Earthbound

Chapter 3

Due to the nature of their profession, scientists are cautious people. If this weren’t so, they’d spend their time exploring hopeful but fruitless blind alleys. Yet most scientists and engineers you speak to today will insist that space travel lies no more than fifty years in the future—and many of them are willing to compress that figure to a mere five years!

The first flight to the moon and beyond is within the offing of our lifetime, and surely, as one science-fictionist so aptly put it, “Columbus was a piker!” by comparison. So a glorious new frontier is soon to be opened…but it will make all previous frontiers look a lot like your neighbor’s back yard.

We will not speak in terms of hundreds of miles, but of millions.

Arctic cold will seem like a Turkish bath, if you’re on the dark side of the moon.

You’d need earflaps in the Matto Grosso jungle, if you happened to come from the sunward hemisphere of Mercury.

In short, we’re in for some mighty stimulating changes.

Basically, however, one element will remain the same, and that element is man. Of course, life won’t be quite the same after the advent of space travel. The limitless imagination of science fiction will give way to the endless facts of everyday life. Yet man will survive more or less as we know him today. Old emotions will be there…naturally, faced with new problems, but the gamut from love through desire and fear to hate will still cover all facets of life.…

But high adventure will await tomorrow’s youth as it never awaited any generation before them. And because I believe Earthbound is a story of high adventure more than it is anything else, that’s an important thing to remember. The youngsters on the corner won’t play cops-and-robbers any more, but spacers-and-pirates; their older brothers won’t dream of baseball, but of rockets and the far horizons; and you won’t talk of your cousin in Salt Lake City, but in Canal City—which will be on Mars.

EarthboundAnd West Point? Well, West Point will be only a quaint historic shrine on the banks of the Hudson. Sure, you’ll be able to visit it on a tourist trip around the vicinity of the little-used Greater New York Port Area…but you’d rather inspect the gleaming new Solar Academy, which trains men for the stars.…

—M.L.