CHAPTER 1

When the first space ship landed on that pleasant world (the only pleasant planet of which Alpha Centauri could boast) the crew was so happy to get rid of the passengers that they took off the moment they could. Not even the interminable boredom of the return trip was enough to make them want to stay in anything like proximity with the thirty men and thirty women who had been sentenced to be marooned as far from earth as was humanly possibly.

There had been maximum security prisons in the past. But this was the ultimate maximum. When the ship took off, the prisoners were isolated as no human beings ever had been in the recorded history of men.

It was part of a plan of course. Earth did want the planet inhabited just as earlier powers had wanted Mars colonized. But when no volunteers appeared despite the cleverest high pressure advertising campaigns, the alternative became clear. If no one wanted to go to the new planet, to New Australia, then someone would have to be forced to go there.

It was just too bad for the exiles, but they could not protest too loudly, since they had long since forfeited any claim on anyone's sympathy. A little back eddy of intransigent inner-directed people, fanatics in a world of other-directed humans, positive that they, and they alone, knew what was good and what was evil; the world heaved a communal sigh of relief when they were taken away. Attempting, as these sixty had, to turn back the clock, to bring back into being the dark days of the twenty-second century, was such a horrid crime as to merit even so harsh a sentence as they received.

* * * * *

The first hundred and fifty years on New Australia were, in a way, difficult. But not too difficult. To these inner-directed people fighting for existence on a new planet was precisely the kind of crusade which to them was worth living.

Five hundred years after they established themselves, their last scientist managed to set up a system of protective devices which prevented any communication with Mother Earth at all. No earth ship landed or took off, and no other means of communication had yet been devised that would work in interstellar space.

A thousand years later even the memory of earth had faded and grown