So ends my last signal until we reach our destination. We are now on automatic, a mere hundred and five light years from our base ... and at the mercy of com- puters. I've tucked in my crew for the long sleep. I'll join them presently.
Within the hour we shall complete the sixth month of our flight from Cape Kennedy. By our time, that is...
But according to Dr. Hasslein theory of time in a vehicle traveling at close to the speed of light, old Mother Earth has aged a few thousand years since our de- parture -- while we have scarcely aged at all.
It may be so. This much is probable: the men who sent us on this journey have long since been moldering in forgotten graves; and those, if any, who read this message are a different breed. Hopefully, a better one.
I leave the twentieth century without regret. Who was it? Marshall? ... said 'Modern man is the missin 'a link between the ape and the human being.'
One final thought -- nothing scientific, purely personal. Seen from up here, everything looks different ... Time bends and space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. He begins to feel like no more than a mote in the eye of eternity. And he is nagged by a question: ahat if any- thing, will greet us on the end of man's first journey to a star? Are we to believe that throughout these thousands of galaxies, these millions of stars, only one, that speck of solar dust we call Earth, has been graced -- or cursed -- by human life?
I have to doubt it.
That's about all. I wonder if Man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who has sent me to the unknown... still makes war against his brother., and lets his neighbor's children starve.
