Names of the men who long ago had first dared space, the men who had first followed a dream to the nearby planets that then had seemed so far, the men who had first hurtled starward and opened up the galaxy.

"Lord, more than two thousand years ago," Carlin murmured. "Queer little ships they must have had."

His imagination was touched. This simple roll of names of men long dead somehow brought it all close to him for the first time.

Those old, pathetically flimsy ships, the enormous courage of those men to whom space was all one unknown abyss. He began to understand why tourists came from all the galaxy to see these mementoes.

"They and their little ships started it all, the whole galactic civilization, the vast human empire," he said musingly.

Marn was looking up at the spire towering in the dusk.

"People criticize us Earthmen for our pride. But this is why we're proud. We're the people who opened up the frontiers of the Universe."

Carlin nodded thoughtfully. "You've a great heritage. But perhaps you remember it too well. This is the present, not the past."

"You're like all the others, you think Earth's history is over," Marn said defiantly. "You'll find out differently. Earthmen will open up the last frontier of all—" She checked herself suddenly, and then said, crestfallen, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to quarrel."

Carlin wanted to ask what she had meant, but Marn started on again through the deepening darkness toward her brother's ship.

He walked with her into the battered planet-cruiser and looked around curiously. It was a medium craft designed for a minimum crew, with oversize cyclotrons and propulsion-wave equipment, drive-plates fore and aft, and an unusually heavy set of heat-screen generators.

"The Hot Side of Mercury is terrible," Marn said when she saw him glancing at the generators. "You need the heaviest heat-screens you can get to prospect there."

Amidships, Carlin noticed a big, empty round room or hold. There was nothing in it but a skeleton of girders designed to hold something over a sliding plate in the floor.

He remembered Jonny's big machine in the workshop. It would fit into this frame. He would have liked 

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