Adam didn't answer. He knew the bigger boy would forget about it if he
changed the subject. "How is it you're not with Mecteacher?"
"We were. But he made us look for you."
The closest wall panel lit bright red. It was Mecteacher. "_Adam! How
did you open that?_"
"I turned it--a certain way," he said evasively. Adam didn't want his
cousins to learn how.
"But how did you know?"
"I--I reasoned it."
* * * * *
The image faded as the new information was assimilated. Mecteacher's
voice said, "Wait a while, Adam."
The computer circuited the other mec's memory banks. After ten minutes,
the "conference" was over and Mecteacher returned to the screen. He
asked Adam to come alone to the classroom. The others were dismissed.
Reluctantly, Adam did as he was told. In the classroom, he stood
stiffly in front of the central panels. All three mecs lit up, their
color this time a tranquilizing blue.
"Adam, we are not real people in the _now_," Mecmother began. "Do you
understand that?"
"Y-yes, I understand. You are--planned--fixed before."
"That's right, Adam. We are pre-set. We have a very large number of
choices and actions, but we are not infinite."
"Infinite?"
"We are limited in the help we can give you. We were real--like you--a
long, long time ago. We exist now only to help you and the other
children. We are here to educate you, to love and console you--and one
other thing. We are here to settle your conflicts, to make sure you
don't hurt each other."
"But I didn't hurt anyone, Mecmother!"
"Not yet, Adam, but avoiding the others the way you do could be the
first sign of trouble."
"How do you _know_? How can you talk if you aren't real?"
"What you hear is a combination of recorded words that are
electronically put together to answer an almost infinite number of your
questions. But do not think of me as not real. I was merely in another
time. Do you understand that?"
"Yes."
"Then you also are able to see that your ability to reason things--to
understand what I am telling you now, for instance, is a remarkable
thing."
"You mean because I'm not like the others?"
"You have a superior mind. You are the leader, but do not regard
yourself as better than the others. You have more intelligence, yes,
but do not look down on your cousins for that. They may develop other
qualities better than yours. Stay simple, Adam, and you will be able to
live among them and thereby make the human race live again. The name of
this ship is _Destiny_. Do you know why?"
"Yes--I know."
"Be with the other children then. Play with them. You'll need each
other to live on New Earth--eleven years from now."
* * * * *
He thought sullenly, how can I play with them when they're _flat_? But
he didn't object out loud to Mecmother. He didn't like her this way.
Explanation was Mecteacher's job and discipline Mecfather's. Mecmother
should be warm and loving.
Mecteacher appeared and asked Adam to call in the other children so the
science lesson could start.
He found them tanning in the sunroom, their unclothed bodies evenly
browned from invisible light. They followed Adam without question, but
seemed to take a long time doing it. Joseph insisted first in donning
clothes, but he put on protective clothing first. Then, realizing the
absurdity of it, he switched to his formality suit--the loose-fitting
robe Mecteacher instructed the children to wear to lend dignity to the
classwork.
During Joseph's delay, the girls ambled off somewhere and returned only
when Adam shouted after them in exasperation. Quickening his pace,
Adam reached the classroom first and asked Mecteacher, "Are the other
children--deep?"
"Deep? Yes, Adam, Mecfather explained that to you. Why are you
confused? It's us, the mecs, who are flat. The other children are
healthy, living beings. The cells from which all of you were born were
selected after years of controlled breeding. Your parents were the
finest the human race could produce--intelligent, strong, healthy, high
survival quotient. Is this what you mean by deep?"
"Partly, but also--_feeling_. I think I feel things better."
The other children waddled in, took their seats and switched on
robomonitors in the ritual of classroom procedure. They all looked at
Mecteacher in the central panel.
Mecteacher motioned Adam to his chair-desk and began the lesson. He
described Old Earth and how it circled Old Sol with the other worlds
and the way the moons circled the planets--all of them condensed into
spheres and all the spheres turning in harmony.
He interrupted himself when Mary's robomonitor registered only partial
comprehension. "What don't you understand, Mary? Is it _sphere_?"
