Though adulthood had diluted his youngster’s vivid imagination with more mundane concerns-family estrangement, income, and well-being-he still told himself stories. When he’d left the solar system to work in deep space, traveling as engineer on various haulage, exploration, and mining ships, he’d eagerly sought out tales of alien life forms encountered on those distant asteroids, planets, and moons. But no monsters to set his imagination on fire. There had been crustaceans and shrimp, tiny pilot fish and delicate frond-like creatures a hundred feet long. They’d been hauling ores from several miles below the surface, and in a nearby mine a Chinese team had broken through into a sub-surface sea. In his early twenties he’d worked for a year on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons.
So from a young age he looked to the stars, and those dreams persisted. No longer restricted to the pages of fairy tales or the digital imagery of imaginative moviemakers, humankind’s forays into space had opened up a whole galaxy of possibilities.
But unlike children born generations before him, there were places he could go, destinations he could explore, where he might just find them. As a youngster they’d fascinated him, as they did all children.
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