'The name of your ship, as you know, is the Gegenschein. We draw the names of our ships from three sources: astronomical terms, historical figures, and traditional ship names. Gegenschein is an astronomical term referring to the faint luminosity extending along the plane of the ecliptic in the direction diametrically opposite to the sun - the sun's reflection, actually, bouncing back from an immense cloud of stellar debris.
'I think that covers all the essential points you'll need to know at the outset. We're going to adjourn to the mess hall now for a most significant occasion - the last meal you're ever going to eat on the planet Earth, and also the first meal you will eat with each other. I hope you all have good appetites, because the meal is a special one.
'Before we go in, though, I'm going to call the roll.
When you hear your name, I want you to stand up and make a complete three hundred and sixty degree revolution, letting everyone get a look at you. This is as good a time as any to start getting to know each other.'
He picked up a list. 'Cyril Noonan.'
The rangy, powerful-looking man in the front row rose and said, in a booming voice that filled the auditorium easily, 'The name I use is Ky Noonan.'
Commander Leswick smiled. 'Ky Noonan, then. Incidentally, Ky Noonan happens to be a Volunteer.'
Noonan sat down. Commander Leswick said, 'Michael Dawes.'
Dawes rose, blushing unaccountably, and stood awkwardly at attention. Since he was at the back of the auditorium, there was no need for him to turn around.
A hundred heads craned backward to see him, and he sat.
Lawrence Fowler.'
A chunky man in the middle of the auditorium came to his feet, spun round, smiled nervously, and sat down.
Leswick called the next name, and the next, until all fifty men had been called.
He began on the women after that. Dawes watched closely as the women rose. Most of them, he saw, were eight to ten years older than he. But he paid careful attention. There was one girl named Herrick who interested him. She was young and looked attractive, in a wide-eyed, innocent way. Carol Herrick, he thought. He wondered what she was like.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was probably an excellent meal. Dawes did not appreciate it, though. He ate listlessly, picking at his food, unable to enjoy the white, tender turkey, the dressing and trimmings, the cold white wine. Although he had overcome his initial bitterness over selection, a lingering tension remained. He had no appetite. It was an inconvenience shared by most of his fellow selectees, evidently, judging by the way they toyed with their food.
The selectees had been distributed at ten tables. Dawes was dismayed to find, when he took his seat, that he could not recall the names of any of the other nine selectees at his table. But his embarrassment was short-lived.
A roundfaced, balding man to his left said, 'I'll confess I didn't catch too many names during rollcall. Maybe we ought to introduce ourselves all over again. I'm Ed Sanderson from Milwaukee. I used to be an accountant.'
It went around the table. 'Mary Elliot, St. Louis,' said a plump woman with streaks of gray in her hair. 'Just a housewife before my number came up.'
'Phil Haas, from Los Angeles,' said a lean-faced man in his late thirties. 'I was a lawyer.'
'Louise Martino, Brooklyn,' said a dark-haired girl of twenty-five or twenty-six, in a faltering, husky voice. 'I was a salesgirl at Macy's.'
'Mike Dawes, Cincinnati. Junior at Ohio State, premed student.'
'Rina Morris, from Denver,' said a good-looking redhead. 'Department store buyer.'
'Howard Stoker, Kansas City,' rumbled a heavy-set man with a stubbled chin and thick, dirty fingers. 'Construction worker.'
'Claire Lubetkin, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.' She was a bland-faced blonde with a nervous tic under her left eye. 'Clerk in a video shop.'
'Sid Nolan, Tulsa. Electrical engineer.' He was a thin, dark-haired, fidgety man who toyed constantly with his silverware.
'Helen Chambers, Detroit,' said a tired-looking woman in her thirties, with dark rings under her eyes. 'Housewife.'
Ed Sanderson chuckled uncomfortably. 'Well, now we know everyone else, I hope. Housewives, engineer, college student, lawyer—'
'How come there ain't any rich people selected?'
Howard Stoker demanded suddenly. 'They just take guys like us. The rich ones buy themselves off.'
'That isn't so,' Phil Haas objected. 'It just happens that most of the wealthy executives and industrialists don't get to be wealthy until they're past the age of selection. But don't you remember a couple of months ago, when they selected that oilman from Texas—'
'Sure,' Sid Nolan broke in. 'Dick Morrison. And none of his father's millions could get him out.'
Stoker growled something unintelligible and subsided.
Conversation seemed to die away. Dawes looked down at his plate, still largely untouched. He had nothing to say to these people with whom he had been thrown by the random hand of selection. They were just people. Strangers. Some of them were fifteen years older than he was.
He had only just stopped thinking of himself as a boy a few years before, and now he was expected to live among them as an equal, as an adult. I didn't want to grow up so soon, he thought. But now I don't have any choice, I guess.
The meal dragged on to its finish around 1330 hours.
Commander Leswick appeared and announced a ninety-minute rest and recreation period. Boarding of the ship would commence at 1500 hours, sixty minutes before actual blastoff time.
They filed out of the mess hall - a hundred miscellaneous people, each carrying his own burden of fear and regret and resentment. Dawes walked along silently beside Phil Haas, the lawyer from Los Angeles. As they reached the door, Haas smiled and said, 'Did you leave a girl friend behind, Mike?'
Dawes was startled by the sudden intrusion on his reverie.
'Oh - ah - no, I guess not. There wasn't anybody special. I figured I couldn't afford to get very deeply involved, not with four years of medical school ahead of me. Not to mention interning and all the rest.'
'I know what you mean. I got married during my senior year at UCLA. We had a hard time of it while I was going to law school.'
'You - were married?'
Haas nodded. They stepped out into the open air.
There was no lawn, just bare brown earth running to the borders of the starport. 'I have - had - two children,' he said. 'The boy's going to be seven, the girl five.'
'At least now your wife's not eligible for selection herself,' Dawes said.
'Only if she doesn't remarry. And I asked her to remarry, you see. She's not the sort of woman who can get along without a man around.' A momentary cloud passed over Haas' bony face. 'Another two years and I would have been safe. Well, that's the way it goes, I guess. Take it easy, Mike. I suppose I'll see you at 1500 hours.' Haas clapped Dawes genially on the shoulder and strode away.
Dawes felt his mood of depression beginning to lift. If a man like Haas could give up his home and his wife and his children at the age of thirty-eight, and still remain calm and able to smile, then it was wrong for anyone else to sulk. Sulking was useless, now. But it's hard to talk yourself into being glad you were selected, Dawes thought.
He thought a moment about Haas' wife. Haas' widow, for so she was legally, now; the wife of a selectee was legally widowed the moment his ship blasted off, and she was entitled to collect insurance, widow's pensions, and any other such benefits. But perhaps she didn't want to be a widow; perhaps she was willing and anxious to volunteer and go alongside her husband.
The law said no. She had to remain behind, willy-nilly, to rear her children. No wonder so many people remained childless these days. If you had children, you ran too many risks. A childless wife could always follow her husband to the stars, or vice versa. So, in a way, selection served as a population control, not only by removing people from Earth - a statistically insignificant six thousand a day - but by the much more efficient method of discouraging people from having children. In a world of seven billion people, anything that lessened population pressure was valuable. Even something as heartless as selection.