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2

 

Recruitment Center Number Sixty-one was a white-lit acre of noise and animal warmth and tension and people packed elbow to elbow under the low ceiling with its signs reading CLASS ONE-SPECIAL and TEST UNITS D-G and PRE-PROCESSING (DEFERRED STATUS) and its painted arrows cryptic in red and green and black. After an hour's waiting, Gus's head was ringing dizzily.

His turn came. A woman in a tan uniform thrust a plastic tag at him, looking past his left ear.

"Station twenty-five on your left," she intoned. "Move along. . . ."

"I'd like to ask some questions," Gus started. The woman flicked her eyes at him; her voice was drowned in the chopping of other voices as the press from behind thrust Gus forward. A thick-shouldered man with reddish hair put his face near Gus's.

"Some mob," he shouted. "Geeze, it's a regular evacuation, like."

"Yeah," Gus said. "I've heard Alpha was next best to Hell, but it seems to be popular."

"Hah!" the redhead leaned closer. "You know the world population as of Sunday night stat cut-off? Twenty-nine billion plus—and the repro factor says she'll double in twelve hundred and four days. And you know why?" he warmed to his subject. "No politician's going to vote to cut down the vote supply—"

"You—over here." A hand grabbed Gus and thrust him toward a table behind which sat a pale man with thin, wispy hair. He pushed two small punched cards across.

"Sign these."

"First I'd like to ask a few questions," Gus started.

"Sign or get out. Snap it up, Mac."

"I want to know what I'm getting into. What's it like, out on Alpha Three? What kind of contract do I—"

A hand closed on Gus's arm. A man in Ground Corps uniform loomed beside him.

"Trouble, fella?"

"I walked in here voluntarily." Gus threw the hand off. "All I want—"

"We process twenty thousand a day through here, fella. You can see we got no time for special attention. You've seen the broadcasts; you know about New Earth—"

"What assurance have I got—"

"No assurance at all, fella. None at all. Take it or leave it."

"You're holding up the line," the thin-haired man barked. "You want to sign, or you want to go back home. . . . ?"

Gus picked up the stylus and signed.

* * *

An hour later, aboard a converted cargo-carrier, Gus sat cold and airsick on a canvas strip seat between the red-headed man, whose name he had learned was Hogan, and a fattish fellow who complained continuously in a tremulous tone:

" . . . . give a man time to think. Big step, going out to the colonies at my time of life. Leaving a good job. . . ."

"They washed a lot of 'em out on the physical," Hogan said. "Figures. Tough out on Alpha; why haul freight that can't make it, hah? Costs plenty to lift a man four light years."

"I thought they took anybody," Gus said. "I never heard of anyone who volunteered coming back home."

"I heard they send 'em to labor camps." Hogan spoke confidentially from the corner of his mouth. "Can't afford to send malcontents back to the hive."

"Maybe," Gus said. "All I know is, I passed and I'm going—and I don't want to come back, ever."

"Yeah," Hogan nodded. "We made it. To hell with them other guys."

" . . . . no time to think it over, consider the matter in depth," the fat man said. "It's not what I'd call fair, not fair at all. . . ."

* * *

They debarked on a flat, dusty-tan plain that stretched away to a distant rampart of smoke-blue mountains. Gus resisted an impulse to clutch the railing as he descended the ramp; the open sky made him dizzy. The air was thin, after the pressurized city and the transport's canned air. Gus felt lightheaded. He hadn't eaten all day. He looked at his watch, was astonished to see that it had been less than five hours since he had left the flat.

Uniformed cadremen called orders up and down the line. The irregular ranks of recruits started off, following a dun-colored lead car. After half an hour, Gus's legs ached from the unaccustomed exercise. His breath was like fire in his throat. The car moved steadily ahead, laying a trail of dust across the empty desert.

"Where the hell we going?" Hogan's voice wheezed beside him. "There's nothing here but this damned desert."

"Must be Mojave Spaceport."

"They're trying to kill us," Hogan complained. "What do you say we fall out, catch some rest?"

Gus thought about dropping back, throwing himself down, resting. He pictured a cadreman coming over, ordering him back.

Back home.

He kept going.

* * *

They marched on through the afternoon, with one brief break during which paper trays of gray mush were handed out. Marching, they watched the sun go down like a pour of molten metal. Under the stars, they marched. It was after midnight when a string of lights appeared in the distance. Gus slogged on, no longer conscious of the pain in his feet and legs. When the halt was called on a broad sweep of flood-lit blacktop, he was herded along with the others into a barracks that smelled of new plastic and disinfectants. He fell on the narrow bunk pointed out to him, sank down into a deeper sleep than he had ever known—

—and awoke in the pre-dawn chill to the shouts of the noncoms. After a breakfast of brown mush, the recruits were lined up before the barracks and a cadre officer mounted a low platform to address them.

"You men have a lot of questions to ask," he said. His amplified voice echoed across the pavement. "You want to know what you're getting into, what kind of handout of jobs or farm land or gold mines you'll get on New Earth." He waited ten seconds while a murmur built up.

"I'll tell you," he said. The murmur stilled.

"You'll get just one thing on Alpha Three, an even chance." The officer stepped down and walked away. The murmur rose to an angry mutter. A noncom took the platform and barked, "That's enough, you Covvs! When the major said an even chance, that meant nobody gets special privileges! Nobody! Maybe some of you were big shots once; forget all that. From now on, it's what you can do that counts. Only half of you are going to Alpha. We'll find out which half today. Now. . . ." He dictated orders. Gus found himself in a group of twenty men tramping out across the pavement toward a tall, open-work structure. A tall, black-haired man marched beside him.

