The Seed of Earth

CHAPTER ONE

The day was warm, bright, sky blue, 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, the 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 disqualified 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.

HQs so-efficient secretary had already adjusted his calendar, dusted his desk, titled 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. IIab762-31 File Seven.

10 October 2116, notices to be sent.

Assignment: starship GEGENSCHEIN, blasting 17 October 2116, from Bangor Star field.

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 implicitly, 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 corner. 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 storeys 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 cryotronic 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, and San Francisco - 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-mutilations 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 in eight days most of those people would be heading out on a one-way journey. Mankind's destiny would brook no sentiment.

He buzzed Miss Thorne 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 Gegenschein.

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 Thorne again.

'Have her name pulled from the list,' he ordered crisply. 'She's got a child born 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 San 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.