STARFARERS

"Look yonder." The man pointed northeast and aloft. "That very bright star in the Milky Way. Do you know it?"

"Yes," answered his son. "Alpha Centauri. The nearest to us. It's two, really, and a third that is dim."

Don Lucas Nansen Ochoa nodded, pleased. Juan was barely past his seventh birthday. "Now look up from it, a little to your right. That other brilliant one is Beta Centauri."

"Is it close, too?"

"No, it's far off. Almost seventy times as far, I have read. But it shines thousands of times as bright as our sun. Most of those we see are giants. Else our eyes could not find them across their distances."

Man and boy sat their horses for a while in silence. They had drawn rein after leaving well behind them the house and its outbuildings, walled off by a cedar grove. The autumn air rested cool, still, and altogether clear. They had light enough without a moon, stars crowding heaven, galactic belt gleaming frosty. The Paraguayan plain rolled away through this dusk toward darkness, grassland broken by stands of trees and big, stump-shaped anthills. No cattle were in view, but now and then a lowing went mournfully through the early night.

"Where are they?" whispered the boy at last. Awe shivered in his words.

Don Lucas's hand traced an are along the constellation. "Look on upward from Beta, to your left. Epsilon — do you see it? — and, past it, Zeta. The name Zeta means it's the sixth brightest in the Centaur. That's where the signs are."