Worlds Apart (5 page)

They were selected, trained, tested, crammed each with the essence of some branch of knowledge, conditioned, toughened, taken to pieces and put together again. Lionel Smith had been packed with all the biology he could take and told to get the rest from the microfilm library. Bentley had had physics hammered into him by the cubic foot. Will Hunter had been made a reasonable facsimile of a medical doctor and told to get the experience he needed where and when he could. Unfortunatdy he had died while he was still getting it.

It was almost true to say that no one knew less about Project Survival than the adolescents who were detailed to survive. From the moment they were chosen, their last few months on Earth were such a whirl of conditioning of one kind or another that not one of the two hundred of them had ever been able to sort it out completely.

"We should have had kids on the way," Robertson declared.

Mary sighed. "Yes, on the basis of what we know now."

"Nonsense," said Boyne, indignation making him brave Robertson's wrath. "Free fall -- complete absence of gravity -- it would have been cruel -- "

"The animals did it," Robertson snapped.

"Animals are often cruel," Bentley observed. "Anyway, they didn't know that their offspring reared in weightlessness would have to learn painfully and possibly unsuccessfully to cope with gravity later. We did."

Robertson repeated: "We should have had children."

"/I/ wasn't going to have any children for whom there might have been no future," Jessie remarked. "Quiet, everybody. We're going round in circles on an old, dead question. Mary's right. On the basis of what we know now, we'd have had children and the Gap would only have been half what it is. But we didn't know. We waited until we saw Mundis and knew we could live on it and then said, 'Right, we'll have children.' That was reasonable and humane and many years ago, so let's hear no more about it."

Jessie was motherly and kindly, but when she spoke like that she was quite forceful and people were liable to pay attention to what she said.

"The fact is," she went on more quietly, "that when the first child was born here on Mundis his parents were thirty-three, and everyone else was thirty-three.

"There was always a certain amount of friction between youth and age, and they were never as sharply divided as this before. But that's old stuff. Let's -- "

"Excuse me, Jessie," said Mary firmly. "It may be old stuff, but it's as relevant now as at any time since the landing. More. This friction, as you call it, was hardly noticeable five years ago, when the children were still children. It's grown every week since then. What's the situation going to be in five years?"

Brad Hulton was slow and even-tempered and steady, like many big men. "I can't see that this is a vital problem," he said. "Suppose we don't always agree with our kids? Suppose it's due to that thirty-three year Gap of understanding? Soon we'll all be dead and the kids will have their own way anyway and there won't be any Gap any more."

What he said was undoubtedly true, but no one else was inclined to be so philosophical about it.

"I want to take up what Mary's been saying," said Jim Bentley. "Truth is, friends, we made mistakes. Maybe they weren't our fault -- maybe they were the fault of people who sent out youngsters with hardly any experience of life to build a new world. But anyway, we made them. What's our general line about them going to be? Are we going to say to the young folk now 'All right, we were wrong, let's do it your way,' or are we going to insist to the death that black is white and we were never wrong and we couldn't possibly be wrong if we tried?"

This was plain speaking, too plain for Robertson and Boyne. Robertson went white with rage. He was angry at everything, but angriest at any suggestion or hint that he could possibly have been wrong, ever. Boyne took Bentley's observations quite differently. Against such stupidity, such failure to see the obvious, what could one do? Clearly all that was wrong in the community was the absence of Faith. Sooner or later everyone would turn to God and there would be a new heaven on Mundis,

"Well, you know," said Brad easily, "granting you're right, Jim, I don't see how we can take everything back and start all over again."

"No," Mary agreed. "In theory it sounds very nice to admit one is wrong . . . "

"But in practice," Jessie took it up, "One finds that the opposition, which is cocky anyway, gets even cockier, thinks it knows everything, takes control, and proceeds to make far worse mistakes."

"That's all beside the point," Robertson said furiously. "If the youngsters don't realize how little they know, we'll have to show them. We haven't lived all these years longer for nothing. One of us is still worth any two of them. They need a lesson -- "

"The first Mundan war?" inquired Brad gently.

