The Seed of Earth

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bangor Starfield, 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 government 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-million-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-morning 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 lamb, might never again put to his lips 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 little 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 soulfully 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 government 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 exposed to help convert into a simulacrum of Earth. He had seen so little of his own 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 17^th, 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 impatiently, waiting for the minutes to tick past.

At 1100 hours a gong sounded in the hall. A speaker in the corner of his room rang 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 Starfield. 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 Jeffersons 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 colonizable planets in the Vega system, your world and the eighth planet, which is not yet settled. That means you'll 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.'

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.

Leswick called the 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.