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.”