The Seed of Earth

CHAPTER FOUR

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 through!

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 am, 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 to the 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 on 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 the 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, driedout 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 which 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 we'll 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 skipping 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 you!