"In the sky He put them as a testament to His glory. You have shaken my poor head with the measure of their distance. But it serves to show that they would not have been placed out of reach if they were intended for us to have." "But Mama, soon they will no longer be out of reach. Your own son will go to the first one in a great new ship." Mrs. Sanchez turned troubled eyes on her son. "I will pray for you." She averted her face and would no longer look directly at him. Roberto angrily snatched up the star projector and went to his room. His father followed. "You must understand," he said, "your mother is a simple woman. She would rather think of the stars as the lamps of the angels than the huge blazing spheres that they are." "I do understand," Roberto said bitterly. "I have heard her words a thousand times from as many mouths. They have sounded through history and are chains meant to bind man to his few worlds. It is the eternal voice of the heavy, peasant mind which tries to shout down every soaring dream of mankind." "Your words are too hard," his father said. Roberto's lips curled to say something cruel but he refrained, not wanting to hurt this fine, little man whose blood was his own. "Yes," Roberto said, softening, "for after all there are always the minds which struggle free and lift us up. They have carried us to the threshold of the stars. And the time will come, a thousand years perhaps, when we will be ready to try for our sister Galaxy, Andromeda." Roberto smiled. "Of course it is certain we will still have our simple folk who will warn us and tell us to beware; that it is not the will of the Almighty that we leave the Milky Way; that we presume too much and we will be struck down. And--" Roberto stopped in mild surprise. He saw in his father's expression the reflection of his mother's apprehension. Roberto turned away sadly and began to pack away the star projector. Someday, he thought, in spite of the little minds, we will have one of these that will show the other space as commonly as our own. And all their phantom angels and devils shall not bar man from the universe. * * * * * Time passed. The ship was launched. Six long years, Roberto thought. Long years of preparation, testing and training. Hard, bone-wearying hours of familiarization and shakedown with nerve-straining, experimental jumps into the other space. Now at last they were in that other space--that strange, blazing white elsewhere that Korenyik had given to mankind as the trail to the stars--the Horsehead Nebula clear before them. Six years of frantic activity ... and now he was launched and there was nothing to do in transit but wait. Six years since he had been to the little sun-faded stone house near Mexico City and felt the warm blood-tug of his parents. Papa now dead and Mama with her dark forebodings of angels and God. He gazed at the dark screens in the starship and wondered what he might see if they were on.