"Our aim is to provide breathing space for human beings. The world is vastly overcrowded, with its seven billion people. Popeek's job is to ease that overcrowdedness, to equalize the population masses of the world so that the empty portions of the globe are filled up and the extremely overcrowded places thinned out a little. But this is only part of our job--the short-range, temporary part. We're planning for the future here. We know we can't keep shifting population from place to place on Earth; it won't work forever. Eventually every square inch is going to be covered, and then where do we go? "You know the answer. We go _out_. We reach for the stars. At present we have spaceships that can take us to the planets, but the planets aren't suitable for human life. All right, we'll _make_ them suitable! At this very moment a team of engineers is on Venus, in that hot, dry, formaldehyde atmosphere, struggling to turn Venus into a world fit for oxygen-breathing human beings. They'll do it, too--and when they're done with Venus they'll move on to Mars, to the Moon, perhaps to the big satellites of Jupiter and Saturn too. There'll be a day when the solar system will be habitable from Mercury to Pluto--we hope." "But even that is short-range," Walton said pointedly. "There'll be a day--it may be a hundred years from now, or a thousand, or ten thousand--when the entire solar system will be as crowded with humanity as Earth is today. We have to plan for that day, too. It's the _lack_ of planning on the part of our ancestors that's made things so hard for us. We of Popeek don't want to repeat the tragic mistakes of the past. "My predecessor, the late Director FitzMaugham, was aware of this problem. He succeeded in gathering a group of scientists and technicians who developed a super space drive, a faster-than-light ship that can travel to the stars virtually instantaneously, instead of taking years to make the trip as our present ships would. "The ship was built and sent out on an exploratory mission. Director FitzMaugham chose to keep this fact a secret. He was afraid of arousing false hopes in case the expedition should be a failure. "The expedition was _not_ a failure! Colonel Leslie McLeod and his men discovered a planet similar to Earth in the system of the star Procyon. I have seen photographs of New Earth, as they have named it, and I can tell you that it is a lovely planet ... and one that will be receptive to our pioneers." Walton paused a moment before launching into the main subject of his talk. "Unfortunately, there is a race of intelligent beings living on a neighboring planet of this world. Perhaps you have seen the misleading and inaccurate reports blared today to the effect that these people refuse to allow Earth to colonize in their system. Some of you have cried out for immediate war against these people, the Dirnans.