ILLUSTRATED BY EMSH It was a very different thing, Algernon Weaver decided, actually to travel in space. When you read about it, or thought about it in terms of what you read, it was more a business of going from one name to another. Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to meditate on it—became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more u

They had put him into a kind of enclosed seat at the end of a long rotating arm, counter-weighted at the opposite side of the aircar proper, and the whole affair swung gently in an eccentric path, around and around, and up and down as the aircar moved very slowly forward through the village. All the houses were faced with broad wooden balconies stained blood-red and turquoise, umber and yellow, gold and pale green; and all of these were crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny chests an

The most difficult part was the number of things that he had to learn. There was no trouble about anything he wanted done by others; he simply commanded, and that was the end of it. But the mass of knowledge about the Terranovans and their world before he came appalled him not only by its sheer bulk but by its intricacy, the unexplained gaps, the contradictions. For a long time after the founding of New Washington—later New Jerusalem—he was still bothered a little by doubt. He wanted to learn al