He had tried to explain it to Dad during the two-week graduation furlough from which he was just returning. It had been good to be home again for a few days, good to feel the warm winds coming up from the south, good to feel the bite of a pick once again in the rocky north-central Greenland soil. The farm was the same as he had remembered it, the heavy house built of glacial rock, the huge granite fireplace, the outbuildings, the fields of wheat spreading forth for miles in every direction. Dad had seemed unchanged, too, his face burned red and seamed by the wind, his hands rough and brown. Mom looked older and more tired, her eyes bright with worry as she greeted her son, but she had smiled through the worry, refusing to say a word to dampen his enthusiasm for his new assignment.
He had spent the first days with old Black, the huge Labrador who guarded the farm against all assailants, hiking the hills and valleys he remembered so well from his childhood. But he knew the question” would come, and presently it did as he sat with Dad before the fire one night after dinner.
“Why do you want to go?” his father had asked him. “What are you looking for, Lars? What do you think you’re going to find out there on a Star Ship that you won’t find right here at home?”
Lars had grinned, a little embarrassed. Just like Dad, he thought, to dispense with preliminaries and speak his mind bluntly. “I don’t know, for sure. I just know I’ve got to do it. I want to go where nobody ever went before. I want to do things that nobody else has ever done, or ever could do.” He patted Black’s massive head, felt the dog muzzle his hand affectionately. “Black knows why I want to go. Ask him why he always wants to see what the other side of a hill looks like.”
“And you have to go on a Star Ship for this?” Dad lit his pipe and watched his son’s face carefully. “You think all the frontiers are out there? You’re wrong, son. Look at our farm, our Greenland. Why, in your Grandfather Heldrigsson’s day our whole Greenland was an icecap!”
Lars shrugged. “The weather technicians—” he said.
“But isn’t that a challenge? They took an icy wasteland here and made it the richest wheatland in the world. Look at the valley of the Amazon. It was a jungle once. Now its crops feed millions of people. Siberia, Antarctica—rich lands, son. There’s work for you here on Earth.”
The clatter of dishes in the kitchen had stopped, and Lars knew his mother was listening. He shook his head. “I’ve thought about it, and it’s no good. This is your frontier, not mine. There’s no more room on Earth, hasn’t been for years. We need colonies, and the Star Ships have to find them. And I couldn’t have a better ship than the Ganymede. You know that Commander Fox is the best planet-breaker in the business.”
“It’s a dangerous business.”
Lars grinned. “Is that supposed to scare me off?”
“But you don’t know how dangerous it may be,” his mother said from the doorway. “Suppose you found aliens on some planet you went to, some race of horrible monsters.”
Lars laughed and gave her a bear hug. “Now you’re just digging up things to worry about. There aren’t any monsters. Hundreds of ships have gone to hundreds of stars and never a monster. At least not an intelligent monster. They haven’t found a single sign of alien intelligence anywhere. There aren’t any aliens.”
“Your Commander Fox thinks there are,” his father said soberly.
“He’s never found any. I don’t think he ever will, either. It’s just a pet idea of his.”
“We still hate to see you go.”
“You’d think I was going on a Long Passage or something,” Lars said. “It isn’t like that. With Koenig drive in our ship we’ll be out to Vega III and back in two months. I won’t be gone for so long.”
And yet now, as he slipped into the factory-fresh uniform and checked his pack again, he felt a pang of regret at leaving the place where he was born and raised, where his family had lived since his great-grandfather had come north from Iceland to break the newly opened wheatland. It was a good home, and he would always love it, but he knew that his frontier, somehow, was on the other side of the hill.
Showered, and immaculate in the new uniform, Lars stopped at an Eating Bar for coffee and a burger-steak, offering his Colonial Service card to the robot cashier. Then he stepped onto the rolling strip again. His Service Card and order sheets were in his pocket, readily at hand. As he reached the loading gates, he noticed that no shuttle car was waiting at the end of the strip, which seemed strange. Usually a car waited at each gate to carry passengers out to the ships. He flashed his card briskly to the guard at the gate and started to push through the turnstile to the shuttle platform.
“Hold it, there!”
He stopped. The guard was staring at him suspiciously. “What’s wrong?” Lars asked.
“You,” said the guard. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the Ganymede.”
“The Ganymede is off limits to all personnel. That’s straight from Security.”
“But I’m on the crew of the Ganymede,” Lars protested. “I can show you my orders.”
Out of nowhere a gray-cloaked officer of the Security Police had appeared at Lars’ side. “Trouble here?”
The guard nodded vigorously. “Caught this man trying to board the Ganymede. You know our special orders.”
“Of course.” The Security man turned his eyes to Lars. “You have papers?”
“Look, I belong on the Ganymede,” Lars said hotly. “What’s all the trouble?”
“If what you say is so, you have papers to prove it. Let me see them.”
Lars fumbled open his order sheets and handed them over. The officer scanned them. “Sorry. This won’t quite do. You’d better come along with me.”
“But it says right there—”
“I can see what it says. I see a robotyped order sheet carrying a robotyped authorization to go aboard. But I don’t see any countersignature.”
Lars’ jaw sagged and he felt his face flushing. “I—I forgot to get it. I was just starting my leave when the orders came, and it slipped my mind in the rush of things—”
The Officer gave him a peculiar look. “That so? You’d better come along with me.”
Lars followed the Security man down a side corridor and into an elevator. Moments later they emerged into a long room one side of which was lined with cubicles. The officer stopped at a desk, flipped the switch on a viewscreen. “Hardy here,” he said. “Get Jackson down here, and contact the Ganymede for me right away. We have a man here trying to crash the gate. May be carrying forged orders, we’ll soon know. Yes, yes, of course it’s urgent!”
He broke contact and turned to Lars. “Now, then. Lets see about those orders. In here.”
He led Lars into a cubicle and strapped him into the seat of an Identi-robot. Lars pressed his palms against the charged metal plates, winced as the bright purple flash of the retinoscope clicked in his eyes. His card and orders were placed in a photochamber.
“I don’t see why you’re making all this fuss,” he said.
“Suppose I weren’t authorized to go aboard the Ganymede? So what? Would it be such a crime?”
The officer just grunted and pulled the report sheet from the robot. “Okay,” he said finally. “You just wait here a while.” He went out, closing the cubicle door behind him.