The Seed of Earth

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was probably an excellent meal. Dawes did not appreciate it, though. He ate listlessly, 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 roundfaced, balding man to his left said, 'I'll 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, premed student.'

'Rina 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 Lubetkin, 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. I 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.

They 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 interning 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 thirty-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, 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 end!'

'So did II' 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 the 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 spacefield. 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 being 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 scorched 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-afternoon. In the quiet isolation of the starfield 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 companionway 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 companionway 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, unornamented.

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.

'We'll 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 outlets 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 nospace, 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 neighbour. 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 little 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 light, the Gegenschein would breast the gulf of light-years and emerge from nospace 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 Earthmen, no colony worlds, no selection. Perhaps a ship or two might have been dispatched 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.