Alpha 4, page 21
“I do. We are going to evacuate some people to the Moon. We still have the old commercial ships, as well as military vehicles, and we’ve been maintaining the bases, mostly because the Soviets have been maintaining theirs. Of course there’s no hope of mankind’s thriving on the Moon, but it’s at least a tenable way-station until we can organize a further jump to Mars, which we just might make livable.”
“And what about the Soviets themselves?”
“They’ll just have to think of the idea for themselves,” the Secretary said. “We certainly aren’t going to propose it to them. Personally, I’d a lot rather outnumber them when it’s all over; lunar bases are terribly vulnerable.”
“Hmm. How are you going to choose our people?”
“Partly by need, partly at random. We want people of proven ability and necessary skills; but we also want to minimize genetic drift, which I’m told will be a real danger in so small a population. Myself, I’m not even sure what it is. So we’re picking out a small group of technicians and known leaders, and we’re issuing each of them ten tickets, which they can hand out to anyone they please.”
“Without restrictions?”
“There are several restrictions. Secrecy is one, though of course we know we can’t maintain it for long. Another is baggage: twenty pounds per person, which has to pack into five cubic feet. But the most important one is that in every group of ten there must be six women. Under the circumstances, men are almost unimportant. If they weren’t our main repository of technology, and of creative energy—and of course there’s the high possibility of accident—we’d make the ratio nine to one, and still think it too high.”
“No children, I suppose?”
“No children. We want skills plus genes. And potency. We’ll generate children later, when we’re sure we can take care of them. We can’t ship them. So if any of your friends want to give up their seats for bairns, you will have to tell them No.”
“I can see myself doing that,” Alex said.
“I hope you can. I’m sorry, Alex. It’s ghastly, to be sure. But it’s the way it’s going to have to go.”
An easy policy for an obvious homosexual like de Tohil Vaca to adapt to—or a childless man like Alex. But de Tohil Vaca was not going to have to tell anybody No; he had passed that obligation on. To, among other people, Alex.
“The system distributes the moral problem nicely, too,” Alex said bitterly. “Every man a god to his friends.”
“Would you rather have the Administration choose everybody?”
The answer to that was obvious. “What about livestock?”
“Oh, these vessels will be arks—animals, seeds, everything. Why? Have you got pets?”
“Two cats.”
“We’re taking ten. If your cats are of opposite sexes and haven’t been altered, I’ll issue you a ticket for your two; you’re the first to ask, and with cats we don’t care about breeds—they all reduce to alley cats in one crossing anyhow. Naturally they’ll have to pass a medical exam, and so will your friends. These tickets, by the way, are being issued by commercial agencies with no connection—no visible connection—to the government. That cover won’t last long, so don’t fail to apply for yours instanter.”
“I won’t. But there must be a price for all this. There always is.”
“My dear fellow,” de Tohil Vaca said, “I told you we valued you. I do hope you’ll call off the strike, as an obvious and complete irrelevancy now; just help us keep the garbage down to a dull roar until we get the ships off, and don’t, if you’ll pardon me the pun, rock the boat. No other price, except for the tickets, which are the same price the old space-lines used to sell them for to the Moon: a thousand dollars—ostensibly, round trip. That’s a part of the cover.”
“I see. Well, many thanks.” Alex arose, hardly seeing his surroundings. The audio system was still playing that damned tune, which he had always hated. At the door, he turned and looked back.
“Mr. Secretary—you’re going, of course.”
“No, I am not,” de Tohil Vaca said, his pleasantly vapid face suddenly turning to stone. “I am the man who failed to prevent this horror, as I was charged by my office to do. My presence on the Moon would dissolve the last chance of man in the bitterest kind of political strife. Under no circumstances would I introduce such a serpent into this rock garden.” Then, suddenly, he smiled. “Besides, I want to see the end. When Ragnarok comes, there ought to be somebody on the spot who is capable of appreciating the spectacle.”
When the door closed behind Alex, he felt, aside from all his other burdens, somewhat less than three inches high.
On the way back to his own office, Alex found himself wondering how Fan would take it. He had almost automatically decided that Fan would have to be one of “his” three men. There was nobody of his own sex that Alex loved better, and besides, the man was omni-competent—almost as much so as he made himself out to be. (Hmm... John Hillary, Alex’s assistant, had better go, too. He was an expert on pressure systems, a good electronicist on the side, easy to get along with, and a vigorous forty ae.)
There was more than a little irony in Fan’s being an obligatory survivor. He had lived an astonishingly full life, starting from the utmost poverty, leaving home at fourteen without a penny in his pocket, turning all kinds of odd jobs in a world where such jobs hardly existed any more, devouring the public library in every town he visited, eventually becoming a highly successful journalist until he got bored with the hours the job required him to keep, cranking out small but socially useful inventions at odd moments, and enjoying himself hugely every step of the way. The lives of most men, even when looked back at from the vantage point of half a century, by comparison resembled nothing so much as the slow growth of a forgotten turnip. Anything Fan accomplished from here on out would have to be regarded as a bonus.