"Oh, no war," said Boyne hastily. "Don't even speak of it. Nothing like that can ever happen again. Everything will come out for the best, so long as we have trust and faith and follow . . . "

"That's just the trouble," complained Bentley. "We expect our kids to share our horror of things we won't tell them about. We ask for blind trust, and insist it must be blind. The other day Dick Smith was talking about atomic energy . . . "

He had to wait for Jessie to shush Robertson and Boyne. Robertson wanted Dick Smith haled before the Council right away and put on trial for offense against the Constitution. Boyne was saying something about anti-Christ.

Bentley caught Jessie's eye. They would get on much better without Robertson and Boyne; but the trouble was, Robertsen and Boyne were just as representative as Bentley himself or Brad. They reacted as a large group of their contemporaries in the Council would react.

"And why shouldn't Dick talk about atomic energy?" Bentley went on, when he could. "Because he'd been told not to. Reasons? Because we'd seen cities destroyed, first in war and then in peace, by atomic power. What's that to Dick? What is a city? What is destruction? What is power? What is war?"

"So what do we do?" asked Brad. "Have a small-scale atomic war here so that they'll know what it's like?"

"We must at least /tell/ them," said Bentley. "I'm asking permission of the Inner Council to tell Dick what I think I ought to tell him."

"In open defiance of the Constitution!" exclaimed Robertson.

"Not defiance. Not when I ask for permission."

Jessie frowned. "You're not going to give him a lot of clues he can use to work out the fundamentals of nuclear fission, are you?" she asked.

"It's a pity," said Bentley patiently, "that we weren't all nuclear physicists. Then we might know what we were talking about. I told Dick, truthfully, that if we all changed our minds and went all out for atomic energy, pooling all our knowledge instead of suppressing it, nobody alive today would be alive when it was accomplished. Clues don't matter -- they're there already, and Dick has the brains to have seen them. The curious reticence in the microfilm about some substances and processes and lines of research, for example. I hate atomic energy, and everything connected with it. You can trust me to say nothing to Dick that will make the rediscovery of atomics any easier, and quite a lot that may make him less inclined to rediscover it."

"That shouldn't be necessary," rapped Robertson. "They should have the sense to see that anything we forbid is forbidden for their own good."

Bentley sighed. He was only a little less equable than Brad. But he had come as near as he ever did to losing his temper. "If it ever comes to open dissension between the young people and us," he said, "they'll win. Because, as a group, they have more sense than we have."

Robertson was on his feet, raging. "Is that a personal insult to me?" he demanded.

"Well, if when stupidity is mentioned, you take it as a personal insult," observed Bentley, "it probably is."

That was the end of that meeting.

2

Rog had two rooms tacked on to the end of his father's house. There was no way from one part of the building to the other -- old Bob Foley had walled it up.

June was in one of the rooms, sewing. Rog gently prodded the door shut before he turned to Toni.

"Do you want the whole story, Toni?" he asked. "Or will you have it in a nutshell?"

Toni leaned back and tensed sundry muscles. She wasn't making any conscious effort to be seductive; she couldn't help it. "Something between the two," she suggested. "I want to know what's behind this, whatever it is. You said it was something wild enough for me, that I might do but no one else."

"That's it. You like John Pertwee, don't you?"

She grinned. "What girl doesn't? A few men have that -- something. Other men make dirty cracks about it because they're jealous. They pretend it's all physical, that the man who has it is just sort of prize bull. But they don't know . . . Yes, I like John. I always did. So?"

"So why not marry him?"

Toni wasn't a genius, but her intelligence was quick. "You're crazy," she said instantly, but kept her eyes on Rog, waiting for him to prove he wasn't.

"No. I think Pertwee's the man you've been looking for all your life. Only you wouldn't took there because of a silly law."

"Maybe -- but how do you get round the fact that I can't possibly marry him? Do you search for all the impossible things, Rog, and try to make people do them?"

"Yes, if there's any purpose in it. There is in this. Toni, you know we're fighting the Constitution. It's wrong, and we want to change it. By 'we' I mean, broadly, all our generation, and particularly those who occasionally think. That includes you."

