 How is it this society can manage such slow communications?
By LESTER DEL REY Illustrated by JOHNS NEARLY TWO hundred years of habit carried the chairman of Exodus Corporation through the morning ritual of crossing the executive floor. Giles made the expected comments, smiled the proper smiles and greeted his staff by the right names, but it was purely automatic. But with the Procyon shuttle arriving yesterday, there was no telling what might turn up. They found it drifting half a light-year out and captured it. For eighty years now, they’d been sending out the little ships that vanished at greater than the speed of light, equipped with every conceivable device to make them return automatically after taking pictures of wherever they arrived. So far, none had ever returned or been located. This was the first hope they’d found that the century-long trips between stars in the ponderous shuttles might be ended and he should have been filled with excitement at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report. The little ship apparently had been picked up by accident when it almost collided with a Sirius-local ship. Scientists there had puzzled over it, reset it and sent it back. Only his youngest son would have sent an elaborate tercentenary greeting verse—one that would arrive ninety years too late! He barely mentioned being married on the way or his dozen children, but filled most of the frame with glowing description and a plea for his father to join him there! He had no desire to spend ninety years cooped up with a bunch of callow young emigrants, even in one of the improved Exodus shuttles. And even if Exodus ever got the super-light drive working, there was no reason he should give up his work. The discovery that men could live practically forever had put an end to most family ties; sentiment wore thin in half a century—which wasn’t much time now, though it had once seemed long enough. He was still young—one of the few under a hundred who’d escaped deportation because of special ability—and patience was still foreign to him. It was enough like an old model Earth conveyance to pass casual inspection, but it floated wheellessly above the ground. Faint blur lines indicated it had been moving when the picture was taken. Earth was becoming a backwater world; no real progress had been made in two centuries; the young men were sent out as soon as their first fifty years of education were finished, and the older men were too conservative for really new thinking.
 People live long enough now where they’ve adapted to the delay.
 People live long enough now where they’ve adapted to the delay.  Everything eventually gets to where it’s going, so they make do.  They work around it. They have the time to wait.  Science is progressing slowly as well, so they can’t rush it anyway.