old fellow, she whispered to the laboring machinery, just take it easy, we’ll have you fixed up and comfortable pretty soon, I’ll make sure they take good care of you.
And in her solitary cubicle in the dormitory where the other students, alone or together, tried to forget tomorrow and the impending finality of the choices, the small, slight, dark-haired girl who had been dubbed “Ching” in her first week in the Academy, stood brushing her teeth before the mirror. The teeth were perfect — any predisposition toward dental or gum disease had been eliminated from her altered genetic makeup. Academy nutrition and conscientious brushing kept them that way.
She had the Oriental eye-fold; the insemination do-nor who had “fathered” her, she had been told, was a Japanese architect. But her face was too much a racial blend to have any other distinguishing characteristics. Even a touch of ugliness, she thought, would have made her more interesting. But, like all G-Ns — Genetically ENgineered Superiors — her face was boringly average and ordinary. She wondered if the scientists who had created the G-Ns had done it that way so that there would not be one more thing for the ordinary, genetically mixed humans to envy; great beauty would have set them even further apart from everyone else.
Tonight she had kept to the exact routine she had known all her life; she had put on a tape of one of her favorite violin sonatas, later practiced a half hour on the viola as she had every night since her fifth year, and now, her teeth brushed and tingling with cleanliness, she showered and went peacefully to bed, wondering how showers and other hygienic maneuvers would be managed in the low gravity of a Ship. Alone among her classmates, she knew she would be chosen. The experiment which had created the G-Ns was an unqualified success; in the class below Ching, there were twenty of them; two classes below her, there were forty, and not one had dropped out due to illness or physical or mental incompetence. The other G-N in Ching’s class, the one that would graduate tomorrow, had left them on her fifteenth birthday; some unsuspected randomness in the engineered musical talent had given her such a soprano voice as was heard only once or twice in a generation, and she had left, with the blessing of the Academy, to pursue a concert career. Ching thought, a little wistfully, of Zora —who had been given back her own name, Suzanne Hayley, and her own nationality, which was Canadian. She, Ching, would never be anything but Ching, of the UNEPS Academy. No name, no country, only a Ship, and fame she would not be able to enjoy. Zora had been allowed to follow her own choice and her own destiny.
But the G-Ns were certainly the wave of the future; some day, no doubt, the G-Ns would be the staff of all the Survey Ships. Ching had no doubt that next year’s class would be the full Ship complement often, instead of leaving it to competitiveness. And she, Ching, had been chosen to be the first to test the sufficiency of G-Ns, and that ought to be enough.
She was an experiment; she had been lonely, having no real peers. And no real friends, either, she thought with a touch of cynicism. They tolerated her, because there was no room in the Academy for anyone who could not get along with all kinds, and any dislike or unfairness shown to Ching would have damaged that person’s career more than Ching’s. But she sometimes envied Moira’s hordes of admirers and her easy sexuality, even admired the close tenderness of Peake and Jimson while she recognized its unwisdom. There was no one she had ever cared for that much, and no one who had cared so much for her; she supposed, a little wryly, that she was the only virgin in her class.
It was worse, she supposed, than being a member of a racial minority in the old days. But she was different, and there was no point in resenting it. Ching turned on her side, and within minutes was peacefully asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
The Ship had been constructed in free orbit, free of the limitations of gravity — on Earth it would have weighed so many tons that the fuel costs of lifting and moving would have been multiplied exponentially. The hull had been constructed from metal refined and manufactured within a Lunar Dome, and the machinery assembled and tested there. The Ship had a name; for political reasons — there were still some of those on Earth — she had been called after a little-known general in the Space Service a hundred years ago. But not one of the crew ever called her, or were ever to call her, anything except The Ship. Anyone who needed to refer to this particular Ship, as distinguished from others, would have had to look up the name in an official register, by the year.
The six members of the crew had their first sight of the Ship from the observation deck of the Lunar shuttle. Only Moira and Teague, both of whom had specialized in the drive units and had helped, with the others in their class who had studied space engineering, to assemble her, had ever seen her before. Ching had worked with identical computers, but had never seen this particular one. She picked out the small, spherical computer module. Peake and Ravi had studied deep-space navigation on simulators and mockups. As for Fontana, she had never been in free-fall, except in the training centrifuge, and brief trips in free-fall transit rockets; she spent the trip out trying to conquer her faint queasi-ness.
From space the Ship looked something like a collection of paper sculptures, strung together in a cluster anyhow, without need for the high-speed streamlining of Earth or gravity, and without any kind of linear organization. There would be sufficient gravity to make the crew comfortable and keep them fit — the DeMag gravitators were the only thing which had made deep-space voyages practicable from a human biological standpoint. But gravity could be sharply localized for the crew’s comfort in a given spot or area; there was no need to orient the Ship on any given axis. Inside, the arrangements made sense; but from outside it looked chaotic. Teague thought the Ship looked like a collection of helium balloons which had somehow drifted together — balloons which just happened to be spherical, cubical, octahedral, or conical.
Moira was wondering what it would look like from the outside when the enormous sheets of thin mylar, the light-sails which operated on solar pressure, were spread out around the conglomeration of shapes. Peake thought, sadly, that Jimson had never seen the Ship — then revised that thought. Jimson was probably seeing it right now, or at least, he had seen it this morning from the space station; he had probably had a good look at it from the Lunar Shuttle, too. Jimson had been assigned as an administrative assistant on the space station, and would probably be in charge of it, a few years from now.
I wonder if he feels like Moses, looking from afar at the Promised Land?
Jimson hadn’t spoken to Peake when the announcements were made. Not once.
And then the Shuttle was drawing up alongship, and they were going through the motions of getting into pressure suits — second nature now, after years of drill on it — and decanting through the airlock. Only minutes later, they were in the DeMagged main cabin, watching the airlock close and the Lunar Shuttle pull away, and Peake realized that there was no one to give the order, this time, to get out of pressure suits. So he checked the pressure of the cabin, shrugged, and unfastened his own helmet, hanging it meticulously in the rack.
Six of us, Moira thought, alone with the Ship which has been our goal, our summit, our daydream for the best part of twelve years. Is that al] there is to it? They had all been expecting some more formality than this. But what more could there be? They were the graduates, they had been given the final sink-or-swim test. If they had not been capable of functioning on their own, without further instruction, they would be now among the failures, serving apprenticeships on space stations, satellites, governing the Earth colonies some day — but they were the independent ones. This Ship gave them the freedom of the universe, and they had to prove themselves in it. They would evolve their own procedures, they would make themselves into a crew — or they would not; it was just as simple, and as enormous, as that.
Suddenly she was frightened, and, looking around at her five shipmates, she was sure they were frightened too. ESP? she wondered, and thought; no; just common sense. If we weren’t scared, we wouldn’t be as bright as we have to be, just to have come this far.
“Look,” said Peake, “there is your cello, Moira. And my violin.”
Ching looked at her viola, in its case. These were the only really personal articles they would retain from Earth and the life that was past. She said into the lengthening silence, “Well, here we all are. What do we do first?”
“I was taught,” Teague said dryly, “that the first thing you do on any Ship is to check the Life-Support system, and I imagine that’s my job — I don’t think there’s anyone else here who specialized in Life-Support systems.”
“My second specialty,” Fontana said. “I suppose I’ll be your standby.”
