A young woman grows up and raises a family before being selected to help run a spaceship traveling to the focal point of the Sun in an attempt to communicate with other species. She meets a man and falls in love, although she is upfront about how she wants to go to Mars. She tells him about her childhood, in which she almost died from a boating accident, and how that gave her a thirst to explore new worlds. Although she wishes to have her husband and daughter accompany her, they refuse, and she leaves behind a book describing fascinating extraterrestrial creatures with different ways of thinking, living, and feeling.