THE UNWILLING
COLONISTS AND THE INHOSPITABLE ALIENS
In a dark cave, on a cold planet, in a distant galaxy, four Earthmen sat and
pondered the chance that had sent them there. The Computer had picked them to
carry human civilization out beyond the limits of the Solar System. They were
to be pioneers of a virgin world.
Do
Your Share for Mankinds Destiny read the slogan back on Earth. But Mankind's Destiny had not prepared
them for the onslaught of the vicious aliens.
Four
humans, alone in a cave, waiting for the outburst that would hurl them at each
others' throats, feeling the alien eyes observing their every action, and
knowing that whatever they did would determine the future of their entire
colony.
Turn this book
over for second complete novel
CAST OF
CHARACTERS
Mike Dawes
From the shelter of a college campus, this
boy was called upon to do more than a man's job.
Carol Herrick
All
her life she had avoided making decisions, but now she was forced into the most
important choice of all.
Ky Noonan
Nine planets weren't enough for him. Would a
virgin planet give him enough elbow room?
Cherry Thomas
Her "selection gave her the chance to free herself from the horror of her Earthly life.
Dave Mulholland
As
he sent men and women to other worlds, he tried to erase their sufferings from
his mind.
Phil Haas
He
would be the perfect colony director, if he could outwit those who plotted his
life.
THE SEED OF EARTH
by
ROBERT
SILVERBERG
ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York
36, N. Y,
the
seed of earth
Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc. All
Rights Reserved
To Robert
Bloch
next stop the stars
Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed
in U.S.A.
HUI he day was warm, bright, sky bhie, thermometer in the high sixties—a completely
perfect October day in New York—needing no modification by the Weather Control Bureau. At the weather
station in Scarsdale, glum-faced weather-adjustment men were piling into their
planes and taking off for Wisconsin, where a cold front was barrelling in from
Canada, and where their expert services would be needed. Twenty thousand miles above Fond du Lac, the orbiting weather
control satellite beamed messages down. In Australia, technicians were
completing the countdown on a starship about to blast off for a distant world
with a cargo of one hundred reluctant colonists. In Chicago, where the morning
mail had just arrived, a wealthy playboy stared at a blue slip of paper with
wide-eyed horror. In London, where the mail had arrived several hours before, a
shopgirl's face was pale with fear. She, too, had received her notice from the
Colonization Bureau.
Around
the world, it was an ordinary day, thé ninth of October, 2116 a.d. Nothing unusual was happening; nothing but
the usual round of birth, death and, occasionally, Selection.
And
in New York, on that perfect October day, District Chairman David Mulholland of
the colonization bureau reached his office at 0900 sharp, ready if not
precisely eager to perform his routine functions.
Before he left his office at 1400 hours, he
knew, he would have authorized the uprooting of one hundred lives. He tried not
to think of it that way. He focused his mind on the slogan emblazoned on
blue-and-yellow bunting wherever you looked, the slogan of the colonization
bureau: Do
Your Share for Mankind's Destiny.
But
the trouble was, as Mulholland could never forget, that mankind's destiny was
of only trifling interest to the vast mass of men.
He
entered his office, drawing warm smiles from the clerks and typists and
secretaries as he passed their cubicles. In the office, everyone treated
Chairman Mulholland with exaggerated affection. Most of the bureau employees
were sufficiently naive to believe that Chairman Mulholland, if he felt so
inclined, could arrange their exemption from the world-wide lottery.
They
were wrong, of course. No one who met the qualifications was exempt. If you
were between the ages of nineteen and forty, had health rating of plus five or
better, could pass a Feldman fertility test, and were not disqualified by one
of the various social regulations, you went when you were called, in the name
of Mankind's Destiny. There was no way to wriggle off the hook once you were
caught— unless, of course, you could prove 'that you were disqualfied by some
technicality that the computer had overlooked. The remaining child in a family
which had lost four or more children to selection was exempt. Mothers of
children under two years of age were exempt. Even mothers of children under ten
years of age were exempt, if their husbands had been selected and if they had
not remarried. A man whose wife was pregnant was entitled to a single ten-month
delay in departure. There were half a dozen more such technicalities. But,
whatever the situation, sixty ships, six thousand people, left Earth every day
in the week. Someone had to be aboard those ships. Somewhat more than two
million Earthmen headed starward each year.
Two
million out of seven billion. The chance that the dark finger would fall upon your shoulder was inconceivably remote. Even with the figure winnowed down
to the mere three and a half billion eligibles, the percentage taken each year
was slight—one out of every eighteen hundred persons.
Do
Your Share for Mankind's Destiny, said the blue-and-yellow sign that hung behind Chairman Mulholland's
desk. He looked at it unseeingly and sat down. Papers had already begun to
accumulate. Another day was under way.
His
so-efficient secretary had already adjusted his calendar, dusted his desk,
tidied his papers. Mulholland was not fooled. Miss Thorne was trying to make
herself indispensable to the chairman, as a hedge against the
always-to-be-dreaded day when the computer's beam lingered over her number. In
moments of cruelty he thought idly of telling her that no mortal, not even a
district chairman, had enough pull with fate to assure an exemption. It was
entirely in the hands of Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.
Clotho
put your number in the computer. Lachesis riffled the cards. Atropos selected,
and selected inflexibly. The Fates could not be swayed.
Mulholland
lifted the top sheet from the stack on his desk. It was the daily requisition
form. Five of the sixty starships that left Earth each day were manned by
Americans, and one of the five American ships each day was stocked with
selectees drawn by Mulholland's office. He read the requisition form with
care.
REF. llabl'62-31 File
Seven.
10 October 2116, notices to
be sent.
Assignment: starship GEGENSCHE1N, blasting 17
October 2116, from Bangor Starfield.
Required: fifty couples
selected by Board One.
The
form differed only in detail from hundreds of forms that Mulholland had found
on his desk at the beginnings of hundreds of days past. He tried not to let
himself think of days past. He had been chairman for three years, now. It was
of the essence that the high-ranking members of a selection board should not
themselves be subject to selection, and
Mulholland had received his present job a few
weeks after his reaching the age of forty had removed his name from the rolls
of eligibility.
He
was a political appointee. According to the pollsters, his party was due to
succumb to a Conservative uprising in the elections next month. Mulholland
faced his party's debacle with remarkably little apprehension. Come January, he
thought, President Dawson would be back in St. Louis practicing law, and a few
thousand loyal Liberal party hacks throughout the country would lose their
jobs, being replaced by a few thousand loyal Conservative party hacks.
Which
meant, Mulholland thought, that come January someone from the other side of the
fence could sit in. this chair handing out selection warrants, while David
Mulholland could slip back into the obscurity of academic life and give his
conscience a well-needed rest. It Was a mere seventy days to the end of
President Dawson's term. Mulholland shut his eyes tiredly. Barring a political
upset at the polls, he would only have to pass sentence on seven thousand more
human beings.
He
buzzed for his secretary. She came at a gallop; a bony, horse-faced woman of
thirty who ran the office with formidable energy and who never tired of
quoting the bureau slogan to visitors. She probably believed the gospel of
Mankind's Destiny implicidy, Mulholland thought. Which didn't give her much
comfort when she pondered the ten years that lay between her and freedom from
selection.
"Good morning, Mr. Mulholland."
"Morning, Jessie. Type
out an authorization."
"Certainly, Mr.
Mulholland.''
Her
agile fingers clattered over the machine. In a moment or two she placed the
document on his desk. It was strict formality for him to request and for her to
type the paper; mechanically, Mulholland scanned it. This had to go to the
computer, and any typing error would result in loud and unpleasant
repercussions.
As chairman of the District One Board of Selection of the
Colonization
Bureau, I hereby authorize the selection of one hundred ten names from the roll
of those eligible, on this ninth day of October, 2116, in order to fulfil a
departure quota of one hundred for the starship GEGENSCHEIN, blasting 17
October 2116. David Mulholland, Chairman District Board One.
Mulholland -nodded; it was in order. He
signed it in the space indicated, then provided crosscheck by pressing his
thumb down against the photosensitive spot in the lower right-hand comer. The
authorization was complete.
He
handed the form to Jessie Thorne, who deftly rolled it and stuffed it into a
pneumatic tube. Mulholland took the tube from her, affixed his personal seal,
and popped it in the open pneumotube vent under his desk. The little morning
ritual was over.
The
tube, Mulholland knew, would drop twenty stories into the bowels of the
building. There, Brevoort, the vice-chairman, would ritualistically open the
seal, check to make sure that everything was as it should be and then would
place the authorization form face-down on a pickup grid in his office. A photocircuit
would relay the contents of the form instantaneously to the computer, that
sprawling network of tubes and complexity hidden in the ground at some highly
classified location in the central United States.
Activated by the arrival of the authorization,
the cryo-tronic units of Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos would go to work,
selecting, by a completely random sweep, the names of fifty-five men and
fifty-five women from the better than two hundred million eligible Americans.
All five District Boards—New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, San
Fran-sisco—selected from the same common pool.
The
one hundred ten dossiers would be relayed immediately across the country to
Mulholland's office. During the day, Mulholland would go through the dossiers
one by one, checking personality indexes and compatibility moduli to see if his
victims for the day would be able to work together at the job of colonizing a
world. Mulholland had learned through experience that he would have to discard
about ten per cent of his pick, not exempting them but merely tossing them back
in the hopper for another chance. The Computer's records were kept scrupulously
up to date— a whole beehive of clerical workers handled the
job of filing the countless change-of-status applications that came in—but
Mulholland could be certain that of each hundred and ten names scooped up by
the computer, two would have become ineligible for reasons of health, one of
the women would be probably pregnant, one of the men would be psychologically
unsuitable. At least once a week it happened that a selected person died
between the time of his selection and the time of his notification. Three years
of district chairman had taught Mulholland a great deal about vital statistics.
At
0930 hours his names for the day began to arrive, over a closed-circuit
transstat reproducer. The cards came popping out, five-by-eight green cards
with a name and a number at the top and forty or so lines of condensed information
typed neatly below.
He
gathered them up, stacking them neatly on his desk. Behind him, the slogan
warned silently, DO YOUR SHARE FOR MANKIND'S DESTINY. To his left, a gleaming
window opened out onto the blue, cloud-flecked sky. It was a lovely, day. District Chairman Mulholland looked through his names for
October 9, notification to be sent by October 10, departure scheduled for
October 17.
The
selectees had only a week's notice. Fifteen years back, when the
star-colonization had begun, they had been given twelve weeks to tidy up their
Earthly affairs. But that policy, instituted with the praiseworthy intention of
making selection a little more humane, had backfired. Instead of making use of
their twelve weeks to tend to loose ends, transfer' possessions, pay farewells,
some of the selectees had behaved less constructively. A startling number
suicided. Others wrought damage on their persons to make themselves
ineligible, lopping off hands or feet or putting out an eye or performing even
more drastic self-mutiliations in their desperate fear of the unknown stars. Still
others tried to escape by hiding in remote parts of the world. The three-month
period of grace simply did not work. After several years, it was shortened to a
week, and selectees were watched carefully during that week.
So
Mulholland leafed through his hundred and ten cards, knowing that eight days
from now most of these people would be heading out on a one-way journey.
Mankind's destiny would brook no sentiment.
He
buzzed Miss Thome again. "I've got the cards, Jessie. Do we have any
volunteers today?"
"One."
She gave him the card. Noonan,
Cyril F. Age thirty, unmarried. Mulholland read through the rest of the data, nodded, tossed Noonan's
card in a basket on the right side of his desk, and made a sharp downstroke on
a blank tally sheet in front of him. Now there were only forty-nine men to pick
for the voyage of the Qegenschein.
Volunteers were uncommon,
but they did turn up from time to time.
Mulholland
ran through the men first. He picked out his forty-nine without any trouble,
and stacked the six leftover cards in his reserve basket. Those six names
would be held aside until it was determined whether or not the other forty-nine
were still eligible. If Mulholland could fill his quota without recourse to the
reserve basket, the six men would automatically become first on the next day's
selection list. Mulholland had no one left over from the day before, as it
happened; there had been some trouble filling the October 9 quota, and he had
used up his reserve completely yesterday.
With the men's half at least tentatively
finished, he skimmed through the fifty female names. Here, occasionally, the
computer tripped up. Mulholland winnowed one name out immediately; Mrs. Mary
Jensen, 31, mother of four children ages two to nine. She had as much business
being in the list of eligibles as the President's grandmother. Mulholland
initialed her card and buzzed for Miss Thome again.
"Have
her name pulled from the list," he ordered crisply. "She's got a
child bom in 2114."
Fate had been kind to Mrs. Jensen. Since her husband
had never been selected, her only claim to exemption was that she had a child
under two. If her number had come up a month or two later, she would no longer
have been entitled to that exemption. But now, because she had been Called today,
she would most likely never be called again. Probability was against it. Mrs.
Jensen was safe, even if she had no more children.
Mulholland
prepared the rest of the list. Fifty men, fifty women, with a reserve list of
six men and four women. In the afternoon, the notices would go out. They would
be received tomorrow morning, and by nightfall, he knew, the useless appeals
would come flooding in. None of the appeals ever reached Mulholland's office.
They were screened off by underlings, who were trained in the art of giving
gentle 'nos'. Mulholland himself had held such a job until getting his
promotion to the top.
He
looked down the list he had compiled. A college student from Cincinnati, an
office worker in Sari Francisco, a lawyer from Los Angeles. One girl gave her
occupation as "entertainer," from New York.
It
was a cross section. Mulholland privately felt that this was a flaw in the
selection system, because very often a group was sent out without a medical
man, without any kind of religious counsellor, without any expert engineer or
scientist. But there was no helping it. For one thing, it would be grossly
unfair to see to it that the Computer picked one doctor for each hundred
colonists. Generally it worked out that way, but not always.
It was a sink-or-swim proposition. Millions
upon millions of stars waited in the infinite heavens. The stellar colonization
was a far-sighted enterprise, and, like most farsighted enterprises, was cruel
in the short run. But, centuries hence, a far-flung galaxy would shine with the
worlds of man. It was the only way. Even though the ships existed to take man
to the stars, only a handful of people would consider uprooting themselves to
go out into the dark. If the colonization of the stars had been left on a
volunteer basis, barely a dozen worlds would /be settled now, instead of the thousands that already bore man's imprint.
They were small colonies, to be sure, but they grew. Only a handful out of the thousands had failed to take root.
And,
thought Mulholland, a week from tomorrow the starship Gegenschein would take ninety-nine conscripts and a lone volunteer to the stars. He looked through his cards: Herrick, Carol; Dawes, Michael; Haas, Philip;
Matthews, David; And
eight dozen others. Tonight they laughed, played, sang, loved. Tomorrow they
would no longer belong to Earth. The inflexible sword of colonization would cut
them loose.
Mulholland
shrugged. He was making his old mistake, thinking of the conscripts as people
instead of as names on green cards. That way lay crackup. He had to remember
that he was only doing a job, that, if he didn't take care of it someone else
would. And it was for Mankind's Destiny.
But
he was weary of wielding the sword. It was less than a month till Election Day,
and he prayed devoutly that his party would be turned out of office. It was no
way for a loyal party hack to be thinking, but Mulholland didn't care. It would
be an admission of weakness to resign. An electoral defeat would get him out of
the job much more gracefully.
n
There
had been rain
over Ohio during the night. For once, it had been natural rain. The weather
control people engineered the weather with great care during the summer, when
thirsty fields cried out for rain, and in the winter, when unchecked snow might
throttle civilization. But in
October
the fields lay empty. There was no need for artificial rain. The rain that
fell in the early hours of morning over central Ohio was God's rain, not man's,
sent by the cold front sweeping southward out of Canada.
In
his furnished room just off Eleventh Avenue, not very far from the university,
Mike Dawes pulled the covers up over his head, retreating symbolically to the
womb in hope of finding warmth and security. But it was no good. He was half
awake, awake enough to realize he was awake, but still too drowsy to want to
get out of bed. He could hear the pattering of the rain. It was a dark morning.
The
lumo-dial of his clock read 0800 hours. He knew it was time to get out of bed.
This was Wednesday, his busiest day of the academic week. At 0900 there was old
Shepperd's Zoology lecture, and German at 1000 hours. And I forgot to review those verbs, Mike Dawes thought in irritation. If Klaus calls on me, I'm sunk.
He
thought about getting out of bed for a few minutes; finally, he rationed
himself to sixty more seconds of warmth. Counting off a-thousand-one, a-thousand-two, he sprang out of bed faithfully on the count
of a-thousand-sixty, and shivered in the bieak morning coldness.
Routine
took hold of him. He stripped off his pajamas and tossed them onto the bed; he
groped for a towel and his robe, found them, and made his way down the hall to
the shower. He spent three minutes under the cold spray. When he returned to
his room, the clock said 0813 hours. Dawes smiled. He was right on schedule. If
only he hadn't forgotten about those verbs I But it was too late to fret about that.
He'd have to hope for the best.
It
looked as though this semester was going to be one long dreary grind, he
thought as he pulled clothes from the rickety old dresser and started to climb
into them. He was twenty; this was his third year at Ohio State. If all went
well, he would graduate the following year and move on to medical school for
four years.
If all went well.
At 0821 hours he was ready to leave: teeth
brushed, hair combed, shirt buttoned, shoelaces tied. The books he would need
for his morning classes were waiting on the edge of the dresser. He would have
time for some orange juice, toast, and coffee at the Student Union. The
probability of a surprise Zoo quiz was too great to allow for skipping
breakfast; he needed all the energy he could muster. He was skinny, in the
first place, stretching one hundred and fifty pounds out for six feet and an
inch. In the second place, he liked to have breakfast.
Dawes
started downstairs. It was still raining slightly, but not hard enough to be
troublesome. Anyway, it was only a four-block walk from the rooming house where
he lived to the Union.
First,
though, came one particularly unpleasant morning ritual. He stopped downstairs
in the hallway, where the mailboxes were. The mail was usually delivered at
0800 hours, and nobody in the house could relax until it had come. Dawes
scanned the boxes as he came down the stairs. Yes, there was mail in his box.
He could see the single letter leaning slantwise through the metal grillwork.
A
letter from his parents in Cincinnati, mybe. Or a bill from the laundry. Or an
announcement of some new show being performed by a campus group. The letter
might be anything, anything at all. And he would have to go through this same
little ritual of fear every morning for, perhaps, the next twenty years, until
he was forty and no longer needed to worry.
His hand quivered a little as he pressed his
thumb against the opener-plate. The scanner recorded his print and obediently
opened the mailbox. He took out the letter.
It
was a blue envelope, longer than Usual, with
an official penalty-for-private-use imprint where the statnp was supposed to
be. Dawes' eyes travelled over the return address almost casually. Colonization Bureau, District Board Number
One, New York.
His stomach felt queasy as he ripped the
envelope hastily open.
It was addressed to him, all right. The
letter, typed
\
neatly
in dark red on the standard blue paper, came quickly to the point.
Yom have been selected to be a member of the
colonizing expedition departing on 17 October from Bangor, Maine, aboard the
starship GEGENSCHEIN. You must report at once to your nearest Colonization
Bureau registry center. You are now subject to the provisions of the
Interstellar Colonization Act of 2099, and any violation of these provisions
will meet with severe punishment.
By order of D. L. Mulholland, District
Chairman.
Mike Dawes read the contents of the slip of
blue paper four times, one time after another, and with each reading the
numbness grew in him. He was finding it hard to believe that he had really been
called. After all, the chance was one in thousands, he thought. Why, in all his
life he had only known two or three people to be called. There had been Mr.
Cutley, who ran the grocery store, and Teddy Nathan, who lived on the next
block. And Judy Wellington also, Dawes thought.
And now me.
"Dammit, it isn't
fair!" he muttered.
"What isn't?" a
casual voice asked behind him.
Dawes
turned. He saw Lon Rybeok there—a senior who lived on the first floor. Rybeck
still wore a dressing gown; he had no early classes, but came out to look at
the mail anyway.
Mutely Dawes held up the blue slip. Rybeck's
eyes narrowed and his tongue flicked briefly across his lips. "They
picked you?" he said hoarsely.
Dawes
nodded. "It just came. I have
to report to the nearest registry center right away."
"That's a lousy break,
DawesI"
"Damn
right it is! Why'd they have to grab me? I'm only twenty! I haven't even
finished college! I—"
He
quit, realizing that he sounded foolish. Rybeck was trying to look sympathetic,
but behind the expression of concern was a deeper amusement—and relief.
Probability dictated that the invisible hand would not reach into this house a
second time; Dawes' Selection meant Rybeck could breathe more freely.
"It's
rough," Rybeck said gently. "The morning mail comes and all your
plans explode like bubbles. Where are they sending you, do you know?"
Dawes
shook his head. "It just says 111 be leaving next Wednesday from the
Bangor starfield. Doesn't give the destination."
Suddenly
he did not want to talk to Rybeck any more. He had envied the older man long
enough. Rybeck had a casual attitude toward grades, toward professors, toward
other people, that the more conscientious Dawes had never fully understood. And
now there was Rybeck, smiling ironically, standing there in his dressing gown
with his life still intact. Dawes felt intolerable jealousy. He rushed past
Rybeck, up the stairs and into his room.
The
clock said 0830, but it didn't matter now. Dawes tossed his textbooks
carelessly into the bookshelf. Nothing mattered any more. There would be no
more classes for him, no more hours of study, no more ambitions. He didn't have
to worry about applying to medical school. Instead of the years of study,
interning and residency, struggling to set up a practice, he would live out the
rest of his days on some alien world of another star.
Of all the lousy luck, Dawes thought.
He tried to rationalize it. He tried to tell
himself that it was better his number had come up now, when he was still young.
Except for his parents, no one would miss him very greatly. It might have been
much worse if he had hung on another ten years. He visualized himself at T$ie age of thirty, a little on the plump side, a
well-fed general practitioner with a nice home in Cleveland Heights or perhaps
here in Columbus. He would have a wife, two small children, a modest but
growing practice. And the inexorable hand would descend and pluck him away from
all that. Better to go now, he agreed bleakly.
But still better not to go at all!
He
unfolded the note and read it yet again. This time he noticed the slogan across
the bottom of the sheet: Do Your Share For Mankind's Destiny.
Twenty
years ago, they had decided that mankind's destiny was in the stars. Mike
Dawes had been a gurgling baby when the decision was made that, twenty years
hence, would rip him from the fabric of existence on Earth. Get out to the
stars, that was the cry that swept newly-united Earth. Settle other worlds.
Spread Earthmen through the universe. It had been a noble aim, Dawes thought.
Except that nobody seemed very anxious to go. Let the other guy colonize the stars. Me, I'll stay here and read about it.
So
there was a conscription. And now, Dawes thought, I've been caught.
. .
. report at once to your nearest Colonization Bureau registry center ...
When
they said "at once," they meant it, Dawes knew. They meant get there
within the hour. And woe betide if they discovered he had done anything to
himself to make himself ineligible. There had been cases of women slashing at
their bodies with knitting needles to disqualify themselves; naturally, only
fertile colonists were wanted. But the penalty for intentional self-hurt was a lifetime
at hard labor. It wasn't "worth it.
Twice
he reached for the phone, to call his parents in Cincinnati and let them know.
Twice he drew back. They would have to be told sooner or later, he knew. But he
steered away from bringing the bad news himself. Then he pictured how it would
be if he remained silent and let the bureau send them its official notice. He
picked up the phone again.
His
father answered. Mike felt a pang of regret as he heard the voice of his
father, the newsstand proprietor who had scraped for years so his favorite boy
could study to be a doctor.
"Yes? Who is
this?"
"Dad, this is
Mike."
Is everything all right?" said the immediately suspicious voice.
"You got our letter? You didn't run out of money so soon, did you?"
"No, Dad. I-they've-"
"Speak
up, Mike. We must have a bad connection. I can hardly hear you."
"I've been selected,
Dadl"
There
was a pause, a sharp indrawing of breath. Dawes heard indistinct muttering; no
doubt his father had his hand over the mouthpiece and was telling his mother
about it. Dawes was grateful, for the first time, that he had never been able
to afford a visual attachment for the phone. Right now he did not want to see
their faces.
"When did you get the
notice, boy?"
"J-just
now. I have to report to the registry center right away. I leave next
Wednesday."
"Next Wednesday,"
his father repeated musingly.
Dawes
heard his mother sobbing in the background. She cried out suddenly, "We
won't let them take himl We won't!"
"There's
no helping it, Ethel," said his father quiedy. "Boy, can you hear
me?"
"Yes, Dad."
"Report where you're supposed to. Don't
do anything wrong, do you hear?" "I won't,
Dad." "Will we see you again?"
"I—I
suppose so. At least they ought to let us say goodbye."
"And there isn't any way you can get out
of this? I mean, once they call you, you can't appeal?" "No, Dad.
Nobody can appeal." "Oh. I see."
There was another long pause. Dawes waited,
not knowing what to say. He felt strangely guilty, as if he were at fault
somehow for having brought this sorrow upon his parents.
His
father said finally, "So long, boy. Take care of yourself. And let us
know, soon as you know anything about where you're going."
"Sure, Dad. Tell Mom not to worry. So
long."
He
hung up the phone. After a moment, he walked to the window. The rain had
stopped; it was nearly nine and the slackers were hustling to get to classes on
time. Out there on campus, life was going on as usual. The football coach was
sweating out tactics for Saturday's game, Shep-perd was clearing his throat and
stepping forward to deliver his Zoology lecture, Klaus was belaboring hapless
freshmen over irregular German verbs. Life went on. The world revolved serenely
around the sun. But, a week from now, Mike Dawes would be no longer part of
this world.
He
felt a quiet, seething anger at the injustice of it. He hadn't asked to be part
of Mankind's Destiny. He had no itch to conquer other worlds. He wanted to stay
on Earth, marry some reasonably pretty Ohio girl, raise some reasonably normal
Ohio children.
Well,
that dream was over. There was nothing left for him to do now but to walk down
to the registry center and hand himself in, like a wanted criminal.
He
locked his room, wondering if he would ever come back here to collect his few
belongings, and trotted downstairs and into the street. It seemed to him that
everyone on the street turned to look at him, as if they could see the words
written in scarlet on his forehead: MIKE DAWES HAS BEEN SELECTED.
The
registry center was in a loft over the movie theater. Only four days ago he had
taken a girl to a movie there. They had cuddled in the balcony, ignoring the
film on the tridim screen, and he had necked with her and wondered about those
aspects of life that were still mysteries to him.
When
you were selected, he thought, you also get a wife. They send out fifty men,
fifty women, if you happen to be married already but have no children, you can
accompany your spouse as a volunteer. If you're married and do have children,
and your mate is selected, you stay behind to take care of the children. Unless
you and your wife go to space together, you are given one of the other
colonists as a mate, and any earthside relationship you may have had is considered
terminated. So he would be married soon—to someone.
He
took the stairs leading to the registry center two at a time. A few boys were
waiting on a bench along the wall; they peered curiously
at him as he came in. They had just turned nineteen, and were waiting to
register.
Dawes
had registered here just a year ago. Everyone had to register at the age of
nineteen; if you" failed to register, you were automatically selected. So
he had come in and filled out the forms, and they had put him through the
diagnosing machines and then given him the quick and efficient fertility test.
