INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO US, BUT WE HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT THE COMBINED INTELLIGENCE AND POTENTIAL OF THESE FUTURE FEDERATION CITIZENS WILL FAR SURPASS ANYTHING ACHIEVABLE BY EVEN THE BUILDERS. IT WILL BE A SLOW, NATURAL PROCESS, HOWEVER, KEPT FREE OF ANY KIND OF FORCE OR COERCION.
IN THE MEANTIME WE SHALL BE BUSY SEEKING OUT AND ADDING RACES TO THE FEDERATION, ENSURING ITS SAFETY FROM NATURAL THREATS FROM WITHOUT AND THE POISON OF UNDESIRABLES FROM WITHIN. YOUR LIFE FROM NOW ON WILL BE VERY BUSY, PERHAPS EXACTING. BUT NOT LONELY AS THE SERVANTS AND PROTECTORS OF THE FEDERATION, YOU WILL.COOPERATE CLOSELY WITH AND LEARN TO UNDERSTAND ENTITIES OF MANY DIFFERENT SPECIES. LONG BEFORE THE CITIZENS ARE READY TO DO SO. BECAUSE WE HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT QUALITY IN COMMON — THE QUALITY WHICH OUR SYSTEM OF EXAMINERS WAS PRIMARILY DESIGNED TO UNCOVER.
For a few moments the screen remained blank, and ‘ Martin looked quickly at the other people in the room. The woman he had met earlier smiled faintly and said, “They do say that it is better to start a job at the bottom…” The others seemed to be looking somewhere deep within themselves and were silent.
He returned his attention to the monstrous, crablike being. Was it his imagination or was there really a glint of amusement in that great, bulging sausage of an eye as once more the non-Citizen’s words were projected onto the screen.
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE BEEN EXAMINED AND HAVE BEEN FOUND UNSUITABLE FOR CITIZENSHIP IN THE FEDERATION OF GALACTIC SENTIENTS. PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR IMMEDIATE TRANSFER TO THE EARTH-HUMAN PRELIMINARY TRAINING SCHOOL ON FOMALHAUT THREE.
Chapter 4
BY the time they had reached the final stages of their training on Fomalhaut Three they were eleven Earth- years older and, thanks to the advanced medical science available, they looked and felt at least that much younger. Several times Martin had asked by how much their life spans had been extended, but that was one of the questions which their supervisor refused to answer, saying that if they did not complete their training to its satisfaction they were likely to end their lives prematurely in some stupid and avoidable accident, so that giving them information regarding their probable life expectancies would serve no useful purpose.
They were now in possession of the knowledge and ability to control and direct mechanisms of a complexity and power undreamed of by the people they had been on Earth-although they had still, their superior insisted, to acquire the experience and wisdom to use this power effectively. So they had waited and trained to an even finer pitch, wondering when, if ever, their first assignment would come.
Due to training commitments, their original classmates and one-time friends had gradually drawn away from them to disappear, two by two, in the directions of their chosen specialties. But there were compensations. As the training programs of Martin and Beth, the woman he had seen during that final visit to the examination and induction center back on Earth, began increasingly to overlap, and their friends to move away, Beth and he had drawn-or had they been forced? — closer.
It was a disturbing thought, particularly when, as now, it returned to trouble both of them at the same time. Martin slipped his arm around Beth’s shoulders and drew her back into the relaxer which, as well as being sinfully soft, was set for one-quarter gee. But her arm and neck muscles were stiff with tension, and she was wearing her totally unnecessary spectacles, which was not a good sign.
“How much does that slimy, supercilious supervisor know about us?” she asked, so softly that she might have been speaking to herself. “Was a few hours with the interrogation robots at the induction center enough to tell it everything! And if it knows everything, how accurately can it predict our behavior? Have we any free will, any choices? More importantly, have you, had you, any choice at all?”
“We can always choose to fail the next test,” Martin said, in an attempt to change the subject. “But it might well be that, in our situation, teacher knows best.”
“It knows us well enough to know that we wouldn’t deliberately fail a test,” Beth said impatiently. “And you know what I mean. We had no choice, no competition, no chance to make comparisons. I know that you were, well, impressed by Kathy. She impressed hell out of all the men, she’s gorgeous, dammit. If things had been different you might have preferred…”
Looking miserable, she left the sentence hanging.
Martin gave her shoulders another sympathetic squeeze, trying to draw her closer. But the warm, yielding, and normally responsive body had become that of a cold, fleshy mannequin with tension-frozen joints. He sighed, remembering that during their first meeting in the induction center so long ago, before he had even learned her name, he had decided that she was a lovely and highly intelligent young woman who took things much too seriously.
He had found no reason to change his mind about her when they met in the spacious living module occupied by the school’s Earth-humans, or during recreation periods in the forests and lakes overlying that tremendous underground training complex. Fomalhaut Three provided an environment suited to the needs of many of the Galaxy’s warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing races, and much of its training and large-scale simulation equipment was hi common use. But none of the trainees, including Martin, were allowed to make contact with a member of another species until they had graduated from the school.
He and Beth had met more and more frequently as their chosen specialties required them to share training simulations of increasing complexity, duration, and degrees of risk. She, who once had been responsible for the computer control of traffic in a small Earth city, and who was now able to direct energies and engines capable of changing the topography of a continent; and he, a cynical, discontented, one-time lecturer in zoology who, it seemed, was destined to do little else but talk. He shook his head and brought his mind back to the present time and problem.
“You’re forgetting,” he said quietly, “that the only one of us to impress Kathy was George. George with the muscles, and mustache, and the teeth. Did you fancy…”
“No,” she said firmly. “Kathy is welcome to him.”
“Besides,” he went on, “they’re both specializing in multi-environmental plant and animal husbandry. Fine, demanding, vitally important work, no doubt, especially if they want to stay inside the World, but it is still only fanning. Teaming up with a ship handler, the class’s only trainee hypership captain, no less, is much more fun. For personal as well as professional reasons.”
Beth did not smile as she turned her head to look at him, and her eyes were hidden by light reflection in her spectacles.
He went on. “It is quite possible that the supervisor knows our minds much better than we do, and that would include being able to predict what we are likely to do in any given situation. But what of it? That creature is hyperintelligent, not omniscient, and I think that its thought processes are just too alien for it to be able to influence us against our wills where anything so subtle as Earth-human emotional relationships are concerned. The decisions we made, and will make, are still our own, regardless of the fact that it probably knows about them in advance. The point I’m trying to make is that, had the supervisor given you more female competition by confronting me with a dozen, or a hundred, tall, dark-eyed, lovely women who know what I’m thinking almost before I do, the process would have taken much longer, and wasted a lot of our supervisor’s precious training time, but ultimately I would have made the same choice.”
He felt her relax, but not completely, as she allowed herself to settle into the backrest beside him.
“If I had been confronted with a hundred men..” she began.
“I was lucky you weren’t,” he said.
Irritably, she said, “How can I argue with you when you always say the right thing? But I keep forgetting that you’re training as one of those devious-minded, smooth-talking specialists in First Contact who never stops practicing…”
“This,” he reminded her gently, “is not the first contact.”
