“Before we take to sea we walk on land,

Before we create we must understand.” – Joseph Louis Lagrange

Soon he would address the supreme Council, under the dome made famous by successive inaugurations of its members, and many assemblies: the United Planets had a sense of decorum.

His speech, however, would have nothing to do directly with the politics of Sol and of the UP: it was all about higher physics and astronomy, the discovery that would transform mankind’s view of itself, and of the Universe.

The resources that had allowed him to get the ultimate results were awesome in their magnitude: there was no historical comparison to the multiple arrays of supercomputers on three planets, Earth, Mars and Europa, joining forces to iterate and solve the Lagrangian equations up to third order, those enigma expressed in dense matrices of probability.

Of course he had payed the price: his youth, years of lobbying the Council, whose approval was needed to engage the massive funds necessary for his research, the building of the elite team of mathematicians and scientists across several worlds, the price of leadership.

Now, as he was readying to present the results to the Council, he thought of that lonely figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, in the New Mexico desert, at the end of the Manhattan project, all those centuries ago in the dying years of the third civil war: only this time, he would deliver the ultimate answer – there was no ending, the Universe would last for ever, and ever, and ever, and he had the proof.