Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson

new facility; a human race as fragmented and tumbled-about as pieces in a kaleidoscope.” The multi showed that forgotten toy in action. It carried more impact than conventional pictures of fractals and chaotic systems. “Don’t you agree we need people who consider these matters, not just in words and numbers and equations and charts, but with their guts?” His metaphor for the entire organism was equally striking. “They can’t hand us a planned optimum course, and what they do offer is often wrong and always incomplete. But they make one Jupiter of a difference. Believe me, they do.”
    Kyra glanced at Lee. He looked too young to be that important. Of course, he was merely one among many. Like the rest, he concentrated on knowledge of a given area, which was why he lived where he did. Most of his overt work he performed at home, on the computer or in his head. But it required more than quantitative data. He must get out, make a point of meeting a variety of folk, cultivate them, develop a sense of their thoughts and feelings, the unspoken as well as what they could express in words.—
    He needed to be simpático and observant, she thought. Which he pretty clearly was.
    Recollection and reflection had shot past while he was saying: “You’ve had the real adventures.”
    “Not when I could help it,” she laughed.
    “An explorer in old days on Earth, Amundsen, claimed that adventure is what happens to the incompetent,” Guthrie added.
    “You know what I mean,” Lee argued in his earnest fashion. “Tahir said it. You, Pilot Davis, you’ve walked on Mars,”—
    (Halfway up Olympus Mons, vision swept across rocky vastness to a subtlety of desert hues, rolling away beneath rose-petal heaven. Hazed by a dust storm that glinted in sharp daylight, a crater reared like a castle guarding the edge of creation.)
    —“asteroids, comets,”—
    (A stride set her afloat. The worldlet was little more than a darkness, faintly a-sheen where a crest jutted out of shadow, a piece torn from the sky that otherwise encompassed her. Stars filled that night, their multitudes over-whelmed it, unwinking brilliances, colors clear, steel-blue Vega, amber Arcturus, smoldering coal that was Betelgeuse. The Milky Way torrented in frost and silence. Then as she flew, the shrunken sun hove in sight, and her helmet stopped radiance down to save her eyes. She barely descried the outermost flight feathers of its zodiacal wings, and a spark that was a planet.)
    —“and beyond.”
    (The ice of Enceladus glittered as if stars had been strewn over it, from a scarp at the left rim of vision to the near horizon on the right. Few shone overhead. Saturn drowned them, topplingly huge, tawny-bright, emblazoned with cloud-bands and with swirls that were cyclopean storms. Almost edge on, the rings were not the jewel-work she beheld elsewhere but an unfading meteor-streak across her whole viewfield. Two sister moons gleamed, drawn scimitars. Through silence she heard her pulse beating. Tears stung. When she blinked, they caught in her lashes and Saturn made rainbows of them.)
    “I’ve been a tourist twice on Luna, once in L-5,” Lee said. “Otherwise the universe outside Earth exists for me only in books, the multiceiver, and the vivifer.”
    “I was lucky in that regard,” Guthrie reminisced. “In my salad days there were still places on Earth where thenights were decently black. Sometimes in the mountains, especially, looking up from my sleeping bag, I’d
feel
how this globe was a tiny dancer amongst a billion billion campfires.”
    Kyra wondered if that was what had first turned his dreams spaceward. She thought of herself groundside, straining to make out a few wan pinpoints. Too damn many lights, wherever you went. Even in midocean, they fogged the dark and glared down from orbit. Too many people.
    “Not that I’m sorry for myself,” Lee said hastily. “I know how fortunate I am, to do interesting work well rewarded.”
    Fortunate