The Seed of Earth

CHAPTER FIVE

'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 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 I'll 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 tell 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 the Bible, the Lord talking to Abraham: "And I 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 shethoscopes 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 2134, 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 she 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 back when you come in. Urgent.

And Carol had punched out the number and waited trembling for the call 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 selected!'

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 little 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 bottle, 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 shown 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 only October from Bangor, Maine, aboard the star ship GEGENSCHEIN.

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 re-examination she sat in an empty anteroom waiting for the verdict, 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 marry 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 uncomprehendingly, she was going to do her share for Mankind's Destiny.