n taxes in experimental
research. For a project to achieve reality now, it must have benefits,
visible benefit, for the majority of mankind. It must have a _raison
d'etre_ that had nothing of a military flavor. And occasionally Nails
had been hard put to explain why, to people who did not understand; to
explain his feeling that men must expand or die; that from a crowded
planet there could be only one frontier, and that an expansion outward
into space.

Of course there were, Nails admitted to himself, other frontiers. The
huge basin of the Amazon had been by-passed and ignored by man, and
quite possibly would be in the future as well. The oceans, covering
seventy-five per cent of Earth's surfaces also presented a challenge
to man, and the possibility of a new frontier of conquest.

But these did not present the limitless frontier for expansion offered
by space. Men must look upon them as only temporary challenges, and
cherish them as remaining problems, never to be solved for fear of a
loss of the problem itself.

Yet space was different. Here man's explorations could touch upon
infinities that were beyond comprehension, into that limitless void
man could plunge ever outward for thousands of generations without
ever reaching a final goal or solving a last problem. Here was a
frontier worthy of any man, against which the excess energies of a
warrior spirit might be expended without harm to their fellows.

To open a crack in this frontier was Nails' supreme goal, because,
once opened, men need never fight again amongst themselves for lack of
a place to go or a thing to do.

* * * * *

Space Lab One had been in spin for two days.

On Earth, TV viewers no longer demanded twenty-four hours of Lab
newscasts, and were returning to their normal cycles of Meet the
Press, the Doctor's Dilemma, and the Lives of Lucy, and other juicier
items of the imagination that, now that their lab was a functioning
reality, seemed far more exciting than the pictures of the
interminably spinning wheel and the interviews with scientists aboard
that had filled their screens during the spin-out trial period.

On the wheel itself, life was settling into a pattern, with comments
about being able to stand upright becoming old hat.

In rim sector A-9, Dr. Claude Lavalle's birds and beasts had adapted
themselves to the light gravity; and their biological mentor had
evolved feeding, watering, and cleaning methods