And, a few weeks later, he had received a card telling him that he had passed.
He had shrugged and put the card in his wallet, thinking that selection was
something that happened to other people.
But it had happened to him.
Now.
He
put his blue slip down on the reception desk and the clerk looked at it,
nodding. Behind him, Dawes heard the waiting boys muttering. As a selectee, he
had a certain new notoriety.
"Come
this way, please," she said solemnly to him, giving him a
you-are-doing-your-share-for-mankind's-destiny look. She led him into an inner office,
where a tall, balding man in his late forties sat initialing some papers.
"Mr.
Brewer, this is Michael Dawes, who was
selected by the New York board today."
Brewer rose and extended a hand.
"Congratulations, Dawes. Maybe you can't see it right now, but you're
about to take part in mankind's greatest adventure. Thank you, Miss
Donaldson."
Miss
Donaldson left. Brewer sat down again, gesturing Dawes toward a comfortable
pneumochair.
"Well?" Brewer asked. "You're sore as hell, aren't you?"
"Am I supposed to be
happy?"
Brewer
shrugged. "If you wanted
to go to the stars, you'd
have volunteered. It's a rough break, youngster. How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"You're still young enough to adjust.
Some mornings I have men in their thirties come in, men with families. You'd be
surprised how many of them want to blow me up. You aren't married, are
you?"
"No, sir."
"Parents?"
"They
live in Cincinnati. I've phoned them already." "You don't figure you
have any grounds for disqualification, then."
Dawes shook his head. In a quiet voice he
said, "I can't get out of it. I'm resigned to going. But that isn't going
to make me like it."
"We
assume that," Brwer said. "But we also assume that you won't spend
all your time sulking when you ought to be colonizing. You don't sulk for long
on an alien world and stay alive." He shook his head. "If you think you've got troubles, think about the last man selected in this district. Father
of three children. Age thirty-nine years, eleven months, three weeks. One week
to go and he'd be ineligible, but the computer picked him. He said it was a
frame-up. But he went, he did."
"Is that supposed to make me feel
better?" Dawes asked.
"I
don't know," said Brewer, sighing. "They tell me misery loves
company. You probably feel awfully sorry for yourself, and I" don't blame
you."
"Will I be allowed to
see my parents again?"
"You
can fly to Cincy this afternoon, if you like. For the next week you'll be
accompanied by a bureau guard. As a precaution, you understand. Naturally,
he'll give you as much privacy as you want—in case there may be a young lady
you would like to pay a farewell visit to, or—"
"Just my
parents," Dawes said.
"All
right. Whatever. You have seven days. Make the most of them. You'll get a full
physical next door right now. Maybe you're no longer eligible."
"Small chance of
that!"
"We can always hope,
eh, Mike?"
"Why do that? What do you care whether I go or not?
Do
you know what it's like to be ripped up and tossed out into space? You're over
age; you're safe."
Brewer
smiled sadly. "I don't have a good heart; I never was eligible. But that
doesn't mean I don't know what you're going through now. My wife was selected
ten years ago. Come with me, Mike. The doctor will have a look at
it
you.
Ill
Cherry
Thomas came awake all at once, but reluctantly, and
looked around. The apartment was a mess. Two empty bottles sat on the floor
near the bed, cigarette ashes were sprinkled everywhere. It had been a pleasant
evening and it was good to know that somebody enjoyed your company, Cherry
thought.
She
lugged the cleanall out of the closet, plugged it in, and set it to work
gobbling up the scattered ashes while she herself showered. The gentle
cleansing spray felt good. After ten minutes under the water she stepped out, stretched,
yawned, did her calisthenics. Mustn't let the middle start to sag, dearie.
You're only as good as your figure is.
Morning duties over,' Cherry flipped the
switch on the radio; music streamed into the apartment. She jabbed down on the
window-opaquer and the polarity of the glass shifted, letting in the morning
sunlight. It looked as if New York would have another perfect day. The wall
clock said 1123 hours, 10 October 2116.
She
knew there wasn't much time. At 1300 she was due downtown for an audition; one
of the big sensie-theaters needed usherettes. It was cheap work for a girl who
had once danced and sang in the best establishments of three continents, but
time moved along; she was twenty-five, no longer in the first golden bloom of
youth, and these days the night club managers seemed to have a cradle fetish—
the younger the better. Next year, Cherry thought sourly, somebody would come
up with the ultimate in that line— the ten-year-old singer.
She
punched out breakfast on the autocook. Cherry's apartment was automatic in
almost every respect. She had always dreamed of living surrounded by the latest
gadgets, and, one year when she'd really been taking in the cash, she had
bought herself all the gadgets there were. An automatic backscratcher that came
out of the bed's headboard when she wanted it, an autocook, automatically
opaquing windows, light-dimmers, a cleanall. Her apartment was a nest for
electronic wizardry of all kinds.
Cherry
ate without interest. Breakfast was just something that had to be eateii, not
any source of pleasure. She was tense about the audition at 1300. An usherette
had to prance up and down the aisles in nothing more than a bit of hip-length,
translucent fluff. She was1 sure she had the figure for the job, but
her confidence was low. In the past year she had been gaining weight, slowly,
inexorably, uhstoppably.
It wasn't like this when Dan was here, she thought.
Dan
had been the world to her: manager, trainer, coach, father-confessor, agent.
Dan had found her when she was a dime-a-dance girl in Philadelphia, and before
Dan had finished with her she was the toast of Las Vegas, Paris, Bucharest. Dan
had slimmed her down, taught her poise, forced her to fight temptations, found
her the best jobs and compelled her to rum down everything but the very best.
But
Dan was gone. They had selected him, two years ago. And nothing had been the
same since.
Without
him she could not fend for herself. Within a year Cherry Thomas was no longer a
name to put in lights; she was back singing in the dives, the flashy but tawdry
joints on the wrong side of town. The big wheel had spun and the pointer had
pointed at Dan, and they had taken him away and sent him out to some brand new
world to build a civilization. She had wept and raged for two days, and then
she drank for three more, but nothing brought him back.
Selection.
The word was the foulest in Cherry's vocabulary. When someone said it in her
hearing, her eyes slitted, her jaws tightened, her stomach contracted in anger
and pain. Selection was a dirty word. And the man who had invented Selection,
whoever he was, would rot in Hell if Cherry Thomas' muttered curses could put
him there.
And
the worst of it was, Cherry thought, rubbing the old wound with salt for the
millionth time, that she could have gone with him, if she had wanted to.
"You can always become a volunteer," Dan had told her as she wept
hysterically that morning. "You can come with me wherever I'm going, if
it means that much to you." And he had knotted his hands in his thick dark
hair and waited for her answer, and she had refused to say anything.
Well,
what the hell would you do? she demanded fiercely of nobody in particular. She had been
twenty-three, rolling in money, the toast of the entertainment world. He was
ten years older than she. Sure, she had thought she loved him, but how can
anyone be sure of that? It seemed like so much to ask, for her to give up her
limousine and her apartment and her pet ocelot and her cozy, luxurious, pampered
life to follow him out to the stars.
So
she had finally said no, she would stay here, and Dan had shrugged calmly,
telling her that it was better that way, that she was probably, not fitted for
the rugged frontier life anyway. And he had gone, leaving her behind. And then
the anguish began for her in earnest.
She
had sold the fancy cars and given away the ocelot. She still had the apartment
but very little else. She had lost her cozy, luxurious life, and she had lost
Dan. There had been the quick, crazy, bad marriage right after Dan was taken, a
marriage that lasted only a couple of months, and after that the long, slow,
gentle slide downward. The slide hadn't ended yet. Soon she'd be performing for
ten bucks a night. And she would drift wearily on into her thirties and forties
and maybe her fifties, growing heavier and lonelier, while Dan built log cabins
in the stars. Perhaps he was dead now. What did it matter? If she had chosen to
go with him, everything would have been much different.
But I was selfish. I stayed behind. And what
did I get for it?
Cherry
shook her head sadly, put her coffee cup into the autowash, and took a cheeriup
pill from the medicine cabinet. The pill took effect practically at once: a
fine, false buoyant feeling of optimism and good cheer replaced the
introspective mood of gloom. She punched the dial three more times and three
more little yellow pills popped out. One every four hours would see her through
the day without a moment of depression; maybe the good mood was phony, but it
was better than brooding about Dan all day.
She
hung up her robe and eyed herself critically in the elaborate three hundred
degree full-length mirror, something she never dared to do before taking her
cheeriup. Fortified, she could, observe her body without fear. She nodded
approvingly. A visit to the steam bath, she thought, was in order, to shave a
bit of poundage off the rear end. Otherwise, she was satisfied. Her belly was
still flat, her bosom high and firm. She grinned at herself. That usherette's
job wouldn't present any problems at all.
She
dialed the wardrobe control for her clothes, and slipped rapidly into them—a
one-piece blue dress with scanties underneath. No sense dressing elaborately
for this kind of audition, she thought. The wardrobe indicator had already
sampled the outdoor weather and reported that it was coolish; it proffered a
wrap for her, and she took it.
One last check in the mirror: makeup was
okay, hair well groomed, face scrubbed. Thanks to the cheeriup, she looked
happy, enthusiastic, eager. The auditioners would never be able to see the core
of misery deep beneath the surface.
Good
morning, Miss Thomas," said the elevator's voice as she stepped in. A
photoscanner in the elevator's roof was rigged to recognize all of the
building's tenants and give them a personal greeting.
"Good morning," she said.
"Nice day."
There
was no reply. The elevator's brain-center was programmed only for one
sentence. But she believed in returning the greeting, anyway. It was the least
she could do.
The
elevator deposited her in the glittering chrome-and-green-glass lobby. She
started to break the photobeam that controlled the front door; then, as an
afterthought, she decided to see if there had been any mail for her.
That
was when she found the selection notice from the colonization bureau.
Mirror-bright
fingernails slashed the blue envelope open. She read the message carefully,
slowly; reading had never been one of her strong points. When she had gone
through the brief notice the first time, she doubled back and read it again.
Yes; no doubt of it. It was a selection
notice. "Well, 111 be a-So they got me, too!"
You have been selected to be a member of the
colonizing expedition departing on 17 October
from Bangor, Maine, aboard the starship GEGENSCHEIN. You must report at once to
your nearest Colonization Bureau registry center. You are now subject to the
provisions of the Interstellar Colonization Act of 2099, and any violation of these provisions will meet with severe punishment.
By order of D. L.
Mulholland, District Chairman.
Her first reaction was an outraged one: Who
the hell are they
that they can grab hold of
Cherry Thomas and say that she has to go out and go to the stars? They can't
push me around like that!
But after the first wild flare of defiance
came a quieter, more sobering thought: Maybe it won't be so bad. I could use a
change of air. I'm not going anyplace here on Earth. In ten years I'll be a
two-bit floozie. So why not go where they want me to go?
And then came the last thought, the clincher:
Maybe you can pick the place where you're goingl Maybe I can go to the planet
where Dan isl
She
hurried upstairs. According to the notice, she had to report to the nearest
registry center at once. The phone directory told her that there was a center
ten blocks away. To blazes with that audition! For the first time in two years
she felt genuine enthusiasm.
She
took a cab to the registry center—no need to worry about economizing now. She
practically ran up the stairs and into the big office. A receptionist blinked
at her and Cherry shoved the blue slip forward.
"Here. I just got
this. I've been selected. Where do I go?"
"Ill take you to the
director."
The
director was a blank-faced man in his fifties who turned on a smile when Cherry
entered. She said at once, "I'm Cherry Thomas. I just got selected."
"Won't
you have a seat? I'm Mr. Stewart. I realize this day is an unhappy one for you,
but may I assure you—"
She cut him off. "Look, Mr. Stewart, I
want you to do me a favor. I don't mind getting selected, I suppose. But I want
you to send me to the same planet where they sent Dan Cirillo in 2114. I don't
know the name of the planet, but you ought to be able to look it up somewhere,
and—"
Mr.
Stewart's blank moon-face was furrowed by a frown. "You don't seem to
understand, Miss Thomas. You're not being sent to a planet that's already been
colonized. You'll be going to a completely untamed world, a virgin
planet."
"But
I want to be near Dan! Listen, he was everything to me, we were practically
getting married, and then you came along and selected him. So he went out
there. Well, now it's my turn, and I want to go to him! Can't you see how
important, it is? Damn it, don't you have any heart?"
Mr.
Stewart shrugged gently. "I'm afraid it's utterly impossible for you to
follow him now. For one thing, don't you see that he's been married up there
for two years?"
"Dan—married?" Cherry shook her
head. Stupid of me not to
think of that! Of course, when they sent you up there you have to be coupled
off! Slowly her fluttering
nervous system calmed. "I—hadn't figured on that," she said in a soft
voice. "Sure. He got married up there." She felt a lump sprouting at
the base of her throat.
Mr.
Stewart leaned forward, smiling now. "So you see, we couldn't send you to
him. Not now."
"But
I could have gone two years ago! All I had to do was come here and say the word, and you would have sent me!
And I'd be up there with him now! I'd be his wife!" Her voice reached a
pitch of near hysteria. She burst into sudden tears and put her head in her
hands.
The
peak of emotion passed in a moment or two. When she looked up, she saw Mr.
Stewart watching her calmly, as if he went through this sort of thing every
day.
"So
I'm going to some other planet?" she asked quietly. "Which one?"
"Only
the higher authorities know that, Miss Thomas. Does it really matter?"
"No—no, I suppose it
doesn't."
He
fussed uncomfortably with papers on his desk. "I've sent for your records,
but it'll take a little while. You didn't register at this office."
"I
registered in Philadelphia," she said. "Six years ago." It
seemed like an eternity. And now, at last, her number had come up. In her
mind's eye she pictured the Cherry Thomas of 2110, timidly filling out the
registry form. Just a scared kid of nineteen, then. A lot had happened in six
years.
Mr.
Stewart said, "I take it you're not currendy married, Miss Thomas?"
"No. I was—a couple of years ago. Not
now."
"I
see. And—and there isn't anyone who might possibly care to volunteer to
accompany you?"
Cherry
thought down the list of the men she knew. No, none of them had the stuff of a
volunteer in them. She shook her head silently.
"May I ask your
profession?" Mr. Stewart said.
"I'm—an
entertainer."
"That's a very general category. Would
you care to be more specific?"
"Right
now I'm sort of unemployed. I was supposed to get a tryout for a job this
afternoon, but I guess that's out now. I've been a night-club singer, a dancer,
and a couple of other things."
She
smiled ironically. Ever since they had taken Dan away, she had started every
day by cursing selection and the men who ran it. But now that she herself was
meshed in the net, she saw that selection was the thing she had waited for
without knowing. It offered escape—escape from the harsh tinsel world she lived
in, escape from the jeering booking agents who grudgingly paid her price now
and who in a few years would bargain and haggle with her, escape from the
inclosing wall of loneliness and fear.
A new world; a husband;
children.
Her
eyes felt misty with unaccustomed moisture. "Look," she said. "I
ain't appealing. You see they don't turn me down, hear?"
IV
people generally stepped to one side when they saw Ky Noonan
coming toward them down the street. It was not only on account of his size;
there are big men whose very size serves only to emphasize their essential
innocuousness. But about Noonan there was that intangible air of authority, of
quiet self-confidence, that silently admonished other people: Better watch out and get out of my way. Ky
Noonan is coming throughl
At thirty, he was just ripening into his
physical prime. He was flamboyantly big, six feet four, a two hundred pounder who carried no fat. His jet-black hair swept
backward in an untamed but somehow orderly mass that added seeming inches to
his already impressive height. He had a voice to match his height, a heavy
growling rumble that could be heard blocks away when he troubled to project it.
His shoulders were broad, his legs long and sturdy, his skin tanned until it
looked like fine cordovan or expensive morocco leather.
He
had come to an important decision today. The decision had been a couple of
years in the bud, years that he had spent hauling freight in Jamaica and
policing the troubled frontier of South Africa. His police term had expired
more than a month ago, and he had not put in an application for re-enlistment.
He was restless on Earth. He had matured early, left an unmourned home at
fourteen, held a hundred jobs in twenty countries since then.
Earth
hemmed him in. The prison of the blue sky irked him. He wanted to leave.
They
had let him have a tour of duty under the Venus dome in 2111, but that was not
what he wanted, either. No place in the solar system suited him. In the system,
a man either lived on Earth or he lived under a dome. Venus, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Pluto—six human settlements,
plus one on Luna. But man was bound there, bound by the glimmering wall of
duroplast that held away the encroaching poison from outside. He had spent his
year on Venus gloweringly performing routine activities under the dome, while
staring with undisguised anger at the red and green and blue and violet world
outside, the world of formaldehyde and foul gases and weird waxen plants, the
world where no man dared go without a breathing-suit and full shielding.
He did not need to visit the other solar
system settlements to know that it would be the same. On Mars you looked out
on dead red desert; on Ganymede you squinted past eye-searing white fields of
snow to the giant unapproachable glory of Jupiter swelling in the sky. What
good was it if, bound as you were tcTthe need for oxygen and water, you left Earth
only to be penned beneath a plastic dome?
No.
The only world of the solar system that allowed a man to range freely over its
surface unencumbered by apparatus for survival was Earth, and Earth no longer
held any fascination for Ky Noonan. He longed for the stars.
Like
everyone else, he registered for selection when he turned nineteen. At nineteen
he was belligerent, bellicose, loudly warning the terrified technicians that
they had better find him ineligible for selection, or else. But they had
ignored his threats and passed him as being fit and fertile, and for a day or
two he had stormed and raged at the intolerable invasion of his private rights
that-selection constituted.
And
now he stood oil a dingy, deteriorated street in old Baltimore on a mild October
afternoon, outside an office on whose door was inscribed in golden letters,
Colonization Bureau, District One, Local Board of Registry #212. A few simple
words and he would place his private rights forever out of his own reach.
At thé
moment of decision he hung back, an act not characteristic of him. But he
hesitated only a handful of moments. He had come this far; he
realized that there could be no turning back now.
The
office door was the old-fashioned kind, manually operated. He grasped the handle
and pulled it open. He stepped inside.
A
dozen teenagers, boys and girls, stood at a table to the left of the door, frowning busily over the registry
questionnaire. To the right, several others stood on line, waiting to be
admitted to the medical office for their physical examinations. All of them
looked scared. Noonan smiled inwardly, knowing that by his action today he was
permitting some frightened, reluctant little person to spend twenty-four extra
hours on Earth.
He strode to the reception desk and said,
clearly, so that everyone in the room could hear him, "My name is Noonan.
I want to volunteer."
A dozen heads swivelled round to peer at him.
There was a silence in the room. The receptionist
muttered something automatic and conducted him inside, to an office whose door
bore the label Mr.
Harness.
Mr.
Harness was a timorous-looking, clerkish, dried-out little man with a
pretentiously solemn manner. He offered Noonan a chair and said, "Do I understand that you wish to volunteer for selection?"
"You understand
right."
Mr.
Harness steepled his fingers in a thoughtful way. "We don't get many
volunteers these days, as you can imagine. You're the first in more than a
month."
Noonan shrugged. "Do I
get a medal?"
Mr.
Harness looked uncomfortable. "Not exactly. But you do get certain
privileges that the ordinary conscripts won't be entitled to. You're aware of
that, aren't you?"
"I
know that volunteers get their first pick of the women," Noonan said
bluntly. "Maybe they get better food on the starship going out, too. But
the women angle is the only privilege I'm interested in."
"Ah—yes. Of course,
Mr.—Mr.—"
"Noonan. Ky
Noonan."
The Bureau man reached for a data blank and a
pen. "We might as well get the details down, Mr. Noonan. Would you spell
that first name, please?"
Noonan's
lips twitched with sudden annoyance. "Cyril. C-Y-R-I-L. Cyril Franklin
Noonan. I call myself Ky." The effete first name had been his mother's idea;
he detested it, but all his official records bore that name, and he was too
proud a man to apply for an authorized legal name-change. He called himself Ky,
and let it go at that.
"Date of birth?"
"Fourth of January 2086."
"Making you—ah—thirty. Your occupation,
please?" "Most recently, I was a policeman.
A lot of other things before that."
"Any special training? Medicine, the
law, science, engineering?'
"I know how to use these—" Noonan
held out his big hands—"and I know how to use this." He touched his
forehead. "But no professional training, no."
Harness
looked up. "May I ask why you're volunteering, Mr. Noonan? You're not
required to answer, of course, but for my own personal curiosity—"
"Noonan
smiled. A volunteer had certain special privileges, and reticence was one of
them. So long as he was deemed psychologically and physiologically fit for
colonization, and so long as he was not rendered ineligible by the existence of
young children who would be orphaned by his volunteering, and so long as he
had not committed any serious crime, he was not required to explain. But
old-maidish men like Harness wanted to know all the gossip, Noonan thought.
He
said, "For your own personal curiosity, I'm volunteering because I'm
tired of staying on Earth and want to try someplace else. I'm not in debt and I
haven't ruined any innocent wenches lately and I'm not volunteering to escape
from a dominating mother. I'm just signing up because I want to see what it's like out there."
Harness
seemed terrified by the booming outburst. He shrank back in his chair and said,
"Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Noonan. I wasn't implying—now, if you'll simply
fill out the rest of this data blank—"
Noonan
filled it out. The questionnaire was a standard one; it wanted to know what
jobs he'd held, what special skills, if any, he had had, what diseases he had
contracted, what relatives, if any, there were. He listed as many of his jobs
as he could remember, drew a casual X through the column of diseases none of
thich he had ever had, and left a question-mark in the next-of-kin column. His
parents were probably still alive, and for all he knew still living in West
Virginia, but he hadn't been in touch with them for fifteen years and didn't
see any point in doing it now.
He turned the blank over and found himself
being asked whether he had ever been pregnant and whether he had ever had
certain specific feminine complaints.
Noonan looked up. "You sure you gave me
the right form to fill out?"
Harness managed a faint grin. "We use
the same form for both sexes. Ignore the sections that aren't relevant, and go
on."
Noonan went on. When it came to the section
that asked, How
much time will you need to settle your affairs?, he wrote in impressive capitals, NONE.
Signing the sheet, he handed it back to Harness, who skimmed through it and
lifted his eyebrows prissily when he came to the final entry.
"You're willing to
leave immediately, Mr. Noonan?"
"Why
not? My affairs are in order. I don't have much property and I don't have much
money, and I don't have anybody to give it to. So I'll just hand over
everything I own to charity. I won't be needing money where I'm going."
"Very
well," Harness said crisply. "Today is October eighth. Will you
report back here in three days?"
"Three days?
Why?"
"According
to law, you have three days to reconsider your decision. If you still want to
volunteer at the end of the week, come back here and well finish processing
your application."
Noonan shook his head. "I ain't gonna do
any reconsidering. I made my mind up before I came in here." "The
law prescribes—"
"To hell with the law. I came here to
sign up now, not three days from now. Three days from now I want to be out of
here. You get me?"
Harness
looked flustered and upset, as if this deviation from accustomed routine had
left him hopelessly confused and bewildered. "Well—it's irregular, but I
suppose we can waive the waiting period—"
"Yeah. Waive it."
"Just one moment, Mr.
Noonan."
Harness
swivelled around and pulled a thick leather-bound book from a shelf. He thumbed
through it for several minutes while Noonan watched with mounting impatience,
inwardly cursing the maddening network of regulation and ordinance that
bureaucrats could weave around a man who simply wanted to join up and get
moving.
Finally
Harness looked up and said, "You're in luck, it seems. The waiting period
is a privilege, not a mandatory regulation. It can be waived."
"Okay. Waive it. When
do I leave?"
Order
restored, Mr. Harness steepled his fingers again, carefully aligning thumb
against thumb, index finger against index finger, and along down until his
pinkies touched. "It may still take a while, I'm afraid. The first thing
to do is to send you next door for a medical and psychological checkup. Lord
knows you look healthy
enough, but one never can tell, can one?"
He
seemed to be waiting for Noonan to agree with the platitude before he went on.
Noonan remained silent. After a hesitant moment Mr. Harness continued, "If
you pass your tests this afternoon, we'll forward your papers to the board one
headquarters in New York, and you'll be included in the next list to be made
up. After you're assigned to a ship, there's a wait of seven days before
blastoff. No matter how impatient you are to leave, there's no getting around
that seven-day wait."
"While you check up on me and make sure
I'm not slapping out on a jail term or something like that."
Mr.
Harness looked uncomfortable. "The seven-day wait is mandatory, Mr.
Noonan. You must know, certainly, that we have a certain amount of screening to
do."
"There's
where you're wrong, Harness. If Earth is in such a sweat to send people out to
the stars, how come nobody has ever thought of giving condemned criminals a
chance to go to a colony instead of rotting in jail? You wouldn't have to let
the convicts go mixed in with ordinary people; you could wait until you had an
entire cargo of criminals, and send them off to some world together."
Mr.
Harness smiled coldly. "And populate a world entirely with murderers,
rapists, and thieves? I'm afraid such a colony wouldn't survive very
long."
"You know damn' well it would,"
Noonan said. "They'd learn to live with each other. They'd have to. What you people are really afraid of is sending out a bunch of
ruthless people with guts and letting them settle on a planet. You know that in
a thousand years or so that world would be running the galaxy, eh,
Harness?" "I don't see what this has to do—"
"Okay.
I'm just telling you. Getting an idea off my mind. Sorry I brought the whole
thing up."
Mr.
Harness moistened his lips nervously. "I fear I've no control over the
policies of the colonization bureau in any event, Mr. Noonan. Now, if you'll
step next door to the medical office—"
The
medical exam went about as Noonan had expected; they gave him a thorough
going-over and decided that he was in perfect health, which he could have told
them in the first place. While he waited for the results of his fertility test
to come from the lab, Noonan took the psych examination, which consisted of a
few meaningless ink-blot and word association tests, and a short conversation
designed to discover whether or not Noonan had any severe anti-social or
non-cooperative tendencies.
After
twenty minutes, the psychiatrist said, "I think you'll do, Mr. Noonan.
You're a stubborn man and you're a self-centered one, but you've got the stuff
we need in the colonies. Suppose we check and see how your tests came out,
now."
The
tests had been positive. Noonan left the registry center with a certificate of
acceptance in his pocket. He had turned down the $100 bonus given to all
volunteers to spend on a last-minute binge; he explained to Harness that he had
more than enough money of his own to burn up in his remaining week on Earth.
On his way out, he smiled at the terrified teenagers waiting in line to
register. With half the world living in daily dread of the computer, it was a
clean, good feeling to know that you were different, that you had walked into a
registry center and told them to sign you up.
His
papers were on their way by fax to New York, to the central board for this
district, and the next morning they would be on District Chairman Mulholland's
desk when he began to fit together his selectee list for the day. The local
board would notify him where and when he was supposed to report, as soon as
word came back from New York.
There
was absolutely no turning back now, but Noonan did not let that trouble him.
Even though he had signed a waiver, he was still free to change his mind right
up until a couple of days before blastoff. But he did not intend to change his
mind. And once he left Earth, he would never see it again. The trip to the
stars was a one-way journey. No colonist returned.
It
was late in the afternoon, past five, and night was beginning to close in.
