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INTRODUCTION
Hiding Place

"The world's great age begins anew . . ."

As it has before, and will again. The comings and goings of man have their seasons.

They are no more mysterious than the annual cycle of the planet, and no less. Because today we are sailing out among the stars, we are more akin to Europeans overrunning America or Greeks colonizing the Mediterranean littoral than to our ancestors of only a few generations ago. We, too, are discoverers, pioneers, traders, missionaries, composers of epic and saga. Our people have grown bolder than their fathers, ambitious, individualistic; on the darker side, greed, callousness, disregard for the morrow, violence, often outright banditry have returned. Such is the nature of societies possessed of, and by, a frontier.

Yet no springtime is identical with the last. Technic civilization is not Classical or Western; and as it spreads ever more thinly across ever less imaginable reaches of space—as its outposts and its heartland learn, for good or ill, that which ever larger numbers of nonhuman peoples have to teach: it is changing in ways unpredictable. Already we live in a world that no Earthbound man could really have comprehended.

He might, for instance, have seen an analogy between the Polesotechnic League and the mercantile guilds of medieval Europe. But on closer examination he would find that here is something new, descended indeed from concepts of the Terrestrial past but with mutation and miscegenation in its bloodlines.

We cannot foretell what will come of it. We do not know where we are going. Nor do most of us care. For us it is enough that we are on our way.

—Le Matelot

 

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Framed