And there was another side to the matter which might be even more important. Though Alex was nobody’s adventurer, he had once faced death himself, but in retrospect it now seemed to have been very nearly a false alarm—an undifferentiated tumor of the mastoid process, of the same general class that struck many people these days, which had scared hell out of everybody concerned... and then turned out to be as easily operable as a hangnail, or almost.
Fan’s experience had been quite different: he had been attacked by a mutated leukemia virus which had nearly cleaned out his bone marrow as thoroughly as if it had been sucked by a dog, leaving him virtually without any of the tissues necessary for generating blood cells. This had been followed, with utter inevitability, by a whole series of secondary infections for which it had been impossible to give him antibiotics—or, for that matter, even aspirin—because his natural immunity to any such foreign substances had been knocked out as well. And there was no treatment for the virus itself.
That siege had frightened nobody, for there was no doubt whatsoever that Fan was going to die. Fan’s response was simply, “No thank you; not yet.”
And so he hadn’t. There was no explanation for that but Fan’s own, which was preposterous: he claimed that he had directed his remaining blood-forming tissues to regenerate and get busy making antibodies against the virus, on pain of his extreme displeasure, and so of course they had. If you did not believe this analysis, Fan politely invited you to come up with one of your own.
It had become a moderately famous case history, and there were a good many medical research people who yearned for a few drops of Fan’s blood to analyze for the antibodies. They had to go right on yearning, for any fooling around with Fan’s blood was verboten. For nearly a year after his recovery, his attending physician had almost literally hovered over him night and day, waiting to slap a patch on him if he so much as cut himself shaving, until Fan tired of that too and told him to get out and go treat somebody who was sick, for God’s sake.
That had all happened some years ago, but as a result Alex knew that few people in the world were as well equipped by temperament and by intelligence as Fan was to face the coming slaughter. If it had turned out that he had to stay behind, he would have watched the process with grave interest, and very likely some aesthetic pleasure. Rather like de Tohil Vaca, Alex thought; except that he had more confidence in Fan’s ability to maintain his detachment to the end.
Maybe Fan ought to be left off the ship and asked to command the rock-tides to turn back. He would enjoy it so hugely if they did.
Now, who else? Juli, certainly; he would exercise that choice only because he had been given the power to do so and for no other reason, like an attorney’s privilege for arbitrary challenge of a juror after all his challenges-for-cause had been used up. But the women were not the heart of the problem yet, for even with Juli ruled in, he had five more he could choose.
But since Fan had to go, and Hillary, he was left with only one more man. And very few of his male friends, he realized grimly, were really good for anything but amusing him... or, to put the matter more bluntly, flattering him and eating on his credit. Merlyn could be ruled out at once; he had no talents whatsoever, not even little ones, and besides had a vicious streak which would be dangerous in a small community. Grindford was a somewhat pleasanter person, with a demonstrated talent for survival; but what else could he do besides duck when he saw the egg approaching the fan? Not a damn thing, except brag about how irresistible he was to women. Even if the brags were true, which Alex gravely doubted, a great seducer would be nothing but a living fossil on the Moon, under the conditions de Tohil Vaca had specified.
Those two eliminations were easy, but from there on out the pain set in. All of the remaining men in the luncheon circle were creative in some slight degree—apparently equally slight, and all utterly negligible, until you examined them each on their merits under the new situation. Take Bang Jøhnsund, for instance: who on the Moon could use a talent for writing the most moronic and endless kind of 3V serial? The answer might well be, everybody; surely, under such confined and near-hopeless conditions, a talent for taking people’s minds off their troubles might turn out to be of tremendous value. Much of the same kind of value might inhere in Polar Pons; he entertained people, no, more, he told them things about their world that they needed to know in such a way that they thought they were being entertained while in fact they were learning. The fact that he had to simplify the information he imparted so well beyond the point of caricature—without knowing that he was doing so—counted against him, but he might shape up under pressure; almost everyone did.
Goldfarb Z and Tighe were only superficially easier cases. To be sure, the subject of Goldfarb Z’s Cantos was unknown to everyone, including himself, since he had sworn not to develop the invisible ink he had been writing it in until he had finished the work. After that, he would read it, and probably change the title in the light of what he found; the present title was only a sort of running head or slug. But he was a poet, with a fair record of production behind him before he had undertaken the completely hermetic opus. The same could be said of Will Emshredder, though he worked in multimedia and thus—if one could judge by Goldfarb Z’s working title—was of a completely opposite school. Obviously the lunar colony could not afford to be without a poet, but did Alex have to choose between schools as well, or was it only the genes for creativity that mattered? And Tighe was a scholar, and there again a propensity for scholarship might be more important than the fact that Tighe’s particular field of study had no social utility on Earth even now, and would completely cease to exist on the Moon.
Although he had never given the matter any thought before, Alex had the feeling that poets were scarce commodities, whereas almost any other ten-man cadre might come up—literally—with a scholar. Which poet, then? Goldfarb Z, though gregarious, was also a man of almost impenetrable reserve; but even after all these years, Alex could not say he knew Emshredder any better, because the man was almost fumblingly inarticulate except when he was in front of his consoles. He thought he did not know which of the two he liked better, which was some small advantage, in that it made for at least a little impartiality. And sheerly on instinct, he felt that Will Emshredder had the larger talent. Very well; he should be the third man.