Noonan knew, how he planned to spend this night; it was the way he intended to
spend whatever nights remained to him on Earth. A meal and a bottle.
A
cold wind whistled up Fremont Avenue toward him. He walked along, collar wide,
not noticing or caring. The first faint stars began to twinkle in the
blue-black sky. He grinned at them.
Take
a good look, he
thought. Take
a look at me, stars. My name's Ky Noonan, and soon I'm going to be up there with youi
V
"Do
I really
have to go next week?"
Carol Herrick asked hopefully. She sat tensely rigid, back straight, knees
pressed tightly together, staring across the wide uncluttered desk at the
elderly man who seemed, at the moment, to have absolute control over her
destiny. "I mean, isn't there some way I can get excused from having to
go?"
The
colonization bureau man shook his head solemnly from side to side.
"None?" Carol asked.
"If
you qualify, you have to go. That's the law, and there's no way around
it."
Even
delivered as gently as they were, they were stern words. Carol fought
desperately to hold back the tears. She wanted to let go, to throw herself at this
man's feet, to soak his knees with her tears. How could they send her to some
other world? It wasn't right, she thought. She belonged here in San Francisco,
with the fog and the bridges and the Sunday afternoon strolls in Golden Gate
Park, not out on some strange alien planet.
She
said in a soft, confused voice, "But—why send me? I don't know anything about space—about the stars. I can't even cook
very well. I'm not the sort of person they want up there."
"They
want all kinds of people, child. You'll learn how to cook, to sew, to skin wild
animals. Space will turn you into a regular pioneer wife."
The
redness came back into her face. "That's another thing. They're going to
make me get married, aren't they? All the colonists have to marry."
"Of
course. And to bear children. We start each world with only fifty couples—but
for the colony to survive, it has to multiply. Don't you want to get married,
Carol? And have children?"
"Yes, I do, certainly.
But—"
"But what?"
"I
was waiting—waiting so long for the right one to come along. Turning down
fellows, waiting to see what the next one would be like. And now it's too late,
isn't it? I could have been married, maybe had a baby by now, and then I
wouldn't have to go—out
there."
"I'm
sorry. I'm supposed to give you the standard speeches about Mankind's Destiny,
Miss Herrick—Carol—but I suppose you wouldn't appreciate them. All I can say
is, I'm sorry—but you'll have to accept your lot."
She
stared dreamily past the man behind the desk, past the banner with its meaningless
slogan, past the wall itself into a gray void. She said half to herself,
"I waited so long— and now they'll marry me to the first one who comes
along. Won't they?"
There's a certain amount of choice, Carol.
You're not required to accept if you don't like the man who selects you, you
know. You can say no."
"But 111 have to marry one of them. I can't say no to all of them."
"Yes. You'll have to
marry one of them."
Carol shut her red-rimmed eyes for an
instant, thinking of what it would be like to be married, to share a bed with a
man, to feel your body swelling up with a child inside it. The idea was as
strange to her as the entire notion of going to a far-off star was.
After
a moment she looked up, her eyes meeting those of the colonization bureau man.
He looked something like her father, she thought: wise, and kind, with white
hair and soft, smiling eyes—and also, like her father, behind the outward
gentleness lay an inner inflexibility, an unbreakable wall of thou must and thou shalt not.
"Why?"
she whispered. "Why must I go out there? Can you teli me?"
"I
can tell you, but I don't know if I can make you understand. Have you ever
looked up at the sky at night and seen the. stars, Carol?"
"Of course."
"But
you haven't seen all the stars. You don't see more than a few thousand stars
when you look at the night sky. You may think you see millions, but you only
see a handful. But there are millions
out there, Carol. Billions. And each one of them a sun like our sun. There are
hundreds of millions of solar systems in the sky. Millions of planets like
Earth, where human beings can live. And it's mankind's destiny to spread out
through the universe, populating those worlds. Remember, in U\e Bible, the Lord
talking to Abraham: 'And
1 will make thy seed as the dust of the earth,
so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be
numbered.' And
then He said, 'Look
now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and so
shall thy seed be.' Millions
of worlds, Carol— and it's given to you to help carry the seed, of Earth to the
stars."
The
girl shrugged blankly. "But why do we have to go to the stars? Why can't we just stay here on Earth? I don't
understand why people have to be selected and sent out there. I don't want to
go!"
"You'll
have to go, Carol, whether you want to or not. For the destiny of mankind. Big
words, words you may never understand. But you'll have to go."
Dumbly,
Carol let herself be put through the examination, unprotestingly, understanding
little, filled with a vague regret and with the mild resentment that was the
only anger she was really capable of.
Carol
Herrick had never really given much thought to the entire immense question of
selection. Three years ago, on her nineteenth birthday, she had gone downtown
to this registry center, because the law required her to. She had given her
name, and the doctors had examined her—that part she hadn't liked very much,
walking around in underclothes while doctors asked her questions and pressed
stethoscopes against her skin, even though the doctors didn't seem to regard
her as anything more than a walking piece of furniture—and a week or so later
she had received the little card telling her that she had qualified, that her
name was on file with the big Computer and that she was subject to selection
until she turned forty.
She
had figured out on a scrap of paper that she would not be forty until 2034, and
that was so ridiculously far in the future that she could hardly visualize the
stretch of years that lay between. So, because her mind could deal neither with
the concept of selection nor with an interval of twenty years, she simply
forgot the entire matter. She was subject to selection, she knew. Well, what of
it? So was practically everybody else, and hardly anyone actually got taken,
really. She knew of only one or two persons who had been selected, though she
admitted that her memory didn't go back too far, that there might have been
others taken when she was a little girl. She remembered the celebration there
had been a few years ago, five or six, when her father had reached his fortieth
birthday and was no longer eligible for selection. There had been champagne,
and cigars, and they had let her have some champagne because she was seventeen
and old enough to do what grownups did. But she had been sick, and thrown up in
the bathroom, and after that she had gone to bed early, missing all the real
fun of the party.
Selection
had been something not to think about, something shadowy and unpleasant, like
Death—and what normal person gave much thought to dying? Carol went through
her daily routine without letting selection color her life. She was graduated
from high school and found a job in Oakland, as a secretary in a big
construction firm, and every day the took the bus through the tube under the
bay, and did her day's work, and came home and watched television and went out
on a date or went to bed early.
Only
now all that was finished. The little blue slip in the mailbox had finished all
that.
Carol
had left for work at the usual time that day, and as usual she had not bothered
to check the mailbox on her way out—if she got a letter as often as once a
month, that was unusual. But when she reached her office, at 0900, there was a
message waiting on her desk.
Your
mother called. Wants you to call her hack when you come in. Urgent.
And
Carol had punched out the number and waited tremblingly for the impulse to
flash across the Bay to San Francisco, and her mother's face had come on the
screen pale and tear-streaked. For a moment her mother had not been able to
speak, and Carol thought dully that Daddy must have died. But then the words
came out in a tumbling rush: "Carol baby, we got the notice, you've been Selectedl"
Selected.
Carol had smiled; selection was something that happened to other people. But it
had happened to her. Other people in the office had heard her mother's words as
they came blurting over the phone; the news spread, and as the gloomy-faced
fellow workers gathered round to mutter litde speeches of commiseration, Carol
began to realize that being selected was very serious indeed.
They
had let her go home from the office right away, and she had ridden back across
the bay; her mother was having hysterics and her father, summoned home from
work, sat grimly staring at a half-empty liquor bottie, and her twelve-year-old
brother, white-faced and confused, looked at her strangely and said nothing.
That was what being selected was like, she thought. It was like dying, only you
stayed around for a little while after you had died, and watched the way the
survivors mourned you.
She
had reported to the registry center as required, and they had showed her to the
kindly-looking man who was in charge, and she had tried to explain that the
stars held no interest for her, that she was just an ordinary office girl with
no desire to be a pioneer, that she did not want to go to space.
But
her wishes, it seemed, did not matter. There was no way out. The blue slip of
paper with its neat red typing said, You have been selected to be a member of the colonizing expedition
departing on 17 October from Bangor, Maine, aboard the starship GECENSCHEIN. It was a government order, and there could be
no argument. In only a week, she would be bound for the stars.
When she had first registered, they had given
her a little blue-covered booklet that explained how selection worked and what
colonization was like. She had read it through and thrown it away, finding it
of no great importance. Now she asked for and was given another copy, and after
her reexamination she sat in an empty anteroom waiting for the verdiot,
reading the booklet they had given her.
She
skipped through the parts about how selection worked, the central Computer and
the local boards and the five districts and all the rest. That part of it no
longer concerned her, not now. Turning to the part that told of how a colony
operated, she read carefully, looking at each word before moving on to the
next.
They
picked out a hundred people, fifty men and fifty women, and sent them off to a
planet in the sky. Along with them went tools and books and medical supplies
and whatever else a brand new world needed. One of the hundred colonists was
chosen as the colony director, and he served until the colonists decided to
elect somebody else.
The
first thing they did was to marry everybody off. Colonists had to be married
and were supposed to have as many children as they could. The way it worked,
all the unmarried people of the colony divided up, men and women, and ,then the
men picked, in a special order. The women could accept or refuse, as they
liked, but at the end everyone had to be married to someone, and if a woman
refused everyone the colony director was entitled to assign a husband for her.
Carol
put down the booklet, frowning. The idea of being married was a little
frightening. She remembered the day of her eighteenth birthday, and her mother
saying, "Well, Carol, now you're eighteen. You'll be a married woman
before you know it!"
Four
years ago. And in the time since, her mother had brought the subject of
marriage up time and again. Certainly there had been plenty of candidates. The
first boy who had wanted to marry her was Phil, and she might have said yes to
him, but she didn't really like him enough.
After
him, there had been that tall boy, Tom. Tom might have been all right, but he
wanted to write poetry, and what future did a girl have married to a poet? And
after Tom-After Tom there had been Paul, but Paul was old, almost thirty, and
he was getting bald and fat around the middle; she had said no to Paul. After
Paul, Richard; after Richard, Dave. No to Richard, no to Dave. Carol had kept
waiting, waiting, as her twentieth year ended and her twenty-first began, and
then as that year came round to its finish. Why many now? There was always the
hope that Prince Charming would come riding up in his glossy brand-new
Frontenac limousine and sweep her off her feet
So
she had waited for that one perfect mate, for the husband that heaven had set
aside for her alone, and in the meantime the wheel had turned and selection had
taken her instead. Now, faced for the first time with a major crisis, Carol
took a rare introspective glance and realized, with mild shock, that perhaps
she had not wanted to marry at all. Perhaps she had been fooling everyone,
herself and her parents and her succession of beaux, into thinking she was
shopping for a mate when actually all she wanted was to remain at home, with
Mother and Dad and brother, in her own clean little room, alone in the bed she
had slept in since childhood, calm, untroubled by the confusions that marriage
undoubtedly would bring.
A
strange realization. Am I really like that, she wondered? And then she
corrected herself: Was I really like that? The Carol Herrick who had
been existed no more. No longer did she have any control over what happened to
her.
Now
they would take her away from her home and her parents and the old black
teddy-bear on the dresser, and send her to a strange place and push her into
the arms of a strange man. Funny, she thought: right now the man who is going
to be my husband is sitting in a registry center, cursing and complaining,
waiting to find out if he will be declared eligible. What will he be like? He
could be as old as forty, she knew. Almost as old as her father. That would be
odd, being married to a man that old.
Or,
perhaps, her husband might be nineteen or twenty, a frightened boy. That might
not be so dreadful: she could be a sort of older sister or aunt to him, as well
as a wife. Calm his fears, and in that way ease her own.
But
anyone at all might pick her. A burly truck driver, brutal and selfish; a wispy
little college professor; a coarse, ugly man like the fisherman she had seen at
the wharf, with a twisted nose and the reek of prawns about him.
She
closed the booklet. A banner on the wall commanded, Do Your Share for Mankind's Destiny.
Why? Why this senseless hurling out of
bewildered people to the stars? Carol Herrick had no idea. Meekly, she was
being swept along on the tide.
The
door opened. The kindly white-haired man stood there with papers in his hand.
^Well?" Carol asked. -
"The
test result was positive. In other words, you're passed. You're eligible."
Carol nodded slowly. "I have to go,
then." "Yes. You have to go."
In
the empty room the fatal words echoed resonantly like a sentence of death.
Carol took an uncertain step forward. She was going to the stars.
Uncomplainingly and uncom-prehendingly, she was going to do her share for
Mankind's Destiny.
VI
Afteh
completing his
list of one hundred ten names for the seventeenth of October blasting of the Gegenschein, District Chairman Mulholland turned his attention to the next item on
his daily routine: finalization, as they so barbarously called it in
scheduling, of the previous day's list.
The
October 16 ship was the Skyrover, departing from the Cape Canaveral base.
Mulholland had prepared the usual quota of names; during the early hours of the
morning, while he had been assembling the Gegenschein list, word was coming in from the local boards on the previous day's
selections. Mulholland scanned the long yellow sheets. The Skyrover list would present no difficulties, he saw.
There were fifty-one eligible males, fifty-two eligible women.
He deleted the three surplus names, entered
them on the proper form, and gave the deletion list to Miss Thorne. During the
day three people somewhere in the United States would leam that they had
received a minute's reprieve; instead of departing as they had been told on the
October 16 ship, they would be held over until October IT, and, if not needed
to fill vacancies on the Cegenschein list,
would certainly be included on the _list of whatever ship was scheduled for
departure on the 18th.
His
job, Mulholland thought, was like a kind of cosmic jigsaw puzzle—a puzzle in
which he used human pieces, scooping up a hundred at a time, discarding those
which might be bent or broken and unsuitable for the pattern, fitting the rest
into place. Each day another pattern had to be created; sometimes there were
too many pieces, and some were put aside for another day.
He
completed the Skyrover
fist and sent it down the
pneumotube to Brevoort, twenty stories below. Brevoort would phone Cape
Canaveral and advise them verbally of the completion of the list; the list
itself would be sent to Florida by fax at the same time. With the Skyrover under control, Mulholland was finished for
the day. The time was 1400 hours. At the Bangor starfield that moment, the Enterprise Three was blasting off, with one hundred colonists
aboard, people who had been selected a week before.
It
went on constantly, day and night—people registering for selection, people
being selected, people reporting for blastoff, ships departing. Five ships
leaving a day from the United States alone, sixty from the world, four hundred
twenty ships a week. And, so immense were the heavens, it would be untold
centuries before the last habitable planet had been colonized by men of Earth.
1400
hours. The end of the day. Mulholland tidied his desk and said his
goodbyes—most of the clerical workers had two hours more before their day
ended—and left. As he stepped outside, into the bracing October wind, he tried
to shrug off his day's labor like an otter coming to shore and shaking itself
dry. Once 1400 hours came, he could stop being Dictrict Chairman Mulholland,
wielder of the sacred staff; he could go back to being plain Dave Mulholland of
White Plains. Once aboard the sleek bullet of a train, he smiled politely to
other commuters whose faces if not names he knew, and settled back in his
padded seat. The nonstop White Plains express made the trip in seven minutes.
Years ago, before the new trains had been put in use, the trip took longer,
long enough for him to have a drink and relax before arriving at the White
Plains station. But there was no time for a drink now.
One
was waiting for him at home, though, an icy martini. Mulholland kissed his
wife, patted the bouncingly joyful dog, drank his drink.
"Anything
new, dear?" Ellen asked. She was forty-one; safe from selection, at last.
Like him, her hair was red—"You're bound to raise a flock of
redheads," friends had said over and over, when they were married sixteen
years before. But they had no children. Out of fear of selection, perhaps, Mulholland
admitted.
"Nothing
new, Ellen. The same as always. One hundred heads on the block."
She looked at him painfully, but kept unsaid
what she was thinking. They had been over the same ground often enough in the
past. The job was tearing him apart—nobody loves the public executioner or the
baseball umpire or the local boss of selection—but resignation was impossible.
You didn't toss away a job the party had carefully gained for you. If you did,
there would be no further jobs forthcoming from them—ever.
Mulholland
changed into his puttering clothes. There was work to do in the garden, in what
remained of the afternoon. He enjoyed working with his hands, grubbing down in
the dirt to bed an azalea or trim a privet hedge. He could get absorbed in the
mere physicality of the work, absorbed enough to forget that a hundred people
in the United States were cursing him bitterly because he had done the job he
was paid to do.
At
least, he thought, it wasn't so bad now that he didn't have to hear appeals. He
sat in lofty isolation in his office, drawing up lists and initialing forms; at
least he had no direct contact with the victims he was condemning. Before
reaching the top, when he had been one of the subchiefs in charge of
refusing appeals, the job had been infinitely more painful.
He
remembered some of the appeals. There was the poet embarked on an immense verse
cycle, who arrived bearing a petition from some of the world's leading creative
figures begging that he be excused in the name of culture. The poet had been
shipped out with regrets; the surest way to destroy selection would be to begin
making exceptions in the name of minority interests. Then there had been
countless parents who could not bear separation from their children or from
each other; students who pleaded for a chance (denied) to complete their
educations; stage figures asking (unsuccessfully) to be allowed to finish the
runs of their plays. Selection could make no exceptions. Whatever the cost to
Earth in terms of a work of poetry forever lost, a hit play closed, a potential
Einstein shipped to the stars, such losses had to be endured. To permit
creative people, people of genius, to escape the net of selection would be to
insure that only mediocrities would go to the stars, and mankind's noble
destiny thus would be thwarted.
Mulholland
finished his garden work, went indoors, washed, had another cocktail, ate
dinner. In the evening, several hours of reading, a bit of music, an hour or
two of video, a sedative, and bed.
He
had few personal friends these days. Once he had been more gregarious, but
nowadays social relationships were difficult for him to maintain. Either people
regarded him with thinly veiled horror (who wants to play bridge with the
hangman?) or else they cultivated his friendship with the hope that someday he
might do them a favor, when selection struck their home. Of course, he could do
no favors, but people never seemed to believe that.
He
went to bed at 2300 hours. He was up again at 0730, shaved and showered and
dressed and fed within forty-five minutes. On his way to the station he saw a
mail truck making its rounds with the morning delivery, and felt little comfort
from the fact that he no longer needed to dread the arrival of a blue envelope.
It was impossible for him ever to forget that two hundred million Americans
lived in the grip of terror each morning between breakfast and the arrival of
the day's mail, never knowing until the red-white-and-blue truck had made its
appearance whether or not this would be the day their number came up.
At 0900 on the dot, Mulholland was at his office. The requisition form was waiting for him, as always; fifty couples were
needed for the starship Aaron
Burr, leaving Canaveral on
the eighteenth of October. He went through the standard morning routine,
authorizing the selection of one hundred ten names for the Aaron Burr.
Two
hours later, the first replies began to come in from the local boards on the Gegenschein selectees. Mulholland put each form in the "hold" basket and
forgot about them until it was time to get back to the Gegenschein list. He had already forgotten about the Skyrover; now that its list was complete, it faded into
the long blur of unremembered ships whose passengers Mulholland had authorized.
After
lunch—a tense affair as always for he never digested well on a working day—he
turned his attention to the Gegenschein.
His notes told him that one
slot had already been filled: Noonan, the volunteer sent through from Baltimore
Board #212. Mulholland needed forty-nine men, fifty women
to make up the complement.
Most of the east coast and midwest reports had come in
already. The western people, naturally, would take longer;
in most cases the mail was just being delivered now, out
on the Coast. But there were enough early returns to begin
working with. Mulholland began to sort through them,
checking them off against his master file. j
Columbus',
Ohio Board#156 We have examined registrant Michael Dawes and find him
acceptable for selection. . .
New
York Board #11 We have examined registrant Cherry Thomas and
find her acceptable for selection .
. .
Philadelphia Board #72 We have examined registrant
Lawrence T. Fowler and find him acceptable
for selection . . .
And,
mixed with the rest, a red slip that signified a turndown: Atlanta Board #243 We have examined
registrant Louetta Johnson and find her not acceptable for selection for the
reasons detailed below. . . .
Mulholland ..paused, turned the red slip
over, and read it. Louetta Johnson had been found after due medical examination
to be in her twelfth week of pregnancy, this fact being unknown to Miss
Johnson, who therefore had not notified the registiy center of this change in
her status.
He put her slip aside and crossed her name from
his list. Within the next hour, he lost two more of his possibles: the 93rd
Board, in Troy, New York, reported that Elgin Mac-Namara had been the victim of
a fatal auto accident the very day of his Selection; the 114th Board, in
Elizabeth-town, Kentucky, regretfully informed the district chairman that
registrant Thomas Buckley had been taken into custody after allegedly shooting
his wife and another man, and would not be eligible for a berth on the Gegenschein.
But,
despite these minor setbacks, the list slowly filled. By 1320 hours,
Mulholland's tally showed forty-three men and thirty-nine women assigned to the
Gegenschein, with five of his original hundred and ten
disqualified and twenty-three yet to be heard from. Not long after that, the
first reports began to come in from the far west:
San
Francisco Board #326 We have examined registrant Carol Herrick and find her acceptable
for selection . . .
Los Angeles Board #406 We have examined
registrant Philip Haas and find him acceptable for selection . . .
A red slip from Seattle Board #360: Registrant Ethel Pines declared ineligible on
medical grounds; registrant Pines has cancer. Mulholland removed the name of Ethel Pines
from his list.
By 1340 hours, he was nearing completion. A
quick check indicated that he had forty-eight men, forty-six women. Ten of his
original hundred and ten were scratched, ineligible. One volunteer. Seven
reports were yet to come in.
Ten minutes later, they were in: five
acceptables, two rej'ects. Mulholland drew a line under the column of male
names and quickly counted upward: fifty names in all, headed by Cyril Noonan,
volunteer. He was short one woman.
Now
he reached into his replacement basket and drew out the three cards that had
been left over from the Skyrover
quota. One man, two women.
Mulholland put the man's card aside. He flipped the other two cards into the
air. One landed face up; he snatched at it—the card of a woman named Marya
Brannick.
Marya
Brannick's name was entered in the fiftieth slot on the distaff side of the Qegenschein list. Carefully putting the completed Gegenschein list to one side, Mulholland took tomorrow's Aaron Burr list from its pigeonhole and inscribed the
names of Irwin Halsey and Maribeth Jansen at the heads of the two columns.
He buzzed for Miss Thome.
"Jessie,
I've assigned the three leftovers from the Skyrover list. Brannick goes into the Gegenschein, Halsey and Jansen are being held over till
tomorrow for the Aaron
Burr."
Miss
Thome nodded efficiently. "I'll see that the notification goes out to the
local boards. Anything else, Mr. Mulholland?"
"I don't think so.
Everything's under control."
She
gave him a toothy smile and scuttled back to her adjoining cubicle. Sighing,
Mulholland checked the clock. 1358 hours. Astonishing how smoothly the
selection mechanism works, he thought. The list gets filled as if by clockwork.
And
it had been clockwork, he realized, with himself
doing nothing that a robot was unable to do. He wondered what a film of himself
at work on a typical day would look like, speeded up a little. Even more
ridiculous than the ancient fast-camera films, no doubt. He would emerge on the
screen as an inane fat little bureaucrat, busily pulling lists in and out of
pigeonholes, inscribing names, juggling surpluses, carrying forth extra
selectees until they were needed, signing documents, self-importantly buzzing
for his secretary—
It was an unflattering picture. Mulholland
tried to blank it out, but the imagé
refused to quit his mind.
Thank God it was quitting time, he thought.
He
studied the completed Gegenschein
list again. It looked all
right: the hundred names, fifty in each column, each on its appointed line. He
skimmed down the men's list: Noonan, Cyril; Dawes, Michael; Fowler, Lawrence; Matthews, David; And right along to the names at the bottom: Nolan, Sidney; Sanderson, Edward.
He
checked out the women's column next: Thomas, Cherry. Martino, Louise; Goldstein, Etna; And down to the last, the ink not yet dry on
her name: Brannick,
Marya.
Mulholland
nodded. Fifty here, fifty there. The list was okay. He scrawled his signature
in the proper place. Another day, another shipload, he thought. Another cargo
for his conscience.
The
long list of names wavered, blurred; he closed his tired eyes. But that was a
mistake. His imagination responded by conjuring up images of people; names took
on flesh, faces hovered accusingly in the air. Edward Sanderson, he thought—and
pictured, for no particular reason, a short, slim, narrow-shouldered man with
thinning brown hair. Ema Goldstein—she might be a dark-haired girl^with large
eyes, who majored in dramatics in college and had hopes of writing a play, someday.
Sidney Nolan—
Mulholland
shook his head to'clear it. He had managed to keep this from happening all day,
this sudden taking on of flesh on the part of the names on his list. So long as
he thought of them simply as names, as strings of syllables, everything was all
right. But once they began asserting their humanity, he crumbled beneath the
assault.
Hastily
he pressed his thumb against the sensitized spot, rolled up the sheet, stuffed
it in its little cylinder, and sent it rocketing down the pneumotube to the
waiting Brevoort. The Gegenschein
had her cargo, barring
accidents and possible suicides between now and the seventeenth of the month.
The clock said 1400 hours.
The day was over. Mulholland rose, sticky with sweat, eyes aching, mind numb.
He was free to go home.
At least you only get selected once, he thought. I have to go through this every day.
He
tidied his desk and moved in a shambling way toward the door. Tomorrow, the Aaron Burr list would have to be finalized, and some new
list would be begun. And after that, the weekend, when Dick Brevoort moved
upstairs to prepare the Saturday and Sunday lists. The wheels of selection
never ceased grinding, even though an individual component of the great machine
might occasionally require a couple of days of rest.
Mulholland
peered into the adjoining office. Miss Thome was behind her typewriter, spine
stiff, fingers sharply arched. She seemed supremely happy in her business.
Mulholland wondered if the names she typed so busily all day ever came to haunt
her. Probably not, he decided. She could go home each night with a clear
conscience to whatever she enjoyed doing in the evenings, crocheting or
watching video or hstening to sixteenth-century madrigals.
He looked in. "Good
afternoon, Jessie."
"Good
afternoon, Mr. Mulholland. Have a very pleasant evening."
"Thanks,"
he said in a suddenly hoarse voice. "The same to you, Jessie."
He walked slowly toward the
door.
VII
Bangor
starfteld,
from which three ships of colonists departed every week, covered sixteen
square miles of what had once been virgin forest in northern Maine. The lofty
firs were gone; now the area had been cleared and levelled and surrounded by a
fence labelled at thousand-yard intervals, NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT TO CLASSIFIED
PERSONNEL. by order of colonization
bureau.
Within the fenced-off area there was surprisingly little in
the way of construction. Since the starfield was for govern-
ment use only, not commercial, there was no need for the
usual array of terminals, passenger buildings, Waiting rooms,
and concessions that cluttered every commercial spaceport.
The buildings at the Bangor field were few: a moderately
elaborate barracks for the permanent staff, a more sketchily
constructed housing unit for transients, a couple of staff
amusement centers, and a small administration building.
All these were huddled together in a compact group in the
center of the cleared area. Fanning off in three directions
were the blastoff fields themselves, kept widely separated
because a starship likes a mile or two of headroom when
it can get it. .
