I don't know why we had figured that all progress and improvement in interstellar flight would cease just because we had left earth. The eternal, colossal conceit of men, I guess.
When our last signal back to earth had given the okay sign, sure, they started building bigger ships and recruiting another crew. But by the time that the Albert E. II, was ready to take off for a more extended expedition, the Larson Drive was now the Larson-McKendrick Drive, with a velocity of a full half the speed of light, some five times our velocity.
Somehow, Tina had managed to get herself in the party, as Hans had sensed she would. And the time-differential, as it worked out, wasn't serious at all. Tina had been only 32 when we left her on earth. Including the year and a half she had already been with the colony on New Columbia, she was still quite a bit younger than Hans, and just twice as pretty as the day of their separation.
The tremolo note was rising now, the soft, mystic pitch of excitement inherent in the new world.
I turned to Mac, who was grinning like to split his face. I said, "Looks like you were wrong, old boy—about the impossibility of colonizing."
He nodded his head readily, but he wouldn't tear his eyes away from that monsterous, preposterous chocolate cake. The attraction, I discovered, was a little bevy of on-lookers who stood at its base. They were a dozen or more most attractive colonists in the younger age-bracket and unmistakably of the opposite sex.
Mac said, "Yeah, I was wrong about colonizing prospects. Dead wrong. Aren't you glad?"
And now the tremolo feeling split into a crescendo of sub-harmonics and overtones, a magnificent chord of attunement with life and humanity everywhere in the universe. And all at once I knew I was glad, happy as hell to see these people from the old hometown of earth.