One of the Consortium agents leans close to him. He says that as an avatar he will have legs. Long powerful legs, and he can run again.

PUSH IN ON JOSH, thinking about that. And you see in his eyes... he's going to go for it.

SPACE/ALPHA CENTAURI SYSTEM, 2103 AD. The I.S.V. PROMETHEUS flies backwards through the void, blasting out the fire of the gods like a cosmic blowtorch. Its hybrid fusion/antimatter engines hurl out incandescent plasma a million times brighter than a welding arc, with an exhaust plume twenty miles long which stretches out ahead of it, slowing it as it nears Alpha Centauri.

INTERSTELLAR VEHICLE PROMETHEUS is finishing up a month long deceleration from its peak velocity of over nine tenths the speed of light, still pulling 5 gees.

It's a big bastard... half a mile long. Most of that is engine and fuel, though the fuel tanks are almost empty.

Alpha Centauri is the nearest starsystem to Earth, at 4.5 lightyears away. A lightyear is the distance light travels in a year, and since light travels 186,000 miles a second, this is a long way. To get an idea how far this is, imagine the Earth is a grain of sand in my driveway in Malibu. On that scale the sun is a cantaloupe 50 feet away. And Alpha Centauri is in New York.

I'm pointing this out because it's necessary to understand the kind of energies it takes to get there in any reasonable amount of time. You have to go really fast. Almost as fast as the absolute laws of physics permit. And you have to use more energy to reach that speed (and then slow back down) than all of human civilization is currently using in a year. So the bottom line is... the bottom line. Money. A lot of money.

About a million dollars a pound, to get something from Pandora back to Earth. The object of the game is not to go there and mine coal.