"These boys don't give away much," he said. "A man'd think they had something to hide."

"No talking in ranks!" a wide-faced cadreman with gaps between his teeth barked. "You'll find out all you need to know soon enough, and you won't like it." He leered and moved on. There was no more talking.

* * *

At the tower, the men were herded into a large open-sided lift that lurched as it rumbled upward. Gus watched the desert floor sink away, spreading out below like a dirty blanket. He shied as the gate whooshed open beside him at the top.

"Out, you Covvs!" the burly noncome shouted. Nobody moved.

"You," the cadreman's eyes fixed on Gus. "Let's go. You look like a big, tough boy. All it takes is a little guts."

Gus looked out at the railless platform, the four-foot catwalk extending across to a wider platform twenty feet distant. He felt his feet freeze to the car floor.

The noncom shook his head, brushed past Gus, walked halfway across the catwalk, turned and folded his arms.

"Alpha's that way," he jerked his head to indicate the far end of the walk.

Gus took a breath and walked quickly across. Others followed. Three stayed behind, refusing the walk. The noncom gestured.

"Take 'em back!" The car door closed on them. The cadreman faced his charges.

"This scares you," he said. "Sure, it's something new; you never had to do anything like that before. Well, out on Alpha everything'll be new. You Covvs'll have to adapt or die."

"What if somebody fell?" the black-bearded man asked.

"He'd be dead," the noncom said flatly. "That's real rock down there. If you're going to die, it's better to do it here than after the government's wasted the cost of shipping you four lights into space."

* * *

After the tower, there was a climb up a tortuous construction of bars and angles, a maze on edge that led to dead ends and impasses that forced the climber to descend, find a new route, while his hands ached and his legs trembled with fatigue. Then there was a water hazard: Locked in a large cage suspended over a muddy pond, Gus listened to instructions, held his breath as the cage submerged, rose, dripping, submerged again. . . . and again. When the torture ended he was half drowned. Two unconscious men were carried away. Then there was an obstacle course, with warning signs posted. Several men ignored the signs—or forgot—or lost their balance. They were carried away. Gus stared at one blood-spattered face, unbelieving.

"They can't do this!" Hogan said. "By God, these birds have gone out of their minds! They. . . ." He fell silent as the gap-toothed noncom strolled past.

There was a half-hour break while the colonists ate another mush ration; then the day went on. There was a run across a rock-strewn ground where a misstep meant a broken ankle, or worse; a passage through a twisted, eighteen-inch duct where panic could mean entrapment, upside down; a ride in a centrifuge that left Gus dizzy, shaking, soggy with cold sweat. None of the trials were particularly strenuous—or even dangerous, if the subject kept his head and followed instructions. But steadily the roster of men dwindled. By nightfall, only Gus and eight others were left of the twenty who had started together. Hogan and the black-haired man—Franz—were among them.

"Haven't you caught on to what's going on here yet?" Hogan whispered hoarsely to Gus as the survivors tramped back toward the barracks area. "I heard about this kind of place. They brought us out here to do away with us. The whole deal—free trip to a new planet, the whole colonization program—it's a phony, a cover-up for killing off everybody who's not satisfied with things."

"You're nuts," Franz said.

"Yeah? You've heard the talk about euthanasia. . . ."

"A little gas in the hive would be easier," Gus said.

"That pond! If I wouldn't of seen it, I'd of called the man a liar told me about it!"

"Sure, it's a screwy setup," Franz conceded. "But this is a crash program. They had to improvise. . . ."

A murmuring sound had grown unnoticed in the distance. Now, as it swelled, Gus thought of distant thunder, and his imagination pictured cool wind, a cloudburst after the misery of the day's heat.

"Look!" Men were pointing. A flickering white star at zenith grew visibly brighter, and the sound grew with it. The rumble rolled across the plain, and the light brightened into a glittering play of fire at the end of a trail of luminosity.

"Stand fast!" the noncoms shouted as the ranks broke. A jet plane thundered across from the east, shot upward, dwindling toward the descending ship, which grew, waxing like a moon, as a hot wind sprang up, blowing outward from the landing point ten miles distant. A glint of high sunlight showed on the flank of the great vessel. It sank gently on its pillar of fire, dropped again into darkness, a moving tower of lights, sliding down to settle in its bed of roiling, fiery cloud. Slowly, the bellow of the titanic engines died, the glare faded. Echoes washed back and forth across the plain.

"Starship!" the words ran through the ranks. Gus felt his heart begin to thud in his chest. Starship!

 

There was no sleep that night. "You'll get plenty from now on," the cadreman told the recruits, as they formed up into double lines leading to a white-painted building that gleamed pale in the polyarcs. It seemed to Gus that the plain was filled with men, shuffling toward the lighted doorways. Hours passed before he reached the building. He blinked in the greenish glare of the long, antiseptically bare room. Teams of surgically masked men and women worked over rows of tables.

"Strip and get on the board," a voice chanted. Technicians closed in around Gus. He backed, gripped by a sudden panic.

"Wait—"

Hands caught him. He fought, but cursing men forced him back. Hyposprays jetted icy cold against his arms. Questions clamored in his brain but before he could form them into words he felt himself sinking down into the fleecy softness of sleep. . . . 

 

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