Jo shooshed him, and they continued listening. "This expedition is one of the many under the administration of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and coordinated by the joint armed forces. You are aboard the Exploration Frigate DLE 560, also known as USS Taurus. The general volume of space around you is the Taurus moving cluster, a roughly globular group of 100 stars. Your destination is the Hyades open cluster, specifically Gamma Tauri. "Your primary mission is, as always, to find and contact intelligent life. However, secondarily, you may be able to shed some light on the phenomenon we call 'moving clusters.' These are ill-defined groups of stars, all in parallel motion. "Taurus is moving away from us at 28.5 miles per second. Now 130 light years away, the group was closest to us--some 65 light years--only 800 thousand years ago...." Fred stopped listening. Why, that long ago, man was already differentiated. In another half-million years, more or less, the gang around the old juke box in Java would be using fire ... only he wouldn't really be man, just an unreasonable facsimile. Man? He wouldn't show up for another 450 millennia--too soon, too soon. Something's got to be done about our theories: in 25,000 years, we appeared as a clever savage, developed to our present state. What were we doing in all the years the lower hominids were evolving? Where were we? No matter. In 25,000 years, we haven't had a chance to mature. Because of political pressure, DLE 560 is out into the universe, trying to befriend other intelligences. And so are a host of other peoples from Earth: peoples who owe their allegiance to imaginary lines on Earth's surface. Suppose we do make contact? Can we--man, that is--handle the job? _Have_ we matured? Why are we here? * * * * * The learning curve is exponential. It took man nearly 50 years to go from Jenny to jet, from Kittyhawk to Canaveral. It took him little more than a decade to go from _Titan_ to transcontinuum, from exploring Earth to exploring the universe. And man being a contrary, contumacious, cockeyed Cat, it wasn't a good thing, Man. There were some cynics who thought it was the most miserable thing that could happen to the universe. They based this on the shrieking ambivalence man displayed in the total course of events, primarily bad, he'd created and lived through. He began meekly enough. Hunted and planted and found a little leisure. With that commodity, he set up special caves and began to paint, to sculpture, to philosophize.