"Thanks. I'm with you, moderately. But why not just wait a few years till we can vote the changes?"

"Three quarters majority? That's the Constitution, you know."

"Well, a few more years."

"Why not wait until we're all dead and then we don't have to bother doing anything at all? No, Toni, I don't undervalue patience. Sometimes it's essential. But if a thing is wrong, /now/ is always the time to change it. Like the three quarters majority. That was all right for the founders, all the same age, with the same experience, with the same goals. Now it has to go. As things are, it just stops all change, all progress . . . "

June tooked in. "Can I come in?" she asked, looking uncertainly at Toni.

"Sure thing," said Toni, with her friendly grin. June had Rog, whom Toni had wanted, but Toni had never acquired the habit of bearing malice.

However, June was looking at Rog. He considered the matter carefully. "No, June," he said at last. "Better not."

The door closed quietly.

"I grant the point about the three quarters majority," said Toni. "What else?"

"The mating prohibitions. They were for the early days, or if for some reason breeding was slow or insecure. But the original two hundred are eight hundred plus now. Groups don't matter a damn. Anyone should be able to marry anyone, barring blood relations."

Toni nodded. "Fred and Alice," she said.

"And you and Pertwee."

"Oh, but that's fantastic. I mean -- "

"List the things that are fantastic about it, one at a time."

"He's fifty-four and I'm twenty-one."

"How long have any of your marriages so far lasted? A year or so. Pertwee won't be noticeably decayed a year from now."

Toni grinned. "I don't agree you've answered that, but we'll pass it meantime. Because I'm inclined to pass it, I suppose. Point two -- it's illegal. It can't be marriage."

"I hope to arrange that, by having you bring up the matter. Like the three quarters majority and the other class of prohibition."

"Item three -- suppose Pertwee has a point of view on this?"

"I'd trust you to change it, if it needs to be changed."

"Point four -- would we have to leave Lemon?"

"For a month. Give me a month at least and I'll guarantee that when you come back there will be no action taken against you."

"Point five -- do you think I'd make up my mind on this just on the spur of the moment?"

"You might. But anyway, you can think about it, now I've told you."

"Oh, I'll think about it -- you cunning devil. You know I've always been half in love with John, and this is the sort of thing I'm just crazy enough to do. Not because you want it -- I don't give a damn about your plans, really, Rog. But just because . . . "

"Because," said Rog agreeably.

When Toni had gone he pondered for a while and then remembered June. He went in to her at once.

"I hope you don't mind, honey," he said. "It was just something it's better for you not to know."

"Oh, no," said June expressionlessly, "I didn't mind at all."

Rog was balancing the points. He couldn't topple the Constitution on the atomic-energy negation -- for one thing, no one in his party knew whether atomic energy would be desirable or not, given all the data. But he could use the flat, unreasonable "no" to loosen up the founder colonists for a defeat on the majority-vote question and a rout on the marriage prohibitions. Then . . .

Briefly he considered doing something about June. He decided, however, to continue the interesting balancing of possibilities instead. June was always around; destiny wasn't always as malleable as it was now.

3

John Pertwee sat in the garden as the shadows grew deeper, waiting and reviewing his responsibilities. Kate and Frank were married; there was no need to consider them. Ruby was sixteen and competent. She could, if necessary, look after Jack and Norman. They were in the house at his back, presumably asleep.

No, he need consider no one but himself.

For all the early years, the hard years, Pertwee had been the President of the Council. He had presided at the very meeting at which it had been agreed that thirty-three years was too great a Gap to be crossed by man and woman -- that for strongest breeding, to ensure that no healthy young person should be tied to a man or woman becoming sterile, and for various other reasons, no marriage be allowed between founder colonist and native Mundan.

Then, Marjory had been alive. Marjory was cool and clever and beautiful, and he loved her. Besides, when that was agreed, he was surrounded by scores of attractive young women, and it was hard to visualize the possibility of mating eventually with what was then a female child just out of the womb.