It was an unflattering picture. Mulholland tried to blank it out, but the image refused to quit his mind.
Thank God it was quitting time, he thought.
He studied the completed Gegenschein list again. It looked all right: the hundred names, fifty in each column, each on its appointed line. He skimmed down the men's list: Noonan, Cyril; Dawes, Michael; Fowler, Lawrence; Matthews, David; And right along to the names at the bottom: Nolan, Sidney; Sanderson, Edward.
He checked out the women's column next: Thomas, Cherry; Martino, Louise; Goldstein, Erna; And down to the last, the ink not yet dry on her name: Brannick, Marya.
Mulholland nodded. Fifty here, fifty there. The list was okay. He scrawled his signature in the proper place.
Another day, another shipload, he thought. Another cargo for his conscience.
The long list of names wavered, blurred; he closed his tired eyes. But that was a mistake. His imagination responded by conjuring up images of people; names took on flesh, faces hovered accusingly in the air. Edward Sanderson, he thought - and pictured, for no particular reason, a short, slim, narrow-shouldered man with thinning brown hair. Erna Goldstein - she might be a darkhaired girl with large eyes, who majored in dramatics in college and had hopes of writing a play, someday. Sidney Nolan—
Mulholland shook his head to clear it. He had managed to keep this from happening all day, this sudden taking on of flesh on the part of the names on his list. So long as he thought of them simply as names, as strings of syllables, everything was all right. But once they began asserting their humanity, he crumbled beneath the assault.
Hastily he pressed his thumb against the sensitized spot, rolled up the sheet, stuffed it in its little cylinder, and sent it rocketing down the pneumotube to the waiting Brevoort. The Gegenschein had her cargo, barring accidents and possible suicides between now and the seventeenth of the month.
The clock said 1400 hours. The day was over. Mulholland rose, sticky with sweat, eyes aching, mind numb.
He was free to go home.
At least you only get selected once, he thought. I have to go through this every day.
He tidied his desk and moved in a shambling way toward the door. Tomorrow, the Aaron Burr list would have to be finalized, and some new list would be begun.
And after that, the weekend, when Dick Brevoort moved upstairs to prepare the Saturday and Sunday lists. The wheels of selection never ceased grinding, even though an individual component of the great machine might occasionally require a couple of days of rest.
Mulholland peered into the adjoining office. Miss Thorne was behind her typewriter, spine stiff, fingers sharply arched. She seemed supremely happy in her business. Mulholland wondered if the names she typed so busily all day ever came to haunt her. Probably not, he decided. She could go home each night with a clear conscience to whatever she enjoyed doing in the evenings, crocheting or watching video or listening to sixteenth-century madrigals.
He looked in. 'Good afternoon, Jessie.'
'Good afternoon, Mr. Mulholland. Have a very pleasant evening.'
'Thanks,' he said in a suddenly hoarse voice. 'The same to you, Jessie.'
He walked slowly toward the door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bangor Starfield, from which three ships of colonists departed every week, covered sixteen square miles of what had once been virgin forest in northern Maine. The lofty firs were gone; now the area had been cleared and levelled and surrounded by a fence labelled at thousand-yard intervals, NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT TO CLASSIFIED PERSONNEL, by order of colonization bureau.
Within the fenced-off area there was surprisingly little in the way of construction. Since the starfield was for government use only, not commercial, there was no need for the usual array of terminals, passenger buildings, waiting rooms, and concessions that cluttered every commercial spaceport. The buildings at the Bangor field were few: a moderately elaborate barracks for the permanent staff, a more sketchily constructed housing unit for transients, a couple of staff amusement centers, and a small administration building. All these were huddled together in a compact group in the center of the cleared area.
Fanning off in three directions were the blastoff fields themselves, kept widely separated because a starship likes a mile or two of headroom when it can get it.
On the morning of the seventeenth of October, 2116, two of Bangor Starfield's three blastoff areas were occupied. On Field One stood the Andrew Johnson, solemnly alone with a mile of heat-fused sterile brown earth on each side: a tall steel-blue needle that towered erect on its landing-jacks and retractile atmospheric fins. The Andrew Johnson was scheduled for departure on the twentieth of the month; tomorrow the service crews would swarm out to Field One to begin the three-day countdown that prefaced every departure of a starship.
At present the service technicians were busily running the final tests on the Gegenschein, which stood in the center of Field Three, slim and straight, glinting golden in the morning sunlight. The Gegenschein was due for blastoff at 1600 hours that afternoon, and with the countdown in its final six hours the service crews scuttled like busy insects through the ship, making certain that everything was in perfect order. Only once, twelve years before, had there been a major starship accident, but it was hoped that there would never be another.
Field Two remained empty. A returning starship, the Wanderer, was due back late that evening, and Field Two was being held open for it. A small service crew was on duty at the Field Two blockhouse, running final checks on the guidance system that would monitor the Wanderer into its landing orbit later in the day. Nothing could be left to chance - not with a hundred-million-dollar starship.
From the upper floor of the housing unit for transients, looking out past the squat yellow-brick edifice that served as the permanent staff residence barracks, both the Andrew Johnson and the Gegenschein could be seen, one at the western end of the field, the other far to the east. Mike Dawes, who had arrived at the Bangor Starfield at 0945 hours after an early-morning flight from New York, peered out the window of the small room to which he had been assigned, looking first at the distant, blue-tinted Andrew Johnson, then, turning eastward, at the much closer Gegenschein.
'Which one am I going on?' he asked.
'The gold-colored one,' said the uniformed Colonization Bureau guard who had shown him to his temporary room. 'It's on Field Three, over there.'
Dawes nodded. 'Yes. I see it.'
'You've got an hour or so to rest here and relax. At 1100 hours there's a preliminary briefing session downstairs in the central hall. You won't be able to miss it; just turn to your left when you leave the elevator. The briefing lasts about an hour. Then you'll be given lunch.'
'I'm not going to be very hungry,' Dawes said.
The guard smiled. 'Most of them never are. But the meal is always a good one.'
The condemned man ate a hearty meal, Dawes thought. He realized with a strange sense of loss that he had only one more meal to take on Earth; after that, he might never again taste the egg of a chicken or the leg of a lamb, might never again put to his lips a tomato or a cucumber or a radish. It was a small loss, but a telling one. Life on Earth was just such a confection of little details.
'What time is blastoff?' he asked.
'1600 hours. Don't worry - they'll fill you in on the schedule downstairs.'
'I suppose they will.'
'Any other questions?'
Dawes shook his head. The guard walked to the door, opened it, paused before stepping out. 'Remember,' he said. 'You can't leave this building without a pass. The best thing is simply to stay in your room until the gong rings for the briefing session.'