A Bow to Malthus

With the late twenty-first century development of a practical ion-propulsion rocket engine capable of speeds in the neighborhood of speed-of-light, America was ready for its first cautious steps into space exploration. At circa 4.2 light years from the sun, Alpha Centauri is the Solar System's nearest neighbor in the Milky Way Galaxy, a two hundred billion star conglomerate arranged in a flat spiral estimated to have a width of 100 thousand light years with a depth of 10 thousand light years. Army major Henry Collier and five crew hoped to find life on one of the six probe-identified planets of their destination star. The chosen planet was much the same as Earth in size and distance from its star, conditions necessary to the development of the sort of flora and fauna we know on Earth. These assumptions follow from man's analysis of the known Universe, its commonly found 97/98 elements, and their physical reaction to one another. The jackpot was the great fortune in finding a planetary match with the Earthling's first cast into space's mysterious depths. However, the life that Collier and Doctor Grace Fielding found was almost too rich for their blood. After depositing Collier and his doctor colleague in open scrub country; for safety, collier sent the lander back to the mothership. A prescient action. Ten minutes following the lander's departure, Grace and Collier were prisoners of a mounted troop of barbarians. Meanwhile, more civilized portions of the planet Trello were preparing for war that would bring its two major powers into a struggle for dominance.