“That was five days ago. In spite of not being hurt myself, I didn’t recover from the shock and exhaustion overnight.”
“Hm.” Coffin tugged his chin and glanced sideways. “Why hasn’t the accident been on the news?”
“My request. You see, it occurred to me—what I mean to ask of you.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t think a lot of the wreckage can be salvaged, damn it, but I’d like to try. You know what it’d be worth to the colony, just to recover a motor or something. Salvagers can’t feasibly clear a landing area; they’d have no way of removing the felled trees, which’d pose too much of a hazard. But they can construct a wagon and slash a path for it. That’d at least enable them to bring out the instruments and tapes more readily—I think— than by trudging back and forth that long distance carrying them in packs.”
“Instruments and tapes,” Coffin said thoughtfully. “You consider that, whether or not repairable parts of the car can be recovered, the instruments and tapes must be?”
“Oh, heavens, yes.” O’Malley replied. “Think how much skilled time was spent in the manufacture, then in planting and gathering the packages —in this labor-short, machine-poor economy of ours. The information’s tremendously valuable in its own right, too. Stuff on soil bacteria, essential to further improvement of agriculture. Meteorology, seismology—Well, I needn’t sell you on it, Josh. You know how little we know, how much we need to know, about Rustum. An entire world?”
“True. How can I help?”
“You can let your stepson Danny come along with me.”
Coffin halted. O’Malley did the same. They stared at each other. The slow dusking proceeded.
“Why him?” Coffin asked at last, most low. “He’s only a boy. We celebrated his nineteenth… anniversary… two tendays ago. If he were on Earth, that’d have been barely a couple of months past his fifteenth.”
“You know why, Josh. He’s young, sure, but he’s the oldest of the exogenes—”
Coffin stiffened. “I don’t like that word.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Just because he was grown artificially instead of in a uterus, from donated cells instead of his parents coming here in person, he’s not inferior.”
“Sure! Understood! How would three thousand people be a big enough gene pool for the future, cut off in an environment like this, if they didn’t bring along—”
“—a potential million extra parents. When you marry, you’ll also be required to have one of them brought to term for you to adopt.”
O’Malley winced. His Norah had died in the Year of Sickness. Somehow he’d never since had more than fleeting liaisons. Probably that was because he’d never stayed put long at a time. There was too much discovery to be made, by too few persons who were capable of it, if man on Rustum was to endure.
Yet he was still, in one way, shirking a duty to wed. Man in his billions was a blight on Earth, but on Rustum a very lonely creature whose hold on existence was precarious at best. His numbers must be expanded as fast as possible—and not merely to provide hands or even brains. There is a more subtle kind of underpopulation, that can be deadly to a species. Given too few parents, too much of their biological heredity will be lost, as it fails to find embodiment in the children they can beget during their lifetimes. In the course of generations, individuals will become more and more like each other. And variability is the key to adaptability, which is the key to survival.
A partial, though vital solution to the problem lay in adoption. Spaceships had been overburdened with colonists; they would certainly not add a load of plants and animals. It sufficed to carry seeds—of both. Cold-stored, sperm and ovum could be kept indefinitely, until at last it was convenient to unite them and grow a new organism an an exogenetic tank. As easily as for dogs or cattle, it could be done for humans. Grown up, marrying and reproducing in normal fashion—for they would be perfectly normal people—they would contribute their own diverse chromosomes to the race.
This was, however, only a partial measure. The original settlers and their descendants must also do their part.
Coffin saw O’Malley’s distress, and said more gently: “Never mind. I get your point. You remembered how Danny can tolerate lowland conditions.”
The other man braced himself. “Yes,” he replied. “I realize the original cell donors were chosen with that in mind. Still, the way we lucked out with him, this early in the game—Look. The trip does involve a certain hazard. It always does, when you go down where everything’s so unearthly and most of it unknown. That’s why I’ve kept my idea secret, that Danny would be the best possible partner on this expedition. I don’t think the risk is unduly great. Nevertheless, a lot of busybodies would object to exposing a boy to it, if they heard in advance. I thought, rather than create a public uproar… I thought I’d leave the decision to you. And Teresa, naturally.”
Again Coffin bridled. “Why not Danny?”
“Huh?” O’Malley was startled. “Why, I, well, I took for granted he’d want to go. The adventure— a real springtime vacation from school… After all, when he was a tyke, he wandered down the Cleft by himself—”
“And got lost,” Coffin said bleakly. “Almost died. Was barely saved, found hanging onto the talons of a giant spearfowl that aimed to tear him apart.”
“But he was saved. And that was what proved he was, is, the first real Rustumite, a human who can live anywhere on the planet. I’ve not forgotten what a celebrity it made him.”
“We’ve gone back to a decent obscurity, him and the rest of us,” Coffin said. “I’ve seen no reason to publicize the fact that he’s never since cared to go below the clouds. He’s a good boy, no coward or sluggard, but whenever he’s been offered a chance to join some excursion down, even a little ways, he’s found an excuse to stay home. Teresa and I haven’t pushed him. That was a terrible experience for a small child. In spite of being a ninety days’ wonder, he had nightmares for a year afterward. I wouldn’t be surprised if he does yet, now and then.”
“I see.” O’Malley bit his lip. They stood a while beneath a Raksh whose mottled brightness seemed to wax as heaven darkened. The evening star trembled forth. A breeze, the least bit chilly, made leaves sough. It was not bedtime; this close to equinox, better than thirty-one hours of night stretched before High America. But the men stood as if long-trained muscles, guts, blood vessels, bones felt anew the drag upon them.
“Well, he’s got to outgrow his fears,” burst from O’Malley. “He has a career ahead of him in the lowlands.”
“Why should he?” Coffin retorted. “We’ll take generations to fully settle this one plateau. Danny can find plenty of work. We could even argue that he ought to protect those valuable chromosomes of his, stay safe at home and found a large family. His descendants can move downward.”
O’Malley shook his head. “You know that isn’t true, Josh. We won’t ever be safe up here on our little bit of lofty real estate—not till we understand a hell of a lot more about the continent, the entire planet that it’s part of. Remember? We could’ve stopped the Sickness at its beginning, if we’d known the virus is carried from below by one kind of nebulo-plankton. We’ll never get proper storm or quake warnings till we have adequate information about the general environment. And what other surprises is Rustum waiting to spring on us?”
“Yes—”
“Then there’s the social importance of the lowlands. We came because it was our last hope of establishing a free society. In those several generations you speak of, High America can get as crowded as Earth. Freedom needs elbow room. We’ve got to start expanding our frontiers right away.”