And they built our space colonies and have always run our space-lanes.
But Trase Barnes wasn't one of them.
Like I say, Trase's father was a spaceman, a long thin giant of a man who loved the sky and lived in it. Trase's mother was like his father, a space-woman born, and they lived out there at No-Grav City, hung there fifty thousand miles away from the moon, where spacemen live without the heavy bonds of gravity.
But Mrs. Barnes came into the Moon-Station hospital to have her baby, and naturally she hoped for a son—a spaceman-born. But Trase was just as sound and healthy as an Iowa pig in October, and he knew from the beginning which way was up and down. But how he hated it!
When Trase's pa came back from a long haul out to Pluto—he'd been gone a year and a half—and found out that Trase would never be a spaceman, he broke into tears. Only time he ever cried.
Well, they lived with him and they raised him, here in the gravity of the moon. His pa had to make a living, hitching space hulks back and forth in the dark of the sky, but his ma was as kind as ever; she just gritted her teeth and stayed in the gravity with him till he got out of Moon-Station prep-school. They finally had another child, a girl, who was a space-woman born. Now she's a woman pilot on a Mercury to Venus run.
Oh, how Trase hated himself, and the world, and most of all the gravity that bound his feet to the ground. His first wanderings were out there to the space-port, where the spacemen in their gray uniforms strolled easily about and swaggered before his eyes. There were the mysterious vessels, crouched in their launching racks, their skins shiny with the flow-sheen imparted to them by tremendous speeds out in nothing. There were the gatherings of spacemen to talk about the black, black side of Mercury, the pale corona of the sun seen from Neptune, the thousands of square miles of flat green moss on Venus, but mostly they talked of the purple and yellow rings of Saturn, and the deep-breath feeling of space.
So Trase would go back to his school books and try to understand arithmetic and geography, and his body would always be on time, his physical being would say "present"—but his mind, ah, his mind wandered a golden pathway among the glittering worlds of the sky.
His little fingers were deft and quick, and by the time he was ten he had made a dozen space-models. There was a model of old number 19, crude, rough, and laughable, with its huge stepped rockets that were dropped away to the rear on the way to the moon. There beside his schoolbooks was the Adventurer II, first ship to go inside Mercury's orbit and come back to tell the tale. His walls were lined with pictures of such men as Rak Bartel, the laughing spaceman who rescued the Wofford expedition from the wilds of Titan, and over there was Colombo Dante, the pale little Indian half-breed who held ten speed records around the solar system that are still unbeaten today.