Dawes was passed over by the heads of the teams; he shrugged, thrust his hands in his pockets, and stood to one side. The cargo hatch in the belly of the ship was lowered open, and Noonan and his team entered, while the Gegenschein crew clambered back up the catwalk to ready their ship for departure. In a few minutes, crates began appearing, heavy wire-bound wooden crates that contained all of Earth that there had been room to bring along.
Others lugged the crates across the clearing, out of the way of the ship's rocket-blast area. The job took nearly an hour. Haas inventoried each crate as it appeared, checking it off against a master list. When half had appeared, he whistled again and rotated the teams, letting the tired men rest and putting fresh ones to work. Dawes took his place in the second team, hauling the crates away from the ship and over to the supply dump.
The cargo hold was nearly empty when Dave Matthews came trotting out of the forest, shouting for Haas.
The colony director turned. 'What is it, Dave?'
Matthews raced up, panting. Dawes and a few others stopped work to listen to him.
Matthews gasped, 'Aliens 11 saw aliens!'
Haas frowned. 'What?'
'Skulking around in the edge of the forest. Dark shadowy things. They looked like men, or apes, or something.'
A twinge of fear went through Dawes. But Haas smiled. 'Are you sure, Dave?'
'How can I be sure? They ran away as soon as I went toward them.'
'Did anyone else in your team see them?' Haas asked, looking at the other four members of the scouting patrol.
'Not me,' Sid Nolan said.
'Me neither,' Paul Wilson agreed. 'We came running when Matthews shouted, but we didn't see anything.'
'And the survey team said there was no intelligent life on Osiris,' Nolan pointed out.
Haas shrugged the matter off. 'We'll check later. You might have been mistaken, Dave.'
'I hope so. But I wasn't.'
The affair was allowed to drop there. At the moment, it was more urgent to empty out the Gegenschein.
The work made Dawes perspire, and then he felt colder when a gust of wind came. But he enjoyed the mere activity of moving around, of using his muscles after four weeks of dreary confinement.
At last the ship was unloaded. An assortment of packing-crates and smaller cases sat in disorder five hundred yards from the ship. The crewman bustled busily about, checking off items on a vastly accelerated count-down. It took two days to prepare a ship for blastoff when it was laden with colonists and cargo; empty, it could be readied in only a few hours.
While the crewman worked, the hundred colonists boarded the ship for the last time, to prepare a meal in the galley. It would be their third meal of the day. But it was only midday on Osiris, and Haas had ordered that work would continue until sundown, six or seven hours hence, so they would be adjusted to the new time-schedule from the very start. Dawes was on the clean-up crew after the meal. When he emerged from the ship, finally, he saw Haas and Captain McKenzie in conference. Haas was counting, to make certain everyone was off the ship.
He blew his whistle. 'Attention, all! The Gegenschein is about to blast off! Everyone over by the cargo, right away! The Gegenschein is leaving!'
CHAPTER TEN
Final preparations took twenty minutes. At last, the Gegenschein was ready. It sounded one last warning honk before blasting off. Mike Dawes, standing in the safe zone with the other colonists, felt a sharp inward tug as he saw the ship seem to draw back on its haunches, retracting its landing jacks in the last few moments before blastoff. This was the last link with Earth, the golden ship at the edge of the lake.
The warning honk died away and the ship sprang suddenly up from the ground, hovering on its blazing pillar of flame for a moment as it fought with Osiris' pull, then, breaking loose, shot upward to the cloud-muddied sky.
For half a minute, perhaps, the retreating rocket-blast added a second sun to the sky. A strange luminous glow cast double shadows over the ground, but faded rapidly.
The Gegenschein was gone.
A life hardly begun was finished now, Dawes realized.
His past, twenty years on Earth, infancy and childhood and awkward adolescence, was becoming remote and dreamlike, as if it had not actually happened to him but had been told to him in sleep. Only the uncertain future was real.
He stood by himself, nervously staring at the seared place where the Gegenschein had been. Beyond lay the dark forest, either inhabited or not inhabited by humanoid alien beings, depending on the accuracy of Dave Matthews' observation. Dawes felt cold. This was not a pleasant world.
And blastoff had been like the severing of the umbilicus. A thunder of flame and a bull-voiced roar and the link with Mother Earth was severed forever.
Severing of the umbilicus. He liked the analogy. It was the sort of thought a doctor might have. And he was a doctor in embryo only, or not even that - a shivering skinny twenty-year-old who would never have to worry about medical school applications now. A flip of the wheel, a random twitch of the giant computer, and they packed you off like a steer on a tenth-class ship to a world like Osiris. They ripped you out of your old life and told you to build a new one, on a cold windswept planet where shadowy alien shapes skulked through the dismal forest.
A hand grabbed Dawes' shoulder firmly from behind, breaking into his mood. He looked around.
'Something the matter with you?' Ky Noonan asked gruffly. 'You look lousy.'
'I feel lousy. Mind?'
Noonan grinned. 'It's your privilege, kid. But you better stop brooding about Earth.'
'I'm not—'
'I see it all over your face. Look, Earth don't exist any more, as far as you and me are concerned. There's just Osiris.'
'I know that,' Dawes said slowly. 'But it takes a while to get used to the idea.'
'You've had plenty of time. Four weeks on the ship, and two hours since we landed. Take some free advice: get used to being here.'
Dawes made no reply. All the time since the day he had pulled the blue envelope from his mailbox, he had been telling himself to accept the dealings of fate without complaint. He had deluded himself into thinking he was resigned to selection. But evidently he wasn't. Apparently the resentment still showed in his eyes.
Noonan chuckled and strode lightly away, toward a small group of women on the other side of the packing cases. Dawes followed him with his eyes, brow furrowing as he strained to understand what made the big man tick.
Noonan was a volunteer. He wore his volunteer's status like a badge of merit, which it was. Dawes watched him bantering with the girls over there. The big man was smiling, but there was a faraway look in his eyes. Still, he seemed completely at ease, self-sufficient, happy. As if anyone could be happy, torn from family, friends, career—
No. Dawes reminded himself that Noonan had volunteered. He hadn't been torn from anything; maybe he had nothing to be torn from.
Phil Haas mounted a packing crate at the far end of the clearing and blew his whistle. It was time to get things set up. Dawes joined the gathering group.
'We're on our own now,' Haas said, speaking loudly to fight the insistent whistling of the wind. 'That ship is gone and it isn't ever coming back. We've got plenty to do now. The first thing is to set up the stockade and inflate the domes.'
A voice from the back of the group - Dave Matthews' voice - called out. 'Phil, what about those aliens I saw? I think we ought to have a permanent security patrol, just in case they come back.'
Haas' lean face darkened. 'The important thing is to get the stockade built immediately.'
'But the aliens—'
'There's some doubt as to whether you actually did see aliens, Dave. Remember, the survey team didn't find any such creatures here—'