A sudden change in the colors and format of one of the displays being presented around him in the monitor room of the Drive Control Subcenter caught Bernard Fallows's eye and dismissed other thoughts from his mind. The display was one of several associated with Number 5 Group of the Primary Fuel Delivery System and related to one of the batteries of enormous hydrogen-feed boost pumps located in the tail section of the vessel, five miles from where Fallows was sitting.
"What's happening on Five-E, Horace?" he asked the empty room around him.
"Low-level trend projection," the subcenter executive computer replied through a small grille set to one side of Fallow's console. "Booster five-sub-three's looking as if it's going to start running hot again. Correlation integral sixty-seven, check function positive, expansion index eight-zero."
"Reading at index six?"
"Insignificant."
Fallows took in the rest of the information from the screen. The changes that the computers had detected were tiny—the merest beginnings of a trend which, if it continued at the present rate, wouldn't approach anything serious for a month or more. With only another three months to go before the ship reached Chiron there was no cause for alarm since the rest of the pump-group had enough design margin to make up the difference even without the backup. But even so, there was little doubt that Merrick would insist on the primary's being stripped down to have its bearings reground, alignment rechecked, and rotor rebalanced again. They had been through that routine twice already in the three months that the main drive had been firing. That meant another week of working in near-zero g and klutzing around in heavy-duty protective suits on the wrong side of the stern radiation shield. "Bloody pump," Fallows muttered sourly.
"Since a pump is not an organic system, I presume the expression is an expletive," Horace observed chattily.
"Aw, shuddup." The computer returned obediently to its meditations.
Fallows sat back in his chair and cast a routine eye around the monitor room. Everything seemed to be running smoothly at the crew stations beyond the glass partition behind his console, and the other displays confirmed that all else was as it should be. The reserve tank to Number 2 vernier motor had been recharged after a slight course-correction earlier and was checking out at "Ready" again. All the fuel, coolant, primary and standby power, hydraulic, pneumatic, gas, oil, life-support, and instrumentation subsystems servicing the Drive Section were performing well within limits. Way back near the tail, the banks of gigantic fusion reactors were gobbling up the 35 million tons of hydrogen that had been magnetically ramscooped out of space throughout the twenty-year voyage and converting over two tons of its mass into energy every second to produce the awesome, 1.5-mile-diameter blast of radiation and reaction products that would have to burn for six months to slow the 140-million-ton mass of the Mayflower II down from its free-cruise velocity.
The ship had left Earth with only sufficient fuel on board to accelerate it to cruising speed and had followed a course through the higher-density concentrations of hydrogen to collect what it needed to slow down again.
Fallows glanced at the clock in the center of the console. Less than an hour before Walters was due to take over the watch. Then he would have two days to himself before coming back on duty. He closed his eyes for a moment and savored the thought.
Only three months to go! His children had often asked him why a young man in his prime would turn his back on everything familiar and exchange twenty years of his life for a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri. They had good reason, since their futures had been decided more than a little by his decision. Most of the Mayflower II's thirty thousand occupants were used to being asked that question. Fallows usually replied that he had grown disillusioned by the spectacle of the world steadily rearming itself toward the same level of insanity that had preceded the devastation of much of North America and Europe and the end of the Soviet empire in the brief holocaust of 2021, and that he had left it all behind to seek a new start somewhere else. It was one of the standard answers, given as much for self-reassurance as anything else. But in his private moments Fallows knew that he really didn't believe it. He tried to pretend that he didn't remember the real reason.
He had been born almost at the end of the Lean Years following the war, so he didn't remember about that period, but his father had told him about the times when fifty million people lived amid shantytown squalor around the blackened and twisted skeletons of their cities and huddled in lines in the snow for their ration of soup and bread at government field-kitchens; about his mother laboring fifteen hours a day cutting boards for prefabricated houses to put two skimpy meals of beef broth and rice from the Chinese food ships on the table each day and to buy one pair of utility-brand pressed-paper shoes per person every six months; about his older brother killed in the fighting with the hordes that had come plundering from the Caribbean and from the south.
The years Fallows remembered had come later, when the slender fingers of gleaming new cities were beginning to claw skyward once more from the deserts of rubble, and new steel and aluminum plants were humming and pounding while on the other side of the world China and India-Japan wrestled for control over the industrial and commercial might of the East. Those had been stirring years, vibrant years, inspiring years. Fallows remembered the floodlit parades in Washington on the Fourth of July—the color and the splendor of the massed bands, the columns of marching soldiers with uniforms glittering and flags flying, the anthems and hymns rising on the voices of tens of thousands packed into Capitol Square, where the famous building had once stood. He remembered strutting into a high-school ball in his just acquired uniform of the American New Order Youth Corps and pretending haughtily not to notice the admiring looks following him wherever he went. How he had bragged to his envious friends after the first weekend of wargaming with the Army in the New Mexico desert . . . the exhilaration when America reestablished a permanently manned base on the Moon.
