With the men's half at least tentatively finished, he skimmed through the fifty female names. Here, occasionally, the computer tripped up. Mulholland winnowed one name out immediately; Mrs. Mary Jensen, 31, mother of four children ages two to nine. She had as much business being in the list of eligibles as the President's grandmother. Mulholland initialed her card and buzzed for Miss Thorne again.
'Have her name pulled from the list,' he ordered crisply. 'She's got a child born in 2114.'
Fate had been kind to Mrs. Jensen. Since her husband had never been selected, her only claim to exemption was that she had a child under two. If her number had come up a month or two later, she would no longer have been entitled to that exemption. But now, because she had been called today, she would most likely never be called again. Probability was against it. Mrs. Jensen was safe, even if she had no more children.
Mulholland prepared the rest of the list. Fifty men, fifty women, with a reserve list of six men and four women. In the afternoon, the notices would go out. They would be received tomorrow morning, and by nightfall, he knew, the useless appeals would come flooding in.
None of the appeals ever reached Mulholland's office.
They were screened off by underlings, who were trained in the art of giving gentle 'nos'. Mulholland himself had held such a job until getting his promotion to the top.
He looked down the list he had compiled. A college student from Cincinnati, an office worker in San Francisco, a lawyer from Los Angeles. One girl gave her occupation as 'entertainer,' from New York.
It was a cross section. Mulholland privately felt that this was a flaw in the selection system, because very often a group was sent out without a medical man, without any kind of religious counsellor, without any expert engineer or scientist. But there was no helping it. For one thing, it would be grossly unfair to see to it that the computer picked one doctor for each hundred colonists. Generally it worked out that way, but not always.
It was a sink-or-swim proposition. Millions upon millions of stars waited in the infinite heavens. The stellar colonization was a far-sighted enterprise, and, like most farsighted enterprises, was cruel in the short run. But, centuries hence, a far-flung galaxy would shine with the worlds of man. It was the only way. Even though the ships existed to take man to the stars, only a handful of people would consider uprooting themselves to go out into the dark. If the colonization of the stars had been left on a volunteer basis, barely a dozen worlds would be settled now, instead of the thousands that already bore man's imprint. They were small colonies, to be sure, but they grew. Only a handful out of the thousands had failed to take root.
And, thought Mulholland, a week from tomorrow the starship Gegenschein would take ninety-nine conscripts and a lone volunteer to the stars. He looked through his cards: Herrick, Carol; Dawes, Michael; Haas, Philip; Matthews, David; And eight dozen others. Tonight they laughed, played, sang, loved. Tomorrow they would no longer belong to Earth. The inflexible sword of colonization would cut them loose.
Mulholland shrugged. He was making his old mistake, thinking of the conscripts as people instead of as names on green cards. That way lay crackup. He had to remember that he was only doing a job, that, if he didn't take care of it someone else would. And it was for Mankind's Destiny.
But he was weary of wielding the sword. It was less than a month till Election Day, and he prayed devoutly that his party would be turned out of office. It was no way for a loyal party hack to be thinking, but Mulholland didn't care. It would be an admission of weakness to resign. An electoral defeat would get him out of the job much more gracefully.
CHAPTER TWO
There had been rain over Ohio during the night. For once, it had been natural rain. The weather control people engineered the weather with great care during the summer, when thirsty fields cried out for rain, and in the winter, when unchecked snow might throttle civilization.
But in October the fields lay empty. There was no need for artificial rain. The rain that fell in the early hours of morning over central Ohio was God's rain, not man's, sent by the cold front sweeping southward out of Canada.
In his furnished room just off Eleventh Avenue, not very far from the university, Mike Dawes pulled the covers up over his head, retreating symbolically to the womb in hope of finding warmth and security. But it was no good. He was half awake, awake enough to realize he was awake, but still too drowsy to want to get out of bed. He could hear the pattering of the rain. It was a dark morning.
The lumo-dial of his clock read 0800 hours. He knew it was time to get out of bed. This was Wednesday, his busiest day of the academic week. At 0900 there was old Shepperd's Zoology lecture, and German at 1000 hours.
And I forgot to review those verbs, Mike Dawes thought in irritation. If Klaus calls on me, I'm sunk.
He thought about getting out of bed for a few minutes; finally, he rationed himself to sixty more seconds of warmth. Counting off a-thousand-one, a-thousand-two, he sprang out of bed faithfully on the count of a-thousand-sixty, and shivered in the bleak morning coldness.
Routine took hold of him. He stripped off his pajamas and tossed them onto the bed; he groped for a towel and his robe, found them, and made his way down the hall to the shower. He spent three minutes under the cold spray. When he returned to his room, the clock said 0813 hours. Dawes smiled. He was right on schedule. If only he hadn't forgotten about those verbs! But it was too late to fret about that. He'd have to hope for the best.
It looked as though this semester was going to be one long dreary grind, he thought as he pulled clothes from the rickety old dresser and started to climb into them.
He was twenty; this was his third year at Ohio State. If all went well, he would graduate the following year and move on to medical school for four years.
If all went well.
At 0821 hours he was ready to leave: teeth brushed, hair combed, shirt buttoned, shoelaces tied. The books he would need for his morning classes were waiting on the edge of the dresser. He would have time for some orange juice, toast, and coffee at the Student Union. The probability of a surprise Zoo quiz was too great to allow for skipping breakfast; he needed all the energy he could muster. He was skinny, in the first place, stretching one hundred and fifty pounds out for six feet and an inch.
In the second place, he liked to have breakfast.
Dawes started downstairs. It was still raining slightly, but not hard enough to be troublesome. Anyway, it was only a four-block walk from the rooming house where he lived to the Union.
First, though, came one particularly unpleasant morning ritual. He stopped downstairs in the hallway, where the mailboxes were. The mail was usually delivered at 0800 hours, and nobody in the house could relax until it had come. Dawes scanned the boxes as he came down the stairs. Yes, there was mail in his box. He could see the single letter leaning slantwise through the metal grill-work.
A letter from his parents in Cincinnati, maybe. Or a bill from the laundry. Or an announcement of some new show being performed by a campus group. The letter might be anything, anything at all. And he would have to go through this same little ritual of fear every morning for, perhaps, the next twenty years, until he was forty and no longer needed to worry.