Sensors, analyzers, siphons and beam-guides paralleled the lasers' signals along an incandescent column of plasma from the dissolving planetoid into the Extractor's processes and, when ready, into the hopper. The truncated apex of the Extractor's teleport gate cone glowed red, then violet, and thirty meters of its length disappeared into its new hyperspace home.
The invisible nozzle hurled a concentration of elemental substance across hyperspace to its sister station four and a half light-years distant.
The first sign of incoming was a churning, expanding mass of violet bubbles around the apex of the Collector. Shifting colors as it cooled and solidified, the mass transformed into a huge brown globe. The globe separated from the nozzle and drifted off, replaced by another mushrooming bubbling mass at the nozzle's tip.
A fleet of robot tugs clamped mag-beams on the free-floating globes and hauled them off. Another fleet of giant space tugs moved into position for the next gift of crude but treasured substance teleported across interstellar space from a distant star.
The cornucopia was in flow and humankind's first outbound and inbound highways to the greater universe were complete and working.
Afterwords
An overview of the times prepared by Level 2 students, Luna Middle School, based on records and commentaries in the official archives of The Interstellar Mining and Teleport System. (Reference: Index, Capsule V67 The Interstellar Historian, Third Millennium, Interstellar Era.)
In the centuries that followed humankind's giant leap to Luna, scientists, engineers and scholars in almost all of Planet Earth's disciplines probed ever deeper into space. Explorers studied and charted the surfaces, depths and atmospheres of each of the Solar System's bodies, and scrutinized the dynamics and constituents of space matter out to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. They ventured into the void beyond Pluto's aphelion for hundreds of millions of kilometers — although not yet the stars.
The first landing on Luna in Year 1969 of the then Common Era was judged to be among humankind's grandest achievements. At the Luna landing's Tercentenary a universal calendar was ordained to commemorate the Event as New Year's Day, Year 0, formally beginning humankind's Interplanetary Era.
By then, populated Moon and Mars bases were well established. Construction cadres had ventured into and beyond the Asteroids. Their experiences, surface and strata tests and studies influenced the selection of sites for mining operations and strategic outposts along the space frontiers. Advance construction battalions built basic habitat and, having attained 'shirt sleeve' environments, conceptualized, planned, gathered local materials, and designed and built infrastructure and industries that, in time, blossomed into enormous encapsulated cities, social orders, cultural adjustments and civilizations.