“See? Be sure to count your change.”
(“Quiet, Pat.”)
“Let me quote,” Mr. Howard continued, “from the charter of the Long Range Foundation: ‘Dedicated to the welfare of our descendants.’ “ He paused dramatically-I think that was what he intended; “Ladies and gentlemen, what one thing above all is necessary for our descendants?”
“Ancestors!” Pat answered promptly. For a second I thought that he had used his vocal cords, But nobody else noticed.
“There can be only one answer-living room! Room to grow, room to raise families, broad acres of fertile grain, room for parks and schools and homes. We have over five billion human souls on this planet; it was crowded to the point of marginal starvation more than a century ago with only half that number. Yet this afternoon there are a quarter of a million more of us than there were at this same hour yesterday – ninety million more people each year. Only by monumental efforts of reclamation and conservation, plus population control measures that grow daily more difficult, have we been able to stave off starvation. We have placed a sea in the Sahara, we have melted the Greenland ice cap, we have watered the windy steppes, yet each year there is more and more pressure for more and more room for endlessly more people.”
I don’t care for orations and this was all old stuff. Shucks, Pat and I knew it if anyone did; we were the kittens that should have been drowned; our old man paid a yearly fine for our very existence.
“It has been a century since the inception of interplanetary travel; man has spread through the Solar System. One would think that nine planets would be ample for a race too fertile for one. Yet you all know that such has not been the case. Of the daughters of Father Sol only fair Terra is truly suited to Man.”
“I’ll bet he writes advertising slogans.”
(“Poor ones,”) I agreed.
“Colonize the others we have done, but only at a great cost. The sturdy Dutch in pushing back the sea have not faced such grim and nearly hopeless tasks as the colonists of Mars and Venus and Ganymede. What the human race needs and must have are not these frozen or burning or airless discards of creation. We need more planets like this gentle one we are standing on. And there are more, many more!” He waved his hands at the ceiling and looked up.
“There are dozens, hundreds, thousands, countless hordes of them … out there. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the stars!”
“Here comes the pitch,” Pat said quietly. “A fast curve, breaking inside.”
(“Pat, what the deuce is he driving at?”)
“He’s a real estate agent.”
Pat was not far off: but I am not going to quote the rest of Mr. Howard’s speech. He was a good sort when we got to know him but he was dazzled by the sound of his own voice, so I’ll summarize. He reminded us that the Torchship Avant-Garde had headed out to Proxima Centauri six years back. Pat and I knew about it not only from the news but because mother’s brother, Uncle Steve, had put in for it-he was turned down, but for a while we enjoyed prestige just from being related to somebody on the list-I guess we gave the impression around school that Uncle Steve was certain to be chosen.
Nobody had heard from the Avant-Garde and maybe she would be back in fifteen or twenty years and maybe not. The reason we hadn’t heard from her, as Mr. Howard pointed out and everybody knows, is that you don’t send radio messages back from a ship light-years away and traveling just under the speed of light. Even if you assumed that a ship could carry a power plant big enough to punch radio messages across light-years (which may not be impossible in some cosmic sense but surely is impossible in terms of modem engineering)-even so, what use are messages which travel just barely faster than the ship that sends them? The Avant-Garde would be home almost as quickly as any report she could send, even by radio.