United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then, indeed, the Lhari had been lying all along, the vicious lie that maintained their stranglehold monopoly of star-travel. He was their enemy again, the spy within their gates, like Briscoe, to be hunted down and killed, but to bring the message, loud and clear, to everyone: The Lhari lied! The stars can belong to us all!
You can't realize what it was like in those days. Oh, we'd had star-travel for centuries, we were beginning to stagnate. And now look at us! Oh, they derided Rhazon said that even if he did find anyone, any other race, they'd be monsters with whom we could never communicate.
We reached this point once before. Then a Lhari captain, Rhazon of Nedrun, abandoned the safe ways of caution, and out of his blind leap in the blind dark came many good things. Trade with the human race. Our Mentorian allies. A system of mathematics to take the hazards from our star-travel. "Yet once again the Lhari had grown cautious and fearful.
Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millions back on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him a practical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on such exotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundred years or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combined big-game expedition and escape from Lunar City.
"I wasn't thinking about anything like that," he said honestly. "It was simply that I couldn't let them die. After all " he was speaking more to himself than to the girl "it's their star-drive. They found it. And they've given us star-trade, and star-travel, cheaply and with profit to both sides. I hope we'll get the star-drive someday.
Alicia would now have a full-time occupation keeping people from taking advantage of him. But the ship went back to Earth. And on Earth Jamison became the leading television personality of all time, describing and extrapolating the delicious dangers and the splendid industrial opportunities of star-travel. Bell was his companion and co-star.
Word Of The Day