On
the morning of the seventeenth of October, 2116, two of Bangor Starfield's
three blastoff areas were occupied. On Field One stood the Andrew Johnson, solemnly alone with a mile of heat-fused
sterile brown earth on each side: a tall steel-blue needle that towered erect
on its landing-jacks and retractile atmospheric fins. The Andrew Johnson was scheduled for departure on the twentieth
of the month; tomorrow the service crews would swarm out to Field One to begin
the three-day countdown that prefaced every departure of a starship.
At
present the service technicians were busily running the final tests on the Gegenschein, which stood in the center of Field Three,
slim and straight, glinting golden in the morning sunlight. The Gegenschein was due for blastoff at 1600 hours that
afternoon, and with the countdown in its final six hours the service crews
scuttled like busy insects through the ship, making certain that everything was
in perfect order. Only once, twelve years before, had there been a major
starship accident, but it was hoped that there would never be another.
Field
Two remained empty. A returning starship, the Wanderer, was due back late that evening, and Field Two
was being held open for it. A small service crew was on duty at the Field Two
blockhouse, running final checks on the guidance system that would monitor the Wanderer into its landing orbit later in the day.
Nothing could be left to chance—not with a hundred-milhon-dollar starship.
From
the upper floor of the housing unit for transients, looking out past the squat
yellow-brick edifice that served as the permanent staff residence barracks,
both the Andrew
Johnson and
the Gegenschein could be seen, one. at the western end of the
field, the other far to the east. Mike Dawes, who had arrived at the Bangor
starfield at 0945 hours after an early-moming flight from New York, peered out
the window of the small room to which he had been assigned, looking first at
the distant, blue-tinted Andrew Johnson, then,
turning eastward, at the much closer Gegenschein.
"Which one am I going on?" he asked.
"The gold-colored one," said the
uniformed colonization bureau guard who had shown him to his temporary room.
"It's on Field Three, over there."
Dawes nodded. "Yes. I
see it."
"You've got an hour or so to rest here
and relax. At 1100 hours there's a preliminary briefing session downstairs in
the central hall. You won't be able to miss it; just turn to your left when you
leave the elevator. The briefing lasts about an hour. Then you'll be given
lunch."
"I'm not going to be
very hungry," Dawes said.
The guard smiled. "Most of them never
are. But the meal is always a good one."
The
condemned man ate a hearty meal, Dawes thought. He realized with a strange sense of loss that he had only
one more meal to take on Earth; after that, he might never again taste the egg
of a chicken or the leg of a Iamb, might never again put to his hps a tomato or
a cucumber or a radish. It was a small loss, but a telling one. Life on Earth
was just such a confection of litde details.
"What time is blastoff?" he asked.
"1600
hours. Don't worry—they'll fill you in on the schedule downstairs."
*I
suppose they will." "Any other questions?"
Dawes
shook his head. The guard walked to the door, opened it, paused before stepping
out. "Remember," he said. "You can't leave this building without
a pass. The best thing is simply to stay in your room until the gong rings for
the briefing session."
"I'm not going to run
away," Dawes said.
The door closed behind him.
He
looked around at his room,
his home for what was left of his stay on Earth. It was hardly imposing. The
room was an ugly little box whose severity was lessened only by the picture
window opening out onto the field. The walls were painted dull green; there was
a bed, a chair, a dresser, a washstand. It looked like a five-dollar room in
some cheap hotel. His one piece of luggage stood near the door. He had been
allowed twenty pounds of personal effects aside from the .required articles of
clothing. He had chosen books, checking first as advised to make certain that
none of his choices would be duplicated in the colony's filmed library.
It
had been a long week, he thought, as he sank down on the
chair near the window and looked out at the ship that soon would carry him to
the stars. It had taken him a day or so to withdraw from the college, settle
his campus debts, and pack; he had given his textbooks to the university
library, handed over his pitiful college souvenirs, the usual assortment of
enamelled beer-mugs and banners and beanies, to a sophomore living on the same floor at his boarding house.
Then
he had returned to Cincinnati, accompanied by a watchful minion of the
colonization bureau, for a painful and depressing final visit home. His parents
were not taking his selection very well. His father, a tight-lipped man who
rarely displayed any outward sign of emotion/was doing his best to show a stiff
upper lip and bear up under the calamity, but it was obvious that the news was
rapidly bringing him to a state of collapse. His mother had become almost
totally inarticulate; all she could do was stare soul-fully at her son,
sniffle, sob.
His
older brother had come up from Kentucky, looking peevish and fretful about the
sudden intrusion of Mankind's Destiny into the Dawes family. "Something's
gotta be done about this selection business," Dan kept repeating, rubbing
his thinning scalp. "You. can't just let the guwiment go around grabbing
up people, a promising doctor like Mike, heave them out into space like
this."
His
married sister had flown home from Tacoma with her paunchy, piously inclined
husband; she sobbed over her departing brother, which annoyed Dawes because she
had treated him like a slave when they were younger, while her husband mouthed
consoling platitudes about fate and destiny.
It
was like a wake, Dawes thought, only the guest of honor was up and around to
greet everyone. He felt acutely uncomfortable during his three-day stay at his
parents' home. And finally he could take the protracted goodbying no longer,
and, conniving with the bureau watchdog, told them that he had to go on to New
York for final briefing.
They
accompanied him to the airport, wailing and weeping all the while. And then a
segment of his life on Earth ended, as he said his final goodbyes to his family
and climbed aboard the plane for New York.
Although
he stayed in a fine hotel at bureau expense, his stay in New York was far from
pleasant. The great buildings, the shows, the people, the bustling vitality—
everything served only to remind him of the world he was giving up, in exchange
for some lonely alien ball of mud which he was supposed to help convert into a
simulacrum of Earth. He had seen so little of his home world, really. There was
all of Europe: Paris, London, Bucharest, Moscow, the great cities he would
never have a chance to visit now. The Orient; Africa, the Pyramids, the Nile,
Japan, China; he had never even seen the Grand Canyon. And now he never would.
The
two days at large in New York dragged mercilessly. He wondered how, in the old
days, selectees had managed to endure three whole months of lame-duck existence
on Earth; he was fearfully impatient to be gone and done with it, instead of
lingering for a few final days. He was grateful when, early on the morning of
the 17th, he was taken to the airport and flown to Bangor.
And
now he could see the Gegenschein
sitting on the field, in
the last stages of its countdown. At 1600 hours, it was goodbye to Earth. He
paced his room impatientiy, waiting for the minutes to tick past.
At 1100
hours a gong sounded in the hall. A speaker in the comer of his room and
crisply, "All selectees are to report to Room 101 for indoctrination.
Place your baggage in the hall outside your room for pickup."
Dawes
left his suitcase in front of his door and followed the flickering neon signs
down the hall to the elevator, and from there to Room 101. Room 101 was a huge
auditorium in the center of the compound; several men in blue-and-yellow
uniforms bustled about on a dais, adjusting a microphone, while pale,
tense-faced civilians filtered in and took seats as far away from each other as
possible.
Dawes
slipped into an empty row near the back and looked around, seeing his fellow
selectees for the first time. One hundred people were spread thinly about in an
auditorium big enough for ten times that number. He managed an ironic smile at
the way each selectee had managed to place
himself on a little island, insulated by five or six empty seats on each side
from his nearest neighbor, as if afraid of impinging on the final hours of
anyone's privacy. They seemed to be ordinary people; Dawes noticed that most of
them appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties, and a few were
older than that. He wondered whether the colonies were portioned out strictly
at random, or whether perhaps some degree of external control was exerted. It
was perfectly within the range of probability for the Computer to select fifty
men of twenty and fifty women of forty to comprise
a colony, but it seemed unlikely that such a group would ever be allowed to go
out. ■Someone in this room is going to be my wife, Dawes thought with sudden surprise. His heart pounded
tensely at the thought, and color came to his face. Which one of them will it be?
Behind
him, the auditorium doors closed. An officer with an array of ribbons and
medals on his uniform front stepped up to the dais, frowned at the microphone,
raised it a fraction of an inch, and said, "Welcome to Bangor Star-field.
I'm Commander Leswick, and your welfare will be my responsibility until you
blast off at 1600 hours. I know this has been a trying week for you, perhaps
virtually a tragic week for some, and I don't intend to
repeat the catch-phrases and slogans that you've been handed for the past seven
days. You've been selected; you're going to leave Earth, and you'll never
return. I put it bluntly like this because it's too late for illusion and
self-deception and consolation. You've been picked for the most important job
in the history of humanity, and I'm not going to pretend that you're going out
on an easy assignment. You're not. You're faced with the tremendous challenge
of planting a colony on an alien world trillions of miles from here. I know,
right now you feel frightened and lonely and wretched. But never forget this;
each and every one of you is an Earthman. You're
a representative of the highest form of life in the known galaxy. You've got a reputation to live up to, out there. And you'll be building a world. To
the future generations on that world, you'll be the George Washingtons and
Thomas Jef-fersons and John Hancocks.
"The
planet you're going to is the ninth out of sixteen planets revolving around the
star Vega. Vega is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and also one of the
closest to Earth—twenty-three light-years away. You're lucky in one respect:
there are two coionizable planets in the Vega system, your world and the
eighth planet, which is not yet settled. That means youll eventually have a
planetary neighbor, unlike most other colonies which are situated on the only
habitable world in 'their system. The name of your planet, by the way, is
Osiris, from Egyptian mythology—but you can call it anything you like, once you
get there.
"The trip will take about four weeks,
even by Einstein drive. That'll allow you plenty of time to get to know each
other before you reach your new planet. Captain McKenzie and his crew have made
several dozen successful interstellar flights, and I can assure you you'll be
in the best possible hands.
"The
name of your ship, as you know, is the Gegenschein. We
draw the names of our ships from three sources: astronomical terms, historical
figures, and traditional ship names. Gegenschein is
an astronomical term referring to the faint luminosity extending along the
plane of the ecliptic in the direction diametrically opposite to the sun—the
sun's reflection, actually, bouncing back from an immense cloud of stellar
debris.
"I
think that covers all the essential points you'll need to know at the outset.
We're going to adjourn to the mess hall now for a most significant occasion—the
last meal you're ever going to eat on the planet Earth, and also the first meal
you will eat with each other. I hope you all have good appetites, because the
meal is a special one.
"Before
we go in, though, I'm going to call the roll. When you hear your name, I want
you to stand up and make a complete three hundred and sixty degree revolution,
letting everyone get a look at you. This is as good a time as any to start
getting to know each other."
He picked up a list.
"Cyril Noonan."
The
rangy, powerful-looking man in the front row rose and said, in a booming voice
that filled the auditorium easily, "The name I use is Ky Noonan."
Commander
Leswick smiled. "Ky Noonan, then. Incidentally, Ky Noonan happens to be a
Volunteer."
Noonan sat down. Commander Leswick said,
"Michael
Dawes." y
Dawes
rose, blushing unaccountably, and stood awkwardly at attention. Since he was
at the back of the auditorium, there was no need for him to turn around. A
hundred heads craned backward to see him, and he sat.
"Lawrence
Fowler."
A chunky man in the middle of the auditorium
came to his feet, spun round, smiled nervously, and sat down. Les-wick called
die next name, and the next, until all fifty men had been called.
He
began on the women after that. Dawes watched closely as the women rose. Most of
them, he saw, were eight to ten years older than he. But he paid careful
attention. There was one girl named Herrick
who interested 'him. She
was young and looked attractive, in a wide-eyed, innocent way. Carol Herrick, he thought. He wondered what she was like.
VIII
It
was probably an
excellent meal. Dawes did not appreciate it, though. He ate listelessly,
picking at his food, unable to enjoy the white, tender turkey, the dressing and
trimmings, the cold white wine. Although he had overcome his initial bitterness
over selection, a lingering tension remained. He had no appetite. It was an
inconvenience shared by most of his fellow selectees, evidently, judging by the
way they toyed with their food.
The selectees had been distributed at ten tables.
Dawes was dismayed to find, when he took his seat, that he could not recall the
names of any of the other nine selectees at his table. But his embarrassment
was short-lived. A round-faced, balding man to his left said, "111 confess I didn't catch too many names during
rollcall. Maybe we ought to introduce ourselves all over again. I'm Ed
Sanderson from Milwaukee. I used to be an accountant."
It went around the table. "Mary Elliot,
St. Louis," said a plump woman with streaks of gray in her hair.
"Just a housewife before my number came up."
"Phil
Haas, from Los Angeles," said a lean-faced
man in his late thirties. "I was a lawyer."
"Louise
Martino, Brooklyn," said a dark-haired
girl of twenty-five or twenty-six, in a faltering,
husky voice. "I was a salesgirl at Macy's."
"Mike
Dawes, Cincinnati. Junior at Ohio State, pre-med student."
"Puna
Morris, from Denver," said a good-looking redhead. "Department-store
buyer."
"Howard
Stoker, Kansas City," rumbled a heavy-set
man with a stubbled chin and thick, dirty fingers. "Construction
worker."
"Claire
Lubetldn, Pittsfield, Massachusetts." She was a bland-faced blonde with a nervous tic under
her left eye. "Clerk in a video shop."
"Sid
Nolan, Tulsa. Electrical engineer." He was a thin, dark-haired, fidgety
man who toyed constantly with his silverware.
"Helen
Chambers, Detroit," said a tired-looking woman in her thirties, with dark
rings under her eyes. "Housewife."
Ed
Sanderson chuckled uncomfortably. "Well, now we know everyone else, I
hope. Housewives, engineer, college student, lawyer—"
"How
come there ain't any rich people selected?" Howard Stoker demanded
suddenly. "They just take guys like us. The rich ones buy themselves
off."
"That
isn't so," Phil Haas objected. "It just happens that most of the
wealthy executives and industrialists don't get to be wealthy until they're
past the age of selection. But don't you remember a couple of months ago, when
they selected that oilman from Texas—"
"Sure," Sid Nolan broke in.
"Dick Morrison. And none of his father's millions could get him out."
Stoker growled something unintelligible and
subsided. Conversation seemed to die away. Dawes looked down at his plate,
still largely untouched. He had nothing to say to these people with whom he had
been thrown by the random hand of selection. They were just people. Strangers.
Some of them were fifteen years older than he was. He had only just stopped
thinking of himself as a boy a few years before, and now he was expected to
live among them as an equal, as an adult. J didn't want to grow up so soon, he thought. But now I don't have any choice, I guess.
The
meal dragged on to its finish around 1330 hours. Commander Leswick appeared and
announced a ninety-minute rest and recreation period. Boarding of the ship
would commence at 1500 hours, sixty minutes before actual blastoff time.
The
filed out of the mess hall—a hundred miscellaneous people, each carrying his
own burden of fear and regret and resentment. Dawes walked along silently
beside Phil Haas, the lawyer from Los Angeles. As they reached the door, Haas
smiled and said, "Did you leave a girl friend behind, Mike?"
Dawes was startled by the
sudden intrusion on his reverie.
"Oh—ah—no,
I guess not. There wasn't anybody special. I figured I couldn't afford to get
very deeply involved, not with four years of medical school ahead of me. Not to
mention mterning and all the rest."
"I
know .what you mean. I got married during my senior year at UCLA. We had a hard
time of it while I was going to law school."
"You—were
married?"
Haas
nodded. They stepped out into the open air. There was no lawn, just bare brown
earth running to the borders of the starport. "I have—had—two
children," he said. "The boy's going to be seven, the girl
five."
"At least now your wife's not eligible
for selection herself," Dawes said.
"Only
if she doesn't remarry. And I asked her to remarry, you see. She's not the sort
of woman who can get along without a man around." A momentary cloud passed
over Haas' bony face. "Another two years and I would have been safe. Well,
that's the way it goes, I guess. Take it easy, Mike.
I suppose
I'll see you at 1500~hours." Haas clapped Dawes genially on the shoulder
and strode away.
Dawes
felt his mood of depression beginning to lift. If a man like Haas could give up
his home and his wife and his children at the age of ithirty-eight, and still
remain calm and able to smile, then it was wrong for anyone else to sulk.
Sulking was useless, now. But it's hard to talk yourself into being glad you were selected, Dawes thought.
He
thought a moment about Haas' wife. Haas' widow, for so she was legally, now;
the wife of a selectee was legally widowed the moment his ship blasted off, and
she was entitled to collect insurance, widow's pensions, and any other such
benefits. But perhaps she didn't want to be a widow; perhaps she was willing
and anxious to volunteer and go alongside her husband.
The
law said no. She had to remain behind, willy-nilly, to rear her children. No
wonder so many people remained childless these days. If you had children, you
ran too many risks. A childless wife could always follow her husband to the
stars, or vice versa. So, in a way, Selection served as a population control,
not only by removing people from Earth— a statistically insignificant six
thousand a day—but by the much more efficient method of discouraging people
from having children. In a world of seven billion people, anything that
lessened population pressure was valuable. Even something as heartless as
selection.
Dawes
saw a bulletin board on the wall of the mess hall building. He wandered over.
Tacked on it was a mimeographed roster of the Gegenschein passengers. Only four married couples were
included in the hundred names. Dawes wondered how many of the other ninety-two
had been married at the time of their selection. A good many, most likely. And
how many husbands or wives had been unable to bring themselves to volunteer and
thus join their selected mates? How many were leaving children behind?
How many, he wondered, welcomed selection as
a chance to escape an intolerable marriage, an unpleasant job, a dreary and
useless existence? Selection was not completely a curse, to some.
He
returned to his room. The suitcase, he noticed, had been picked up while he had
been gone. He sprawled out on the uncomfortable bed, kicked off his shoes, and
waited for the time to pass.
At
1500 hours, the gong in the hall rang again. The crisp voice out of the speaker
said, "Attention. Attention. All selectees are to report- to the front of
the barracks for boarding ship. All selectees are to report to the front of the
barracks for boarding ship, at once."
In
the hall, Dawes met Mary Elliot; the older woman smiled at him, and he returned
the smile tensely. Several selectees whom Dawes did not know joined them at the
elevator, and they rode down together.
"Well,
this is it," Mary Elliot said. "Goodbye to Earth. I thought this week would never endl"
"So
did I!" exclaimed a willowy thirtyish brunette behind Dawes. "So long
to Earth."
Three
motor coaches waited outside the barracks. Guards in blue-and-yellow uniforms
efficiently herded the selectees into die first coach until it was full, then
began channelling people toward the second. Dawes boarded the third coach. By
that time, the first one was halfway across the immense space-field. The
uniformed men did their job with a calm impersonality that seemed faintly
inhuman to Dawes. But, he reflected, they had to do this three times a week.
All over the world, now, people were beirig herded into starships. By nightfall
six thousand Earthmen would be on their way to an uncertain destination.
Close up, the Gegenschein seemed immense. Standing upright on its
tail, it reared two hundred feet above the bare brown soil. 'Its hull was
plated with a molecule-thick sheath of gold, by way of ornament; each of the
starships had its own distinctive color. The hatch was sixty feet above the
ground. To gain entry, one had to ride up a gantry lift that held five people
at a time. A catwalk was available for those who wanted to climb.
Dawes was in no hurry. He waited in line for
his turn to enter the lift. Turning, he took his last look at Earth, sucked in
his last breath of Earth's air.
It
was mid-aftemoon. In the quiet isolation of the star-field the air had a clear,
transparent quality. There was a tangy nip in it; it smelled of distant fir and
spruce. The sun was low in the October sky, and a brisk breeze swept in from the
north.
Now,
at the moment of ship boarding, Dawes began to think of all he Would never see
again. Never another sunset on Earth, never the moon full and pale in the sky,
never the familiar constellations. Never again the glory of autumn-tinted
maples, never the sight of football players racing down a field, never again a
hot dog or a hamburger or a vanilla sundae. Little things; but little things
added up to a world, and it was a world he was leaving forever behind.
"Next five," came
the guard's voice.
Dawes
shuffled forward and onto the metal platform. The lift rose with a groaning of
winches. Now that he was close to the ship's skin, he could see the tiny
pittings and indentations that told of previous service. The Gegenschein looked newly minted at a distance, but at
close range the appearance was far different.
The lift halted at the lip of the entry
hatch. Hands gathered them in, and behind Dawes the lift began to descend for
its next load. Within, fluorescent lights cast their cold beams on a circular
room which opened onto a spiral com-panionway at either end.
"Men go up, women down," chanted a
space-tanned young man in starman's uniform. "Men to the fore compartment,
women aft."
Dawes clambered up the ladder that lined the
com-panionway at the top of the circular room. He realized that, in flight,
gyroscopic balancers would keep the ship forever upright—but it was difficult
to visualize the way the compartments would be oriented.
At
the top of the ladder another crewman waited. "Men's dorm is straight
ahead," he was told.
Dawes found himself in a compartment large
enough for twenty-five persons. There was nothing luxurious about the
compartment: no money had been expended on plush carpeting, mosaic tile walls,
or the other trimmings customary in commercial spacecraft. The walls were bare
metal, unpainted, unomamented.
Dawes
recognized Sid Nolan, the engineer from Tulsa, already sprawled out in one of
the acceleration cradles. Dawes nodded hello and said, "What are we
supposed to do, now that we're here?"
"Just pick out a cradle and sit down.
Once everybody's aboard they'll tell us what happens next."
"Mind
if I take this one?" Dawes asked, indicating the cradle that adjoined
Nolan's.
"Why should I mind? Suit yourself."
Dawes
lowered himself into the cradle. It was like an oversize lounge chair,
suspended on shockproof cables. At right and left there dangled safety straps
to be buckled before blastoff.
The
chamber filled quickly. Dawes recognized Ky Noonan, the husky volunteer, who
entered, picked out a cradle, and immediately strapped himself in with an
expert hand. Ed Sanderson, the accountant from Milwaukee, was three cradles to
Dawes' left.
Dawes'
watch said 1520 hours when the chamber was filled. A loudspeaker overhead
crackled into life.
"Settlers
of the planet Osiris, welcome aboard the starship Gegenschein" a deep, pleasantly resonant voice said.
"I'm Captain McKenzie, and for the next four weeks I'll be in command of
your ship. The compartments you now are in will be your residences for the
entire journey—but you won't be as cooped up as it may seem now. There are two
lounges, .one fore and one aft, and a galley where you'll take your meals.
"The
Gegenschein carries a crew of nine, and you'll meet them
all soon enough. But I'll have to point out now that this isn't exactly a
luxury liner. My crewmen have their own jobs to do, such as navigating,
controlling the fuel flow, servicing the ship in flight. You'll be responsible
for the tidiness of your own cabins, and each day ten of you will serve with
the crew to help prepare meals and clean the ship.
"Blastoff
will take place, as you know, at 1600 hours. The time is now 1523 hours, so, as
you see, there are approximately thirty-seven minutes left. The countdown is
in its final stages now. At 1545 hours you will all have to be strapped into
your cradles; those of you who have travelled in space before may be familiar
with the way the straps work, but in any event crewmen will circulate among you
to make sure you're all strapped down.
"The
ship will rise on conventional chemical-fuel rockets, as in interplanetary
traffic. The initial acceleration will be three gravities; you may experience
some discomfort, but not for long.
"We
will travel on rocket drive for eighty-three minutes. At 1723 hours the rocket
drive will cease to be operative, and we will make the Einsteinian conversion
to nospace at 1730 hours. Once the conversion is complete you will be free to
leave your protective cradles. There'll be a signal given to indicate this. At
1800 hours dinner will be served in the galley.
"Well continue on Einstein drive for the
next four weeks. In case any of you intend to get a last look at Earth as we
blast off, please be informed now that there are no vision oudets or pickups anywhere
in the ship but in the main control cabin. The reason for this is simple: any
kind of porthole constitutes a structural weakness in the hull, and since
better than 99% of the trip is going to be spent in no-space, where there's
nothing to see anyway, the designing engineers have eliminated the visual
outlets.
"Let
me ask you now simply to relax, lie back, and get to know your neighbor.
Blastoff time is thirty-five minutes from now. Thank you."
The speaker clicked off.
Nolan murmured, "Too bad about that
business of no vision outlets. I would have liked to get a last look at the
Earth on the way out."
"Maybe it's better this way," Dawes
said. "Yeah," Nolan agreed after a pause. "You may be right
there."
They
fell silent. Dawes fumbled with the straps of his protective cradle; they
locked into each other in an intricate way, but he solved it after a few
moments of tentative fumbling, and by the time the crewman entered the compartment
to check, Dawes was completely strapped down.
Minutes
ticked away. Dawes tried to freeze in his mind the image of the moon full in
the night sky, the Big Dipper, the belt of Orion. Less than ten minutes
remained now.
He
tried to picture the layout of the ship. At the very top, at the rounded nose,
the control cabin and crew quarters were probably located. Then, he thought,
below that were the two male dormitories, one on each side of the ship. Then
the central lounge, and below that the two female dorms. In the rear, the other
lounge, and the galley. And behind them, the rocket combustion chambers and the
mysterious compartment housing the Einstein Drive.
He
knew very Utile about the Einstein Drive. Only that its core was a
thermonuclear generator that, by establishing a controlled field of greater
than solar intensity, creased a stress-pattern in the fabric of space. And that
the ship would nose through the stress-pattern like a seal gliding through'a
cleft in the Arctic ice, and the ship would enter the realm termed nospace.
And
then? Somehow, travelling faster than the normal universe's limiting velocity,
that of fight, the Gegenschein
would breast the gulf of
fight-years and emerge from no-space in the vicinity of Vega, to make a landing
on Osiris by conventional chemical-rocket propulsion.
He
frowned. He understood the principles only vaguely; hardly anyone really knew
what happened when the Einstein generator went into action. All that counted
was the result: and it worked. Without the development of the drive, in the
late years of the twenty-first century, there would have been no expansion into
the universe by Earth-men, no colony worlds, no selection. Perhaps a ship or
two might have been despatched to Alpha Centauri, taking twelve years for the
journey and return, or perhaps an immense vessel would have been sent starward
to house several generations on a century-long flight to the stars.
Now,
ships flitted from Earth to Vega in four weeks. And Terran colonies dotted the
skies.
Dawes
forced himself to relax. Somewhere above him, he knew, the countdown was in its
final minutes. The field was clear; soon, with a mighty splash of radiance
against the already seared soil, the Gegenschein would
rear skyward.
"Stand
by for blastoff," the voice of Captain McKenzie warned suddenly.
Far
beneath him, Dawes sensed the rumbling of the giant rocket engines. There was a
thunderous roar; a massive fist pushed down, against his chest, as the ship
lifted. His heart pounded furiously under the strain of acceleration. He closed
his eyes.
He
felt the pang of separation. His last bond with Earth, the bond of gravity, had
been severed.
IX
Dawes
had never known four
weeks could move so slowly.
The-novelty
of being spacebome wore off almost at the beginning. In nospace, there was no
sense of motion, no rocket vibration, no feeling of acceleration. The ship hung
motionless. And the hundred passengers, crammed mercilessly into their tiny
vessel, began to feel like prisoners in a large cell.
During
that first week, the hundred colonists concentrated on getting to know each
other—but in a distant, guarded way, as if each had something to hide from ail
the others, that something being his inmost self. After a week, Dawes knew the
names of almost all of his fellow selectees, but he knew little else about
them. Each of the hundred cloaked himself in his private tragedy and made
little effort to form friendships.
