foreground below. At intervals between them, unidentifiable
sprawling constructions began to make their appearance-random
collections of buildings, domes, girder lattices, and storage
tanks, tied loosely together by tangles of roadways and pipelines.
Farther away to the left, a line of perhaps half a dozen slim
spires of silver reared up from a shantytown of steel and concrete.
He identified them as gigantic Vega satellite ferries standing on
their launch-pads. They seemed fitting sentinels to guard the
approaches to what had become the Mecca of the Space Age.
As Victor Hunt gazed down upon this ultimate expression of man’s
eternal outward urge, spreading away in every direction below, a
vague restlessness stirred somewhere deep inside him.
Hunt had been born in New Cross, the shabby end of East London,
south of the river. His father had spent most of his life on strike
or in the pub on the corner of the street debating grievances worth
going on strike for. When he ran out of money and grievances, he
worked on the docks at Deptford. Victor’s mother worked in a bottle
factory all day to make the money she lost playing bingo all
evening. He spent his time playing football and falling in the
Surrey Canal. There was a week when he stayed with an uncle in
Worcester, a man who went to work dressed in a suit every day at a
place that manufactured computers. And his uncle showed Victor how
to wire up a binary adder.
Not long afterward, everyone was yelling at everyone more often
than usual, so Victor went to live with his aunt and uncle in
Worcester. There he discovered a whole new, undreamed-of world
where anything one wanted could be made to happen and magic things
really came true-written in strange symbols and mysterious diagrams
through the pages of the books on his uncle’s shelves.
At sixteen, Victor won a scholarship to Cambridge to study
mathematics, physics, and physical electronics. He moved into
lodgings there with a fellow student named Mike who sailed boats,
climbed mountains, and whose father was a marketing director.
When his uncle moved to Africa, Victor was adopted as a second son
by Mike’s family and spent his holidays at their home in Surrey or
climbing with Mike and his friends, first in the hills of the Lake
District, North Wales, and Scotland, and later in the Alps. They
even tried the Eiger once, but were forced back by bad weather.
After being awarded his doctorate, he remained at the university
for some years to further his researches in mathematical
nucleonics, his papers on which were by that time attracting
widespread attention. Eventually, however, he was forced to come to
terms with the fact that a growing predilection for some of the
more exciting and attractive ingredients of life could not be
reconciled with an income dependent on research grants. For a while
he went to work on thermonuclear fusion control for the government,
but rebelled at a life made impossible by the meddlings of
uninformed bureaucracy. He tried three jobs in private industry but
found himself unable to muster more than a cynical indisposition
toward playing the game of pretending that annual budgets, gross
margins on sales, earnings per share, or discounted cash flows
really meant anything that mattered. And so, when he was just
turning thirty, the loner he had always been finally asserted
itself; he found himself gifted with rare and acknowledged talents,
lettered with degrees, credited with achievements, bestowed with
awards, cited with honors-and out of a job.
For a while he paid the rent by writing articles for scientific
journals. Then, one day, he was offered a free-lance assignment by
the chief R and D executive of Metadyne to help out on the
mathematical interpretation of some of their experimental work.
This assignment led to another, and before long a steady
relationship had developed between him and the company. Eventually
he agreed to join them full-time in return for use of their
equipment and services for his own researches-but under his
conditions. And so the Theoretical Studies “Department” came into
being.
And now. . . something was missing. The something within him that
had been awakened long ago in childhood would always crave new