REF. IIab762-31 File Seven.
10 October 2116, notices to be sent.
Assignment: starship GEGENSCHEIN, blasting 17 October 2116, from Bangor Star field.
Required: fifty couples selected by Board One.
The form differed only in detail from hundreds of forms that Mulholland had found on his desk at the beginnings of hundreds of days past. He tried not to let himself think of days past. He had been chairman for three years, now. It was of the essence that the high-ranking members of a selection board should not themselves be subject to selection, and Mulholland had received his present job a few weeks after his reaching the age of forty had removed his name from the rolls of eligibility.
He was a political appointee. According to the pollsters, his party was due to succumb to a Conservative uprising in the elections next month. Mulholland faced his party's debacle with remarkably little apprehension.
Come January, he thought, President Dawson would be back in St. Louis practicing law, and a few thousand loyal Liberal party hacks throughout the country would lose their jobs, being replaced by a few thousand loyal Conservative party hacks.
Which meant, Mulholland thought, that come January someone from the other side of the fence could sit in this chair handing out selection warrants, while David Mulholland could slip back into the obscurity of academic life and give his conscience a well-needed rest.
It was a mere seventy days to the end of President Dawson's term. Mulholland shut his eyes tiredly. Barring a political upset at the polls, he would only have to pass sentence on seven thousand more human beings.
He buzzed for his secretary. She came at a gallop; a bony, horse-faced woman of thirty who ran the office with formidable energy and who never tired of quoting the bureau slogan to visitors. She probably believed the gospel of Mankind's Destiny implicitly, Mulholland thought. Which didn't give her much comfort when she pondered the ten years that lay between her and freedom from selection.
'Good morning, Mr. Mulholland.'
'Morning, Jessie. Type out an authorization.'
'Certainly, Mr. Mulholland.'
Her agile fingers clattered over the machine. In a moment or two she placed the document on his desk.
It was strict formality for him to request and for her to type the paper; mechanically, Mulholland scanned it.
This had to go to the computer, and any typing error would result in loud and unpleasant repercussions.
As chairman of the District One Board of Selection of the Colonization Bureau, I hereby authorize the selection of one hundred ten names from the roll of those eligible, on this ninth day of October, 2116, in order to fulfil a departure quota of one hundred for the starship GEGENSCHEIN, blasting 17 October 2116. David Mulholland, Chairman District Board One.
Mulholland nodded; it was in order. He signed it in the space indicated, then provided crosscheck by pressing his thumb down against the photosensitive spot in the lower right-hand corner. The authorization was complete.
He handed the form to Jessie Thorne, who deftly rolled it and stuffed it into a pneumatic tube. Mulholland took the tube from her, affixed his personal seal, and popped it in the open pneumotube vent under his desk. The little morning ritual was over.
The tube, Mulholland knew, would drop twenty storeys into the bowels of the building. There, Brevoort, the vice-chairman, would ritualistically open the seal, check to make sure that everything was as it should be and then would place the authorization form face-down on a pickup grid in his office. A photocircuit would relay the contents of the form instantaneously to the computer, that sprawling network of tubes and complexity hidden in the ground at some highly classified location in the central United States.
Activated by the arrival of the authorization, the cryotronic units of Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos would go to work, selecting, by a completely random sweep, the names of fifty-five men and fifty-five women from the better than two hundred million eligible Americans. All five District Boards - New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco - selected from the same common pool.
The one hundred ten dossiers would be relayed immediately across the country to Mulholland's office. During the day, Mulholland would go through the dossiers one by one, checking personality indexes and compatibility moduli to see if his victims for the day would be able to work together at the job of colonizing a world. Mulholland had learned through experience that he would have to discard about ten per cent of his pick, not exempting them but merely tossing them back in the hopper for another chance. The computer's records were kept scrupulously up to date - a whole beehive of clerical workers handled the job of filing the countless change-of-status applications that came in - but Mulholland could be certain that of each hundred and ten names scooped up by the computer, two would have become ineligible for reasons of health, one of the women would be probably pregnant, one of the men would be psychologically unsuitable. At least once a week it happened that a selected person died between the time of his selection and the time of his notification. Three years of district chairman had taught Mulholland a great deal about vital statistics.
At 0930 hours his names for the day began to arrive over a closed-circuit transstat reproducer. The cards came popping out, five-by-eight green cards with a name and a number at the top and forty or so lines of condensed information typed neatly below.
He gathered them up, stacking them neatly on his desk. Behind him, the slogan warned silently, DO YOUR SHARE FOR MANKIND'S DESTINY. To his left, a gleaming window opened out onto the blue cloud-flecked sky. It was a lovely day. District Chairman Mulholland looked through his names for October 9, notification to be sent by October 10, departure scheduled for October 17.
The selectees had only a week's notice. Fifteen years back, when the star-colonization had begun, they had been given twelve weeks to tidy up their Earthly affairs.
But that policy, instituted with the praiseworthy intention of making selection a little more humane, had backfired. Instead of making use of their twelve weeks to tend to loose ends, transfer possessions, pay farewells, some of the selectees had behaved less constructively. A startling number suicided. Others wrought damage on their persons to make themselves ineligible, lopping off hands or feet or putting out an eye or performing even more drastic self-mutilations in their desperate fear of the unknown stars. Still others tried to escape by hiding in remote parts of the world. The three-month period of grace simply did not work. After several years, it was shortened to a week, and selectees were watched carefully during that week.
So Mulholland leafed through his hundred and ten cards, knowing that in eight days most of those people would be heading out on a one-way journey. Mankind's destiny would brook no sentiment.
He buzzed Miss Thorne again. 'I've got the cards, Jessie. Do we have any volunteers today?'
'One.' She gave him the card. Noonan, Cyril F. Age thirty, unmarried. Mulholland read through the rest of the data, nodded, tossed Noonan's card in a basket on the right side of his desk, and made a sharp downstroke on a blank tally sheet in front of him. Now there were only forty-nine men to pick for the voyage of the Gegenschein.
Volunteers were uncommon, but they did turn up from time to time.
Mulholland ran through the men first. He picked out his forty-nine without any trouble, and stacked the six leftover cards in his reserve basket. Those six names would be held aside until it was determined whether or not the other forty-nine were still eligible. If Mulholland could fill his quota without recourse to the reserve basket, the six men would automatically become first on the next day's selection list. Mulholland had no one left over from the day before, as it happened; there had been some trouble filling the October 9 quota, and he had used up his reserve completely yesterday.