"We've all got to be at work in seven hours," I said, "if we expect to
get through before the end of the afternoon. What say we turn in?"
"You stay here with us, Bet," said Lucy. "You parked your copter in our
port, didn't you? Frank, I think we need a drink."
I pushed the buttons. Nobody said anything, but somehow it was a toast
to Hal. I know the liquor had to get past a lump in my throat and the
women were both crying. It wasn't like my self-contained Lucy. I guess
she thought so herself, for she braced herself. But her voice was still
trembling when she turned to Bet.
"A year from now," she said, "we'll all be back here in this room and,
this time, part of Hal will be here with us--his son, our little Hal."
"It might be our little Hallie." Bet smiled through her tears. "It will
be ten weeks before I can run the Schuster test to find out."
"It won't make any difference. Hal will never know that, but he'll know,
way out there on Lydna, that his baby has been born. He'll know, even
though he can never see it--or us."
* * * * *
Lucy blinked, then went on bravely. "Every time he looks in a mirror
there, he'll say to himself, 'Well, back on Earth, there's a little tyke
with my blue eyes and my curly hair and my mouth and nose and chin,
who's going to grow up to be tall and straight like me--or maybe like
Bet, but also a lot like me.'
"And as he grows older, he can think back to the way he was as a child
and a boy and a man, and know that his son, or his daughter, will be
feeling and thinking and looking some day just about the way he himself
is then, and it will be a link with Earth and with us--"
That was when I had to go to the window and look out for a long time to
pull myself together before I could face them again.
Lydna is top-top secret, but as I've said before, we newsgatherers get
inside information.
I have a pretty shrewd idea of what the mysterious Lydna Project is.
It's to alter human beings so they can adapt to the colonization of
outer space.
The medics do things to them to enable them and their descendants to
resist every possible condition of temperature and radiation and
gravity. They have to alter the genes--acquired characters would be of
use only in a short-term project, and this is long-term. But you can't
alter genes without affecting the individual.
We'd have Hal's normal child.
But when Hal got to Lydna, he and the rest of them would be shocked and
sick for a while at sight of some of the inhabitants. And if he had any
children on Lydna, we, back here, would scarcely recognize them as
human. Some of them might have extra limbs. Some might have eyes and
ears in odd places. Some might have lungs outside their bodies, or
brains without a skull.
By that time, Hal himself would have got over being sick--unless, some
time, he got hold of a mirror and remembered the boy he used to be.