"Well--there's a duplicate of that map Ed made yesterday from orbit
photographs of this area, about a hundred miles square. We're near the
eastern edge of that square. There's the other map he made of the
whole globe. We didn't duplicate that one. I guess that's about it."
"Knives," Wright muttered. "Knives and a few tools."
"The firearms may make a difference while they last."
"Yes, perhaps. But thirty years from now----"
"Thirty years from now," said Dorothy, still sheltering his head,
"thirty years from now our children will be grown."
"Oh." Wright groped for her fingers. "You almost wanted it like this,
didn't you? I mean, to land and not return?"
"I don't know, Doc. Maybe. I'm not sure I ever quite believed in the
possibility of return. State Orphanage children like Ann and me,
growing up in a tiny world within a big one, we weren't quite human
ever, were we? Not that the big world didn't seep in plenty." She
smiled off at private shadows of memory. "We did learn things not in
the directors' curriculum. When they started grooming Ann and me for
this--Youth Volunteers! Stuffing our little heads with the best they
had--oh, it was fun too. By that time I think I had a fair idea of the
big world. The Orphanage was pleasant, you know--clean, humanitarian,
good teachers, all of them kind and more than a bit hurried. They did
try so hard never to let me hear the word 'nigger'! Ignorance is poor
insulating material, don't you think? And why, Doc, after all that's
been known and thought and argued for the last hundred years, couldn't
they select at least one Oriental for our little trip? Wouldn't have
had to come from Jenga's empire--our own states in the Federation had
plenty of 'em--scholars, technicians, anything you care to name."
Wright had calmed. He said, "I argued for it and got told. They even
said that the spaceport rights and privileges recently given to
Jenga's empire would allow the Asiatics to build their own
ship--tacitly implying that humanity should stay in two camps world
without end. Ach! You can shove the political mind just so far, then
it stalls in its own dirt Even Jensen wasn't able to budge them."
"It's history," said Dorothy, and Paul wondered: _How does she do it?
Speaking hands and voice, enough to shove away the black sorrow even
before it fairly had hold of him--and she'd try to do it for anyone,
loved or not. She was the first (and only one) who said to me there
are some things more important than love-and she herself would be
bothered to explain that in words._ "Well," Dorothy reflected, "I
believe the Orphanage slapped too much destiny of Man on the backs of
our little necks--they're just necks. Paul, why don't you sleep
awhile? You too, Doc. Let me keep watch. I'll wake you both if
anything stirs out there. Doze off, boys."
Paul tried to, his mind restless in weary flesh. No permissible margin
of error, said the twenty-first century. But _Argo_ lay at the bottom
of a lake because of an error. Not an error like the gross errors
twenty-first century man still made in dealing with his own kind and
still noisily disregarded, but an engineering error--something
twenty-first-century man viewed with a horror once reserved, in not so
ancient times, for moral evil. The cardinal sin was to drop a decimal.
If, like Wright, or Paul himself, you were concerned with the agony
and growing pains of human nature, disturbed by the paralytic
sterility of state socialism and the worse paralysis of open tyranny,
you kept your mouth shut--or even yielded, almost unknowingly, to the
pressures that reduced ethical realities to a piddling checker game
perverting the uses of semantics. They said, "There won't be any war.
If there is, look what we've got!" If you were like the majority of
Earth's three billion, you hoped to get by with as much as the traffic
would bear and never stuck your neck out. They celebrated the turn of
the third millennium with a jolly new song: "Snuggle up, Baby--Uncle
pays the bill...." But for all that, you mustn't use the wrong bolt.
Unreasonably quiet here. A jungle evening on Earth would have been
riotous with bird and insect noises.... He slept.