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ALVAN WREN, POISED beside a transparent port in the side of the service rocket, gazed out with considerable interest. The object of his attention, hanging a few miles away and slowly drifting closer, was not too imposing at first glance; merely a metal globe gleaming in the sunlight, the reflection from its surface softened by a second, concentric, semitransparent envelope. At this distance it did not even look very large; there was no indication that more than seventy years of time and two hundred million dollars in effort had already been expended upon that inner globe, although it was still far from completion. It had absorbed in that time, on an average, almost a quarter of the yearly income from a gigantic research “sinking fund” set up by contributions from every institution of learning on Earth; and — unlike most research projects so early in their careers — had already shown a sizable profit.

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