[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There wasn't a single mistake in the plan for
survival--and that was the biggest mistake!
For centuries, the rains swept eight million daily tons of land into
the sea. Mountains slowly crumpled to ocean floors. Summits rose again
to see new civilizations heaped upon fossils of the old.
It was the way of the Earth and men knew it and did not worry. The end
was always in the future. Ever since men first learned to make marks on
cave walls, the end remained in the future.
Then the future came. The records told men how the Sun was before, so
they knew it was swollen now. They knew the heat was not always this
hot, or the glacier waters so fast, the seas so high.
They adapted--they grew tanner and moved farther pole-ward.
When the steam finally rose over equatorial waters, they moved to the
last planet, Pluto, and their descendants lived and died and came to
know the same heat and red skies. Finally there came the day when they
couldn't adapt--not, at least, in the usual way.
But they had the knowledge of all the great civilizations on Earth, so
they built the last spaceship.
They built it very slowly and carefully. Their will to live became
the will to leave this final, perfect monument. It took a hundred and
fifty years and during all that time they planned every facet of its
operation, every detail of its complex mechanisms. Because the ship had
a big job to do, they named it _Destiny_ and people began to think of
it not as the last of the spaceships, but as the first.
The dying race sowed the ship with human seed and hopefully named its
unborn passengers Adam, Eve, Joseph and Mary. Then they launched it
toward the middle of the Milky Way and lay back in the red light of
their burning planet.
* * * * *
All this was only a memory now, conserved in the think-tank of a
machine that raced through speckled space, dodging, examining,
classifying, charting what it saw. Behind, the Sun shrank as once it
swelled, and the planets that were not consumed turned cold in their
orbits. The Sun grew fainter and went out, and still the ship sped
forward, century after century, cometlike, but with a purpose.
At many of the specks, the ship circled, sucking in records, passing
judgment, moving on--a bee in the garden of stars. Finally, hundreds
of light-years from what had been its home, it located an Earth-type
world, accepted it from a billion miles off, and swung into an approach
that would last exactly eighteen years.
Immediately, pumps delivered measured quantities of oxygen and nitrogen
atoms. Circuits closed to move four tiny frozen eggs next to frozen
spermatozoa. The temperature gradually increased to a heat once
maintained by animals now extinct.
The embryos grew healthily and at term were born of plastic wombs.
The first voices they heard were of their real mothers. Soft, caressing
songwords. Melodious, warm, recorded women voices, each different,
bell-clear, vivacious, betraying nothing of the fact that they were
dead these long centuries.
"I am your mother," each voice told its belated offspring. "You can see
me and hear me and touch what appears to be me, and together with your
cousins, you'll grow strong and healthy...."
The voices sang on and the babies gurgled in their imported terran
atmosphere. The words were meaningless but important, for it had been
learned on the now dead world that these sounds were one of the factors
in love and learning.
Day after day, the voices lapped warm over the children. Plastic
feeders provided nutrition as noiseless pumps removed excess carbon
dioxide.
In one end of the ship, a miniature farm was born hydroponically, its
automatic grinders pre-digesting ripe vegetables for the children.
Animals were born, too, for food, but also companionship, and later to
stock New Earth ahead.
As the babies began to understand, the woman voices merged into
one mechanical mother who could be heard and seen and summoned on
panel screens throughout the ship. Everything became as Earthlike as
possible, but because the environment was artificial, the children grew
aware of their purpose in life at an age rarely reached on ancient
Earth.
* * * * *
They were two years old when their Mecmother informed them: "You are
unlike any children ever born. You are the last of a dead race, but
you must live. You must not be afraid. You must do everything humanly
possible to live."
When they were four, Mecmother introduced them to Mecteacher and said
to pay attention for five hours each day. Mecteacher took their IQs and
explained to Adam that he had a greater capacity than Eve, Joseph and
Mary, and was therefore their leader.
Soon afterward, all the children started "school," but Adam excelled.
