tellar
travel, one which the Cavour drive would have averted: the Fitzgerald
Contraction. Time aboard the great starships that lanced through the
void was contracted; the nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back
seemed to last only six weeks to the men on the ship, thanks to the
strange mathematical effects of interstellar travel at high--but not
infinite--speeds.

The results were curious, and in some cases tragic. A crew that had aged
only six weeks would return to find that Earth had grown nine years
older. Customs had changed; new slang words made language
unintelligible.

The inevitable development was the rise of a guild of Spacers, men who
spent their lives flashing between the suns of the universe and who had
little or nothing to do with the planet-bound Earthers left behind.
Spacer and Earther, held apart forever by the inexorable mathematics of
the Fitzgerald Contraction, came to regard each other with a bitter sort
of distaste.

The centuries passed--and the changes worked by the coming of the Lexman
Spacedrive became more pronounced. Only a faster-than-light spacedrive
could break down the ever-widening gulf between Earther and Spacer--and
the faster-than-light drive remained as unattainable a dream as it had
been in the days of James Hudson Cavour.

--_Sociocultural Dynamics_
Leonid Hallman
London, 3876

_Chapter One_

The sound of the morning alarm rang out, four loud hard clear
gong-clangs, and all over the great starship _Valhalla_ the men of the
Crew rolled out of their bunks to begin another day. The great ship had
travelled silently through the endless night of space while they slept,
bringing them closer and closer to the mother world, Earth. The
_Valhalla_ was on the return leg of a journey to Alpha Centauri.

But one man aboard the starship had not waited for the morning alarm.
For Alan Donnell the day had begun several hours before. Restless,
unable to sleep, he had quietly slipped from his cabin in the fore
section, where the unmarried Crewmen lived, and had headed forward to
the main viewscreen, in order to stare at the green planet growing
steadily larger just ahead.

He stood with his arms folded, a tall red-headed figure, long-legged, a
little on the thin side. Today was his seventeenth birthday.

Alan adjusted the fine controls on