behind him the world that had reared
and fostered him. He was striking out and out. First the planets would
be overrun, and then man would leap from the planets to the stars!

* * * * *

For years after America had become a country, had built a tradition of
her own, Europe was regarded by millions as the homeland. But as the
years swept by, this had ceased to be and the Americas were a world unto
themselves, owing nothing to Europe.

And that was the way it would be with Earth. For centuries, for
thousands of years, Earth would be the Mother Planet, the homeland for
all the millions of roaming men and women who dared the gulfs of space
and the strangeness of new worlds. There would be trips back to the
Earth for sentimental reasons ... to see the place where one's ancestors
were born and had lived, to goggle at the monument which marked the
point from which the first spaceship had taken off for the Moon, to
visit old museums and see old cities and breathe the air that men and
women had breathed for thousands of years before they found the power to
take them anywhere.

In the end, Earth would be just a worn-out planet. Even now her
minerals were rapidly being exhausted; her oil wells were dry and all
her coal was mined; her industry stabilized and filled; her businesses
interlocking and highly competitive. A world that was too full, that had
too many things, too many activities, too many people. A world that
didn't need men and women. A world where even genius was kept from
rising to the top.

And this was what was driving mankind away from the Earth. The
competition, the crowded conditions, in business and industrial fields,
the lack of opportunity for new development, the everlasting struggle to
get ahead, fighting for a place to live when millions of others were
fighting for the same thing. But not entirely that, not that alone.
There was something else--that old adventuresome spirit, the driving
urge to face new dangers, to step over old frontiers, to do and dare, to
make a damn fool of one's self, or to surpass the greatest
accomplishments of history.

But Earth would never die, for there was a part of Earth in every man
and woman who would go forth into space, part of Earth's courage, part
of Earth's ideals, part of Earth's dreams. The habits and the virtues
and the faults that Earth had spawned and fostered ... these were things
that would never die. Old Earth would live forev