Joel lay back on his bunk, staring into the glowing square. Walls, floor and ceiling receded from consciousness. He was free of the prison as if like Alice he had stepped through a mirror into a world beyond.
"Sa Nels, a Martian of Terran descent, discovered the stellar drive in 4471," the narrator was saying. "The Republic organized an expedition to the trinary system of Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and B, our nearest neighbors; and Sa Nels was put in charge."
The narrator's voice droned on. Joel scarcely heard him.
These were government films of the actual take-off of the Vega, Sa Nels' ship. It lay in its cradle in the midst of the sandy red Martian wastes. The crew were at their posts. Sa Nels waved at the camera, climbed into the Vega. The ports were sealed.
There was a blinding flash from the stern of the ship. It rose slowly, crazily in the rarified Martian atmosphere, gained momentum until it was a thin needle-like streak and dwindled in the flick of an eye and disappeared.
Joel let out his breath with a sigh. He had been clenching his fist until his fingers ached. The first ship to reach the stars!
It had been twenty-one years, he recalled after the Vega passed beyond radio contact before a wondering Earth had heard from them again.
Twenty-one years compressed into as many minutes in the film unreeling before Joel's eyes. He saw the blood red ball that was Proxima Centauri swim into view on the scanner. He sighted the yellow-white star of Alpha Centauri A and its orange twin, Alpha Centauri B.
He landed with the expedition on the second planet of Alpha Centauri A and saw the deserted stone villages of the invisible natives, the thick flesh-like Nigel trees, mobile carnivorous plants that stalked the members of the crew like crawling land octopi....
The rest of the film was taken up with the improvement in stellar travel, the establishment of the first colony on Asgard and its slow growth.