Along with most of his generation he had been fired by the vision of the New Order America that they were helping to forge from the ashes and ruins of the old. Even stronger than what had gone before, morally and spiritually purer, and confident in the knowledge of its God-ordained mission, it would rise again as an impregnable sanctuary to preserve the legacy of Western culture from the corrosive flood of heathen decadence and affluent brashness sweeping across the far side of the globe. So the credo had run. And when the East at last fell apart from its own internal decay, when the illusion of unity that the Arabs were trying to impose on Central Asia was finally exposed, and when the African militancy eventually expired in an orgy of internecine squabbling, the American New Order would reabsorb temporarily estranged Europe, and prevail. That had been the quest.
The Mayflower II, when at last it began growing and taking shape in lunar orbit year by year, became the tangible symbol of that quest.
Although he had been only eight years old in 2040, he could remember clearly the excitement caused by the news that a signal had come in from a spacecraft called the Kuan-yin, which had been launched in 2020, just before the war broke out. The signal had announced that the Kuan-yin had identified a suitable planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri and was commencing its experiment. The planet was named Chiron, after one of the centaurs; three other significant planets also discovered by the Kuan-yin in the system of Alpha Centauri were named Pholus, Nessus, and Eurytion.
Ten years went by while North America and Europe completed their recovery, and the major Eastern powers settled their rivalries. At the end of that period New America extended from Alaska to Panama, Greater Europe had incorporated Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and the Ukraine as separate nations, and China had come to dominate an Eastern Asiatic Federation stretching from Pakistan to the Bering Strait. All three of the major powers had commenced programs to reexpand into space at more or less the same time, and since each claimed a legitimate interest in the colony on Chiron and mistrusted the other two, each embarked on the construction of a starship with the aim of getting there first to protect its own against interference from the others.
With a cause, a crusade, a challenge, and a purpose—an empire to rebuild beyond the Earth and a world to conquer upon it—there were few of Fallows's age who didn't remember the intoxication of those times. And with the Mayflower II growing in the lunar sky as a symbol of it all, the dream of flying with the ship and of being a part of the crusade to secure Chiron against the Infidel became for many the ultimate ambition. The lessons of discipline and self-sacrifice that had been learned during the Lean Years served to bring the Mayflower II to completion two years ahead of its nearest rival, and so it came about that Bernard Fallows at the age of twenty-eight had manfully shaken his father's hand and kissed his tearful mother farewell before being blasted upward from a shuttle base in Arizona to join the lunar transporter that would bear him on the first stage of his crusade to carry the American New Order to the stars.
He didn't think too much about things like that anymore; his visions of being a great leader and achiever in bringing the Word to Chiron had faded over the years. And instead . . . what? Now that the ship was almost there, he found he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do . . . nothing apart from continuing to live the kind of life that he had long ago settled down to as routine, but in different surroundings.
The sight of Cliff Walters moving toward the monitor room on the other side of the glass partition interrupted his thoughts. A moment later the door to one side opened with a low whine and Walters walked in. Fallows swung his chair round to face him and looked up in surprise. "Hi. You're early. Still forty minutes to go."
Walters slipped off his jacket and hung it in the closet by the door after taking a book from the inside pocket. Fallows frowned but made no comment.
"Logging on early," Walters replied. "Merrick wants to talk to you for a minute before you go off duty. He told me to tell you to stop by the BCD. You can take off now and see him on the company's time." He moved over to the console and nodded at the array of screens. "How are we doing? Lots of wild and exciting things happening?"
"Five-sub-three primary's starting to play up again, you'll be happy to hear. Low-level profile, but it's positive. We had a one-fifteen second burn on vernier two at seventeen hundred hours, which went okay. The main burn is behaving itself fine and correcting for trim as programmed. . . ." He shrugged. "That's about it."
Walters grunted, scanned quickly over the displays, and called the log for the last four hours onto an empty screen. "Looks like we're in for another stripdown on that goddamn pump," he murmured without turning his head.
"Looks like it," Fallows agreed with a sigh.
"Not worth screwing around with," Walters declared. "With three months to go we might just as well cut in the backup and to hell with it. Fix the thing after we get there, when the main drive's not running. Why lose pounds sweating in trog-suits?"
