It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos, were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after spawning its first-born.
For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight.
The first graduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important, because we were the first.
We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and grandparents and kid brothers and sisters—the people who a short time ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had never really existed.
But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us with pride in their eyes.
A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant. "... these boys have worked hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things. They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up at them and feel humility—for mankind needs humility."
The speaker was Robert Chandler, who'd brought the first rocket down on Mars just five years ago, who'd established the first colony there, and who had just returned from his second hop to Venus.
Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time, for I was thinking:
He's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the first!