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transformed the actor into a virtual duplicate of his grandfather.
    Besides these historical and contemporary programs, there were many set in the fictional future of exploration. The science in those series had usually been so bad that even the fifteen-year-old Thor Taggart had winced, but they had abounded with energy, excitement and optimism. The series Aliens had featured a new first-contact story every week, many of them based on classic tales.
    Documentaries about the progress of exploration and exploitation had been common as well, although they had never been nearly as popular as the pure entertainment programs. Thor keyed in a few minutes of each program to refresh his memory. He remembered many of the episodes. The dialogue and plotting were hopelessly simple-minded and naive to his adult sensibilities, but he could still feel a faint tingle of the excitement that had so stirred his adolescent imagination.
    He spent the first half of the day going over the old shows, sometimes going back as far as forty years, long before he had been born. Always, a significant part of the programming had been space-oriented, expanding or shrinking as fads had made or dropped other genres. Virtually all of it had been sympathetic toward the adventure of space exploration. There was the occasional exception. Space Pirates , for instance, or the utterly bizarre Star Tarts , which had run for two seasons before the Islamic bloc had forced a worldwide crackdown on media porn. In all, it was much as he had remembered.
    He opened one of the trays he had bought and poured water over it from the bathroom tap. The meal began to heat and reconstitute and he ate it with the plastic fork provided. He washed it down with genuine milk and felt fortified to face the next part. It was time to look in on contemporary programming.
    After four excruciating hours he sat back in his cushion, appalled. His first selection had been titled Asteroid . It had sounded something like the old Pioneers . What he had watched instead had been the "family saga" of an incredibly rich and corrupt clan of psychopathic degenerates who mined gold (gold?!) from space rock, working slave-gangs of transported convicts. When they weren't chuckling over the death-agonies of the miners, they were usually indulging in a lot of kinky (off-screen) sex or crooked political wrangling, all of it amid surroundings of free-fall opulence fit to set any Earth slum-dweller frothing with rage and envy.
    Then there had been Space Cop , an actioner about a team of handsome, incorruptible customs agents dedicated to keeping Earth free of goods smuggled in from space. In the space of a single hour they had dealt with a gang smuggling drugs made in secret, free-fall labs, another smuggling low-priced high-tech equipment, sure to put millions of Earthmen out of jobs, a third gang bringing back dangerous criminals exiled to Lunar colonies and a fourth bringing in a sinister political rabble-rouser. All four gangs were bloodily annihilated by the end of the hour. In this epic, "space scum" was one of the milder references to offworlders. Thor had a suspicion that, had media blue laws not been so strict, the references would have been considerably more graphic.
    Frantically, he had switched around looking for something more hopeful. Every time he found any appearance by space settlers or explorers, they were invariably depicted as sociopaths, criminals, exploiters, sinister political schemers or, at best, deluded fools. How had he missed all this? The answer, of course, was that Bob was right: he had been hopelessly out of touch. He had spent too much of his life in colleges and with his rich friends and relatives. College establishments and the rich were always the last to accept change, or even notice it.
    He needed to find out when this change had taken place. Had it been sudden or gradual? Had all networks changed at once or had one instituted it and the others followed? What was behind it?