'I'm not going to run away,' Dawes said.
The door closed behind him.
He looked around at his room, his home for what was left of his stay on Earth. It was hardly imposing. The room was an ugly little box whose severity was lessened only by the picture window opening out onto the field.
The walls were painted dull green; there was a bed, a chair, a dresser, a washstand. It looked like a five-dollar room in some cheap hotel. His one piece of luggage stood near the door. He had been allowed twenty pounds of personal effects aside from the required articles of clothing. He had chosen books, checking first as advised to make certain that none of his choices would be duplicated in the colony's filmed library.
It had been a long week, he thought, as he sank down on the chair near the window and looked out at the ship that soon would carry him to the stars. It had taken him a day or so to withdraw from the college, settle his campus debts, and pack; he had given his textbooks to the university library, handed over his pitiful college souvenirs, the usual assortment of enamelled beer-mugs and banners and beanies, to a sophomore living on the same floor at his boarding house.
Then he had returned to Cincinnati, accompanied by a watchful minion of the Colonization Bureau, for a painful and depressing final visit home. His parents were not taking his selection very well. His father, a tight-lipped man who rarely displayed any outward sign of emotion, was doing his best to show a stiff upper lip and bear up under the calamity, but it was obvious that the news was rapidly bringing him to a state of collapse. His mother had become almost totally inarticulate; all she could do was stare soulfully at her son, sniffle, sob.
His older brother had come up from Kentucky, looking peevish and fretful about the sudden intrusion of Mankind's Destiny into the Dawes family. 'Something's gotta be done about this selection business,' Dan kept repeating, rubbing his thinning scalp. 'You can't just let the government go around grabbing up people, a promising doctor like Mike, heave them out into space like this.'
His married sister had flown home from Tacoma with her paunchy, piously inclined husband; she sobbed over her departing brother, which annoyed Dawes because she had treated him like a slave when they were younger, while her husband mouthed consoling platitudes about fate and destiny.
It was like a wake, Dawes thought, only the guest of honor was up and around to greet everyone. He felt acutely uncomfortable during his three-day stay at his parents' home. And finally he could take the protracted goodbying no longer, and, conniving with the bureau watchdog, told them that he had to go on to New York for final briefing.
They accompanied him to the airport, wailing and weeping all the while. And then a segment of his life on Earth ended, as he said his final goodbyes to his family and climbed aboard the plane for New York.
Although he stayed in a fine hotel at bureau expense, his stay in New York was far from pleasant. The great buildings, the shows, the people, the bustling vitality - everything served only to remind him of the world he was giving up, in exchange for some lonely alien ball of mud which he was exposed to help convert into a simulacrum of Earth. He had seen so little of his own world, really. There was all of Europe: Paris, London, Bucharest, Moscow, the great cities he would never have a chance to visit now. The Orient; Africa, the Pyramids, the Nile, Japan, China; he had never even seen the Grand Canyon. And now he never would.
The two days at large in New York dragged mercilessly. He wondered how, in the old days, selectees had managed to endure three whole months of lame-duck existence on Earth; he was fearfully impatient to be gone and done with it, instead of lingering for a few final days.
He was grateful when, early on the morning of the 17th, he was taken to the airport and flown to Bangor.
And now he could see the Gegenschein sitting on the field, in the last stages of its countdown. At 1600 hours, it was goodbye to Earth. He paced his room impatiently, waiting for the minutes to tick past.
At 1100 hours a gong sounded in the hall. A speaker in the corner of his room rang crisply, All selectees are to report to Room 101 for indoctrination. Place your baggage in the hall outside your room for pickup.'
Dawes left his suitcase in front of his door and followed the flickering neon signs down the hall to the elevator, and from there to Room 101. Room 101 was a huge auditorium in the center of the compound; several men in blue-and-yellow uniforms bustled about on a dais, adjusting a microphone, while pale, tense-faced civilians filtered in and took seats as far away from each other as possible.
Dawes slipped into an empty row near the back and looked around, seeing his fellow selectees for the first time. One hundred people were spread thinly about in an auditorium big enough for ten times that number.
He managed an ironic smile at the way each selectee had managed to place himself on a little island, insulated by five or six empty seats on each side from his nearest neighbor, as if afraid of impinging on the final hours of anyone's privacy. They seemed to be ordinary people; Dawes noticed that most of them appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties, and a few were older than that. He wondered whether the colonies were portioned out strictly at random, or whether perhaps some degree of external control was exerted. It was perfectly within the range of probability for the computer to select fifty men of twenty and fifty women of forty to comprise a colony, but it seemed unlikely that such a group would ever be allowed to go out.
Someone in this room is going to be my wife, Dawes thought with sudden surprise. His heart pounded tensely at the thought, and color came to his face. Which one of them will it be?
Behind him, the auditorium doors closed. An officer with an array of ribbons and medals on his uniform front stepped up to the dais, frowned at the microphone, raised it a fraction of an inch, and said, 'Welcome to Bangor Starfield. I'm Commander Leswick, and your welfare will be my responsibility until you blast off at 1600 hours. I know this has been a trying week for you, perhaps virtually a tragic week for some, and I don't intend to repeat the catch-phrases and slogans that you've been handed for the past seven days. You've been selected; you're going to leave Earth, and you'll never return. I put it bluntly like this because it's too late for illusion and self-deception and consolation. You've been picked for the most important job in the history of humanity, and I'm not going to pretend that you're going out on an easy assignment. You're not. You're faced with the tremendous challenge of planting a colony on an alien world trillions of miles from here. I know, right now you feel frightened and lonely and wretched. But never forget this; each and every one of you is an Earthman. You're a representative of the highest form of life in the known galaxy. You've got a reputation to live up to, out there.
And you'll be building a world. To the future generations on that world, you'll be the George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons and John Hancocks.
'The planet you're going to is the ninth out of sixteen planets revolving around the star Vega. Vega is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and also one of the closest to Earth - twenty-three light-years away. You're lucky in one respect: there are two colonizable planets in the Vega system, your world and the eighth planet, which is not yet settled. That means you'll eventually have a planetary neighbor, unlike most other colonies which are situated on the only habitable world in their system. The name of your planet, by the way, is Osiris, from Egyptian mythology - but you can call it anything you like, once you get there.
'The trip will take about four weeks, even by Einstein Drive. That'll allow you plenty of time to get to know each other before you reach your new planet. Captain McKenzie and his crew have made several dozen successful interstellar flights, and I can assure you you'll be in the best possible hands.