"Break up that clinch," ordered Arkalion. "We're making one more stop at Nowhere to pick up anyone who wants to return to Earth. Some of 'em probably won't but those who do are welcome...."
"Jason will stay," Temple predicted. "He'll be a leader out among the stars."
"Then he'll have to climb over my back," Alaric III predicted happily, his eyes on the viewport hungrily.
Temple's jaw throbbed. He was tired and sleepy. But satisfied. Sophia had died and for that he was sad, but there would always be a place deep in his heart for the memory of her: delicious, somehow exotic, not a love the way Stephanie was, not as tender, not as sure ... but a feeling for Sophia that was completely unique. And whenever the strangeness of the far-future Earth frightened Temple, whenever he felt a situation might get the better of him, whenever doubt clouded judgment, he would remember the tall lithe girl who had walked to her death that a world might have the freedom she barely had tasted. And together with Stephanie he would be able to do anything.
Unless, he thought dreamily as he drifted off to sleep, his head pillowed again on Stephanie's lap, he'd wind up with a bum jaw the rest of his life.
Milton Lesser started reading science-fiction in 1939, and began writing it in 1949. Since then he has had a myriad stories and novels published under many pen-names. Of this novel, he writes:
"Along with a lot of other people, I like to write about the first interstellar voyage. The reason is simple. Once mankind gets out to the stars and begins to spread out across the galaxy, he'll be immortal despite his best—make that worst—efforts to destroy himself. You can destroy a world, maybe a dozen worlds, but spread humanity out thin among the stars, colonies here, there, and all over, and he's immortal. He'll live as long as there's a universe to hold him.
"I know interstellar travel is a long way off, but science has a way of leaping ahead in geometric, not arithmetic progression. A hundred years? Perhaps we'll have our first starship then. Let's hope so. For if man can survive the next hundred years—the hardest hundred, I believe—he'll reach the stars and go on forever."