"I know what a sphere is," she said, remembering a previous lesson. "A
sphere is an apple or an orange--"
* * * * *
Mecteacher detected a covert wince from Adam's monitor. The teacher
appeared to Adam on his desk panel where the others couldn't see or
hear. "Do not think this is because she is not--deep, Adam. She is only
seven and not as advanced for her age as you are. You understand how we
mecs are pre-set?"
"Yes."
"In the classroom, then, if we don't go fast enough for you, try to
be patient. We can only deviate within set limits. It is not a new
problem, Adam. On Earth, it impeded the educational system from the
beginning."
Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up
an apple on the central panel and re-explained the age-old analogy
between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and
further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth
and the apple.
Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon.
"That's an interesting question, Eve. But we are still too many
millions of miles away to know yet. Before you are ready to leave the
ship, you will know."
In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other
children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played
without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his--with one
exception.
He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom
and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had
discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained
his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for
long. Often, when he grew tired of free-falling, he visited his lonely
chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship.
On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the
mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a
previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present
dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they
were pre-set. They _had_ to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going
against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong.
It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his
seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the
conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise
in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs
permanently off.
* * * * *
The stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to
watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk
night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire
blazing hot and big--bigger than any star in his memory, closer than
the _Destiny_ had ever come to a star.
Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth
years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New
Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He
would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land.
Then he and the others--
The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were
alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why
weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a
genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses?
They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that
he was supernormal; the others were--flat, undeep.
For years, he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered
their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when
he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under
the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled
over to him.
They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he
turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that
seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring
on their lips that he thought was repulsive.
He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and
descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he
had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the
drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit
wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it.
And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how
to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not
be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he
thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals--or would I?
* * * * *
He pondered the question for a moment, then decided, as he had so often
in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They
were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the _Destiny_,
but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at
seven--perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had
suggested--but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they
still played the same games with scarcely any variation.
He heard them rummaging above, attempting again and again to pull open
the hatch. It had happened this way for years: They'd try to open the
trapdoor for an hour or two, then give it up and turn their attention
to something else. They never thought to turn the handle. Maybe an
undeep person wouldn't be able to reason the combination clicks, but
only a completely flat one would persist in pulling when it always
ended in failure.
Possibly, he thought, the cosmic rays had been more destructive to
their egg cells. Or maybe the alien radiations subtracted something
from the other cells to add to his. If this were true, he was partly a
product of the others and owed his depth to them.
Adam felt sorry for his cousins then and wished he hadn't hurt them
by avoiding their presence. Despite their undepth, they must have
feelings. The mecs probably wouldn't have been able to give them depth
but, he remembered, the other role of the mecs was to prevent each one
of them from harming the others. In their role as arbitrator, Adam
realized, they might have stopped him from hurting them so.
Filled with remorse, he left his desk-chair and walked stoop-shouldered
under the low ceiling. At the trapdoor, he opened the combination on
the inside lock handle and pushed upward. It wouldn't open. He tried
again, but it wasn't the lock that was stuck. They must have slid
something heavy over the hatch, something he couldn't move.
He tried calling to them, but his voice was lost in the insulative
metal of the deck. Finally he sat down, conserving his strength for a
final onslaught.
If he couldn't open the hatch, he realized vividly it would be not
only his failure, but the failure of the human race.
But maybe it did not have to be so. Maybe the differences in the others
weren't biological--maybe they were environmental. And with that
thought, he made his way through the narrow passageway and reversed his
deed of eleven years past. He turned the mecs back on.
Returning to the hatch, he reworked the combination to make sure it was
not the lock that held him. He pushed upward with all his strength,
steadily with increasing pressure, until the beads of perspiration
turned into gulleys that streamed down his face.
Exhausted, he crawled back to his chair and lay across the desk
littered with calculations of a landing he would never make. The soft
luminescence from the _Destiny's_ nuclear engines crept forward and
caressed him.
* * * * *
In the aft recroom, Eve and Mary were admiring Joseph's strength in
being able to push the heavy couch over Adam's trapdoor.
Three wall panels lit red. All the mecs appeared together. "It's time
for your science lesson," one said. "But where is Adam?"
"He's in the trapdoor," they answered flatly.
The panel turned green, reserving its redness for the delinquent Adam
when he would choose to appear.