And promptly upon this decision, Alex found out what he had never known before: that it was in fact Goldfarb Z whom he liked better. It was astonishing how acutely painful the discovery was.
The pain became worse when he came to consider the women. Rosasharn had a limited talent—how limited, he had no way of assessing—but she was somewhat beyond her childbearing years, and decidedly ugly to boot; taking her along would be a betrayal of one of the essential premises of the escape, if Alex had understood de Tohil Vaca on that point. By the same token, Girlie Stonacher was young, pretty, promiscuous and provenly fertile; she would fit into the proposed colonial society like a key into a slot, and furthermore enjoy it hugely. Count her in. The same terms, with some minor reservations as to what era one was thinking about, had been said—Alex did not know with how much truth—of Irene Pons; but how, how, how could he give Irene a ticket and refuse one to Polar? And would Irene go without him? And if she did, would she not feel the guilt of her husband’s death all the rest of her life, regardless of the fact that it would be in no way her fault, and hate Alex for forcing the choice upon her?
Worse was to come. He realized that he had been assuming all along that Fan’s wife Gradus would also be among the Chosen, not specifically because she was Fan’s wife but because she was the quickest intelligence among all the women, as well as being the most beautiful. But in both these departments, Goldfarb Y was not far behind and should surely be included; and the one emotion Goldfarb Z had ever shown in public was a passionate devotion to her. Alex was therefore in the position of having to part them forever, while at the same time arbitrarily taking along his own Juli, who, though pretty and sweet and good in bed, had a brain about the size of a truffle, and no talent he had ever been able to discover.
This was a more painful case than that of Polar and Irene Pons—not to them, but to Alex. The numbers simply and inexorably ruled Polar out; Alex was entitled to only one man out of the group, and he was morally certain that, having included one administrator and one engineer, that third man should be a poet. But suddenly he thought he saw a way out. It was genes that counted, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? And Will Emshredder had a daughter....
Slowly, feeling as though he were dividing his own soul in two, he drew a line through Will Emshredder’s name and wrote down that of Goldfarb Z.
It had never occurred to him before that the reason God demands love of everyone is that He must feel overwhelmingly guilty.
The basement warehouse was huge, but there were not many echoes in it; the Chosen were very subdued about their baggage-checking. Juli examined her two cartons for the umpteenth time. Twenty pounds and five cubic feet had not turned out to be much, and in the end, she had decided on taking almost nothing but keepsakes—and, of course, Splat! and Hausmaus, currently crouched in a carrier on the labeling table, from which occasionally issued low, hoarse cat-howls of protest. Presumably Alex’s cartons, which had already gone out, had been more practical.
Of course her cartons were not all keepsakes, really. She had also put together the best approximation she could think of to a survival kit, consisting of small tools, a medicine chest, blankets, and a few other such items, including a nest of plastic containers—no matter where a woman went, she would find some use for those. She hoped the teddy bear wouldn’t be discovered; it probably wouldn’t show up on the fluoroscope, except for its eyes, and there were several dozen other buttons, all loose, in that box. She knew the stuffed animal had no business being in there at all, but it had been the only toy she had ever had.
Well, if she had forgotten anything important, it was too late to include it now. Reluctantly she shoved the cartons onto the moving belt, which would carry them to the blimp for Rockland Spaceport. The cats ought to go now, too, but suddenly, seeing nobody else around her that she knew, she decided not to part with them just yet.
Where, above all, was Alex? Juli already had her reservation, but Alex had to confirm his own, and it was getting close to the time for the helicopter shuttle for today’s flight (only the baggage went by blimp), on which they were both booked. He and the other eight people he had chosen, not without much agony, had been holding some kind of farewell party to the Earth, which she had chosen not to attend as likely to be entirely too painful. Had they all gotten drunk and lost track of the time?
She did not dare to go looking for him; suppose he should show up at the last minute and find her gone? But time passed on the big warehouse clock, and passed, and passed....
The elevator doors to the shuttle closed for the last time today. The endless belt stopped moving. There was nobody human left in the warehouse but herself.
They had missed the flight.
Halfway between panic and fury, she picked up the cat carrier, the contents of which had fallen asleep but now resumed its moans and squalls of despair, and marched off to a telephone booth, where she phoned, first of all, the ticket agent. For more than half an hour she got nothing but a recording telling her all the lines were busy, which she had fully expected. The secret was not yet out, at last reports, but all the same that office must be a madhouse; just the rumor (there had been no announcement) that commercial lunar flights were being resumed had generated a tidal wave of would-be tourists.
At last, she got through to a clerk. No. Dr. Stewart had not picked up his reservation. No, neither had Mr. ad Parnassum. Neither had any of the others.
Next, by citing the code formula which stood for (though the clerk did not know this) the real intent of the exodus, she reached the agent himself and made her plea.
