She had the kind of mouth he liked too–a mouth which suggested that
she could be, by turns, capricious, level-headed, and audaciously
friendly with strangers without in any way inviting familiarity.
There was a certain paradoxical timidity in her gaze too. It was
manifesting itself now in an obvious reluctance to be startled too
abruptly by space engineering talk from a young man who had taken
her companionability for granted and who was obviously given to snap
judgments.

She brushed back the hair on her right temple, her brown eyes upraised
to study Corriston more closely.

He hoped that she would realize upon reflection that she was behaving
foolishly. He had taken a certain liberty in talking to her as he would
have talked to an old acquaintance in a long-awaited meeting of minds.
On the big screen a space station that couldn’t be built was sweeping
in toward the ship with eighty-five years of unparallelled scientific
progress behind it.

First had come the Earth satellites, eight of them in their neat little
orbits. They had used low-energy fuels, had kept close to the Earth,
and no one had seriously expected them to do more than record weather
information and relay radio signals. For fifteen years they could be
seen with small telescopes and even with the unaided eye on bright,
cloudless nights in both hemispheres.

First had come these small, relatively unimportant artificial moons and
then, on a night in October 1972, the first space platform had been
launched. Soon the sky above the Earth was swarming with radar warning
platforms, a dozen men to operate them, and carrier-based jets equipped
with formidable atomic warheads.

Nevertheless, how could anyone have known that in another twenty years
interplanetary space flight would become a war-averting reality? How
could anyone have known that by the year 2007 there would be human
settlements on Mars and by the year 2022 the actual transportation to
Mars of city-building materials?

Corriston was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He wished that the girl
would say something instead of just continuing to stare at him. She
seemed to be interested in his uniform. She appeared to be gazing at
him interrogatively, as if she wanted to know more about him before
promising anything.

He wondered what her unconscious purpose was. Did she see in him
the quiet, determined type who was all set to accomplish something
important. Or was she regretting he wasn’t the hard-living, cynical
type who had been everywhere and done everything?

Well, one way to find out was to be himself: a man average in every
way, but with a hard core of idealism in his nature, a creative mind
and enough independence and self-assurance to give a good account of
himself in any struggle which brought his central beliefs under fire
or placed them in long-range jeopardy.

And so Corriston suddenly found himself talking about the Station again.

“Not many people have grasped the importance of it yet,” he said. “One
station will service our needs, instead of fifty-seven, one tremendous
central terminal and re-fueling depot for _all_ of the ships. Do you
realize what that could mean?”

Abruptly there was a startling warmth in the girl’s eyes, an
unmistakable look of interest and encouragement.

“Just what could it mean?” she asked.

“Any kind of steady growth across the years leads to centralization, to
bigness. And that bigness becomes time-hallowed and magnified out of
all proportion to its original significance. The Space Station is no
exception. It started with the primitive Earth satellites and branched
out into fifty-seven larger stations. Now it’s tremendous, a single
central station that can impose its influence in ship clearance matters
with an almost unanswerable finality.”

A shadow had come into the girl’s eyes. “But not completely without
checks and balances. The Earth Federation can challenge its supremacy
at any point.”

“Yes, and I’m glad that the challenge remains a factor to be reckoned
with. As matters stand now the Station’s prestige can’t be implemented
with what might well become the iron hand of an intolerable tyranny.
As matters stand, the Station is actually a big step forward. People
once talked of centralization as if it were some kind of indecent
human bogey. It isn’t at all. It’s simply a fluid means to an end,
a necessary commitment if a society is to achieve greatness. If the
authority behind the Station respects scientific truth and human
dignity–if it remains empirically minded–I shall serve it to the best
of my ability. No one knows for sure whether what is good outbalances
what is bad in any human institution, or any human being. A man can
only give the best of himself to what he believes in.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” an amused voice said, “but the captain wants
you to join him in a last-minute celebration: a toast, a press
photograph–that sort of nonsense. A six hour trip, and he hasn’t even
been introduced to you. But if you don’t appear at his table in ten
minutes he’ll throw the book at me.”

Corriston looked up in surprise at the big man confronting them. He had
approached so unobtrusively that for an instant Corriston was angry;
but only for an instant. When he took careful stock of the fellow his
resentment evaporated. There was a cordiality about him which could not
have been counterfeited. It reached from the breadth of his smile to
his gray eyes puckered in amusement. He was really big physically, in
a wholly genial and relaxed way, and his voice was that of a man who
could walk up to a bar, pay a bill and leave an everlasting impression
of hearty good nature behind him.

“Well, young lady?” he asked.

“I’m not particularly keen about the idea, Jim, but if the captain has
actually iced the champagne, it would be a shame to disappoint him.”