hastened to sign treaties of support and friendship. Chile concluded a defensive alliance with Argentina. Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay were drawn together into nervous neutrality, and declarations of good will towards both their powerful neighbors.
My grandfather took out his naturalization papers, and became a loyal and valued citizen of the Republic.
My father graduated from the University of Sao Paulo in 2062 with a Master's degree in Extra-Terrestrial Engineering, and then spent several years at the government testing-station in the Rio Branco.
It had long been my grandfather's contention that the development of space craft was not simply a matter of prestige, as some thought, and certainly not the expensive frivolity that others proclaimed it, but a wise precaution that would some day prove its worth. For one thing, he argued, if Brazil were to neglect space, someone else would take it over. For another, there would arise, sooner or later, the need for an economic space-freighter. The whole foundation of modern technology rested upon metals; and with the rich metalliferous areas of Canada, Siberia, and Alaska now unworkable; with Africa absorbing all she could mine; India in the market for all she could buy, and South America consuming at an increasing rate, the shortages already apparent in the rarer metals would become more extensive and more acute. The cost, when it should become necessary to seek them in sources outside the Earth, was bound to be great; at present it would be prohibitive, but he did not believe it would remain prohibitive. If practical freighters were developed it could mean that one day Brazil might have a monopoly of at least the rarer metals and metalliferous earths.
How much faith my father had in the argument behind the policy, I do not know. I think it possible that he did not know, either, but used it simply for the problems it raised; and out of all these his hardiest and most favorite concerned what he called "the crate"—his name for an economical, unmanned freighter—and the space-assembled cruiser. Numbers of "crates" of various types exist on his drawing-boards, but the cruisers—craft radically different in conception from those that must resist the stresses of take-off against the pull of