At seven, he knew all about landing the ship. He played that he was
already eighteen and the ship was no longer on automatic.
He was in everything and everywhere. His tow hair poked above the
control board. His busy fingers hand-picked an experimental meal from
the farmroom. When he learned how to turn the artificial gravity switch
off in the recroom, his child legs floated haphazardly somewhere above
his head. And in the sunroom, where heat-lamp walls were triggered by
the degree of an occupant's tan, Adam's freckled face stared through
the visiport, seeing in his mind's eye the New Earth he would one day
conquer.
He lived fully, asking questions, accepting the answers, receiving
instructions. Some of them he testily disobeyed, was punished
compassionately, and learned respect and a kind of love for the mecs.
He played the games of childhood, but he played them alone. Once he was
gazing out a port, imaginatively sorting the stars of his universe into
shapes of the animals in the ship's farm. Mecfather lit up at a nearby
panel, glowing faintly red. Adam resisted an impulse to shiver--the
panel always made him flinch when it glowed red. Red, he was being
conditioned, was his conscience, brought out by Mecfather until he grew
old enough to bring it out himself.
"Why aren't you playing with the other children?" Mecfather asked.
"I've been watching you all day and you've avoided them on every
occasion."
Though he feared him, Adam loved Mecfather as he had been taught to
do and did not hesitate to confide. But how could he explain that the
other children did not seem as _real_ to him as the mecs?
"I don't know," Adam answered truthfully.
"They don't ignore you. They ask you to play, but you always go off by
yourself. Don't you like them?"
"They're flat, Father. They're not deep--like you."
* * * * *
Silent hidden computers assembled the answer, correlated, circuited a
mechanical smile. Certainly--a child brought up with only three real
children and three talking images in his universe could not distinguish
between reality and appearance. On the screen, Adam saw Mecfather
smile, the panel no longer red.
The voice was quiet now and full of understanding. "It is I who am
flat, Adam. I am only an image, a voice. I am here when you need me to
help, but I am not deep. Your cousins are deep; I am the flat one. You
will understand better when you grow older."
Electronically, Mecfather was worried. He called a "conference" of the
other mecs and their circuits joined in a complicated analog: What was
the probable outcome of this beginning of disharmony? There were too
many variables for an immediate answer, but the query was stored in
each mec's memory banks for later answer.
When the mecconference began, the panel switched off and Adam walked
thoughtfully through the ship's corridors. Unexpectedly, he spotted the
other children. He turned quickly into a room before they saw him and
ducked behind the largest of the couches.
He was in the aft recroom, he realized, not having paid attention to
where he was going. What was it all about? Did Mecfather really mean it
when he said the cousins were deeper than the mecs? Adam could believe
he was different from his parents and teacher--after all, he was
only seven--but he couldn't accept the information that he was _not_
different from his cousins. Somehow, he thought, I am alone....
He heard noises, the loud boisterousness of Joseph, the high-pitched
squeal of Eve, the grating laugh of Mary. Adam cringed deeper behind
the big couch. He _was_ different. _He_ didn't make sounds like that.
"Adam! Oh, A-dam! A-dam!" the cousins called, each their own way. "Come
out wherever you are, Adam! Come out and play!"
From behind the couch, Adam saw the beginnings of an infantile but
systematic search. The three of them were looking behind things, under
furniture, in back of hatches. They tried moving everything they saw,
but couldn't budge the heavy couch Adam hid behind.
Looking for escape, Adam's eyes caught a round metallic handle set
flush into the heavy deck carpet. He lifted it and pulled. Nothing
happened. He stood up, bracing his feet against the deck and heaved
with all his strength. It didn't move.
Then he experimentally turned the handle--to the right until it
clicked faintly, then the left, around twice, another faint click, but
different, a left-hand click, he knew somehow. So he turned again to
the left, this time three turns--and then the click was heavy, almost
audible. He pulled the handle and a door formed out of the carpet,
swinging easily open.