“Circumstances make great people and great events,” I told her. “George was running from our world to some impossible Utopia, and wound up a grass-eating plains animal. I flew to unknown places, it’s true, but I flew for Seiglein, in the directions they told me, looking only for the things they wanted, pretend-ing I was an independent big shot when all I really was after was gold stars to please the company. You’re as much a part of that system as we. Believe it. We’re all, equally, a pack of …” I searched for a word.
“Revolutionaries,” came George’s voice, and he hopped down the ramp. “That’s what we are. Even changing our shape and form doesn’t make us really differentinside, culturallywhere it really counts. No, it’s the real revolution we’re after. That’s why I’m so committed. Mankind’s overdue for a revolution. The garden must be weeded or it’ll die out of its own weight.”
“But, George!” I objected. “We’re not human anymore!”
He chuckled. “Physically we’re the outward revolution Seiglein and the others fear, but they are a product of their own system. People have always judged others by form, by looks. People were hounded for their color, for their obesity, for slight defects from perfection. Well, we got rid of that. We bred ourselves into a race of ideal folk and we kidded ourselves that
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we were the best there was. No, the real revolutions are always from the inside, in the mind. That’s the revolution, the one we really represent. So what if we turned everyone in the galaxy into Choz? How could you tell the difference, socially? Would people still have meaning in their Jives? Bull. Patmos was an ana-log of human society. But not now, not anymore.” He seemed to bum with a sudden fire. “We’re going to bring them down.”
Marsha turned to me. “See what I mean?” I nodded, but I still didn’t follow. George was certainly on his own track, one I didn’t comprehend. But George had been on the right track before.
Cycles came and went, and the work on the Nijinsky neared completion. The designers would never have recognized the placenor, in fact, could Marsha.
She had a tough time getting the hang of being a Choz; she didn’t have the advantage of being born to it, as did Ham and Eve, or of learning on open plains as George and I had.
Adjusting to Choz vision took several days, and it took much longer to use it unself-consciously. Movement took not only physical displacement but tremendous self-confidence, like the first time they put me in a ship, linked me to the computer, and said, “Fly it!”
Two out of three trainees, after years of prep, couldn’t make themselves do it. Of those who could, only one in ten would develop enough confidence to try new things with a ship, to take it beyond orbital runs and see what it could do out in space, far from human aid. And of those, like Marsha, only one in thousands confident enough to become a part of their ships, become scouts like me.
It was a matter of pride, and yet it boiled down to self-confidence. The self-confidence that made you go out and come back. The self-confidence, perhaps the bullheadedness, to refuse to admit defeat.
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Marsha had to fall a lot of times, hurt herself a lot of times, before she could get around unaided. She didn’t enjoy being a Choz, but she accepted it. Accepted it and worked at it. I was proud of her.
“We were lucky, George,” I said one day. “Lucky to get one like her at random.”
“Naw,” he scoffed. “They’re thereprobably millions of them. The ones still adaptable. They’re dy-ing out, being replaced by nonadaptable, unthinking Nadyas. But the ones with the sparkthey need to be broken free, shown there’s a better way. Back on old Earth there once reigned huge lizards, called dinosaurs. Enormous. Tons and tons. They couldn’t adapt, and they died. Now it’s our turn. Space has delayed it, and provided something of an outlet that has kept the creative, adaptive spark alive, if dormant. I’ll bet there’ll be a Marsha in every ship, or at least in every other ship! Those are the ones we’re saving, boy! We’re going to de-dinosaur them!”
He talked more and more this way as time passed, and I pursued the subject less and less with him. Instead I spent a great deal of time with Marsha, getting to know her well. We had a definite affinity of the kind impossible to explainemotional, mental, may-be. Not the physical, certainly. That’s not a Choz characteristic. We enjoyed each other, liked being with each other, talking things out. I had never really enjoyed this experience before, nor had she.
Ham and Eve were maturing fast, but they’d had George and me to themselves all their lives. They were jealous of this newcomer, and it took some time to break them down.
Although Eve was my daughter, she identified most closely with George and his interests. I think she fairly worshiped the man, and I knew it embarrassed him no end. She was becoming a proficient biotechnician in the process. George loved to teach, and Eve wasn’t handicapped by George’s previous training, with its dependence on hands and eyes.
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It was Marsha herself who finally broke Ham’s stubborn resistance to and withdrawal from our social communion. She taught him to operate the Nijinsky.
In the meantime, with the help of Cain and Abel, we had managed to prepare the habitat for what had to come, sooner and sooner now.
We’d cleared out all the cargo holds that held material useless to us and jettisoned the stuff. Pressurizing the holds and linking them to the general ship’s bio-monitoring systems, we lined them with grass roll and planted just a few of the tubers from our garden.
The virus took to the carpet like mad. In only a few cycles our grass was competing with the original grass, and we had large areas of new grazing land.
Arranging the grass roll and cutting it with the robots’ help, we lined every place we could except the ramp wells and the bridge area. Within forty cycles, the Nifinsky was a floating, self-contained Choz bio-sphere. Choz grass contributed so much additional oxy-gen to the air we had to turn down the recycling system: We couldn’t breathe it as fast as the plants could spit it out, so it was carbon dioxide, not oxygen, that we had to add.
