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.