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The moment you instruct the computer to redirect you to Sintra, you feel the trust of acceleration. It’s as if you suddenly weighed three hundred pounds—the price of rapid travel through space. It’s more than an hour before you slowly resume your former weightlessness. The capsule has stopped accelerating and it is now coasting—at what enormous speed you cannot tell. As you are relaxing, a buzzer sounds, and words appear on your video screen: // Stand by for hibernation treatment. When you come out of hibernation 83.5 Earth-years from now, you will find yourself on the planet Sintra of star Number 8,773,389,516—a highly stable, class C star in the Milky Way galaxy. Sintra is one of the most beautiful, abundant, habitable planets in the galaxy. Conditions are almost identical with those that existed on earth in the late twentieth century. // Drifting into hibernation, you try to imagine what life will be like on Sintra. Turn to page 26.