James P Hogan. Inherit The Stars. Giant Series #1

to do; in most cases, that meant into industry, agriculture, or the

military forces. Whatever you did, the State was your boss anyway

..-that’s what I meant when I said they were all different branches

of the same big organization.”

“Okay. Now, about the pay records?”

“Charlie was born on Minerva, we know that. So were his parents.

His father was some kind of machine operator; his mother worked in

industry, too, but we can’t make out the exact occupation. The

records also tell us where he went to school, for how long, where

he took his military training-everybody seemed to go through some

kind of military training-and where he learned about electronics.

It tells us all the dates, too.”

“So he was something like an electronics engineer, was he?” Hunt

asked.

“Sort of. More of a maintenance engineer than a design or

development engineer. He seems to have specialized in military

equipment-there’s a long list of postings to combat units. The last

one is interesting – .” Maddson selected a sheet and passed it

across to Hunt. “That’s a translation of the last page of postings.

The final entry gives the name of a place and, alongside it, a

description which, when translated literally, means ‘off-planet.’

That’s probably the Lunarian name for whatever part of our Moon he

was sent to.”

“Interesting,” Hunt agreed. “You’ve found out quite a lot more

about him.”

“Yep, we’ve got him pretty well taped. If you convert their dates

into our units, he was about thirty-two years old at the date of

his last posting. Anyhow, that’s all really incidental; you can

read the details. I was going to run over the picture we’re getting

of the kind of world he was born into.” Maddson paused to con-suit

his notes again. Then he resumed: “Minerva was a dying world. At

the time we’re talking about, the last cold period of the Ice Age

was approaching its peak. I’m told that ice ages are

Solar-System-wide phenomena; Minerva was a lot farther from the Sun

than here, so as you can imagine, things were pretty bleak there.”

“You’ve only got to look at the size of those ice caps,” Hunt

commented.

“Yes, exactly. And it was getting worse. The Lunarian scientists

figured they had less than a hundred years to go before the ice

sheets met and blanketed the whole planet completely. Now, as you’d

expect, they had studied astronomy for centuries-centuries before

Charlie’s time, that is-and they’d known for a long time that

things were going to get worse before they got better. So, they’d

reached the conclusion, way back, that the only way out was to

escape to another world. The problem, of course, was that for

generations after they got the idea, nobody knew anything about how

to do something about it. The answer had to lie somewhere along the

line of better science and better technology. It became kind of a

racial goal-the one thing that mattered, that generation after

generation worked toward-the development of the sciences that would

get them to places they knew existed, before the ice wiped out the

whole race.”

Maddson pointed to another pile of papers on the corner of his

desk. “This was the prime objective that the State was set up to

achieve, and because the stakes were so high, e~verything was

subordinated to that objective. Hence, from birth to death the

individual was subordinated to the needs of the State. It was

implied in everything they wrote and drummed into them from the

time they were knee-high. Those papers are a translation of a kind

of catechism they had to memorize at school; it reads like Nazi

stuff from the nineteen thirties.” He stopped at that point and

looked at Hunt expectantly.

Hunt looked puzzled. After a moment he said, “This doesn’t quite

make sense. I mean-how could they be striving to develop space

flight if they were colonists from Earth? They must have already

developed it.”

Maddson gave an approving nod. “Thought you might say that.”

“But. . . it’s bloody silly.”

“I know. It implies they must have evolved on Minerva from

scratch-unless they came from Earth, forgot everything they knew,

and had to learn it all over. But that also sounds crazy to me.”

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