than Sol itself, became what the star-stationers called it: the Earth Company.
It wielded power… certainly over the stations which it directed long-distance,
years removed in space; and power on Earth too, where its increasing supply of
ores, medical items, and its possession of several patents were enormously
profitable. Slow as the system was in starting, the steady arrival of goods and
new ideas, however long ago launched, was profit for the Company and consequent
power on Earth. The Company sent merchant carriers in greater and greater
numbers: that was all it needed to do now. The crews which manned those ships on
the long flights grew into an inward-turned and unique way of life, demanding
nothing but improvement of equipment which they had come to think of as their
own; station in turn supported station, each shifting Earth’s goods a step
further on to its nearest neighbor, and the whole circular exchange ending up
back on Sol Station where the bulk of it was drained off in high rates charged
for biostuffs and such goods as only Earth produced.
Those were the great good days for those who sold this wealth: fortunes rose and
fell; governments did; corporations took on more and more power, and the Earth
Company in its many guises reaped immense profits and moved the affairs of
nations. It was an age of restlessness. Newly industrialized populations and the
discontents of every nation set out on that long, long track in search of jobs,
wealth, private dreams of freedom, the old lure of the New World, human patterns
recapitulated across a new and wider ocean, to stranger lands.
Sol Station became a stepping-off place, no longer exotic, but safe and known.
The Earth Company flourished, drinking in the wealth of the star-stations,
another comfort which those who received it began to take for granted.
And the star-stations clung to the memory of that lively, diverse world which
had sent them, Mother Earth in a new and emotion-fraught connotation, she who
sent out precious stuffs to comfort them; comforts which in a desert universe
reminded them there was at least one living mote. The Earth Company ships were
the lifeline… and the Earth Company probes were the romance of their existence,
the light, swift exploration ships which let them grow more selective about next
steps. It was the age of the Great Circle, no circle at all, but the course
which the Earth Company freighters ran in constant travel, the beginning and end
of which was Mother Earth.
Star after star after star… nine of them—until Pell, which proved to have a
livable world, and life.
That was the thing which cancelled all bets, upset the balance, forever.
Pell’s Star, and Pell’s World, named for a probe captain who had located
it—finding not alone a world, but indigenes, natives.
It took a long time for word to travel the Great Circle back to Earth; less for
word of the find to get to the nearer star-stations… and more than scientists
came flocking to Pell’s World. Local station companies who knew the economics of
the matter came rushing to the star, not to be left behind; population came, and
two of the stations orbiting less interesting stars nearby were dangerously
depleted, ultimately to collapse altogether. In the burst of growth and the
upheaval of building a station at Pell, ambitious people were already casting
eyes toward two farther stars, beyond Pell, calculating with cold foresight, for
Pell was itself a source of Earthlike goods, luxuries—a potential disturbance in
the directions of trade and supply.
For Earth, as word rode in with arriving freighters&hellip a frantic haste to
ignore Pell. Alien life. It sent shock waves through the Company, touched off
moral debates and policy debates in spite of the fact that the news was almost
two decades old—as if they could set hand now to whatever decisions were being
made out there in the Beyond. It was all out of control. Other life. It
disrupted man’s dearly held ideas of cosmic reality. It raised philosophical and
religious questions, presented realities some committed suicide rather than
face. Cults sprang up. But, other arriving ships reported, the aliens of Pell’s
World were not outstandingly intelligent, nor violent, built nothing, and looked