There
were exceptions. Phil Haas, the West Coast laywer who had left wife and
children behind, circulated among the entire group, making friends, talking to
people, encouraging them, soothing them. Mary Elliot, the plump, motherly
woman who was the oldest of all the hundred selectees at thirty-nine, did the
same. And soon it became evident that Haas would be an ideal Colony Director,
with Mary Elliot as his wife.
The
ship was cramped. There was hardly any room in the sleeping quarters except for
sleeping; the lounges aft were small and low of ceiling, while the galley just
barely held all of them at table. The narrow companionways that ran the length
of the ship would pass two abreast, no more. There was little in the way of
recreation aboard ship: a few books, a few music-tapes, nighdy film showings.
Most of the books and music and films were stowed away in the cargo hold with
the other possessions of the colony-to-be.
As
"day" dragged into "day" and week into week, Dawes found
himself going stale with the monotony and constant discomfort. He counted days,
then hours, until landing. He slept as much as he could, sometimes fifteen and
sixteen hours a day, until he could sleep no more.
Little
cliques were forming aboard the ship as the weeks passed. Groups of six or
eight took shape: people from the same geographical area, or people of the same
general age and intelligence groups, who saw something to share in their common
misfortune. Dawes joined none of these groups. He was the youngest member of
the colony, at twenty—by some fluke of the Computer, none of the other men was
less than twenty-five, .and most were in their early thirties—and he stood to
one side, unable to mingle at ease with the older people. Many of them had lost
wives, families, homes that had been built and furnished with care and expense,
jobs that had cost them outlay of energy and vigorous exertion. He felt guilty,
in a way, that he had lost nothing more serious than his education and his
chosen profession. Conscious that the other selectees were adults and he
himself something less than that, though more than a boy, Dawes established and
observed the gulf between them, and made few friends.
In
the third week an election was held. Phil Haas Was chosen Colony Director, running unopposed. He announced that he would
serve for one year and then would hold new elections. The colonists assembled,
granted him the right to rule by decree until a constitution could be adopted,
and some sort of colonial council established.
Dawes
wondered about the unanimity of the election. Certainly there were other men
among the fifty who yearned for power. Why had they kept politely silent while
Haas was being acclaimed? Men like Dave Matthews, Lee Donaldson: strong men,
capable men, outspoken men. Perhaps they were just biding their time, Dawes
thought. Waiting, letting Haas handle the difficult task of getting the colony
in motion, then making their bids.
Dawes
shrugged. He had no interest in playing politics. He kept
to himself, intending to do his job as a colonist as best he could, without
looking for trouble. Let others fight among themselves for responsibilities; he
was content to drift passively along. After all, he thought, he hadn't asked to
be sent here. Nor was he going to ask for any great share in the
responsibilities.
At the end of the fourth week, finally—it
seemed like the fourth century since blasting off from Earth—a shipwide
announcement sent the Osiris colonists scuttling back to their protective
cradles.
"The
time is 1443 hours, ship time. In exactly twelve minutes, at 1455 hours, we're
going to make a transition out of nospace and back to rocket drive. We'll enter
the atmosphere of Osiris at 1600 hours and take three hours to complete our landing
orbit. Well touch down on the day-side of Osiris at 1900 hours, which will be
exactly noonday down below. Everybody strap down now."
Dawes'
fingers quivered nervously as he lashed himself into the acceleration cradle.
This was it! Landing in less than five hours!
He
wondered about Osiris. The colonization bureau had prepared a couple of
mimeographed sheets about the planet for distribution to the colonists, but the
information on them was scanty. He knew that the planet was roughly Earthsize—
8100 miles in diameter—and that the soil was arable; that the air was like the
air of Earth, only with a trifle less oxygen, a trifle more nitrogen, not
enough of a difference to matter; that the planet had seven continents, of
which two were polar and thus uninhabitable. Survey team reports were never
tremendously reliable: the survey teams moved with desperate haste, often
scouting an entire solar system in a day or two, and once they found a world to
be reasonably suitable they rarely bothered to look for drawbacks. According
to the survey team report, there was no intelligent life on Osiris, at least
not on the temperate northern continent that had been chosen for the colony.
It was an easy statement to make; so far intelligent life had been discovered
nowhere else in the universe. Many planets had species no more than a hundred
thousand years away from intelligence, but nowhere but on Earth was there a
culture, a civilization, as much as a language. Or so the findings had been so
far.
At
1455 hours came the shock of transition. The Einstein generator lashed out,
smashing a gap in the fabric of nospace, and the Gegenschein slipped through the aperture and back into
the universe of real things. Instandy the rocket engines came into play,
guiding the ship into orbit round the planet below. In a series of
ever-narrowing spirals the Gegenschein would
glide .downward, matching velocities with Osiris, until its path grazed the
skin of the planet and the ship came to rest at last.
Lying pinioned in his acceleration cradle,
Mike Dawes clenched his teeth against the pounding of the rockets. The Gengeschein was not insulated very '\vell
against engine vibration; it was strictly functional, a tube designed to transport
people from one world to another, without pretensions to comfort.
He
regretted the lack of a vision screen. It might have been inspiring to see
Osiris growing steadily ahead as the Gegenschein landed.
Much more inspiring than lying on your back in a badly ventilated compartment,
Dawes thought, lying in the half-darkness. Somewhere ahead in the night was
Osiris, Vega IX, four billion miles from the fourth brightest star in Earth's
sky. Would Sol be visible in Osiris' night sky? Probably—as an insignificant
white dot of negligible magnitude.
No
one spoke as the Gegenschein
plunged planetward. Each
man in the compartment was alone with his dreams and memories now. The minutes
passed; at 1600 hours Captain McKenzie announced that the ship had entered
Osiris' atmosphere at last. The actual landing was still three hours away, as
the ship swung round the planet, coming closer and closer to the surface.
1900
hours. Within his cradle Mike Dawes struggled to keep his stomach under
control. The last hour had been a bumpy, bouncing ride downward through
thickening layers of atmosphere. Atmospheric eddies jounced the golden ship; a
storm layer buffeted it. But the journey was ending. The Gegenschein hung low over Osiris' northern temperate continent,
dropping, dropping . . .
Landing.
The impact shuddered through the ship. The Gegenschein wobbled only an instant before the
landing-jacks took effect, digging into the ground.
Captain
McKenzie said, "We've landed right on the nose. Welcome to Osiris, ladies
and gentiemen."
We're here, Dawes thought.
He longed to burrow through the ship's wall
and see the new planet. But an hour more passed before the colonists could
leave the ship. First, the routine atmospheric tests ("as if they'll take
us all back home if they discover that the air's pure helium," Sid Nolan
grumbled). Then, the cooling-off period of fifteen minutes while nozzles
beneath the ship's belly sluiced decontaminating fluids onto the landing area
to deal with the radiation products and chemical poisons of the rocket exhaust.
After
that, the opening of the hatch, the lowering of the catwalk. No gantry lift
waiting for them; descent from the ship would be by ladder only. Phil Haas and
Mary Elliot were the first people out; after them came the others, filing in
slow shuffle along the companionway until they reached the hatch.
Dawes
was the twentieth to leave the ship. He stepped out onto the hp of the hatch.
Osiris
lay before him. The ship had landed in a clearing at the shore of a glittering
blue lake. Beyond the expanse of pinkish-red sand, the soil became more
fertile; not far away loomed a dark, ominous-looking forest, and high beyond
rose arching black cliffs.
Gray
clouds lay heavily in the dark-blue sky like greasy puffs of wool. High
overhead burned giant Vega, with its disc the apparent size of the sun of
Earth, even at a distance of four billion miles. The air smelled subtly
different—thin, with a salt tang to it that was nothing like the tang of the
open ocean. And it was cold. The temperature was about fifty, but an icy wind
came sleeting down out of the forest, cutting into him as he stood staring
sixty feet above the ground.
He
hadn't expected it to be this cold. For no specific reason he had anticipated
tropic heat. But Osiris, at least this continent at this time of year, seemed
bleak, inhospitable, uninviting.
"Come on, kid," someone said behind
him. "Don't stand there all day. Get down the ladder." . Dawes smiled
apologetically. "Sorry. Just taking it all in." "You've got
plenty of time for that."
Dawes
reddened and scrambled hastily down the catwalk. The others were waiting below.
The pinkish sand crunched underfoot. Feeling for the first time, Dawes thought
with awe and wonder, the touch of a human foot.
Chill winds swept down on him as he stood
huddling into himself for warmth, waiting for Haas to organize things, to take
charge. As the colonists filed out of the ship, they wandered about aimlessly
on the sand, moving without direction or purpose or words, all of them
struggling to minimize the shock of concrete realization that they were alone
on an alien planet, never to see Earth again.
At
last all hundred had disembarked, as well as Captain McKenzie and his crew.
Haas
had obtained a whistle from somewhere. He blew it now.
"Attention! Attention,
everybody!"
The
wanderers returned to the group. Silence fell. The wind hooted through the
distant forest.
Haas
said, "Captain McKenzie tells me that he intends to blast off for Earth as
soon as possible. Our first job, then, is to unload the ship. We'll do it in
bucket-brigade fashion. Noonan, pick a team of five men and go with Captain
McKenzie: you'll be the ones to get the crates out of the ship. Sanderson,
choose three and arrange yourselves near the ship to take the crates as they
come out. Well pass them along until they've been placed over there, at the end
of the beach, beyond the five hundred yard safety zone the Gegenschein is going to need." Haas paused.
"Matthews, take four colonists and go scouting around the area. Look
around for any lurking wildlife, and yell if you see anything. The rest of you
just stay in the area; no wandering off."
Dawes
was passed over by the heads of the teams; he shrugged, thrust his hands in his
pockets, and stood to one side. The cargo hatch in the belly of the ship was
lowered open, and Noonan and his team entered, while the Gegenschein crew clambered back up the catwalk to ready
their ship for departure. In a few minutes, crates began appearing, heavy
wire-bound wooden crates that contained all of Earth that there had been room
to bring along.
Others
lugged the crates across the clearing, out of the way of the ship's
rocket-blast area. The job took nearly an hour. Haas inventoried each crate as
it appeared, checking it off against a master list. When half had appeared, he
whistied again and rotated the teams, letting the tired men rest and putting
fresh ones to work. Dawes took his place in the second team, hauling the crates
away from the ship and over to the supply dump.
The
cargo hold was nearly empty when Dave Matthews came trotting out of the forest,
shouting for Haas.
The colony director turned.
"What is it, Dave?"
Matthews
raced up, panting. Dawes and a few others stopped work to listen to him.
Matthews gasped,
"Aliens! I saw aliens!"
Haas frowned.
"What?"
"Sulking
around in the edge of the forest. Dark shadowy things. They looked like men, or
apes, or something."
A
twinge of fear went through Dawes. But Haas smiled. "Are you sure,
Dave?"
"How
can I be sure? They ran away as soon as I went toward them."
"Did anyone else in your team see
them?" Haas asked, looking at the other four members of the scouting
patrol. "Not me," Sid Nolan said.
"Me neither," Paul Wilson agreed.
"We came running when Matthews shouted, but we didn't see anything."
"And the survey team said there was no
intelligent life on Osiris," Nolan pointed out.
Haas shrugged the matter off. "Well
check later. You might have been mistaken, Dave."
"I hope so. But I
wasn't."
The
affair was allowed to drop there. At the moment, it was more urgent to empty
out the Gegenschein.
The
work made Dawes perspire, and then he felt colder when a gust of wind came. But
he enjoyed the mere activity of moving around, of using his muscles after four
weeks of dreary confinement.
At
last the ship was unloaded. An assortment of packing-crates and smaller cases
sat in disorder five hundred yards from the ship. The crewmen busded busily
about, checking off items on a vasdy accelerated count-down. It took two days
to prepare a ship for blastoff when it was laden with colonists and cargo;
empty, it could be readied in only a few hours.
While the crewmen worked, the hundred
colonists boarded the ship for the last time, to prepare a meal in the galley.
It would be their third meal
of the day. But it was only
midday on Osiris, and Haas had ordered that work
would continue until sundown, six or seven hours hence, so they would be
adjusted to the new time-schedule from the very start. Dawes was on the cleanup
crew after the meal. When he emerged from the ship, finally, he saw Haas and
Captain McKenzie in conference. Haas Was counting,
to make certain everyone was off the ship.
He
blew his whistle. "Attention, all! The Gegenschein is about to blast off! Everyone over by the
cargo, right away! The Gegenschein
is leaving!"
X
Final
preparations took
twenty minutes. At last, the Gegenschein was
ready. It sounded one last warning honk before blasting off. Mike Dawes, standing in the safe zone with the other colonists, felt a
sharp inward tug as he saw the ship seem to draw back on its haunches,
retraoting its landing jacks in the last few moments before blastoff. This was
the last fink with Earth, the golden ship at the edge of the lake.
The
warning honk died away and the ship sprang suddenly up from the ground,
hovering on its blazing pillar of flame for a moment as it fought with Osiris'
pull, then, breaking loose, shot upward to the cloud-muddied sky. For half a
minute, perhaps, the retreating rocket-blast added a second sun to the sky. A
strange luminous glow cast double shadows over the ground, but faded rapidly.
The Gegenschein was gone.
A
life hardly begun was finished now, Dawes realized. His past, twenty years on
Earth, infancy and childhood and awkward adolescence, was becoming remote and
dreamlike, as if it had not actually happened to him but had been told to him
in sleep. Only the uncertain future was real.
He
stood by himself, nervously staring at the seared place where the Gegenschein had been. Beyond lay the dark forest, either inhabited or not inhabited
by humanoid alien beings, depending on the accuracy of Dave Matthews'
observation. Dawes felt cold. This was not a pleasant world.
And
blastoff had beeu like the severing of the umbilicus. A thunder of flame and a
bull-voiced roar and the link with Mother Earth was severed forever.
Severing
of the umbilicus. He liked the analogy. It was the sort of thought a doctor
might have. And he was a doctor in embryo only, or not even that—a shivering
skinny twenty-year-old who • would never have to worry about medical
school applications now. A flip of the wheel, a random twitch of the giant
Computer, and they packed you off like a steer on a tenth-class ship to a world
like Osiris. They ripped you out of your old life and told you to build a new
one, on a cold windswept planet where shadowy alien shapes skulked through the
dismal forest.
A
hand grabbed Dawes' shoulder firmly from behind, breaking into his mood. He
looked around.
"Something
the matter with you?" Ky Noonan asked gruffly. "You look lousy."
"I feel lousy. Mind?^
Noonan grinned. "It's your privilege,
kid. But you better stop brooding about Earth." "I'm not—"
"I
see it all over your face. Look, Earth don't exist any more, as far as you and
me are concerned. There's just Osiris."
1 know that," Dawes said slowly.
"But it takes a while to get used to the idea."
"You've
had plenty of time. Four weeks on the ship, and two hours since we landed. Take
some free advice: get used to being here."
Dawes
made no reply. All the time since the day he had pulled the blue envelope from
his mailbox, he had been telling himself to accept the dealings of fate without
complaint. He had deluded himself into thinking he was resigned to selection.
But evidently he wasn't. Apparently the resentment still showed in his eyes.
Noonan
chuckled and strode lightly away, toward a small group of women on the other
side of the packing cases. Dawes followed him with his eyes, brow furrowing as
he strained to understand what made the big man, tick.
Noonan was a volunteer. He wore his
volunteer's status like a badge of merit, which it was. Dawes watched him
bantering with the girls over there. The big man' was smiling, but there was a
faraway look in his eyes. Still, he seemed completely at ease, self-sufficient,
happy. As if anyone could be happy, torn from family^ friends, career-No. Dawes reminded himself
that Noonan had volunteered.
He hadn't been torn from
anything; maybe he had nothing to be torn from.
Phil
Haas mounted a packing crate at the far end of the clearing and blew his
whisde. It was time to get things set up. Dawes joined the gathering group.
"We're
on our own now," Haas said, speaking loudly to fight the insistent
whistling of the wind. "That ship is gone and it isn't ever coming back.
We've got plenty to do now. The first thing is to set up the stockade and
inflate the domes."
A
voice from the back of the group—Dave Matthews' voice—called out. "Phil,
what about those aliens I saw? I think we ought to have a permanent security
patrol, just in case they come back."
Haas'
lean face darkened. "The important thing is to get the stockade built
immediately."
"But the aliens—"
"There's
some doubt as to whether you actually did see aliens, Dave. Remember, the
survey team didn't find any such creatures here—"
"How long did they
look? Half an hour?"
Haas
said with a trace of impatience, "Dave, if you want to discuss this
further, take it up in private with me. We can't spare men for a patrol until
the stockade's been built. Besides which, your aliens, if they exist, are
probably more afraid of us than we are of them." Haas chuckled.
"Let's get busy. We've got plenty more things to do by nightfall—
including the marrying."
Dawes
moistened his lips. Yes, the marrying! He had pushed the thought into the back
of his mind, but now there was no avoiding it.
He
drew his jacket tighter around himself. Like most thin people, he had little
use for cold weather; the wind seemed to cut right through his jacket and between
his ribs. The survey team report had said Osiris was Earth-type, uninhabited,
and fairly fertile, but they hadn't said, anything about that damned nor'wester
that ripped down constandy from the forest.
Haas
stepped down from his packing crate and called over Noonan, Stoker, Donaldson,
and several of the other stronger men of the group, to discuss plans for
setting up the colony. According to the booklets that had been distributed
before landing, there was a fixed and time-tested procedure for setting up a
new colony—a procedure that had worked well on the hundreds of worlds to which
humanity had already spread.
The
first step was to establish a stockade, to mark the original boundaries of the
colony and to provide a tangible measure • of the colony's foothold, as well as
to serve in keeping stray alien creatures away. .,
Once
the stockade was up, the bubble-houses went up, the homes of the colonists. No
more the painstaking hewing of logs for cabins; the bubble-houses sprouted
simply and easily from the extrusion nozzles. A gallon of the selfpolymerizing
fluid could serve to create homes for thousands of colonists; once it was gone,
the science of architecture would begin on the new world.
Once
the fifty couples were settled, the next matter was that of being fruitful and
multiplying. Since the colonists were screened for fertility, it was reasonable
to expect thirty or forty offspring in the first year of the colony, twenty or
thirty in each succeeding year. By the time ten yeas had passed, the older children
would be able to care for the new crop of babies. After fifteen years, the
total population of the colony might be as much as five hundred—and the first
second-generation marriages would be taking place. Given unlimited space and no
economic problems, breeding could be unlimited for several generations.
Population would expand: . eight hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred. It
leaped upward by exponential bounds in each generation. And the colony spread
outward into the ah en wilds, until the raw settiement became a village, a
town, a city, a city among other cities. One by one, a series of new Earths
would thus be carved across the reaches of space by grumbling, miserable,
conscripted pioneers.
Haas
took a while to formulate his plans for the first day's work. Dawes waited at
the edgeof the clearing. The idle colonists, in no hurry to receive their
orders, had formed into the shipboard cliques again. Eight or nine women stood
in one bleakfaced little clump not far away, their faces reflecting their realization
of where they were and how dead their past lives were. Further away Dawes saw a
circle composed of the younger unmarried men, joking tensely, nudging each
other in the ribs. The four married couples—the Wilsons, Zacharies, Frys and
Nortons—remained apart, as if emphasizing the fact that they would not be
concerned with the mass mating soon to take place.
Dawes
stole a look at the little group of women. At least half of them were far too
old for him to begin to consider as potential mates. If he had last choice, he
might indeed have one of them thrust at him, but he hoped not.
Most of the women were in their middle or
late twenties.
Carol
Herrick, at twenty-two, was closest to his own age. Dawes looked at her. She
was shivering slightly in the cold wind, tugging her lightweight jacket closed.
She was a slim girl with brown hair, black eyes, and a 'land of dewy-faced
prettiness about her. Dawes had not exchanged many words with her in the four
weeks, only the standard introductions. She seemed shy, as shy as he, and he
liked that. And she was pretty. Too pretty, Dawes thought ruefully. She was
bound to catch the eye of one of the older men, and whoever preceded him in the
picking would probably grab her up.
He
wondered about the other girls. Cherry Thomas, for instance; he heard her loud
laughter as she stood joking with some of the men. She was tall, lively,
sophisticated-looking. She looked to be about twenty-five or so, and she looked
as if she'd been around a lot in her time. The impartial scoop of the lottery
seized all kinds.
What
of the others? Claire Lubetkin, she of the nervous tic and the faint
predisposition toward hysteria? Chunky, darkhaired Louise Martino, who seemed
to have spent a man-starved life? Some of the women had never been married;
others had husbands, now widowers, on Earth, against whom they were bound to
measure any new mate.
A_strange
uneasiness stole over Dawes and he turned his attention away from the women.
One of them would be his wife, on this bitter, wind-tossed world. He would know
which one soon enough.
Haas
had finished working out his plans. He whistled once again for attention.
"The
order of business right now is to get the stockade up. You've been divided into
six work gangs. Gangs one, two, and three will be led by Ky Noonan, Howard
Stoker and myself. We'll distribute blasters to those three gangs and you'll
gather tree-trunks for the backbone of the stockade. Work gang four will be
under Sid Nolan, and that gang will be in charge of placing the trunks in the
ground. Work gang five, under Lee Donaldson, will bind the trunks together with
permospray. Work gang six, under Mary Elliot, will unpack the crates and
provisions."
It was neady arranged. Most of the men were
assigned to the three logging groups. Dawes and sixteen others went into
Nolan's group, which did the actual building of the stockade. The women were
split between Donaldson's group and Mary Elliot's.
The
work went off smoothly enough, thanks to the tools supplied by Earth. The
forest was thick with barkless trees twenty feet high and six or eight inches
in diameter; the three logging groups made swift work of burning them down,
trimming away the limbs and the fragrant needley foliage, and sizing the trees
to a uniform twenty-foot length. It took only a few minutes to prepare each
tree; within half an hour, several dozen were stacked at the border between the
forest and the clearing.
At
diat point, Nolan's group went into action. They had already laid out their boundaries,
and now it was a simple matter of scooping out a pit with the vacuum extractor,
shoving the sharpened point of the trunk some four feet into the ground, and
tamping down, the ground. Dawes hove to with the rest, feeling a pleasant
thrill at the thought that the colony was under way, that his hands were
helping to shape its walls.
As
the row of stakes grew, placed regularly in the ground three feet apart,
Donaldson followed along with the extrusion machines, spewing out a binding
layer of plastic between each wooden rib. And within the stockade boundaries
the women worked, ripping into the sealed crates and laying bare their
contents.
After
nearly two hours of steady work, the stockade had taken definite shape on three
sides. After three hours, it was practically finished, and Haas and his crew,
no longer required to supply more logs, were fashioning the gate and bolt for
the stockade's entrance. Already the place seemed snug, the winds less cruel,
Dawes thought. He felt exhausted from his work, the constant hoisting of logs
and placing them in the ground, but it was a good kind of exhaustion, the warm
feeling of constructive exertion.
Nightfall
came. Giant Vega had dipped far below the horizon, and a sprinkling of
unfamiliar constellations brightened the darkening sky. No moon had risen.
But, by floodlights, the work had gone on. The stockade was nearly perfect,
having sprung up miraculously in only a few hours. And the bubble-houses had
been blown: fifty of them, small opaque blue domes that glinted dully in the
floodlights' glare. A fifty-first dome, larger than the rest, stood in the very
center of the stockade. It would be the central gathering-place of the colony
in the early days.
Dawes hunkered down on his heels, resting. He was tired;
his muscles would ache in the morning. But the colony was
off to a flying start. The stockade was built and the homes
were erected. ^
"Swell
job, everyone," Haas congratulated them. "We're right on schedule. And it's wonderful the way you all pitched in and did your share."
"What about
wives?" Noonan asked loudly.
A
tense, apprehensive giggle began among the women, and rapidly spread through
the group. Haas held up his hand for silence. "I was just getting to that
part of it now. It's the one remaining item of business."
The
women looked strained, oddly tense, as Haas organized them into a group for
the mate-picking. Dawes studied their faces. Cherry Thomas was smiling. Some of
the other women looked worried, pale, tense. Those were the ones who had never
been married, who had dreamed of a different sort of wedding-night, before
their number came up. Others, those who had left husbands behind on Earth, were
obviously thinking of their loved ones trillions of miles away. •
Haas unfolded a sheet of paper and frowned.
"The time has come to couple off. The instructions I have suggest the
following recommended procedure for handling this: As a volunteer, Ky Noonan
has the right to take first pick. As colony director, I get second pick. After
that, we proceed in order of Computer registration number—an order known only
to me, at die moment. I think that way is better than any other system, and
unless I hear any strong objections that'll be the method well use."
No
one spoke. Dawes privately wished that someone would speak up in favor of a
more gradual system—say, letting things take their natural course, couples
forming as the days went by. But colonies were warned against such arrangements.
It was far safer to establish couplings right at the start, having everyone in
the small community setded at once.
"Very
well," Haas said. "We'll go down the list. Each man will select a
woman, but she has the right of refusal. In case your choice refuses you, you
don't get to pick again until every other man has spoken. If anyone remains
uncoupled after three run-throughs, 111 make assignments myself. Okay. Noonan,
as a Volunteer you've earned the privilege of picking first. Step forward and
name your choice."
Noonan
came forward, smiling calmly. He was the biggest, most aggressive male in the
group, and he gloried in the confident knowledge of his own superiority.
He
ran his eyes insouciantly down the row of waiting women. A strange mixture of
emotions appeared on fifty feminine faces. Some of the women seemed fearful of
being picked by him, others openly hostile, others pleadingly anxious.
After
a moment of hushed silence, Noonan said, "All right. I pick Cherry
Thomas."
Dawes
let his breath out explosively. He had been certain that Noonan would pick
Carol Herrick—but he had bypassed her in favor of the older woman, for some
reason.
Haas said, "Miss Thomas, is this choice
agreeable?"
Cherry
Thomas stared levelly at Noonan, appraising him frankly. "I guess
so," she said. "If Noonan wants me, 111 go with him."
People snickered. A little testily, Haas
said, "This is marriage, Miss Thomas."
"Don't hand me any damned
piousness!" Cherry snapped. "You aren't any better than me, and don't
forget it! I—"
She
stopped. "Okay. Sorry. Maybe I earned that crack. Okay, Noonan will
do."
Haas
made an entry on his list. "So be it. You can have your pick of any of the
bubble-houses. Suppose I say now that any marriage can be dissolved on Osiris
by approval of the council, once we have a council. Until then, let's try not
to have any split-ups."
Dawes watched Noonan and Cherry stroll away
to take their pick of house-sites. No ceremony? He
wondered. It didn't seem so. The- simple act of picking solemnized the
marriage. Well, Dawes thought, it's a brand-new world. Perhaps it's better this
way.
Haas
was next, and to no one's surprise picked Mary Elliot, who accepted. That was a
foregone conclusion, of course.
The
Colony Director looked down at his list again, and announced that Lee
Donaldson had next pick. Donaldson, a strong, cornm an ding-looking man, strode
forward and announced his choice loudly: "Claire Lubetkin."
