A Mobile World

Anyone who crosses an interstellar distance has to take an environment with him and therefore is not dependent on finding, let alone colonizing or conquering, a habitable environment on arrival. Although the interstellar travellers in Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains do not have a faster than light drive, they do have both a Bussard ramjet and technological control of gravity and therefore are able to move a terraformed asteroid with an atmosphere, parks, grass, flowerbeds, trees, pools, buildings and lamps replacing the Sun on the surface as well as a large inhabited interior with a closed ecology where everything can be recycled for millions of years. It is imperative to escape from the paradox of enclosure in a metal hull surrounded by infinite space.

But, if all of that is in place, then the voyage need never end. Some people on (or in) a mobile planetoid can continue to do whatever they would have been doing on their planet of origin while others take the opportunity to explore the universe as they pass through it. The spaceship Astra will take over forty years to reach the triple system, Alpha Centauri. Information beamed back from probes indicates that lifetimes will be insufficient to study the Centaurian planets and the Astra crew might well decide to travel further. Maser contact will keep them informed of changes in the Solar System.

Among some of the crew, decades of previous interplanetary travel have made their:

"...skins dark and leathery..."

-Poul Anderson, Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984), Prologue, p. 10.

When the Advisory Council discusses educational policy, a Biblical question is asked:

"'What is truth?'" (p. 15)