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 dreadfuclass="underline" 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.
CHAPTER SIX
After completing his list of one hundred ten names for the seventeenth of October blasting of the Gegenschein, District Chairman Mulholland turned his attention to the next item on his daily routine: finalization, as they so barbarously called it in scheduling, of the previous day's list.
The October 16 ship was the Sky rover, departing from the Cape Canaveral base. Mulholland had prepared the usual quota of names; during the early hours of the morning, while he had been assembling the Gegenschein list, word was coming in from the local boards on the previous day's selections. Mulholland scanned the long yellow sheets. The Skyrover list would present no difficulties, he saw. There were fifty-one eligible males, fifty-two eligible women.
He deleted the three surplus names, entered them on the proper form, and gave the deletion list to Miss Thorne. During the day three people somewhere in the United States would learn that they had received a minute's reprieve; instead of departing as they had been told on the October 16 ship, they would be held over until October 17, and, if not needed to fill vacancies on the Gegenschein list, would certainly be included on the list of whatever ship was scheduled for departure on the 18th.
His job, Mulholland thought, was like a kind of cosmic jigsaw puzzle - a puzzle in which he used human pieces, scooping up a hundred at a time, discarding those which might be bent or broken and unsuitable for the pattern, fitting the rest into place. Each day another pattern had to be created; sometimes there were too many pieces, and some were put aside for another day.
He completed the Skyrover list and sent it down the pneumotube to Brevoort, twenty storeys below. Brevoort would phone Cape Canaveral and advise them verbally of the completion of the list; the list itself would be sent to Florida by fax at the same time. With the Skyrover under control, Mulholland was finished for the day. The time was 1400 hours. At the Bangor starfield that moment, the Enterprise Three was blasting off, with one hundred colonists aboard, people who had been selected a week before.
It went on constantly, day and night - people registering for selection, people being selected, people reporting for blastoff, ships departing. Five ships leaving a day from the United States alone, sixty from the world, four hundred twenty ships a week. And, so immense were the heavens, it would be untold centuries before the last habitable planet had been colonized by men of Earth.
1400 hours. The end of the day. Mulholland tidied his desk and said his goodbyes - most of the clerical workers had two hours before their day ended - and left.
As he stepped outside, into the bracing October wind, he tried to shrug off his day's labor like an otter coming to shore and shaking itself dry. Once 1400 hours came, he could stop being District Chairman Mulholland, wielder of the sacred staff; he could go back to being plain Dave Mulholland of White Plains. Once aboard the sleek bullet of a train, he smiled politely to other commuters whose faces if not names he knew, and settled back in his padded seat. The nonstop White Plains express made the trip in seven minutes. Years ago, before the new trains had been put in use, the trip took longer, long enough for him to have a drink and relax before arriving at the White Plains station. But there was no time for a drink now.
One was waiting for him at home, though, an icy martini. Mulholland kissed his wife, patted the bouncingly joyful dog, drank his drink.
'Anything new, dear?' Ellen asked. She was forty-one; safe from selection, at last. Like him, her hair was red.
'You're bound to raise a flock of redheads,' friends had said over and over, when they were married sixteen years before. But they had no children. Out of fear of selection, perhaps, Mulholland admitted.
'Nothing new, Ellen. The same as always. One hundred heads on the block.'
She looked at him painfully, but kept unsaid what she was thinking. They had been over the same ground often enough in the past. The job was tearing him apart - nobody loves the public executioner or the baseball umpire or the local boss of selection - but resignation was impossible. You didn't toss away a job the party had carefully gained for you. If you did, there would be no further jobs forthcoming from them - ever.
Mulholland changed into his puttering clothes. There was work to do in the garden, in what remained of the afternoon. He enjoyed working with his hands, grubbing down in the dirt to bed an azalea or trim a privet hedge. He could get absorbed in the mere physicality of the work, absorbed enough to forget that a hundred people in the United States were cursing him bitterly because he had done the job he was paid to do.
At least, he thought, it wasn't so bad now that he didn't have to hear appeals. He sat in lofty isolation in his office, drawing up lists and initialing forms; at least he had no direct contact with the victims he was condemning. Before reaching the top, when he had been one of the subchiefs in charge of refusing appeals, the job had been infinitely more painful.