I looked out across the mass of stars in the distance. I never stopped admiring space in its infinity. From our outpost at UF-2 we were as far from the planet Earth as humans had reasonably explored. There were those who had gone farther, but they were individuals or pirates. Usually they never returned, for which mankind was grateful, as we didn’t know what they had run into in the way of life forms, or what physical abnormality had done them up.