Claire
reddened, fidgeted, nibbled her lower lip. Haas put the question to her. She
wavered indecisively, glanced around at the other men, and finally nodded.
"I accept the choice."
After
Donaldson came Howard Stoker. He came forward in his" bear-like, rumbling
walk, with the dirt of his day's labor still clinging to him.
He
eyed the women as if making up his mind at the last moment and said, "Rina
Morris."
Ninety-odd pairs of eyes focused on Rina
Morris. The redhaired girl drew herself up stiffly. She looked at the thickset,
ugly Stoker with an expression that was anything but friendly. "Sorry. Ill
wait a turn."
Stoker
scowled at her angrily. "Okay. If you're going to be that way, to hell
with you. I pick Carol Herrick instead."
Dawes
whitened at the thought of Stoker pawing over Carol. He wanted to shout out, to
protest.
But Haas said, "Sorry,
Howard. I told you before that regulations don't give you a second choice until
everyone else has spoken." "But-"
"You heard me,
Stoker."
"Dammit,
I'm not going to wait at the end of the line! Just because that girl is too
proud to have me, I—"
Haas
said in a voice that suddenly crackled with authority, "You'll do
whatever I tell you to do, Howard. Get back in line and wait your turn. Mike
Dawes has next choice."
Stoker
grumbled something, spat ostentatiously, and walked to the rear of the group.
Dawes stumbled forth red-faced, still astonished at the sudden reprieve. Carol
had been picked by Stoker, and Haas had refused to allow the choice, and now it
was his choice—
A
row of faces confronted him. Kindly maternal faces; frightened faces; amused
faces. And one face above all others. Dawes searched for the words.
"I p-pick—I pick Carol
Herrick."
Haas smiled. "Miss
Herrick?"
Dawes
waited for an agonizing span of time. He could not look at Carol's face. He
stared away, at the ground, too tense to draw a breath.
Finally
she said, in a voice so soft it could barely be heard,
"I accept."
XI
Dawes
and Carol left the clearing together, walking rapidly
away without speaking, virtually without looking at each other.
He
said to her finally, as they approached the circular row of bubble-houses,
"We'd better pick one out."
"Pick any one you like—Mike."
He
glanced at them. The domes were empty, merely arching shelters against the
downslanting winds, but they did provide a place to sleep if you didn't mind
the ground. Colonists weren't supposed to mind little things like having to
sleep on the ground until there was time to build beds.
He
pointed at the bubble-house that adjoined Noonan's. It might be a good idea to
have Noonan as a neighbor, Dawes thought. Just in case of trouble.
"Let's take that
one," Dawes said.
They
walked toward it, Dawes carrying his own suitcase and hers, each with its
twenty pounds of personal possessions. At the entrance to the dome he paused,
wondering vaguely whether he should bother with the old ritual of carrying his
wife across the threshold. He nearly put down the suitcases to turn to her;
then, changing his mind, he simply walked inside the dome. She followed him in.
Within, the dome covered an area of perhaps
two hundred square feet. There would be room for a bed and perhaps a clothes
cabinet of some sort, not much else. Plumbing would come a while later; until
that time, they would have to make do with the nearby lake for washing and drinking.
"It isn't very
impressive, is it?" he asked.
"No. Not very."
"Well
fix it up. These domes are just temporary, just places to stay until we can
begin building homes. We'll have a swell place some day, Carol."
He
smiled encouragingly at her. But she could not keep up, the pretense; she, sank
down onto her suitcase and stared bleakly off into nowhere. Dawes began to
wonder about the sleeping arrangements for the night. They would have to spread
out all their clothes, he thought, and huddle together for warmth—.
"I
hadn't expected it to be like this," she said suddenly in a toneless
voice. "I mean, my life, and all. I never really thought much about what I
was going to do with myself. But I didn't figure I'd end up in a little bubble
on some other world."
"Neither
did I. Neither did any of us, Carol." "But we're here, aren't
we?"
He
nodded. After a moment, he said, "What did you do, on Earth?"
"Do?
Oh—I was a stenographer. Typist, mostiy. For a construction firm in Oakland. I
guess I was just waiting around to get married, when the time came. Well, I
guess the time did come—sort of."
Dawes
was disappointed. He had never asked her before— he had never dared to speak
much with her on the ship-but he had privately hoped she had been an actress, a
writer, perhaps a singer. Someone with a talent, someone he could be proud of,
someone who would stand out from all the other women. He decided he would have
to be content with her slim prettiness, and let all else go. She was, it
seemed, just an ordinary girl, shyly innocent.
"I
was going to college," he said. "Pre-med. Ohio State. Well, that's all finished, too. We have to start all over, here on Osiris."
He laughed—a nervous, britde laugh. The door
of the bubble-house was still open; he shut it, looking outside first. The last
rays of Vega had long since faded from the sky. Night had come. Dawes admitted
to himself that he felt afraid of what night would bring. Alone in this chilly
plastic bubble with this frightened girl, free in the eyes of the universe to
do anything with her he cared to, if she would let him—
The conversation refused to become
self-sustaining. It kept running out of fuel; three or four times Dawes forced
himself to start a new topic, but after ten minutes he let the interchange
sputter to a total halt. They were silent a while, watching each other.
"It's
like a blind date," Carol said quiedy, when a few moments had passed.
"You and me, put together like this. A blind date that's for keeps."
"Why
did you say yes when I picked you?"
"What
else could I do? I didn't want any of the others, the older men. You looked
like somebody I could talk to, somebody I'd be happy with. Even if you are a
little younger than me. It's better than going with one of those older ones."
"I hope we're happy
together, Carol."
"I hope so, too.
But—Mike, I'm afraid—"
There
were tears in the edges of her eyes. Dawes realized that she was rapidly losing
her nerve and might well go off into wild hysterics any moment. That wasn't the
way he oared to spend his wedding night. And he wouldn't know how to handle her
if she burst in tears.
He
said as firmly as he could, "We're going to have to make the most of
things, Carol. You know what I mean. It's going to be this way, now that our number came up. You and me, together on Osiris,
and no turning back. Not ever."
She
nodded. And then, after a frozen moment of silence, he found himself moving
toward her, putting his arms round her thin shoulders, kissing her. It was a
tender, tremulous sort of kiss, a tentative contact of dry lips, and it had
hardly begun when it was interrupted suddenly by a harsh yeil coming from the
general direction of Noonan's bubble at the left.
He pulled back from her. "Did you hear
something—a shout?"
"It sounded like it was Noonan. Do you
think he's having trouble with Cherry?" "I don't know. But-"
The
shouts came again. And this time the words were unmistakable. Noonan was
bellowing, "Heyi
DawesI Dawes! Helpr
"Let's go see what's
happening," Dawes suggested.
He
stepped outside the bubble, into solid moonless blackness. He blinked, trying
to see.
After
a moment his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he saw what was taking place.
Noonan
and Cherry were xiutside their dome. They were surrounded by dark shapes, black
forms against the blackness. Noonan was flailing at the shapes and shouting.
"Get away from me!" the big man
cried. "Hey, Dawes! Run! Get help!"
Dawes froze, not knowing which way to turn.
He heard Carol catch her breath sharply. His eyes, growing more accustomed to
the dark, picked out the scene clearly now.
Six
or seven dark stubby figures—unhuman figures—clustered around the struggling
forms of Noonan and Cherry Thomas. Dawes saw hunched, neckless heads, thick
shoulders, corded arms. He was too sick to run. He stood where he was,
listening to Noonan's cursing, Cherry's fear-sharpened voice, and the
occasional croaking grunt of a smitten attacker.
Then
he felt something cold and hairy touch him, and he heard Carol scream.
Other
colonists were coming. Dawes fought, fought for the first time since forgotten
childhood. He fought with arms and legs, whirled and butted with his shoulders,
kicked out at chunky, heavily furred figures he could only partially see. His
nails clawed into a musky-smelling hide. He squirmed, wriggled, kicked again.
And then he could fight no more. He was held tight, solidly clamped by thick
alien arms.
"Mike!" Carol
whimpered.
He
felt a pang of inadequacy. "I can't do anything, Carol. Not a ithing.
They've got me, too."
"It's
the aliens," came Noonan's angry voice. "The ones Matthews saw.
Hostile aliens." His booming cry seemed to carry all over the colony
ground. "Aliens!"
Dawes
felt himself being hoisted from the ground. Two powerful hands gripped his
ankles, two his shoulders. He tried once again to resist, but it was like
trying to break loose from the grip of a hydraulic press.
He swayed. He realized he was moving.
Dark
shapes, and darker jungle. He was being carried toward the forest. He could see
nothing, neither Carol nor Noonan nor Cherry.
After
a while, he stopped trying to break free. The aliens were handling him gently
enough. He simply could not move, but they were carrying him along at a steady
pace. Too bad there was no moon, he thought. He could make out the shadowy
shapes of trees bending above him, but all else was mdistinct. He heard
night-birds crowing harshly, mocking him from the treetops. Fear enshrouded
him; he was too frightened even to be afraid, any more. Carried along in the
soft alien grip, he offered himself up to fate, knowing he had no alternative.
The
journey went on for more than an hour. Perhaps it was two hours; it might just
as well have been two months. Dawes lost all sense of the passage of time. The
forest was surprisingly thick for such a cold continent. Dangling vines brushed
his face, one of them leaving a nauseous trail of slime. His hands were in
alien control; he could not even wipe his face. After a while the trail of
slime, running down the left side of his face from eyebrow to the corner of his
mouth, began to burn—whether for imaginary reasons or because of some
chemically corrosive effect, Dawes could not tell. He twisted his head around
and managed to rub some of the slime off on the shoulder of his shirt. But an
inch or two remained, just to the left of his eye, tormenting him by its
inaccessibility. He wondered if it would leave some sort of mark, perhaps a
white scar or a puckering of the skin.
At
last the trek through the forest came to its end. The aliens broke from the
thicket and Dawes could see the bald, bare face's of jutting cliffs, the
upthrust fangs of black rock that had looked so forbiddingly Gothic when he had
first viewed them from the Up of the Gegenschein's hatch.
He
began to feel the ascent. Going up the side of the mountain was a terrifying
experience—the most terrifying since the actual kidnapping.
The
aUens, his night-sharpened eyes perceived, had thick bluish pads on their palms
and on the soles of their blunt feet. Suction pads.
The aliens gripped him firmly, at shoulders
and feet, and started to ascend the naked face of the cliff. Dawes swung
dizzyingly back and forth as they rose. They were climbing the unvegetated rock
as if it were a ladder, and with each new upward thrust he canted out over the
emptiness, wisely refusing to look down.
Then the upwardness ended, just when Dawes
thought his mind would snap from the constant danger of the climb, and the
aliens proceeded inward. Into a cave of some sort, that appeared to be hewn out
of face of the rock cliff.
Dawes'
fertile imagination worked overtime. He pictured strange alien sacrificial
rites taking place in this Haggardesque cave. Or vampire bats lurking in the
darkness ahead, grateful for the sacrifice being brought to them.
But
none of the dire perils he conceived came immediately to pass. The aliens
simply left him in the cave. They put him down with surprising gentleness,
leaving him to lie in cold, moist sand, turned their backs on him, walked away.
In the utter darkness he could see nothing at all.
He
sensed other aliens moving about; he thought he could tell them by their
ape-like shuffle. He wondered if the whole colony was to be carried off and
deposited here in this cave. The survey team said the planet was uninhabited, he thought reproachfully. But Dave Matthews was right after all.
He
thought about the interrupted kiss. Then, about the interrupted wedding-night.
Then, lastly, about the interrupted colony.
It
had been such a brave start; the rearing of the stockade, the coupling off, the
bubble-houses. Eveiything had been going so well for the infant colony. But
trouble had taken less than a day to descend on them.
He
sat quietly in the darkness. The sound of sobbing was coming from a point
somewhere to his right. As background noise he could hear the gentle murmuring
sound of flowing water, as if there were a stream bubbling inside the borders
of the cave.
"Who's there?" he
asked. "Who are you?"
"It's Carol. Is that
you, Mike?"
Some
of his fear ebbed away. At least, he thought, he was not alone!
"Yes. Where are you,
Carol?"
"Sitting
in sand, someplace. I can't see. What's going to happen to us?"
"I
don't know," Dawes said. "Don't move. Stay right where you are and
111 try to find you. Damn this darkness, anyway!"
He
looked around, trying to gauge the direction from which Carol's voice had come.
But he knew that no vector would be accurate in here. The walls of the caves
would have a distorting effect.
A
voice he recognized as Noonan's broke in, saying, "Dawes, is that
you?"
It
came from someplace deeper in the cave, behind him, highlighted by resonating
echoes. "Yes," Dawes said loudly. "And Carol's here, too. Anyone
else?"
"I am," said
Cherry Thomas.
Her
declaration echoed around the cavern. No other voices entered in. Staring
unseeingly ahead of him, Dawes waited a moment, then said flatly when the
echoes died, "I guess it's just the four of us, then, up here in this
cave. What the hell do they want with us?"
Nobody answered.
Outside
the cavern mouth, somewhere. to his right, the endless wind whipped around the
mountains, wlustling, moaning. Dawes shivered. In the darkness he could just
barely' see his own hand held before his face—and even then he could not really
be sure whether or not it was imagination, not actual sight, that had put the
image of the hand there. He had never experienced a darkness of such intensity
before.
And he saw another darkness more clearly
now—the darkness of a life that yanked a person out of his rightful place and
threw him onto a strange world, and then when he had begun to carve some
meaning and familiarity into the strangeness yanked him out again and tossed
him in a windswept cave. He felt very alone, very young, more than a little
frightened, just a little sick.
He started to crawl across the cold wet sands
that formed the floor of the cave. Evidently the brook he heard ran not too deep under the sand, close enough to the
surface to impart a chill, and came bubbling out a few hundred yards deeper in
the cave.
No
one spoke. There was steady sobbing, but he had little hint of a direction. He
had no idea even of how large the cave was.
"Carol! Carol!"
he called out.
On
hands and knees he groped in the blackness. After minutes of uncertain
scurrying, he felt a warm hand graze his, startling him a little. The hand
found his wrist and tightened comfortingly.
Blindly
he reached out. Arms gathered him in. He almost felt like sobbing, out of
gratitude, out of shared terror.
He
clung wordlessly to her in the darkness, gripping tight as if the girl were the
one real thing in a universe of cobwebbed nightmares. "Thank God," he
murmured. Then he relaxed, and after a while he slept.
XH
The
coming 'of daylight revealed
Carol to him. She was lying near him, a pathetic little bundle sprawled on the
sand. She was still asleep, her knees drawn up into her body, her hands tucked
under one cheek.
And,
off to one side, he saw that Cherry also slept—her clothes disheveled, her
bright blonde hair streaming every which way.
His
body ached; every muscle throbbed, his bones were chilled by the damp and cold,
and he felt a general lassitude, the weariness of a body not yet accustomed to
the hard mattress that was the floor of the cave.
Noonan was awake already. Dawes saw him far
back in the cavern, over to the left on the side away from Carol. He was
sitting up, arms clasped in front of him across his knees, looking amusedly at
Dawes. With one easy gesture Noonan pushed himself to his feet and ambled down
the cavern toward Dawes, who stood waiting.
"These
women will sleep through anything," Noonan chuckled. His eyes narrowed as
he saw Dawes more closely. "Christ, you look awful. Green in the
face."
"I'm—pretty tired
out."
"You getting
sick?"
Dawes shook his head.
"I Just feel washed out."
"You look sicker than
just being washed out."
"How
am I supposed to feel?" Dawes demanded. "Who knows where the hell we
are? What are these aliens planning to do to us? We may be stew by lunchtime,
Noonan," Dawes' voice sounded thin and high in his ears.
"I doubt it,"
Noonan said casually. "But let's take a look."
Together
they strolled forward to the Hp of the cavem. Dawes gasped.
They
were at least a hundred feet above the flat, dull-brown surface of Osiris. The
cave was inset in an almost vertical rise of cliff. Above and below them were
flat walls of black stone, gleaming faindy in the morning sun. And down b'elow,
on the distant ground, a few of the aliens moved in aimless patterns as if
standing guard.
Dawes
pointed out past the thickly forested area. "Look there. That must be the
colony, in that clearing all the way out there!"
Noonan nodded. "A good ten miles or so.
And we can see it easily. This is the damnedest flat world I ever saw, except
for these cliffs." He gestured downward, at the aliens. "Nasty bunch
down there."
Dawes
looked out and down. The aliens, at this distance, appeared to be nothing but
yellow-brown splotches against the deeper brown of the soil. They were heavily
furred, he saw, neckless, thick-bodied. He thought he could make out the
bluish-purpleness of the suction-pads on the palms of their broad hands.
Dawes
stepped back from the rim of the cave-mouth, remarking with a levity he hardly
felt, "It's a long drop."
He
glanced at the bigger man, who grinned and said, "Damned right it is. I'd
say we were stuck here a while. We'll just have to make the most of it."
Dawes
nodded bleakly and turned away, to survey the interior of the cave.
The
cavern was long and deep, deeper than it was wide; it slanted back downward,
vanishing into a wall of rock at the rear beyond the penetrating range of the
sunlight. Far to the back of the cave the little stream gushed forth out of the
live rock, coursed along the cave floor for a space, and dropped below the
surface again, puddling up into a small fast-flowing narrow lake. The morning
air was cold and brisk; the wind wailed past the open mouth of the cavern in
relentless pursuit of itself.
They
were a hundred fifty feet above ground, in a cold little alcove in the side of
a steep cliff. They had fresh water. They could survive here indefinitely, if—
Hunger
gnawed at Dawes' middle. He said to Noonan, "Suppose we're left here to
starve to death? What if they don't bring us food?"
"We'll
eat each other," Noonan said amiably. "Women and children
first." He yawned, showing sharp, strong white teeth, and Dawes
half-thought he might be serious. There was never any telling what idea Noonan
might put forth as a serious suggestion.
Yet
he was glad Noonan was here. The older man radiated strength and competence and
courage, all of them attributes that Dawes knew he himself conspicuously
lacked. Noonan was an adventurer. He had been a volunteer. That took a kind of
courage Dawes could hardly begin to understand, and he respected Noonan for
it.
"Let's go wake up the womenfolk,"
Noonan suggested.
"We might as well," Dawes agreed.
He headed to the back of
the cavern, where Carol slept.
Looking
back, he saw Noonan stooping over Cherry, shaking her urgently from side to
side.
Carol
still lay curled up in a ball-like position. She seemed so soundly asleep mat
Dawes regretted having to wake her. He knelt by her side, Ustening for a moment
to the untroubled rhythm of her breathing, and wondered how she could be so
calmly asleep in a place like this.
He
put his hand lightiy to her shoulder. "Carol. Wake up, Carol."
She
stirred, but her eyes remained shut—as if she did not want to wake, Dawes
thought; as if she preferred the security of her dream. He shook her more
energetically, and she began to awaken.
"Carol? Are you
up?"
"What—oh—Mama, yes—I
must have overslept—"
Her eyes opened and she sat
up. For an instant she
stared
at Dawes, at the cave, with blank incomprehension.
Then
her dream of home faded and reality returned.
"Oh—I was dreaming. I slept so soundly
all night. I
thought
you were going to come to me, but you didn't, did
you?
You-"
"Come,"
he said quiedy. "Let's go down to the others. It's morning."
Cherry
had awakened by this time; she stood stretching, knuckling her eyes, adjusting
her clothing. Noonan, nearby, stood with arms folded. Dawes and Carol went
toward them, and Cherry nodded at Carol, smiled at Dawes. For a long moment the
four of them stood apart and looked at each other. Just looked. And Dawes saw
suddenly that life in the cave was going to be complicated.
"We're
not going to have much privacy in here," Noonan said at last, breaking a
silence so taut it creaked.
"You can say that
again," Cherry offered.
"I
won't. But some of us are going to have to change their ideas a little. And I
don't know how long we're going to be stuck up here, either—but I'd guess we
don't get out until someone gets us
out."
"You don't figure there's any way we can
get out ourselves?" Dawes asked.
Noonan
hunched his shoulders into a somber shrug. "I don't have any snap ideas.
It's a long way down, that's all."
"Those
aliens," Carol said in a hesitant voice. "They're down there just watching us?"
Noonan
nodded. "There's a bunch of them outside, in the valley at the foot of the
cliff. We're penned up here, and they can come get us any time they want. But
we can't get out."
"And
I don't suppose the colony is going to come rescue us," Cherry Thomas
said. "They won't give much of a damn about us. Chalk us off as lost, I
guess. They'll be too busy defending their stockade."
"There
isn't any defense," Carol said. "If they can walk up the side of a
cliff, they can climb over a twenty foot fence, can't they?"
Dawes
said, "The colonists won't rescue us. They can't. They don't even know where we are. If there still is a colony, that, is."
Noonan
shook his head in agreement. "That's a point. The aliens may have
everybody cooped up, four to a cave. Or they may have just snatched the four of
us. There's no way of telling."
"Well,
we're stuck here," Cherry said. "But what are we going to do about
food?"
Noonan
shrugged. "We can't eat sand. Maybe the aliens will be nice about it and
bring us something we can eat. Or maybe they won't."
"Suppose they
don't?" Carol asked.
"Then
there are three things we can do. We can sit around in here and wait to starve
to death, or we can take turns eating each other, or we can simply jump out the
front of the cave." Noonan laughed cavernously. 'I'd recommend the last
idea. It makes for a quicker death, that way."
That put a finish to conversation for a
while. The four prisoners separated; Noonan stretched out to sleep, Cherry
headed to the back of the cave to try the drinking-water, and Carol let herself
sink down crosslegged to stare hopelessly at the front of the cave.
The
morning slipped by. It was getting close to noon, Dawes figured, and he was
awfully hungry. The wind had not let up its furious keening, and the sun was
high overhead. He felt too dismal to say anything to anyone.
After
a while he walked to the hp of the cavern and peered down the vertiginous
height. He was stunned to see alien faces peering upward at him. There were
about twenty of the aliens halfway up the side of the cliff, making no attempt
to move closer, looking upward at him. Their blunt heads were almost entirely
covered with short bristly yellow-brown fur, from which dark blue eyes,
piercingly intense, stared out.
Dawes
turned away. Suddenly, he heard a thump behind him.
Surprised, he whirled and caught a glimpse of
the purple suction-pad of an alien as it flashed and disappeared. A bundle lay
at the mouth of the cave. Dawes ran to the edge of the cave and looked out. An
alien was scampering down the side of the cliff to rejoin his fellows below.
Dawes
returned to the bundle. It was a package about the size of a man, wrapped in a
reddish-yellow animal hide that was shaggy and rank. Frowning, Dawes undid the
coarse twine that held the uncured hide together and lay back the wrapping.
His eyes widened. Rising, he cupped one hand
to his mouth and called out to the others.
"Hey, food! Come here, all of youl The aliens brought us food!"
As
Noon an and Cherry and Carol came crowding around to see, Dawes spread out the
provisions. The largest item in the bundle was a- freshly-killed animal, small,
foreshortened, vaguely pig-like, with a hairless black skin. A stiff little
tail about six inches long thrust out sharply at them. There was a deep gash in
the animal's throat, but otherwise it was whole, from its tail to its flattened
snout and glassy yellow buttons of eyes. Strapped to the beast by a crude
length of twine was a short, sharp knife made of some shiny gray material very
much like obsidian.
The
bundle also included several clusters of milk-white fruits the size of large
grapes, and some oblong blue gourd-like vegetables with coarse, knobby skins.
Dawes' mouth watered.
"So
it looks like they intend to feed us," Noonan said. "That may be
good, or maybe it isn't. I hope they're not fattening us for a sacrifice."
"We'll
find that out soon enough," said Dawes. "Well know whenever we get
fed again. If they don't throw us any more for a week, we can figure that the
fattening idea is wrong."
"How did the bundle
get here?" Cherry asked.
"An
alien climbed up the side of the cliff and tossed it in the entrance,"
Dawes said. "Then he beat it. He looked like a big brown spider skittering
down the rock wall."
Using
the blade, Noonan sliced into the animal, while Dawes and the women watched.
Dawes was fascinated with Noonan's surgical precision. The roughly flaked stone
knife was razor sharp, and the big man had a ready way with the beast; he
carved with the skill of a professional butcher. He laid the animal open
speedily, pulling back flaps of its dark red underbelly skin, and scooped out
the warm entrails. He dumped them to one side; they were slimy, oozing with
blood.
"At
least," Noonan said, "the alien blood is the right color." He
efficiently carved chunks of meat from the small creature. "Maybe this
meat is poison and maybe it isn't, but at least the blood's right."
Carol
shuddered. "I've never eaten raw meat. Isn't there some way we can make a
fire?"
Noonan
paused to glance up at her. "No, there isn't," he said emphatically,
"I know you didn't want to come on this trip, girlie. But you're here,
now. You'd better be ready to eat plenty of raw meat—and worse things."
XIH
They
ate, and it was a
strange, silent, almost shamefaced meal. The veneer of civilization that still
clung to all of them, even Noonan, dampened their spirits as they ate the
bloody meat.
Dawes
was voraciously hungry, and it wasn't as hard for him to overcome his
conditioning against eating raw meat as he thought it would be. Still,
something about the sticky blood that ran between his fingers, pasting them
together, made him queasy. And he could see that Carol had to make a visible
effort to choke the meat down. Noonan ate without inhibitions. Cherry put away her
share with a certain reserve, but with no outward show of revulsion. The meat
had an odd, pungent taste about it, even raw, that made it more appealing than
it might otherwise have been.
There
were ten of the blue gourds. After the meat course, Noonan doled out one gourd
to each of them and put the remaining six aside. "In case we don't get fed
again too soon," he explained. "These things will keep. The meat
won't."
The
gourds tasted sour, strongly acidified; they had a stringy, unpleasant texture,
and needed plenty of chewing. But they were nourishing, and filled up the
stomach well. Dawes finished his gourd quickly and turned his attention to the
white grapes. These were doughy in consistency, dry, and not very good.
When
everyone was through eating, Noonan gathered together the remnants of the
meal, the bones of the small animal arid the shells of the gourds, and hurled
them from the cavemouth. After a distinct pause came the thudding sounds of
landing.'
"Why'd you do
that?" Dawes asked.
"To show them that we
appreciated the stuff. There's no better way than to toss back a carcass that's
been cleaned of flesh. Anyway, we can't have that junk sitting around in here.
Bad for sanitation."
Cherry
Tornas grinned uneasily. "Sanitation. Glad you brought that matter up.
This hotel don't" have such good furnishings."
"We'll
set up a couple of latrines up here near the cave-mouth," Noonan said.
"Better ventilation that way. All the comforts of home."
"What's a
latrine?" Carol asked.
"It's
a hole in the ground, dearie." Noonan's voice dripped concentrated H2S04.
"Just a hole in the ground, that's all. You use it. We can have one for
menfolk, one for womenfolk, if you like."
"Oh. I see,"
Carol said in a small, unhappy voice.
Cherry
Thomas giggled in her cold, tmkhng way. Noonan rumbled with laughter. Dawes
felt profoundly embarrassed for Carol, but he said nothing.
Noonan
pointed upcavern, where the little stream split the cavern floor into two
roughly equal sectors.