As for George, with my help through the computer and with the eyes and tentacles of. Cain and Abel, he had made great progress. “I think I can control the virus pretty well,” he told me one day. “I can step it up, slow it down, or make it dormant. A slight modi-fication and I can mildly mutate it so that it will have no effect on anything except Choz and Patmos material. It’s simple, reallyjust took infinite patience in sorting out the code groups. It helped to have your computerI described Moses’ logic system, and that narrowed it down. I can even produce the secretion that breaks down things selectively, if I can be linked to the computer to get the analytical information the virus transmits on molecular composition.”
“You can do everything Moses could, then,” I responded, awed.
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“Not quite.” He shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t have the original virus mutant he worked with. I doubt we could ever match the conditions existing in the original organism. And without it I can’t alter the present pattern.”
I frowned, puzzled. “So? What does that mean?”
“It means,” he replied, “that I can do anything with the virus Moses programmed into itand there are probably lots of things we don’t even know about, | which will need discovering before I can do them. But I can’t change the basic pattern. I can make humans into Choz, but not Choz into humans. Same with the vegetables.”
Marsha had been fascinated by the conversation, but when he said that last her tone changed to mild sadness and disappointment. “Then,” she said, “we’re Choz forever.”
One day the inevitable happened. George called me over.
“What’s the matter, George?” I called cheerfully. “You look too serious.”
“Been noticing things lately?” he asked enigmati-cally.
I looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“I noticed Ham acting funny earlier, and asked him what the matter was. He didn’t know, so I looked into it. We’ll be acting funny ,soon ourselves. Bar. You haven’t noticed it yet because you’re in love with her and lovers always feel differently.”
“Marsha?” I asked, more confused than ever.
He nodded. “She’s a deeper green today. Bar. She’ll get more and more that way. She doesn’t know it, of course. That’s not the system. And Evewell, she’s not likely to notice it, either.”
I thought for a minute. “The Breed,” I said at last. “She’s coming into it.”
He nodded. “She turned as an adult, remember,
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like you. Eve’s due not long from now, so we’ve got to remember that, too. If Ham reacts to Marsha, that means they’re both physiologically about two now adults.”
“So?” I responded. “We’ve known about it. That’s why we have the Nijinsky, and did all this work.”
“There’s three males and only two females,” he said slowly. “Ever think of that?”
I hadn’t, but I didn’t see what difference it made.
“You’ve never been through one on the plains,” he noted. “You never were driven crazy, battling all the males for whoever you got. It’s bad news, and it can result in a lot of jealousy and bitterness. One of us has to lose, and it feels lousy to lose at the Breed,”
“So what do we do?” I asked him. “After this, there won’t be a problem.”
He nodded. “Well, I can control things pretty well, you know. I can send the signals for almost anything. Since Moses was able to control the number of eggs in the last Patmos Breed, I can do it, too. With Eve’s help, I’ve already done the preliminary work.”
“Then you could also stop the Breed,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “I could, but we need people. Badly. I want a manageable number, but a reasonably large one. There are five of uswe can raise two each, I think, handle ten as a co-op venture. I want more Hams and Eves, not the Patmos vegetables. We need the time to raise them right.”
I agreed, and asked for his plan.
“Well, we’ll arrange it for five each. To stop this stupid contest, I’m going to suppress my own sexual drives. I can manage that, with the computer’s help and your link, I think.”
“I think you should be one of the parents,” I objected. “We need more of you. Ham can wait.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t want him to. I think it’s about time he had some responsibility. And
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well, you’ll take Marsha, of course. Evewell, she’s your daughter, of course, but sheshe reminds me a great deal of Mara.”
“She is of Mara,” I pointed out.
“Of course,” he acknowledged. “But it’s more than looks. It’s manner, mind, curiosity. Personality, I guess. After all, I raised them both, in a way. Plenty of time for me. I’ll sit this one out.”
He instructed me on what to do, how to play certain tones pitched so high even we couldn’t hear them, aimed at his genitals and at certain areas in his brain and body.
We called Marsha from the Nijinsky. For the first time I noticed what George was talking about. She was getting that bright-green glow that Mara had had when we left her village for the point. I felt a slight stirring within me that had probably been present all along, but of which I was only now conscious.
George nodded satisfactorily. “She looks normal to me,” he said. “How about you?”
“You’re right,” I told him. “I can feel it now.”
He smiled. “Good. I was afraid that the code tones might have zapped you, as well. Now, I’ll handle Ham and Eve. I want you two to go into Hold A and lock yourself in until afterward. That way we won’t have problems with Ham.”
I nodded, and went over to Marsha.
“What’s this all about?” she demanded. “You two are acting very conspiratorial.”
And I told her. Oh, we’d told her before, academi-cally, but the Breed was always some time in the future in our discussions, not to consider “now,” particularly not to us. Like all spacers, myself included, she’d been sterilized when she entered flight school. Most people were sterilized anyway, of course, but with spacers that was mandatory. Can’t risk birth defects or mutations.
At first she laughed and refused to believe it. “You