Apollo: “You’re right, not poison. It’s a sedative, to lure the dragon into sweetest dreams. How long would happiness like that lock humanity in slumber, lulled by this one sun? Five hundred years? Forever?”

I: “Not forever. The dream would wake us, the dream of voyages, of distant stars!”

Apollo: “Society changes, Mycroft, faster, faster, always, always. How many eternal-seeming dreams did our ancestors have five hundred years ago that we now laugh at?”

I: “We won’t lose this one. It’s as ancient as maps, as ships, as the first hand that grasped a walking stick and crossed a mountain.”

Apollo: “Mycroft, we both believe that humans can, with time and industry, do anything, but one thing humans can definitely do is throw old dreams away. You know how many people these days never even venture to the Moon: too dark, too frightening, too far. Today only our littlest Leviathan has wings. You can’t promise it won’t forget what they were for if it swims happy with the others for five hundred more years. Or if it is swallowed up, as seven become one.”

I: “Jehovah will protect you. Jehovah loves you!”

Apollo: “Cornel would have protected me to the world’s end, but I broke their heart, and spilled their blood, and made them go be Emperor alone. Complacency is the enemy, Mycroft, not xenophobia. An old phoenix needs burning.”

I: “There are better spurs to change than war.”

Apollo: “Name one.”

I: “Any!”

Apollo: “Name one.”

Reader: The Olympics.

I: “Yes, reader! The Olympics! See, Apollo? Earth’s ambition gathers here to break records, and bear that torch which guided ships to brave the ocean back when Ocean was an infinite and changeable god. Can’t you trust that ancient torch to light the star-sea, too?”

Apollo: “No. Not when the complacent crowds, including most Utopians, will choose to watch these Olympics from their safe couches. Antarctica is scary. Tell me these Olympics don’t have the lowest ticket sales of our era, and I’ll concede that safe and happy people would still leave this comfortable planet to brave the icy vacuum between Earth and our nearest starry stepping stone.”

I: “They might.”

Apollo: “They might, but they might not. We must think of worst potential outcomes, Mycroft, not just the wished-for best. If what I fear is true, and we have no war, then complacency may set in, and make us stagnate in our comfortable world. If that happens, the Great Project, and every hand that helped it from the first caves to the Moon, will end here, on this first and only human world. If I am wrong, the worst that will happen is that we endure a devastating war for nothing, and still someday touch the stars. I will not risk sacrificing the future for the present. I will not give up a thousand future worlds to save this one.”

I: “You lost faith.”

Apollo: “So did you.”