"Look here, Dawes. Suppose you and Carol
take the far corner up there, on the right."
"And you?"
"Cherry
and 111 stay on the left, a little ways lower down
toward the cave mouth. That's for sleeping. It's the best arrangement we can
make."
"It'll
be something like living An a
goldfish bowl," Cherry said.
Dawes shrugged. "We'll have to
manage."
He
rose, walked to the front of the cave, and peered out. Seven or eight aliens
squatted on the ground a hundred and fifty feet below, looking up.
"More like a goldfish bowl than you
think," he said, turning around. "They're watching us from down
there. Just watching.
As if—as if we were really
fish in a bowl, or pets in a cage."
"Maybe
we are," Noonan said. He scooped up a handful of moist sand, compressed it
in his clenched fist until it was a hard ball, and angrily hurled it down at
the staring aliens. It broke apart in midnight and showered harmlessly down as
a spray of sand. Noonan turned away, cursing softíy.
The
day dragged along horribly. Four people in an escape-proof cell a hundred yards
long and perhaps seventy feet wide, without fire, without anything but
themselves. And they hadn't yet learned to like each other much.
Dawes
felt his nerves tightening like the tuned strings of a fiddle. There was
nothing to do in the cave but stare at each other, talk, tell jokes. And there
was so little to talk about. Noonan was monolithic; he spoke only when he
chose, never speaking just for the mere sake of making noise. Carol's
conversation seemed to be limited to expressions of faint hopes and fears;
Cherry's, to jokes and reminiscenses of show business.
Dawes
found little to say himself, and spent the hours staring broodingly at his
muddy feet. There was no telling how long they would have to stay here, but he
saw already that however long it would be, it was going to be hellish.
Cherry
had launched into an interminable monologue about her life and good times. It
went on for nearly half an hour, as she told the urdistening trio of her happy
days under the management of Dan Cirillo, a saint of a man if Cherry's account
had any truth to it. She was working up slowly to the great tragedy in her
life, when Dan had been selected, leaving her rudderless. But it was taking her
a long time to get to that point.
"So
I opened at the Lido on the 24th," she said. "Dan got me a great contract—three
thousand a week, all the extras I could think of. Ninety-piece orchestra plus
synthesizer accompaniment. And me in an evening gown that cost ten grand. I
wish I had that evening gown now. I wish I was back there in Nevada. I wish I
was anywhere, anywhere but in this lousy cave."
The
monologue came to a temporary halt. In the silence Carol said, in a dead, flat
voice, "We aren't going to get out. I know we aren't. Not ever. We're just
going to stay here
and
rot. There are times I feel like just jumping out and—" >
"Carol!" Dawes burst out.
The
girl looked up at him without understanding. Her eyes were glazed with fatigue
and fear.
After a shocked little pause Cherry said,
"Well, the kid's got a point there. We're stuck in here for good. If I'd
known what was good for me, I would have gone with Dan back in '14, and we'd be
together somewhere having kids, instead of me being stuck here in this lousy
cave where we can't even—"
"That's enough, Cherry," Noonan
interrupted. "Stop moaning about what you didn't do in '14. What's past
is past." "So well rot away here and—"
"That's enough, Cherry!" Noonan snapped to his feet out of a
crosslegged position without using his hands. "I've got an idea," he
said. "Maybe it isn't worth much, but at least I can try it."
He
began to strip off his shirt, kicking off his shoes at the same time.
"What are you going to
do?" Dawes asked.
Noonan
unsnapped his trousers. "Take a look at that underground stream up back.
I'm going to get in there and wander around a little. Maybe the stream comes
out somewhere. Maybe we can all get out the other side."
He
picked up his clothes, stuffed them under his arm, and, wearing only briefs,
walked upcavern to the place where the stream broke the surface of the cavern
floor. Looking back he called, "Come on up here with me, Dawes. If you
hear me yell, come on in after me."
Dawes
joined him. Noonan tossed down the bundle of his clothes, and entered the
water. It swirled knee-deep as he waded farther upcavern, then abruptly grew
deeper.
As
it approached die height of his chest, Dawes said uneasily, "It's
dangerous to try this, Noonan. You may get trapped underneath, somewhere. I
won't be able to hear you if you yell."
Noonan turned to glance back. His lips were
blue, and despite himself he was shivering, but he smiled. "So? What of
it? At least I tried."
He
turned again and advanced toward the point at which the stream dipped below
ground level again and swept back into the mountain. Dawes heard Noonan suck
breath in gaspingly, and then Noonan went under. Tensely Dawes began to count
off the seconds.
A thousand
one, a thousand two, a thousand
three, a
thousand four . . .
A thousand six, a thousand seven . . .
... a thousand ten . . .
"Where
did he go?" Dawes heard Cherry ask. He turned and saw both women standing
behind him. "He went under," Dawes said simply. Thousand fifteen . . . thousand sixteen . . .
thousand seventeen . . .
. . . thousand twenty . . . . . . thousand
twenty-five . . .
"He's
been gone half a minute," Dawes said a few seconds later. "He ought
to be up soon."
"Suppose he doesn't
come up?" Carol asked.
Dawes
did not answer. But he kicked off his shoes, knowing he'd be expected to go in
after Noonan and try to find him. He started to shiver a litde, and his hands
went tentatively to his belt.
. .
. thousand thirty-six. How
long could a man stay under water? Even a man like Noonan?
"You
oughta go in and look for him," Cherry said. "He may be
drowning."
"Yeah. I know."
. . . thousand forty . . .
The
counting mechanism in his mind was functioning automatically now, ticking away
the seconds. Thousand
forty-two. With
a cold hand Dawes started to strip off his trousers, not worrying about modesty
in the face of the cold stream that awaited him.
Suddenly Noonan broke surface, head
first—leaping up high above the water, gasping loudly for breath, plunging back
down like a sounding whale.
Choking,
retching, he came up again, battled the swift current for an instant or two,
and managed to pull himself to the edge of the water. Dawes waded in a couple
of feet, grabbed his arm, and tugged him up on the sand.
Noonan
was blue all over; goosebumps of enormous size covered him. He lay there,
sprawled out with his face down in the sand, drawing in breath with great
hoarse sobbing sighs. Finally he looked up.
"Cold," he said. "Cold!"
"You find anything?''
Dawes asked.
Weakly
Noonan shook his head. "No. Not a damned thing. I followed the stream as
far as I could. Nothing. Came back and couldn't find
the outlet. Thought I'd—thought I'd drown. Then I broke through."
He
shivered convulsively. Dawes had never seen a man look so cold and completely
exhausted before. Noonan continued to sob for breath.
"Hell
freeze to death," Carol said anxiously. "He's all wet and the sand's
sticking to him. We ought to warm him up somehow."
Dawes felt irritated by her show of sympathy.
Noonan's wild swim, he thought, had been nothing but a 'grandstand play;
showboating for the benefit of the women, and nothing more.
"Hell warm up by himself," Dawes
grunted.
Cherry
glared at him. "The hell he will. You leave him like that, he'll catch
pneumonia or something. But I'll take care of him."
Dawes looked at her,
startled.
Cherry
lay down in the sand next to the still gasping Noonan. She put her arms around
him.
"You two go away," she said without
looking up. "Ill keep my husband warm."
Dawes and Carol walked toward the cavemouth
without looking back. He was angry and depressed. Noonan's show of heroism had
made its effect. And what had Noonan hoped to gain? To find an underwater
passageway through the mountain and out the other side? That was clearly impossible.
Noonan had just wanted to flex his muscles, to get some exercise, and, almost
incidentally, to prove unnecessarily that he was a real man, not a skinny
imitation of one.
And
Carol had been impressed. Dawes had seen it in her eyes, as she took in the
sight of the exhausted Noonan sprawled heroically in the sand. Dawes was more
than ever conscious of his callowness now.
Later,
as the big sun dipped toward night, Noonan recovered from his exertions,
dressed, and he and Cherry joined Dawes and Carol at the cavemouth. The four of
them sat at the cavemouth, together and not together. Dawes sensed conflict
growing among them. Noonan still looked a little the worse for his swim. Dawes
sat with his arm around Carol, and she made no objection, possibly because of
the warmth his nearness provided.
No
more food had come that day. The aliens obviously planned to give them just one
meal a day—if that.
"We
need a hostage," Noonan said, talking more to himself than to any of the
others. "It's the only way to get anywhere. Tomorrow we hang around the
cavemouth until they bring the food—if they
bring the food. When the alien shows up, we grab him."
"What good is that
going to do?" Dawes wanted to know.
"I
don't know," Noonan said. "But at least it's something, dammit! A sign that we're doing something to
get out. You want to sit on your can in here forever, kid?"
"We
probably will," said Cherry. "Like goddam pets. Birds in a gilded
cave. Why couldn't those apes have picked someone else? Why us?"
Night
was falling. Outside, in the valley, a red alien bonfire flickered.
"They're
watching us," Dawes said. "Watching all the time. They want to see
what we'll do. They want to see how long it takes before we start fighting,
before we hate each other's guts, before we start jumping off this damned cliff
to get free."
"Shut up," Noonan snapped.
Dawes
ignored him. "I mean itl It's like a lab experiment. I had experiments
like this in psych class, in college. You take four rats, see, and you stick
them in a cage. Or you put them on a treadmill, and toss them some food when
they look bushed. That's what we are, rats on a treadmill. The experimenter
waits and watches, taking notes, looking to see how long it is until the rats
start snapping at each other, until they drop from exhaustion." "
"I told you to shut
up," Noonan rumbled threateningly.
"Who the hell are you to tell me
anything?"
Noonan
got up and clamped one heavy hand down on Dawes' shoulder. "Look, kid, we
all know life's tough in here. Don't make it any tougher. Quit whining or I'll
toss you out the cave mouth myself."
"Yeah,"
Dawes shot back at him. "You'd like to get rid of me. What a nice setup
that would be, just you and the two girls in here—"
Noonan slapped him, hard.
Dawes
took the stinging blow the wrong way, neck held rigid, and it nearly broke him
in two. After a moment, when he regained his wits, he said softly, "Sorry,
Noonan. I didn't mean to rile you."
"Okay, kid. Just sit
there and shut up."
"But
you see it, don't you? We're doing just what the aliens want! They want to see
which one of us cracks first, and how he does it! They want to see us fight.
They want to see us tear each other apart."
"They're
just primitive savages sitting round a bonfire," Noonan said derisively.
"You're making things up. Giving us all that college stuff. You're making
up things that don't exist."
"Maybe. Maybe I am," Dawes said.
There was sudden tension in the cavern. The two women were silent. Dawes looked
at Noonan, and licked away the salty dribble of blood on his lip. "I tell
you they're just waiting to see us crack up."
"Well, we won't give 'em the
satisfaction. We can hold out.
Remember
the speech they made at Bangor. We're Earthmen. The
galaxy's finest." Noonan looked toward the cavemouth. "Damned
moonless planet," he muttered. "No light out there at all. But we'll
beat them, though. I tell you that."
"Don't
kid yourself, Noonan," said Cherry, half to herself. "The crackup's
coming. It won't take long."
XIV
In
the darkness of
that second night, Dawes cradled Carol in his arms. Noonan and Cherry had
settled down for the night somewhere downcavern. In the utter darkness, there
was no knowing where.
Carol was warm, pliable, with a tense reserve
of tight-
strung nervousness. They were silent a long while, holding
each other for warmth. ~"
After
a while the girl said, "How long can we stay living like this? "The
four of us. I thought you and Noonan were going to fight today, when he told
you to shut up and slapped you."
"Noonan
can kill me with his pinky and thumb. It wouldn't have been much of a fight.
But I was asking for it. I started to crack up."
She
pressed suddenly hard against him. He wished he could see her face. He 'would
have liked to know whether she looked sympathetic or merely scornful, pitying.
In
three days, Dawes was beginning to think that cave life might almost become
bearable. It was possible for human beings to adapt to almost any kind of
situation, he told himself. Even living in a cold, windy cave on an alien
planet.
Food came regularly, about noon each day—the
same assortment each time: a newly-killed beast, white grapes, gourds. Noonan's
plan of catching an alien and holding him as a hostage proved about as
practicable as flying out of of the cave, or walking insectlike down the sheer
face of the cliff. Each day the alien messenger would fling the food package
into the cave and vanish before the watching men could move. They kept guard
for two days, but without even coming close to success. The alien would climb
the cliff, hurl the bundle in, and scamper away again. After two days Noonan
and Dawes completely abandoned the idea of being able to catch one.
But,
Dawes decided, you could get used to anything. You could get used to slimy raw
meat dripping with blood, to grapes that weren't grapes, to a latrine dug in
the sand and to living without soap or depilator or any of the other pretty
things of civilization. There were no mirrors—the stream flowed too fast, and
the back of the cave was too dark for it to serve—and without mirrors a lot can
be overlooked. A tacit understanding not to discuss anyone else's appearance
sprang up; Dawes was happy about it. He saw the stubble sprouting on Noonan's
face and the blotches on Cherry's, and knew that he probably looked equally
unkempt.
When
you live in a goldfish bowl, Dawes thought, you don't waggle fingers at the
other goldfish and loudly cry holier-than-thou. There was no percentage in it.
Dawes
was able to persuade himself that it was going to be all right, that the four
of them would be able to work out a living partem involving minimum friction,
that would endure for however longer their imprisonment continued. But-he soon
found out how wrong he was.
The aliens were keeping constant watch. They
gave no hint of their motives, but milled about ceaselessly in the valley, and
occasionally came skittering past the cave mouth for a quick peek in.
And, though the four humans tried to prevent
it from happening, tension mounted in the cave. It had to. Civilization didn't
wash off as easily as all that.
It began with little things—little trivial
worm like bickerings between them. One time, Noonan objected when Dawes took
the largest share of that day's meat for himself, after Noonan had carved the
still warm carcass into four rough chunks that were not quite equal.
"Why
don't you wait till I hand the stuff out?" Noonan asked.
"Because I'm
hungry."
"I wanted that piece
for myself."
"Why should you get
it?"
"I
carved," Noonan said. "And I'm the biggest. I need the most
food."
They snarled at each other for a second more;
then Cherry suggested that they trim a little of the meat from the big piece
and add it to one of the other portions, and Dawes nodded. The tension died
away. But the dispute was part of the pattern.
And
there was the time when Cherry was halfway through her account of the perils of
show business for the third time; having reached the point in her autobiography
that dealt with Dan's selection, and being unwilling to talk in any great
detail about the segment of her life that had followed that event, Cherry had
backtracked and was reciting her early struggles once again.
Carol"
waited patiently until Cherry launched into a by-now-familiar graphic
description of how a lecherous old nightclub owner had forced her to submit to
a casting-couch routine before he would give her a contract. "So he backed
me into a comer and I could see him starting to drool over me," Cherry said,
"and I told him, "Look here, Mr. Fletcher, if you think you're going
to—' "
Suddenly
Carol burst out, with vehemence that was unusual for her, "How often are
you going to tell that filthy story? I'm sick and tired of it!"
"You
don't like my stories, go somewhere. All we got to do in this place is talk. So
I'm talking. It makes me happy. I know I'm still alive when I talk."
"You don't have to keep talking the same
tiling all the time!"
"What
else am I gonna talk about? These things happened to
me! They are me! Just because you're jealous, because you
spent your whole silly little life doing what other people told you to do and
never getting any enjoyment out of your stupid life—"
"You can't talk about
me like that!" Carol screeched.
They
yelled back and forth at each other for a minute or two more, and next thing
the argument exploded into a fight, the two women springing at each other and
rolling over and over in a tangle of arms and legs, pulling hair, screaming,
shouting. Noonan and Dawes had been at the other end of the cave; they came on
the run and dragged them apart. Carol had been on top, pounding Cherry's head
against the sand, when they were pulled apart.
The
winds wailed. Cherry and Carol glowered at each other; then, as Noonan shoved
Cherry toward the other girl, they reluctantly shook hands. Dawes looked out
into the valley. The aliens outside had increased in number; there were twenty
or thirty of them now. They seemed to be enjoying the spectacle in the cave.
The
next incident came on the fourth day, when Dawes and Carol were bathing. Carol
was at the water's edge, cupping up handfuls and rubbing her face and body to
break the shock of climbing in. A sort of convention had sprung up in the
cave—when one couple bathed, the other busied themselves elsewhere, to provide
at least the impression of privacy. But as he prepared to undress and join
Carol in the water, Dawes glanced around and saw Noonan leaning against the
cave wall not far from the mouth, watching them.
For a surprised second or two, Dawes had no
idea of what to say. The convention in the cave had always been a completely
unspoken one, and he knew Noonan cared very litde about his own privacy or
anybody else's. But still, thought Dawes, in angry annoyance, there was such a
thing as common decency, even here in the cave.
While he stared silently at Noonan, the big
man smiled coldly and said, "Something wrong?"
"What
are you looking at?" Dawes demanded. "You want me to tell you?"
"Just
suppose you keep your eyes where they belong!'' Dawes was angered by the big
man's casual amorality. It was just as easy for Noonan to look the other way
and avoid such frictions.
"Mike,"
Carol whispered warningly. "Don't make trouble with him. Don't start a
ruckus. Why can't you just ignore him?"
"No,"
he said. "There are some things you just don't do. He isn't going to get
away with this."
He-
became uncomfortably aware of Cherry's mocking eyes on him, and Noonan's. Carol
stood at the water's edge with her hands uncertainly shielding her body from
view. "Get into the water," he ordered the girl brusquely. "I
don't want him looking at you that way."
Silently, she obeyed him. Dawes walked
downcavern to where Noonan waited, still leaning against the wall. The older
man seemed to tower two or three feet above him, even leaning.
Dawes said sharply, "Are you trying to
make it worse in here? You didn't have to look at her that way. There was no
call for-that."
"I'll
put my eyes wherever I damned please, sonny-boy. And I'm tired of your
niceness. This isn't any private hotel we got here."
"You
don't have to go out of your way to make life tough here," Dawes returned.
"I don't want you watching Carol when we bathe, from now on, Noonan. Do
you understand that? We can at least pretend we're
civilized—even if some of us don't happen to be."
Noonan
hit him. This time, Dawes expected the blow, and was ready for it. He rolled
agilely to one side and in the same motion directed an open-handed slap at
Noonan's face.
The
big man took it like the brush of a gnat's wing, laughed, and tapped Dawes
sharply in the pit of the stomach. Dawes felt his knees start to buckle. He
caught himself, sucked in his breath.
He
swung wildly at Noonan, missed his face by a foot, and swung again. This time
Noonan opened one big hand, grabbed Dawes' flailing arm, and twisted it.
Yelling,
Dawes tried to break loose. He succeeded in clawing at Noonan's throat with his
free arm, distracting the big man's attention for a moment. Dawes ripped loose
from Noonan. He danced back a couple of feet, panting, feeling the excitement
of combat even though he knew he was yet to score a telling point in the
contest.
He
darted forward and flicked out a fist. Noonan clubbed his hand aside, stepped
forward, hit Dawes almost gentiy on the point of his right shoulder. The impact
stunned him; he felt the surge of pain ripple down his arm to his fingers.
Desperately he tried to land a blow, but once again Noonan caught his wrist.
This
time there was no breaking loose. Noonan inexorably forced him to the ground.
"I'm
gonna put my eyes wherever I please," Noonan said quietly. There was no
malice in his voice, nor anger; just a level affirmation of victory. "You
hear that, Dawes? You ain't giving any orders inside here. If I want to look at
your girl, 111 look at her, and you ain't gonna tell me I can't do it.
Understand that, DawesF'
"For
God's sake, Noonan—act like a human being," Dawes whispered harshly.
As
if in answer, Noonan tucked both of Dawes' wrists in one massive paw and
slapped him a few times with the other, until Dawes' head reeled.
Cherry
said, "That's enough, Ky. He's only a kid. You want to kill him?"
"I
want to show him he can't go telling Ky Noonan what to do!"
The
big hand ground Dawes' wrists together, while the other descended, whack-whack,
quick stxmning backhand and forehand blows across Dawes' cheeks. Finally Noonan
tired of the sport. He released Dawes, scooping him up and throwing him
sprawling back upcavern.
"You
didn't need to do that to him, Ky," Cherry said reproachfully.
"Shut
up I" Noonan snarled. "You trying to tell me what I should do,
too?"
Dawes
lay where he had fallen, not making any effort to get up. His wrists ached
painfully where Noonan's grip had pressed them together, and his cheeks were
raw and hot, partly out of shame and partly from the impact of Noonan's angry
blows. He hadn't even stood a chance in the fight. It was worse than Don
Quixote tilting off at windmills; Noonan could have killed him with two swings
of his arm.
Carol
had remained upcavern by the stream during the entire fight. Now she came over
to him. She looked down at him without speaking, without smiling, without
offering a word of sympathy. Dawes could not tell whether the grave look in her
eyes was one of pity or of contempt. After a while she walked away, back to the
stream, and began to dress.
Dawes
elbowed himself to a sitting position and massaged his wrists. Downcavern he
saw that Noonan had stretched out for a nap. Cherry was drawing sketches in the
sand. The cave was very silent.
He
walked slowly back to the stream, knelt by it, and sloshed water over his face;
the shock of the sudden coldness eased some of the pain of Noonan's slaps.
Shaking himself dry, Dawes went downcavern, past Cherry and Noonan, to stare
out of the mouth of the cave. The clearing below was packed with aliens. He
wondered if they had enjoyed the performance.
XV
After
that, there was a strange
realignment of the tense relationships between the four prisoners in the cave.
The incident of the beating was a sort of dividing-point, separating what had
been from what now was.
Dawes
suffered the most; he had acted foolishly, rashly, in deliberately inviting
Noonan to trounce him, and he had lost status in Carol's eyes. That was clear.
The only sort of respect she could have for him would be based on his intelligence—and
he hadn't acted intelligently toward Noonan. Further, Carol really wanted a man
who could take care of her, who could protect her from the tensions and rigors
of existence in a frightening world—and Dawes had not at all proved himself
that kind of person.
But
sympathy came from an unexpected quarter—from Cherry, who glared at the
invincibly self-sufficient Noonan, and offered soothing words to Dawes. Noonan
glared back at her angrily. His possessiveness was obviously beginning to
irritate Cherry. Dawes wondered when the open split between them would come.
The
swirl of conflicting emotions tightened. Both women half-loved and half-pitied
Dawes. Cherry was physically drawn to Noonan, but was repelled by his
dominating ways, his assertion of ownership. Noonan claimed Cherry as his own
property, but quite clearly he was interested in Carol as well. Around and
around it went, while the aliens gathered outside, and the hours slid toward
sundown and the moonless darkness of Osiris' night.
Dawes sat bitterly by himself, feeling that
he had fallen into total disgrace. Cherry softly sang her old night-club songs,
muffling their stridencies to avoid touching off some new dispute in the cave.
Carol did nothing. As for Noonan, he bathed, slept for a while, woke, and went
to the front of the cave, flattening himself strangely at the mouth, poking his
head out and staring down for a long time as if measuring some distance.
After
a time he came back and spoke with Cherry for a few moments. Then, moving on,
he went to Carol as she sat quietiy against the cave wall, and nudged her.
Dawes
glanced up from his brooding. Noonan was saying something to her. He strained
his ears to catch their words; but the expression on Noonan's face told him all
he really needed to know.
Cherry
crossed the cave, taking a seat at Dawes' side and putting her hand on his
wrist as he began to clench his fists.
"Don't
pay any attention to it," she murmured. "It was bound to happen
sooner or later. Don't make him have to hit you again."
"Is she going to
listen to him?"
Cherry
shrugged. "I don't know. But she may. You never can tell."
"I
hate him," Dawes said darkly."I hate both of them. If he wasn't twice
my size—"
"Well,
he is," Cherry said. "So you might as well just relax."
She
shook out her long blonde hair. It was getting stringy from lack of combing,
and it seemed to Dawes that it was darkening at the roots. It didn't surprise
him much to find that Cherry's blondeness was synthetic.
He tried to relax, to ignore the fact that
elsewhere in the cave Noonan was successfully taking Carol away from him.
After
a long silence Cherry said, "You know, Noonan thinks he knows a way out of
here."
"What?"
"Shh.
He told me about it just a while ago. He says there's a little ledge down the
side of the cliff a way. Thinks we could manage to reach it with a rope ladder
made out of our clothes. But he won't say anything about it to you because he
doesn't want to help you."
Dawes
scowled. "He's got no right to keep something like that to himself-"
"Noonan never worries about rights.
Besides, he doesn't really think his idea could work. We might be able to get
down, all right, but then the aliens would just bring us right back up
here."
Dawes
had to acknowledge the truth of that. He slumped back, the momentary spark of
hope dying. The waiting jailers below would never let them escape so openly, he
thought.
Shadows
deepened in the cave as the angle of sunlight sharpened. Four days, Dawes
thought leadenly. Four days of just Noonan and Carol and Cherry, and the
captivity might well go on forever. Forever. Was this why he had been selected
and flung out into space, to sit in a cave with three other people, guarded by
aliens for some unfathomable alien reason? He thought of all the vast and
cumbersome machinery of selection, the Computer and the local boards and the
blue letter from District Chairman Mulholland, whoever he might be, damn his politicking hide! District Chairman Mulholland,
Dawes thought, was probably some boot-licking nonentity who took a sinister
delight in packing people off to the other planets. And for what? So they could
be captured by ape-things and stuffed into a cave?
A
few more days with Noonan and Carol and Cherry and he might easily go out of
his mind. Dawes remembered a line from some play he had once seen performed at
State: Hell is other people.
Whoever
wrote that line had been right, he thought. Carol and Noonan were laughing,
there at the back of the cave. Dawes forced himself to sit still. It was
hopeless to try to interfere. If Noonan had developed a craving for Carol,
there would be no peace in the cave until Noonan had satisfied that craving,
and nothing Dawes would do could alter that. He listened numbly to their gay
laughter. Carol had never laughed like that in his arms, Dawes thought
bitterly.
He knew Cherry was laughing at him, too, inside,
laughing because he didn't have the strength to knock Noonan sprawling as lie
deserved. On the outside, Cherry was pitying him. Inside, laughing.
The
sun dropped almost out of sight; no more remained to the day but a few dim red
nickers. The eternal wind howled wildly. Dawes looked out into the gathering
night, moonless as ever.
"I
wonder how the colony's doing," he said abstractedly. "Whether
they're still there or not. And whether they ever ask themselves what happened
to us."
"You're
always thinking," Cherry said. "Asking yourself questions.
Well, the people in the colony don't have time to wonder about us—if they're
alive. They're too busy surviving."
The light went completely. In the dark, Dawes
heard Carol's laugh. It sounded strange, harsh, ugly to him. Topping it came
the deep chuckle of Noonan.
"The
light's out," Noonan said, loud enough to be heard all over the cave.
*Time to go to bed."
"Yeah," said
Dawes. "Time to go to bed."
He
hunched into himself, cradling his head on his arms, and clenched his eyes
tight. Sleep was a long time in coming, and it seemed to him he had hardly
fallen off when, the first rays of morning were steeaming through the narrow
mouth of the cave.
Morning. The fifth day.
And
the invisible threads of hatred coiled a little tighter around the four in the
cave.
