Jon's mind began churning with problems. What would they do while Pop was "out"? Who was to run the ship; make the calculations on orbits and trajectories? Who's to handle the controls of landing when we reach our destination, which won't be very long now? Who'll do the thousand and one things Pop has always done? Who'll make the decisions? Again the sense and knowledge of his personal loss came home--and young Jon Carver sank onto the deck of the bunkroom. Again he was just a boy who had lost his dearest pal, his ideal. Pop just couldn't die! Who'd help him with his problems; teach him the many things he was always wanting to know? It just couldn't be that there would be no more of those tussles of friendly play; those boxing matches or wrestling bouts by which his growing body adjusted to swift action and hard knocks. He could not make himself believe that there would be no more of those hours of practical instruction, or the long, pleasant evenings when the big man would talk of the places where he had been, the things he had seen and done in his travels about the galaxy. For Tad Carver was one of the real pioneers of deep space. He had been an officer of the first ship to reach the stars--the planets of Sirius. Deep-space travel was not yet a commonplace thing, although it was becoming so more swiftly with each passing year. Jon knew that there were now regular trips to the planets and some of the moons of his home solar system. One could have a two weeks' vacation trip from Terra to Luna for a thousand credits, or a month's cruise to Mars or Venus for forty hundred. Merchant ships made fairly regular voyages to the planets of Sirius and Vega and, less often, to one or two other even more distant worlds which had been found to contain friendly and civilized beings--not all of them humanoid--who were glad to engage in inter-stellar commerce. Other spaceships plied between Terra and the many newly discovered worlds that were being colonized by Earth people. But it had been men like Tad Carver who, co-operatively, had bought ships and surveyed the spaceways. It was they who had opened up those parts of the galaxy so far charted and who, incidentally, had made fortunes for themselves from the metals, strange jewels and other rare objects they had discovered and brought back, and for which the rich of Terra had paid so willingly and so handsomely. That was why, after a number of years and many such trips, Carver had been able to buy his own small ship, outfit it for deep space travel, and take his family with him on his further voyages of exploration and survey. They were now en route to a new portion of the galaxy, one never--so far as they knew--visited by human beings.