Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having few or no credits in my account, and nothing particular to interest me planetside, I thought I would travel about a little and see the extrasolar part of the galaxy. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to space as soon as I can. This is my substitute for lasguns and deuterium cells. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the rocketship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards space with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by docking pads as Belter gloms by comsat reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you spaceward. Its extreme downtown is the clearpoint, where that noble mount is washed by landing exhaust, and cleared by shockwaves, which a few moments previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of rocket-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Station Departures to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall Outstation, outward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the system, orbit thousands upon thousands of habs whose mortal men are fixed in stellar reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated at the sensor displays; some looking over the manifests of ships from the Sino-Stellar Community; some high aloft in the stabilizer rigging, as if striving to get a still better star-lit peep. But these are all systers; of week days pent up in grav and static orbits—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more sublights, pacing straight for the Limit, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the solar system; loitering under the sunny sunward of yonder staging stations will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the Below as they possibly can without falling in. And there they orbit—miles of them—leagues. Systers all, they come from dyslings and planets, orbital habs and outstations—solwards, rimwards, orbital, and contra-orbital. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the gyro-compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

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Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of canyons. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a course, and leaves you there by a cavern in the wall. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to darkness, if darkness there be in all that region. Should you ever be exposed before a storm in the great Terran deserts, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and darkness are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream of stars above him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Spaceships—there is not a landing pad there! Were Kennedy but a confluence of roads and gift shops, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Van Horn? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to space? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your spaceship were now out of sight of any on land? Why did the Inca Persians hold the stars holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Pallas? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Icarus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, beckoning yearning he saw in the sky, flew into it and fell. But that same image, we ourselves see in all galaxies and clusters. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.