Carol
was unaccountably red-eyed and sullen. She bathed alone, early. Dawes watched
her, from the distance, without getting up. She -was like a little child in so
many ways-helpless, frightened, selfish.
When
Carol was through washing, Noonan bathed, and after him Dawes made his slow way
to the rear of the cavern and plunged into the little stream, enjoying the
sharp pain of the ice-cold water against his skin.
At
noon, the food bundle was hurled into the cave right on schedule. They ate
silendy, Noonan dividing the food as usual and doing a reasonably fair job of
it. Not a word had been spoken in the cave since dawn. Dawes looked out and saw
the aliens massed below, in greater numbers than ever before. After the meal,
he settled into a corner of the cave. Cherry and Carol and Noonan each took up
positions far from each other.
Carol.
Noonan. Dawes. Cherry. Scattered over the cave like particles which innately
repelled each other. No one spoke.
It
was Cherry who split the silence finally. "How long are we supposed to
stay like this?" she asked, her voice hard. "We sit here staring like
mortal enemies at each other? Christ, what did we ever do to each other that makes us hate this way?"
"Shut up," Noonan
growled.
Carol
chuckled hysterically. "What did we do? Ill
tell you. We were bom, that's what we did to each other. We came into this
world and we were picked together and we ended up in this damned cave, making
each other miserable."
"We grate on each
other," Dawes said.
He
found himself hating Carol for having gone to Noonan, hating Cherry for her
noisy banter, hating Noonan for simply being Noonan. Flimsy reasons, all. But
powerful enough to spark the currents of hate in the cave,
"Why
can't we get along with each other?" Cherry demanded of no one
particular.
"We
don't like each other," Dawes said. "You'd almost think the aliens
picked us that way, to see what would happen when we were penned together.
You'd—"
He
stopped, suddenly, pushed himself to his feet, walked to the cavemouth, and
looked down. As always the height made him a littie dizzy, and he gripped the
side of the rock for reassurance.
"Yeah,
look at them," he said. "They sit down there as if they know
everything that's happening in this cave. As if they're drinking in all the
hatred that's rising between us. As if-"
"Stop
that crazy babble," Noonan ordered brusquely. "You hurt my
ears."
Dawes
'knelt and peered down the face of the cliff, trying to see Noonan's ridge.
Yes, there it was, a narrow, precipitous shelf of rock projecting no more than
a few inches from the cliffside. Turning, Dawes said to Noonan, "I understand
you know how to get us out of here. Why the hell haven't you spoken up about
it?"
"Who in blazes told
you that? It's not true!"
"The
ledge down there," Cherry said. "Yesterday you told me-"
Noonan
slapped her viciously. Glaring at Dawes, he said, "Okay, so there's a
ledge down there. But my idea won't work, anyway. Even if we got out, the
aliens would just grab us and put us right back in the cave. Well, won't
they?"
"Maybe not,"
Dawes said.
"Maybe
not! Maybe not!" Noonan roared with laughter. "You can bet your life
they willl You think they'll just sit down there and let us traipse past
them?"
"Maybe.
I know how to beat the aliens," Dawes said in a level voice.
Suddenly
Carol started to laugh—a high, keening, mad shriek of a laugh, repeated over
and over. It wasn't hysteria, but the nearest approach to hysteria. Moments
later Cherry was giggling, calmly, cynically.
"Keep quiet!"
Dawes shouted. "Let me talk!"
"We
don't want to hear any crazy nonsense out of you," Noonan snapped.
"Shut your mouth."
Dawes
grinned oddly and took two unhesitant steps forward. There was only one way he
could make Noonan listen to him. With careful aim he jabbed the big man sharply
in the ribs.
Noonan
was astonished by the assault. He glared at Dawes in amazement for an instant,
and rumbled into action. His fists shot out blindingly, crashing into Dawes'
stomach, pounding him under the heart. Dawes fought back grimly. He landed a
solid blow on Noonan's lip; then Noonan snarled angrily and cracked him
backward with two fast punches in the midsection.
Dawes
landed hard, feeling pain lance through his body. He gasped for breath. Noonan
stood over him, dispassionately kicked him. Each blow was a new agony..
Finally
it was over. Dawes lay crumpled on the ground, shielding his face. Noonan stood
over him, and a strange expression of guilt was. beginning to cross his
features. His lower hp was swelling.
Sitting
up, Dawes put his hands to his ribs; nothing was broken. He said hoarsely to
Noonan, "Okay. You were spoiling to kick me around again, and now you did
it. You got it all out of your system. I hope you did, anyway."
Noonan
looked completely drained of fight. He didn't speak. Dawes mopped a trickle of
blood away from his lips and went on.
"Noonan,
you're a strong man, and in some ways you're a clever man. But you couldn't
figure a way out of here, and you were damned if you'd let me have a go at it without beating me up first. Okay, I got beat up."
"Listen—" Noonan
began unsteadily.
Dawes
cut him off. Despite the pain of the beating, he felt a kind of
exhilaration. "You listen to me. We
can get out of here, if we only cooperate. All four of us.
"I
don't know what kind of things those aliens are—but they aren't as primitive as
they look. We've been writing them off as ugly ape-things, but they're a lot
subder and smarter than that. I think they grabbed us out of the colony and
stuck us up here so they could listen in on our emotions, soak them up, feed on
them. They took four of us. Four people who hardly knew one another. They threw
us here and left us alone. They knew damned well what would happen. They knew
we'd start hating each other, that we'd fight and quarrel and build walls
around ourselves. That's what they wanted us to do. It would be a sort of
circus for them—a purge, maybe. A land of entertainment. Okay. They were right.
We put on a good show for them. And IH bet they've been out there drinking up
every bit of friction and hate and fighting that's gone on in this cave since
we got here."
Dawes paused. The words were flowing
smoothly, now that he had been granted the floor, but he wanted to allow time
for his ideas to sink into the other three minds.
"Go
on," Noonan said quietly. "Finish telling us what you have to
say."
"We
don't have to hate each other, that's what I'm trying
to get across. Sure, we get on each others' nerves. Four saints in a cage like
this would drive each other batty. But we can turn the hate outward. Hate them. And the best way we can show our hate for them is by loving each other
instead of fighting. We're playing into their hands by bickering and brawling.
Let's work together and try to understand each other. I'll admit up to now I've
been as selfish as any of you. We're all equally to blame. But if we start cooperating
now—hell, well be of no more use to them than fighting cocks without any fight.
And we can build that rope ladder and they'll let us go."
No
one spoke when Dawes had finished. He let them think it over, and finally
Cherry said, "They're like parasites, then. Getting their kicks from our
hate?"
"You've
got the idea." Dawes looked at the big man. "Noonan, what do you say?
You think what I said is worth anything?''
Slowly,
Noonan began to smile despite the swollen lip. "Yeah. Maybe you've got
something. I guess we could try it."
XVI
At Dawes' suggestion they relaxed for an hour or so,
talking the "situation out quietly, before starting to build the rope
ladder. Sweating despite the chill, Dawes took charge of the
discussion,-
showing the others as tactfully as he could that there was no real reason for
discord in the cave.
Gradually
he even began to convince himself. The aliens had made Noonan stare at Carol,
had brought on all the humiliation and loss of privacy. And Noonan hadn't
really meant to take away Carol last night. He had just been acting out of
pique, out of the senseless non-motivation that their confinement provided.
Dawes
began to regard the other three as just people. He
didn't hate Noonan any more, or scatterheaded Carol, or cynical Cherry. They
were only people, Earth
people, frail and imperfect,
and they each carried around their own private unhappinesses. In the cave, four
sets of desires and weaknesses and selfishnesses had impinged, causing
conflict. But now, if each only gave ground a little, harmony could prevail.
And
the others began to understand, as Dawes made it plain for them. Slowly,
because they were not quick-thinking people, they were starting to grasp the
essential truth of their situation. And the tension and distrust and hatred was
washing out and draining away.
When
they were all smiling, Dawes gentiy steered the discussion toward the matter of
escaping.
He
said, "Noonan, you say we can get out of here if we build a rope ladder of
some land. Will you show us how to build this ladder of yours?"
"We'll
build it out of clothes," Noonan said. "Obviously. That's the only
land of fabric we have. Let's all start undressing."
He
peeled off his shirt and trousers and tied them together, leg to sleeve, with
an elaborate knot. He reinforced it with a sock.
Carol
was wearing a skirt. She unfastened it, stepped out of it, and handed it over.
Dawes donated his pants. The line was growing
quickly. At Noonan's command Dawes and Cherry roamed the cave, coUecting the
animal hides that the aliens had used to wrap the daily food bundles in. There
were four of them. Noonan slashed them into long strips with the obsidian-like
knife and added them to the line.
"Okay,"
Noonan said at last. "Maybe thisll do. Let's test it. Dawes, get yourself
on the other end of this thing and pull hard."
Dawes
took a double grip on the rope and pulled, as hard as he could, digging his
feet into the sand to keep from being dragged toward Noonan. The line held.
"Good," Noonan
grunted. "She's tight."
He anchored the end of the line to a jutting
rock near the mouth of the cave, hurled the free end out, and let it dangle.
Noonan said, "I'm going to climb down to the ledge. Carol and Cherry will
follow me. And then you, Dawes. All clear?"
Noonan
grasped the line, tugged it to make sure it was fast, and lowered himself over
the edge. Just before he disappeared below the floor level of the cave, he
grinned, and Dawes grinned back.
"Good luck,
Noonan."
"Thanks. I'll probably
need it."
Dawes
watched tensely as Noonan descended, hand under hand, swaying in the wind. He
dangled at the very end of the line, his hands grasping the rope only an inch
or two from its end, and still his feet scrabbled for purchase, his arms
flailed wildly to balance him, and then he stood solid, looking up at them and
smiling.
.,
"Okay," Noonan called. "Carol, you come down next. Keep your
feet clamped onto the rope and hold on tight."
Pale,
frightened beyond the point of feeling fear, Carol took hold of the rope. She
paused for an instant.
"Go
on." Dawes said sofdy. "It's safe. Just hold on and let yourself down
hand by hand."
The
girl grasped the rope with her small hands, wrapped her legs round it, and
started to descend. Dawes held his breath. The rope seemed tremendously long.
Was she going to make it all the way? Or would she fatigue and topple off,
still eighty feet above the ground?
She made it. She dangled in mid-air a few
feet above
Noonan; he stretched out his arms for her,
urged her to let go, and finally she did. He caught her and put her safely down
on the ledge.
Cherry
was next. She showed no outward sign of fear, and she negotiated the descent
quickly and skillfully. Dawes waited until she stood by Carol's side on the
ledge. Then, taking a last look at the cave, he grabbed hold of the rope
himself.
He
had done plenty of rope-climbing in high school, in an ultimately fruitiess
attempt to put some muscle on his skinny body. But those had been fifteen or
twenty-foot ropes. This one dangled for a hundred feet, and no protective mat waited
beneath it.
Positioning
one hand beneath the other, he let himself down, feeling the savage bite of the
wind against his skin. He knew the others were waiting for him, watching him,
maybe praying. Once, he glanced down, and saw he still had nearly half the
distance to go. His muscles were quivering and his arms felt as if they were
about to part company with their sockets. But he made it.
He
hovered above the shelf and Noonan caught him around the waist and pulled him
down to safety. The line swung out over the valley and flapped back against the
side of the cliff.
Dawes
caught his breath and looked downward from the ledge. "We're still at
least forty feet from the ground, What now?"
"I'm
going to try to yank the line loose," Noonan said. "All of you hold
on to me. If I can pull it down, we tie it on here and climb down to the
ground."
"And
if we can't pull it down?" Dawes asked.
Noonan
glared for a moment. "You still haven't lost your old habits. You ask too
many damfool questions. Come on-anchor me."
They held him, while he tugged at the line,
grunting bitterly. Muscles corded and bunched along Noonan's back and
shoulders, and tendons stood out sharply in the hollow of his elbow. The line
was tied too securely at the top, though. It would not come. Noonan pulled
harder—
The
rope snapped loose with an impact that nearly threw the four of them off the
ledge. Noonan looked at the end he held in his hands, then up at the dangling
line still fastened at the cavemouth. The rope had snapped in half.
Noonan
cursed eloquendy. "I hadn't figured on that. But it could have been worse,
I guess."
"How much rope do we
have?" Dawes asked.
"Look for
yourself."
Noonan let the line out over the side of the
ledge. It stopped short nearly fifteen feet from the ground. And, Dawes
thought, a fifteen-foot jump was an invitation for broken ankles or worse—and
they still had a trek of perhaps ten miles back to the colony.
He
looked quizzically at Noonan. The big man said, "We can still manage it.
But it's going to take teamwork. Real teamwork. Ill go down the rope. Dawes, you follow, go right on down me
and hang to my ankles. The girls will do the same, and jump when they reach
your ankles. It can't be more than a six or seven-foot drop from there."
Somehow, it worked. Noonan scrambled down the
truncated rope as far as he could go, and hung there, waiting. Dawes went
next, descending the rope until his feet touched Noonan's'shoulders, then
carefully clambering down Noonan's body until he grasped the big man's feet.
"Okay, come onl" Noonan shouted.
"We can't hang this way forever!"
Dawes
strained to hold on. His toes were about eight feet above the ground. Carol
came down the rope; he could feel every impact as she descended. Looking up, he
saw her coming down past Noonan's shoulders, then reaching his own shoulders.
Her face was white with tension. She clung for an instant to Dawes' hips, slid
down his legs, and let go. He glanced down; she had landed in a crumpled heap,
but she was getting up.
Cherry
came next. Dawes' arms ached mercilessly. He tightened his grip on Noonan's
ankles. But it was no use; he could not hold on. As Cherry's foot grazed his
shoulder, he let go and dropped to the ground. He folded up as he hit, but was
able to rise without difficulty. Cherry still dangled from Noonan.
"Go ahead," Dawes called to her.
"Let go and I'll catch you."
She
released her hold. Dawes braced himself and broke her fall, but the weight of
her dropping on him knocked him over again. A moment later, Noonan landed on
top of them.
After
some instants of confusion, they struggled to their feet and began to laugh.
Cherry was the first to start, and then Noonan and Dawes and Carol took it up,
and they laughed for nearly a minute at the ridiculous spectacle they must have
made, solemnly clambering down each other and landing in a heap.
"Damnedest
silly way to get down a mountainside I ever saw," Noonan said, still
laughing.
"Maybe
so," Dawes said. T5ut it worked, didn't it? It worked!"
They
huddled together at the base of the cliff. Above them, two lengths of rope
dangled in the wind.
Cherry
said, "And there isn't an alien in sight. Not anywhere."
Dawes
looked rapidly around, as if expecting to see the thick-bodied ape-like beings
clustered behind trees observing them. Perhaps they were. But c«rtainly they
were keeping well out of sight.
"You see?" Dawes said triumphandy.
"They aren't interested in us any more. We don't have anything to offer
them, now that we've stopped fighting with each other. They don't care what we
do now."
"I'm cold," Carol said suddenly.
"We
all are," said Cherry. "We better get a move on. Back to the colony,
before the aliens decide they don't want to let us go after all."
Dawes nodded. He pointed
toward the forest. "Standing with our backs to the cliff, the colony ought
to be straight out .that way. What do you think, Noonan?"
The
big man frowned and said, That's about right. We ought to find our way back
there through the forest without much trouble. If we start out now."
"Right.
We want to get there before nightfall," Dawes said. "We've still got
a few hours left. We'd better start out now."
They
set out, in single file—Noonan leading, followed by Carol, then Cherry and
Dawes. Even though the sun was bright in the sky, the day was cold; the
temperature was barely above fifty, Dawes estimated.
He
was thankful that they had kept their shoes, even if their stockings all had
gone to reinforce the rope. The forest floor was covered with the dried prickly
cast-off needles of the conifer trees that abounded there. The wind whipped
through the forest, but the trees served as shielding for them against the
coldest blasts.
It
had taken about two hours to go through the forest the first time, in the hands
of the aliens. By Dawes' reckoning, nightfall was not due for at least three
hours more. With luck, if they followed a true path, they would make it back to
the colony before dark. Once night fell, of course, they would simply have to
squat down and wait for morning before proceeding.
But Noonan led the way with such a confident
air that Dawes did not worry. The big man strode along with springing step,
looking back every few moments to make sure no one had fallen behind.
Dawes
realized that a few months ago this whole sequence of events would have been
inconceivable.
After
an hour of walking, they stopped; Carol was exhausted. Noonan eyed the angle
of the sun, wrinkled up his face, and announced that they had at least two and
a half hours before sunset. "Plenty of time to make it," the big man
added. "If we don't waste any time enroute."
"I'm
cold," Carol said. "Hungry. Tired. I can't keep walking like
this."
Dawes looked at her pityingly. She looked
drawn and exhausted. Carol had taken the days in the cave worse than any of
them. Noonan hardly showed a trace of his captivity; Cherry looked unkempt but
healthy, with a sleek leanness that she had not had before. Dawes ached all
over, but he felt splendid.
"Come
on," he said gently to Carol. "Were almost there. Another hour's
walk, that's alL"
Noonan
lifted her to her feet and pointed her in the right direction. They resumed
their hike.
They
were following a path, well-worn through the thick forest. Looking back, Dawes
could see the black bulk of the cliffs—and, he thought, the two strands of
rope, red and yellow and brown and green. As the sun dropped, the forest became
colder. Birds hooted in the trees; small shiny-skinned animals that looked like
lizards sprang up on rocks, chittered derisively at the group for an instant,
and went hustling off into the safety of the woods.
They
plodded on. Dawes was beginning to feel the effects of his hunger—only one meal
a day for the last five, and that not very nourishing. He longed to stop and
try to shy a rock at one of the curious little forest beasts, but he told
himself that if they ever stopped they might not get started again. He forced
himself to drag one foot in front of the other. His legs ached. His feet, bare
inside his shoes, were slowly being nibbed raw by the leather scraping his
heel. But Noonan strutted jauntily along in the lead.
They
were on their way back to the colony. Something strange and mysterious had
happened to them, but it was over, and they were on their way back. Dawes
comforted himself with that thought. In a little while, they would be seeing
other people again. Haas and Dave Matthews and Ed Sanderson and Sid Nolan and
all the others. They were really strangers to him) but at the moment Dawes thought of them as old friends, friends for
whose companionship he had longed for months and years.
They
stopped again a short time later. Again, it was Carol. She threw herself down
on the ground, sobbing, muttering litde senseless sounds.
Noonan scooped her up. Dawes hung back, even
though technically she was his wife. She would have to be carried, and he had
barely enough strength to carry himself along. Therefore, Noonan: would have to
carry her. It was as simple as that. Dawes made no protest as Noonan picked her
up and cradled her roughly in his arms.
"We're
almost there," Noonan told them. "I'll carry her the rest of the way.
You two all right?"
"I'll make it,"
Cherry said. "If I don't freeze first, that is."
"You, Dawes?"
"I'm okay."
"Let's go, then."
Step
after step after step; and every step, Dawes told himself sternly, brought him
that much closer to the colony, to food and warmth and clothing. Unless, of
course, Noonan had been leading them in the wrong direction all this time. That
might be. No, Dawes argued; the cliffs were still at their backs, and so they
had to be going in the right direction. His tired mind thought up cold
fantasies: suppose the aliens had been following them all this time,
maliciously feeding on their suffering, and planned to massacre them as they
stood within sight of the stockade? Or perhaps the stockade itself would be
empty, all of the colonists dead or captured, leaving Dawes and Carol, Noonan
and Cherry as the sole population of Osiris?
He
shook away the thoughts and kept going. Abrupdy they emerged into a clearing.
Take a look," Noonan
said exultantly.
The stockade was a hundred
yards ahead of them.
XVII
Unsheathed
gtjnsnouts greeted
them as they appeared, footsore, dirty, chilled, at the colony stockades. The
gunbarrels came snaking out of spyholes in the wall; the colonists were on
guard now against any shapes of the forest, it seemed.
"Take it easy,"
Noonan called out. "We're friends. Humans."
A
voice said distincUy behind the stockade, "Christ! Those aren't aliens!
It's—"
"They've come
back!" someone else yelled.
The
gunsnouts disappeared. The stockade gate creaked open and people came rushing
out, familiar people, friends.
Dawes recognized Sid Nolan,
Dave Matthews, Matt Zach-ary, and Lee Donaldson. There were a few others whose
names he could not at all remember.
They
dragged the four returnees within, slammed the stockade gate shut Marya
Brannick appeared with blankets, and the wanderers were quickly clad. Inquisitive
eyes goggled at the four weary ones. Questions bubbled up.
"Where were you?"
"What happened?"
"How did you get
free?"
Dawes
shook all the questioners off. "Where's Haas?" he asked. "We'd
better talk to him first."
Dave
Matthews shook his head gravely. "Haas—isn't here any more."
"Did the aliens get
him?" asked Noonan.
"No. Not the
aliens."
"Where is he, then?" Dawes demanded.
Matthews
shrugged. "We had some trouble here, after the aliens broke in and
kidnapped you. Howard Stoker and a couple of his buddies thought Haas ought to
quit as Colony Director. He-got killed."
"Killed? So Stoker's in charge
now?"
Matthews
smiled gloomily. "No. There was a—well, a counter-revolution, you might
call it. In the name of law and order we executed Stoker, Harris ■ and
Hawes. Lee Donaldson's the Director now."
"What's
happening to the four surplus women, if those men are dead?"
"We're
having trouble over that," Matthews admitted. "The colony's kind of
split on the subject of polygamy right now. But—"
"Let
our troubles wait till later," Lee Donaldson broke in brusquely. "I
want to hear about these people. Where were you?"
"We were taken to a cave in one of the
cliffs beyond the forest," Dawes said. "We were prisoners. The aliens
were keeping us. But we escaped," He grinned. He felt very tired after the
forest trek, but yet invigorated. Tougher, harder. And he was saddened to learn
that there had been dissension in the colony.
"Did they hurt
you?" Donaldson asked.
Dawes
thought about that for a moment. "No," he said finally. "Not—not
physically."
He
looked around. There hadn't been much progress in the colony in his absence. It
still looked bare and hardly begun. He saw troubled faces. There had been
bitter quarrelling here, he realized.
"What
about the aliens?" he asked. "Did they make any further
attacks?"
"No,"
Matthews said. "We've seen them skulking around, outside the stockade. But
they haven't tried to break in again. We keep a constant patrol, now."
"And there's been
trouble here, hasn't there?"
"Trouble?"
Dawes nodded.
"Arguments. Dissension."
Lee
Donaldson tightened his jaw-muscles tensely. "We've had some difficulties.
Haas was our best leader, and he's dead. It hasn't been so easy to make the
people work together since Stoker got his big idea. We do more arguing than
working these days."
Dawes
sighed. He wanted to tell iMatthews and Donaldson what they had learned in the
cave, how the aliens thrived vicariously on strife, how the colonists would never
be completely free of the shadowy neckless beings until they learned to
function like parts of a well-machined instrument, as a colony must if it is to
survive.
But
there was time for that later, he thought. You didn't make people see things in
a minute, or in ten minutes. It could take days—or forever. But there was time
to begin healing the colony's wounds later.
In a
way, Dawes thought, it was a good thing that the colony had something like the
aliens waiting outside to feed on their hate. It would be like having a
perpetual visible conscience; hate would not enter the colony for fear of the
aliens without.
He
turned away. Suddenly he wanted to be alone with himself—with the new self that had come out of the cave. Something had grown with him in those
five days, and it hadn't been just the silky beard stubbling his cheeks. It was
something else.
He
understood now why selection was necessary, why the seed of Earth had to be
carried from world to world. It was because the stars were there, and because it was in the nature of man to climb outward, transcending
himself, changing himself. As he had changed, for he had changed, in those few catalytic days in the cave.
They
had been days of hardening for him. No longer was he filled with vague angry
resentment; no longer did he hate selection and all its minions, Local Chairman
Brewer and District Chairman Mulholland. He forgave them. More; he admired
them, and pitied them because they had to stay behind in this greatest of all
human adventures.
In
the twilight Dawes walked away from the group, down toward the bubble-home he
had chosen and from which he had been taken by the aliens. His suitcase and
Carol's still lay half-open on the ground—the bubble hadn't been entered since
the night of the kidnapping.
Shrugging
out of the blanket, he took spare clothing from his suitcase and dressed
slowly. He stood for a long time, thinking. They would none of them be the same
any more—not Noonan, who for the first time in his life had run into a problem
he couldn't solve with his fists, or Carol, who had gone into the cave innocent
and come out otherwise, or Cherry, whose metal shell had broken open to give
him a
moment of tenderness.
But
Dawes knew that he had changed most of all, and yet not changed. The thing that
was inside him, the curiosity, the seeking mind—now, it was alive and truly
working for the first time. How wrong it had been to dream of that cozy, dead
existence in his nice Ohio home with his nice Ohio wife and his nice Ohio
children I He realized now that he wanted to get out into die wilderness and
see the aliens again, find out why they were the way they were, what they had
wanted from the prisoners in the cave, how they had taken it, what they were
really like. Osiris held a million mysteries. And through the miracle of
selection he had been put here to solve them.
I'm different now.
It was, a hard fact to assimilate. He
realized with a jolt, looking at Carol's suitcase, that she was still his wife.
He didn't want her any more. The boy Mike Dawes had been taken by her innocence
and shyness, but that boy no longer existed. And he needed someone more solid,
someone who could share problems with him instead of simply clinging
dependendy.
Someone was knocking
outside the bubble.
"Come on in,"
Dawes said.
It was Cherry.
She
looked flustered and confused. "You just walked away from everybody like
that," she said. "You feeling okay, Mike?"
"I
just wanted to think. I had to be by myself for a little while. I'm okay."
She
was looking at him earnestly. Glancing away, she saw the two suitcases.
"Carol's with
Noonan," she said.
"I
figured as much," said Dawes without a trace of a quiver in his voice.
"I don't care. Really, I don't."
It
was funny, he thought, how lousy deals turned out to be the biggest things in
your life. Being picked by the lottery, and then being grabbed by the aliens
on top of that. And losing your wife to a man like Noonan. And none of it
mattered—each loss was a find, each finish a beginning.
An
animal honked in the forest, and Dawes grinned. A whole world lay out there
beyond the stockade, waiting to have its secrets pried open in the years to
come. And he'd do it.
He
said, "If Noonan's with Carol—where are you going to stay, Cherry?"
"I haven't figured
that out yet."
He
smiled. Carol had left her suitcase here, but nothing else. If Noonan could be
happy with her, let him be.
Cherry
stepped forward awkwardly. Dawes wanted to tell her that he forgave her and
loved her and needed her, and that he saw through her toughness and through the
scars life had left on her. But he couldn't say any of those things out loud,
and he realized he wasn't finished growing up, quite yet. She would help him,
though. And he would help her.
Funny. Getting picked in the lottery had
seemed like the end of the world to him once. But he couldn't have been
wronger.
He smiled at Cherry. The girl before him was
like a stranger, even after the days in the cave. Everything was oddly brand
new. He tipped her face up the inch or two that separated them in height, and
kissed her, listening to the wind of the alien world—his world.
"Hello," she said
tenderly.
"Hello," he said.