'Here. I just got this. I've been selected. Where do I go?'
'I'll take you to the director.'
The director was a blank-faced man in his fifties who turned on a smile when Cherry entered. She said at once, 'I'm Cherry Thomas. I just got selected.'
'Won't you have a seat? I'm Mr. Stewart. I realize this day is an unhappy one for you, but may I assure you—'
She cut him off. 'Look, Mr. Stewart, I want you to do me a favor. I don't mind getting selected, I suppose. But I want you to send me to the same planet where they sent Dan Cirillo in 2114.1 don't know the name of the planet, but you ought to be able to look it up somewhere, and—•'
Mr. Stewart's blank moon-face was furrowed by a frown. 'You don't seem to understand, Miss Thomas.
You're not being sent to a planet that's already been colonized. You'll be going to a completely untamed world, a virgin planet.'
'But I want to be near Dan 1 Listen, he was everything to me, we were practically getting married, and then you came along and selected him. So he went out there. Well, now it's my turn, and I want to go to him! Can't you see how important it is? Damn it, don't you have any heart?'
Mr. Stewart shrugged gently. 'I'm afraid it's utterly impossible for you to follow him now. For one thing, don't you see that he's been married up there for two years?'
'Dan - married?' Cherry shook her head. Stupid of me not to think of that! Of course, when they send you up there you have to be coupled off! Slowly her fluttering nervous system calmed. 'I - hadn't figured on that,' she said in a soft voice. 'Sure. He got married up there.' She felt a lump sprouting at the base of her throat.
Mr. Stewart leaned forward, smiling now. 'So you see, we couldn't send you to him. Not now.'
'But I could have gone two years ago! All I had to do was come here and say the word, and you would have sent me! And I'd be up there with him now! I'd be his wife!' Her voice reached a pitch of near hysteria. She burst into sudden tears and put her head in her hands.
The peak of emotion passed in a moment or two. When she looked up, she saw Mr. Stewart watching her calmly, as if he went through this sort of thing every day.
'So I'm going to some other planet?' she asked quietly.
'Which one?'
'Only the higher authorities know that, Miss Thomas.
Does it really matter?'
'No - no, I suppose it doesn't.'
He fussed uncomfortably with papers on his desk. 'I've sent for your records, but it'll take a little while. You didn't register at this office.'
'I registered in Philadelphia,' she said. 'Six years ago.'
It seemed an eternity. And now, at last, her number had come up. In her mind's eye she pictured the Cherry Thomas of 2110, timidly filling out the registry form.
Just a scared kid of nineteen, then. A lot had happened in six years.
Mr. Stewart said, 'I take it you're not currently married, Miss Thomas?'
'No, I was - a couple of years ago. Not now.'
'I see. And - and there isn't anyone who might possibly care to volunteer to accompany you?'
Cherry thought down the list of the men she knew.
No, none of them had the stuff of a volunteer in them.
She shook her head silently.
'May I ask your profession?' Mr. Stewart said.
'I'm - an entertainer.'
'That's a very general category. Would you care to be more specific?'
'Right now I'm sort of unemployed. I was supposed to get a tryout for a job this afternoon, but I guess that's out now. I've been a night-club singer, a dancer, and a couple of other things.'
She smiled ironically. Ever since they had taken Dan away, she had started every day by cursing selection and the men who ran it. But now that she herself was meshed in the net, she saw that selection was the thing she had waited for without knowing. It offered escape - escape from the harsh tinsel world she lived in, escape from the jeering booking agents who grudgingly paid her price now and who in a few years would bargain and haggle with her, escape from the inclosing wall of loneliness and fear.
A new world; a husband; children.
Her eyes felt misty with unaccustomed moisture.
'Look,' she said. 'I ain't appealing. You see they don't turn me down, hear?'
CHAPTER FOUR
People generally stepped to one side when they saw Ky Noonan coming toward them down the street. It was not only on account of his size; there are big men whose very size serves only to emphasize their essential innocuousness. But about Noonan there was that intangible air of authority, of quiet self-confidence, that silently admonished other people: Better watch out and get out of my way. Ky Noonan is coming through!
At thirty, he was just ripening into his physical prime.
He was flamboyantly big, six feet four, a two hundred pounder who carried no fat. His jet-black hair swept backward in an untamed but somehow orderly mass that added seeming inches to his already impressive height.
He had a voice to match his height, a heavy growling rumble that could be heard blocks away when he troubled to project it. His shoulders were broad, his legs long and sturdy, his skin tanned until it looked like fine cordovan or expensive morocco leather.
He had come to an important decision today. The decision had been a couple of years in the bud, years that he had spent hauling freight in Jamaica and policing the troubled frontier of South Africa. His police term had expired more than a month ago, and he had not put in an application for re-enlistment. He was restless on Earth.
He had matured early, left an unmourned home at fourteen, held a hundred jobs in twenty countries since then.
Earth hemmed him in. The prison of the blue sky irked him. He wanted to leave.
They had let him have a tour of duty under the Venus dome in am, but that was not what he wanted, either.
No place in the solar system suited him. In the system, a man either lived on Earth or he lived under a dome.
Venus, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Pluto - six human settlements, plus one on Luna. But man was bound there, bound by the glimmering wall of duroplast that held away the encroaching poison from outside. He had spent his year on Venus gloweringly performing routine activities under the dome, while staring with undisguised anger at the red and green and blue and violet world outside, the world of formaldehyde and foul gases and weird waxen plants, the world where no man dared go without a breathing-suit and full shielding.
He did not need to visit the other solar system settlements to know that it would be the same. On Mars you looked out on dead red desert; on Ganymede you squinted past eye-searing white fields of snow to the giant unapproachable glory of Jupiter swelling in the sky. What good was it if, bound as you were to the need for oxygen and water, you left Earth only to be penned beneath a plastic dome?
No. The only world of the solar system that allowed a man to range freely over its surface unencumbered by apparatus for survival was Earth, and Earth no longer held any fascination for Ky Noonan. He longed for the stars.
Like everyone else, he registered for selection when he turned nineteen. At nineteen he was belligerent, bellicose, loudly warning the terrified technicians that they had better find him ineligible for selection, or else. But they had ignored his threats and passed him as being fit and fertile, and for a day or two he had stormed and raged at the intolerable invasion of his private rights that selection constituted.
And now he stood on a dingy, deteriorated street in old Baltimore on a mild October afternoon, outside an office on whose door was inscribed in golden letters, Colonization Bureau, District One. Local Board of Registry #212. A few simple words and he would place his private rights forever out of his own reach.