asked from his seat next to Thelma.
Fellburg stared for a few seconds longer at the huge ship, surrounded by
shuttles, service craft, and supply ships, and the loose cloud of containers,
pipes, tubes, tanks, and assorted engineering that would gradually be absorbed
inside during the remaining three days before liftout from Earth orbit. “See
those three shuttles docked at the stem cargo section . . . and the other one
standing off, waiting to move in?” he said at last.
“What about them?” Thelma asked.
“Those aren’t standard NASO models. Two of them are military transports out of
Vandenberg or Travis, and one of the others looks like a British air force troop
carrier. What the hell are they doing here?”
In the seat beside him, Zambendorf turned his head and gave Abaquaan an
inquiring look. Abaquaan raised his eyebrows ominously. The anomaly of Ramelson
and his colleagues’ getting more involved in the mission than seemed reasonable
had been followed by that of the training course at the NASO center at
Charlotte, North Carolina, intended to provide the basic skills and knowledge
needed by anyone flying with a space mission—how to put on and operate a
spacesuit, the safety regulations enforced aboard spacecraft and in
extraterrestrial habitats, emergency procedures, and so on. But the mission
personnel whom they had met there had been of relatively junior status, such as
engineers, scientists, maintenance technicians, medics, and administrators. The
mission’s senior management, officer corps, or whoever would constitute the
upper levels of the organizational tree, had been conspicuous not only by their
absence but by their not even having been mentioned. And as Drew West had
observed, the mix of people encountered at the course and reflected in the
personnel lists had seemed unrepresentative of the populations envisaged for
space colonies. There were too many scientists and academic specialists:
bacteriologists, virologists, biologists, physicists, chemists, sociologists,
and psychologists . . . even some linguists and a criminologist. Obviously the
mission offered many opportunities for diverse studies that the academic
community couldn’t be expected to miss—buses didn’t leave for Mars every day of
the week —but so many? And where were the agricultural technicians, the
industrial workers, the clerks, and the service people who would be expected to
make up a large percentage of any projected colony? Hardly any had been met.
That seemed strange too.
And now, apparently, a previously unannounced, and by all the signs not
insignificant, military force would be coming too. It was in keeping with
everything else he had been able to ascertain, Zambendorf reflected as he sat
gazing at the screen. Although he was still not in a position to fit the pieces
into a coherent pattern, there hadn’t really been any doubt in his mind for a
long time now: Something very unusual indeed was behind it all.
As the last in a series of prototypes, the Orion was intended primarily to prove
the feasibility of its scaled-up fusion drive and to test various engineering
concepts relating to long-range, large-capacity space missions; like the
experimental Victorian steamships that had preceded the gracious ocean liners of
later years, its design took little account of luxuries or spaciousness of
accommodation for its occupants. Its warren of cabins, cramped day rooms,
machinery compartments, stairwells, and labyrinthine passageways reminded him
more of a submarine than anything else, Massey thought as he lounged on his bunk
and contemplated the view of Earth’s disk being presented on the screen built
into the cabin’s end bulkhead. He and Vernon would share the cabin with two
others, both of whom they knew from the training course: Graham Spearman, an
evolutionary biologist from the University of California at Los Angeles, and
Malcom Wade, a Canadian psychologist. Spearman and Vernon had left to explore
the ship and Wade hadn’t arrived yet; Massey, therefore, was making the most of
the opportunity to relax for a few minutes after arriving on board, checking in,
and unpacking his gear.
From his perspective in Globe II, the entire planetary surface of
Earth—continents, oceans, and atmosphere—revealed itself as a single,
self-sustaining biological organism in which the arbitrary boundaries and
differences of shading that divided the maps of men were no more meaningful than