farms of Venus, to the manufacturing
centers that were springing up on Mars, to the mines of the Jovian
worlds, to the great laboratory plants that would spring up on Titan and
on Pluto and on the other colder worlds.
The migration of races had started long ago. In the Old Stone Age, the
Cro-Magnon had swept out of nowhere to oust the Neanderthal. Centuries
later the barbarians of the north, in another of those restless
migrations, had overwhelmed and swept away the Roman Empire. And many
centuries later, migration had turned from Europe to a new world across
the sea, and fighting Americans had battled their way from east to west,
conquering a continent.
And now another great migration was on--man was leaving the Earth,
moving into space. He was leaving behind him the world that had reared
and fostered him. He was striking out and out. First the planets would
be overrun, and then man would leap from the planets to the stars!
* * * * *
For years after America had become a country, had built a tradition of
her own, Europe was regarded by millions as the homeland. But as the
years swept by, this had ceased to be and the Americas were a world unto
themselves, owing nothing to Europe.
And that was the way it would be with Earth. For centuries, for
thousands of years, Earth would be the Mother Planet, the homeland for
all the millions of roaming men and women who dared the gulfs of space
and the strangeness of new worlds. There would be trips back to the
Earth for sentimental reasons ... to see the place where one's ancestors
were born and had lived, to goggle at the monument which marked the
point from which the first spaceship had taken off for the Moon, to
visit old museums and see old cities and breathe the air that men and
women had breathed for thousands of years before they found the power to
take them anywhere.
In the end, Earth would be just a worn-out planet. Even now her
minerals were rapidly being exhausted; her oil wells were dry and all
her coal was mined; her industry stabilized and filled; her businesses
interlocking and highly competitive. A world that was too full, that had
too many things, too many activities, too many people. A world that
didn't need men and women. A world where even genius was kept from
rising to the top.
And this was what was driving mankind away from the Earth. The
competition, the crowded conditions, in business and industrial fields,
the lack of opportunity for new development, the everlasting struggle to
get ahead, fighting for a place to live when millions of others were
fighting for the same thing. But not entirely that, not that alone.
There was something else--that old adventuresome spirit, the driving
urge to face new dangers, to step over old frontiers, to do and dare, to
make a damn fool of one's self, or to surpass the greatest
accomplishments of history.
But Earth would never die, for there was a part of Earth in every man
and woman who would go forth into space, part of Earth's courage, part
of Earth's ideals, part of Earth's dreams. The habits and the virtues
and the faults that Earth had spawned and fostered ... these were things
that would never die. Old Earth would live forever. Even when she was
drifting dust and the Sun was a dead, cold star, Earth would live on in
the courage and the dreams that by that time would be spreading to the
far corners of the Galaxy.
Russ dug the pipe out of his pocket, searched for the pouch, found it on
the desk behind him. It was empty.
"Hell," he said, "my tobacco's all gone."
Greg grinned. "You won't have to wait long. We'll be back on Earth in a
few more hours."
Russ put the stem between his teeth, bit down on it savagely. "I guess
that's right. I can dry smoke her until we get there."
Earth was larger now. Mars had swung astern.
Suddenly a winking light stabbed out into space from the night side of
Earth. Signaling ... signaling ... clearing the spacelanes for a greater
future than any human prophet had ever predicted.