text: “We dreamed of the stars.” The old man sat, slumped slightly, on an uneven bench, hair strewn unneatly about his face. The transient light from the fire played over the hollows and crevices of his frame, giving him the illusion of great depth and impossible topography. He coughed once more, a deep, rich hacking from the bottom of his lungs, and began again. “We dreamed of the stars. Long ago, before the world got small again. “There were men among us who spent their lives on such dreaming. “Now the lights have gone out, it's hard to imagine a sky without a million million pinpricks set into it every night. But at the time, there was so much light in Boston that you were lucky to see any stars at night. Even in spite of that, we knew they were there, and in our minds there was a depth to the sky which replaced the hard impermeability we could see. We knew we only had to walk off into the night to find the stars, and we knew, in our hearts, that if we flew high enough and fast enough, we could eventually reach them.” The pages of the books around us moved, stirred by some imperceptible breeze coming in the third floor window of the library. We would have to block the draft when winter came. “Space was the word we used. The vast, empty space in which the earth hangs like a jewel. Black as night, empty of even the wind. “We visited it, long ago. Men flew out, and put their indelible mark on the disk...sphere...of the moon. Their task seemed almost impossible, and yet, when they accomplished it, we still dreamed of the stars. “They were far away. Impossibly far away. We knew that. We could travel as fast as we could, and still spend lifetimes reaching them. Whole generations, long-lived though they were, could ride through that emptiness, living and dying without seeing their origin or destination. It was foolish, really, but we couldn't help but dream. “We can't really see the stars from here. They look like pinpricks, or motes of dust. So we built machines to see for us. Huge, massive machines spaced out across the desert, all working together to see. You could fill this city with such machines, and still not imagine the scope of our work.” He straightened a little, swaying with rhetorical passion. As he stood, the firelight spun across the underside of his face. “And one day, even before I was born, a man said, 'Why not go there? Why not see the stars?' We had made rockets, and ridden aloft on plumes of fire like men and angels. Why should we not see the stars? “There was great excitement among those of us who dreamed. It was as if this man, in speaking, had opened up our secret desires to ourselves. Eagerly, we followed in his footsteps. We tried again and again to see space, and succeeded, but still we dreamed of the stars. It still seemed impossible, but the hope that had awoken in us would not be easily quelled. “Then, one day, a project was proposed. Project Orion, it was called. Terse and fanciful - the style of the time. Orion was a story, a legend of a man who died in a great and terrible hunt, and was placed by gods in the stars forever. Even the name held the ecstasy of our dream. And at long last, it seemed like that dream might be fulfilled. “You see, the rockets, those fiery arrows we had ridden into space before, couldn't get us to the stars. They wouldn't burn for long enough, not for the fifty or hundred years the shortest trip would take. But the answer came in an unlikely form: Nuclear weapons.” A motion. “Nuclear weapons. In those days everyone wanted to be rid of them, but no one knew how to begin. They were more powerful than anything else we had known. “Project Orion was an insane idea. The powerful blasts that destroyed anything within miles would push us to the stars. We would build a huge ship, a tower of metal larger than the building we're sitting in now. On the bottom of the tower, there would be a huge disk of metal. “Rockets would carry us up to space, and then, in the safety of emptiness, we would be free to fly. Behind the ship, we would detonate nuclear weapons, slowly, one at a time, for years. They would explode into balls of fire and force, and we would ride these behind the safety of our plate. It would take fifty years to reach the nearest star, and once there we could never come home. We would die at those foreign stars, our dream realized. “A great man once said that this would be the ideal use for our nuclear weapons. He was right, of course, but that mattered very little. “The project was never begun. It was planned, and thought through, and then abandoned. And not long after that, a war began. But...” He stopped. Shook his head. Sat down. “We dreamed of the stars. He choked, his voice broken with tears, “I dreamed of the stars. But things have happened. Maybe I'm the only one who still dreams. And I know now that I will never see them.” And he began to cry.