"Tell it to Merrick," Fallows said, making an effort not to show the disapproval that he felt. Talking that way betrayed a sloppy attitude toward engineering. Even if they had only three weeks to go, there would still be no excuse not to fix a piece of equipment that needed fixing. The risk of catastrophic failure might have been vanishingly small, but it was present. Good practice lay with reducing possibilities like that to zero. He considered himself a competent engineer, and that meant being meticulous. Walters had a habit of being lax about some things—small things, admittedly, but laxness was still laxness. To be ranked equally irked Fallows. "Log change of watch duty, Horace," he said to the grille on the console. "Officer Fallows standing down. Officer Walters taking over."
"Acknowledged," Horace replied.
Fallows stood up and stepped aside, and Walters eased himself into the subcenter supervisor's chair. "You're off on a forty-eight, that right?" Walters asked.
"Uh-huh."
"Any plans?"
"Not really. Jay's playing on one of the teams in the Bowl tomorrow. I'll probably go and watch that. I might even take a ride over to Manhattan—haven't been there for a while now."
"Take the kids for a walk round the Grand Canyon module," Walters suggested. "It's being resculpted again—lots of trees and rocks, with plenty of water. Should be pretty."
Fallows appeared surprised. "I thought it was closed off for another two days. Isn't the Army having an exercise in there or something?"
"They wound it up early. Anyhow, Bud told me it'll be open again tomorrow. Check it out and give it a try."
"I might just do that," Fallows said, nodding slowly. "Yeah . . . I could use being out and about for a few hours. Thanks for the tip."
"Anytime. Take care."
Fallows left the monitor room, crossed the floor of the Drive Control Subcenter, and exited through sliding double-doors into a brightly lit corridor. An elevator took him up two levels to another corridor, and minutes later he was being shown into an office that opened onto one side of the Engineering Command Deck. Inside, Leighton Merrick, the Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering, was contemplating something on one of the reference screens built into the panel angled across the left corner of the desk at which he was sitting.
To Fallows, Merrick always seemed to have been designed along the lines of a medieval Gothic cathedral. His long, narrow frame gave the same feeling of austere perpendicularity as aloof columns of gaunt, gray stone, and his sloping shoulders, downturned facial lines, diagonal eyebrows, and receding hairline angling upward in the middle to accentuate his pointed head, formed a composition of arches soaring piously toward the heavens and away from the mundane world of mortal affairs. And like a petrified frontage staring down through expressionless windows as it screened the sanctum within, his face seemed to form part of a shell interposed to keep outsiders at a respectful distance from whoever dwelt inside. Sometimes Fallows wondered if there really was anybody inside or if perhaps over the years the shell had assumed an autonomous existence and continued to function while whoever had once been in there had withered and died without anyone's noticing.
Despite having worked under him for several years, Fallows had never been able to master the art of feeling at ease in Merrick's presence. Displays of undue familiarity were hardly to be expected between echelon-six and echelon-four personnel, naturally, but even allowing for that, Fallows always found himself in acute discomfort within seconds of entering a room with Merrick in it, especially when nobody else was present. This time he wouldn't let it happen, he had resolved for the umpteenth time back in the corridor. This time he would be rational about how irrational the whole thing was and refuse to be intimidated by his own imagination. Merrick had not singled him out as any special object of his disdain. He behaved that way with everybody. It didn't mean anything.
Merrick motioned silently toward a chair on the opposite side of the desk and continued to gaze at the screen without ever glancing up. Fallows sat. After some ten seconds he began feeling uncomfortable. What had he done wrong in the last few days? Had there been something he'd forgotten? . . . or failed to report, maybe? . . . or left with loose ends dangling? He racked his brains but couldn't think of anything. Finally, unnerved, Fallow managed to stammer, "Er . . . you wanted to see me, sir."
The Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering at last sat back and descended from his loftier plane of thought. "Ah, yes, Fallows." He gestured toward the screen he had been studying. "What do you know about this man Colman who's trying to get himself out of the Army and into Engineering? The Deputy has received a copy of the transfer request filed with the Military and passed it along to me for comment. It seems that this Colman has given your name as a reference. What do you know about him?" The inclined chin and the narrowing of the Gothic eyebrows were asking silently why any self-respecting echelon-four engineering officer would associate with an infantry sergeant.
It took Fallows a moment or two to realize what had happened. Then he groaned inwardly as the circumstances came back to him.
