"But cases have been known where a sender failed—especially those on extremely hot or exceptionally cold planets. I'm not doubting that you handled them all right—it's just that I think it worth the time and effort to check them and make sure while we're still out here."
"All right, you're the captain." Jon opened the drawer in the control desk and hunted out the sheets on which he had figured his former flight plans to the various planets.
"We won't need to land if the signals are working," his father said. "Just get us close enough in line so we can receive the messages."
"In that case, we can fly almost by sight, merely taking into consideration the direction and speed of the planets." Jon shoved his papers back into the drawer. "Let's see ... we'll make the best time going to One, then the Sun, then Three, Four and Five, and then circling about and heading for home."
"Fine! Get going."
"Strap down, everybody."
A quick glance to see that they were all secure, then Jon closed the master switch of his new interlocking controls. Smoothly, with increasing acceleration, the Star Rover lifted upward through the atmosphere on the planet Marci—Carveria Two.
Ever more swiftly it flew, and a special sort of gladness was in each heart at the thought that soon they would be once more speeding toward their home on far distant Terra.
Traveling about the universe, seeing new suns, new planets, new and interesting—even though alien, and sometimes dangerous—forms of life of various kinds, all this was a constant source of interest and delight. Still there was within each of them, even Tad Carver, a love of and a longing for the planet that had given them birth. Men had always found it so—it was probable that men born on Terra always would. Probable, too, that men born on other planets would always long for a return to their mother world.
It took a special type of person to become a colonist on another and alien planet. Much the same type of pioneer as those great-grandparents, many times removed, who had made the terrible journey across the western plains and mountains of Noramer to conquer the great, wealth-producing West, and their forefathers and mothers who had braved the perilous and unknown oceans to come from the Old to the New World in Colonial days, to search for freedom and opportunity.