##

Remote spunnel nodes and boosters along the route
from the Solar System to Alpha Centauri monitored
the Signal and the response. Rings of laser arrays
along the edge of the Extractor's hopper flashed
alive and focused their beams on a large, slowly
tumbling planetoid hundreds of kilometers across
its minor dimension.

Sensors, analyzers, siphons and beam-guides
paralleled the lasers' signals along an
incandescent column of plasma from the dissolving
planetoid into the Extractor's processes and, when
ready, into the hopper. The truncated apex of the
Extractor's teleport gate cone glowed red, then
violet, and thirty meters of its length disappeared
into its new hyperspace home.

The invisible nozzle hurled a concentration of
elemental substance across hyperspace to its
sister station four and a half light-years distant.

The first sign of incoming was a churning,
expanding mass of violet bubbles around the apex
of the Collector. Shifting colors as it cooled and
solidified, the mass transformed into a huge brown
globe. The globe separated from the nozzle and
drifted off, replaced by another mushrooming
bubbling mass at the nozzle's tip.

A fleet of robot tugs clamped mag-beams on the
free-floating globes and hauled them off. Another
fleet of giant space tugs moved into position for
the next gift of crude but treasured substance
teleported across interstellar space from a
distant star.

The cornucopia was in flow and humankind's first
outbound and inbound highways to the greater
universe were complete and working.

Afterwords

An overview of the times prepared by Level 2
students, Luna Middle School, based on records
and commentaries in the official archives of
The Interstellar Mining and Teleport System.
(Reference: Index, Capsule V67 The Interstellar
Historian, Third Millennium, Interstellar Era.)

In the centuries that followed humankind's giant
leap to Luna, scientists, engineers and scholars in
almost all of Planet Earth's disciplines probed ever
deeper into space. Explorers studied and charted the
surfaces, depths and atmospheres of each of the
Solar System's bodies, and scrutinized the dynamics
and constituents of space matter out to the Kuiper
Belt and Oort Cloud. They ventured into the void
beyond Pluto's aphelion for hundreds of millions
of kilometers -- although not yet the stars.

The first landing on Luna in Year 1969 of the then
Common Era was judged to be among huma