"I, er . . . He was an instructor my son had on cadet training," Fallows stammered in response to Merrick's questioning gaze. "I met him at the end-of-course parade . . . talked to him a bit. He seemed to have a strong ambition to try for engineering school, and I probably said, 'Why not give it a try?,' or something like that. I guess maybe he remembered my name."
"Mmmm. So you don't really know anything about his experience or aptitude. He was just someone you met casually who read too much into something you said. Right?"
Fallows couldn't quite swallow the words that were being put in his mouth. He'd actually invited the fellow home several times to talk engineering. Colman had some fascinating ideas. He frowned and shook his head before he could stop himself. "Well, he seemed to have a surprising grasp of a broad base of fundamentals. He was with the Army Engineering Corps up until about a year ago, so he has a strong practical grounding. And he's studied extensively since we left Earth. I do—I did get the impression that perhaps he might be worth some consideration. But of course that's just an opinion."
"Worth considering for what? You're not saying he'd make an engineering officer, surely."
"Of course not! But one of the Tech grades maybe . . . Two or Three perhaps. Or maybe the graduate entry stream."
"Hmph." Merrick waved a hand at the screen. "Doesn't have the academics. He'd need to do at least a year with kids half his age. We're not a social rehabilitation unit, you know."
"He has successfully self-taught Eng Dip One through Five," Fallows pointed out. Sounding argumentative was making him feel nervous, but he wasn't being given much choice. "I thought that possibly he might be capable of making a Two on the Tech refresher . . ."
Merrick glared across the desk suspiciously. Evidently he wasn't getting the answers he wanted. "His Army record isn't exactly the best one could wish for, you know. Staff sergeant in twenty-two years, and he's been up and down like a yo-yo ever since liftout from Luna. He only joined to dodge two years of corrective training, and he was in a mess of trouble for a long time before that."
"Well, I—I can't pretend to know anything about that side of things, sir."
"You do now." Merrick arched his fingers in front of his face. "Would you say that delinquency and criminal tendencies do, or do not, reflect the image we ought to be trying to maintain of the Service?"
Faced with a question slanted like that, Fallows could only reply, "Well. . . no, I suppose not."
"Aha!" Merrick seemed more satisfied. "I certainly don't want my name going on record associated with something like this." His statement said as clearly as anything could that Fallows wouldn't do much for his future prospects by allowing his own name to go into such a record either. Merrick screwed his face up as if he were experiencing a sour taste. "Low-echelon rabble trying to rise above themselves. We've got to keep them in their places, you know, Fallows. That was what went wrong with the Old Order. It let them climb too high, and they took over. And what happened? They dragged it down—civilization. Do you want to see that happen again?"
"No, of course not," Fallows said, not very happily.
"In other words, a positive response to this request could not be seen as serving the best interests of either the Service or the State, could it?" Merrick concluded.
Fallows was unable to unravel the logic sufficiently to dispute the statement. Instead, he shook his head. "It doesn't sound like it, I suppose."
Merrick nodded gravely. "An officer who abets an act contrary to the best interests of the Service is being disloyal, and a citizen who acts against the interests of the State could be considered subversive, wouldn't you agree?"
"Well, that's true, but—"
"So would you want to go on record as advocating a disloyal and subversive act?" Merrick challenged.
"Definitely not. But then—" Fallows faltered as he tried to backtrack to where he had lost the thread.
"Thank you," Merrick said, pouncing on the opportunity to conclude. "I agree with and endorse your assessment. Very good, Fallows. Enjoy your leave." Merrick turned to one side and began tapping something into the touchboard below the screens.
Fallows stood awkwardly and began moving toward the door. When he was halfway there he stopped, hesitated, then turned round again. "Sir, there's just one thing I'd like—"
"That's all, Fallows," Merrick murmured without looking up. "You are dismissed."
Fallows was still brooding fifteen minutes later in the transit capsule as it sped him homeward around the Mayflower II's six-mile-diameter Ring. Merrick was right, he had decided. He had been a fool. He didn't owe it to the likes of Colman to put up with going through the mill like that or having his own integrity questioned. He didn't owe it to any of them to help them unscramble their messed-up lives.
Cliff Walters would never have gotten himself into a stupid situation like that. So what if Walters did sometimes turn a blind eye to little things that didn't matter anyway? Walters was a lot smarter when it came to the things that did matter. So much for Fallows, the smartass kid shuttling up from Arizona to save the universe, who still hadn't learned how to keep his nose clean. Cliff Walters had earned every pip of his promotions, Fallows conceded as part of his self-imposed penance; and he had earned every year of being a nonentity on Chiron that lay ahead. Someday, maybe, he'd learn to listen to Jean.