“First, education, until the age of twenty. This left two hundred and ninety-nine opportunities. Then, for perhaps five years, shared work; the car, the mortgage, the furniture, that two salaries would pay off earlier than one. Two hundred and thirty-four opportunities were left. Some of them were seized: a spate of childbearing perhaps would come next. But subtract a good ten years more at the end of the cycle, for the years when a child would be simply too late—too late for fashion, too late for companionship with the first-born. We started with three hundred and ninety opportunities. We have, perhaps, one hundred and forty-four left.
“Is that the roster complete? No. There is the battle of the budget: No, not right now, not until the summer place is paid for. And more. The visits from the mothers-in-law, the quarterly tax payments, the country-club liaisons and the furtive knives behind the brownstone fronts and what becomes of fertility—they have all been charted. But these are superfluous. The ratio 390:144 points out the inevitable. As three hundred and ninety outweighs one hundred
and forty-four, so the genes of the slovenly and heedless outweigh the thoughtful and slow to act.
“We tampered with the inevitable.
“The planet teemed and burst. The starships went forth. The strong, bright, quick ones went out in the ships. Two sorts were left: The strong ones who were not bright, the bright ones who were not strong.
“We are the prisoners of the planet. We cannot leave.
“The children—the witless ones outside—can leave. But who would have them?”
Ross peered into the shifting shadows. “But,” he said, “you are the masters of the planet——”
“Masters’? We are slaves! Fully alive only here where we are born and die. Abstracted and as witless as they when we are among them—well we might be. For each of us, square miles to stand guard over. Our minds roving across the traps we dare not ignore, ready to leap out and straighten these children’s toppling walls of blocks, ready to warn the child that sharp things cut and hot things burn. The blue lights—did you think they were machines?” They were us!
“You’re torturing yourselves!” Ross exploded. “Let them die.”
“Let—ten—billion—children-—die? We are not such monsters.”
Ross was humbled before their tragedy. Diffidently he spoke of Halsey’s Planet, Ragansworld, Azor, Jones. He warmed to the task and was growing, he thought, eloquent when their smiles left him standing ashamed.
“I don’t understand,” he said, almost weeping.
The voice corrected him: “You do. But you do not—yet —know that you do. Consider the facts:
“Your planet. Sterile and slowly dying.
“The planets you have seen. One sterile because it is imprisoned by ancients, one sterile under an in-driven matriarchal custom, one sterile because all traces of divergence have been wiped out.
“Earth. Split into an incurable dichotomy—the sterility of brainless health, the sterility of sick intellect.
“Humanity, then, imprisoned in a thousand sterile tubes,
cut off each from the other, dying. We feared war, and so we isolated the members with a wall of time. We have found something worse to fear. What if the walls are cracked?”
“Crack the walls? How? Is it too late?”
Somehow the image of Helena was before him.
“Is it too late?” they gently mocked. “Surely you know. How? Perhaps you will ask her.”
The image of Helena was blushing.
Ross’s heart leaped. “As simple as that?”
“For you, yes. For others there will be lives spent over the lathes and milling machines, eyes gone blind in calculating and refining trajectories, daring ones lost screaming in the hearts of stars, or gibbering with hunger and pain as the final madness closes down on them, stranded between galaxies. There will be martyrs to undergo the worst martyrdom of all—which is to say, they will never know of it. They will be unhappy traders and stock-chasers, grinding their lives to smooth dull blanks against the wearying routine so that the daring ones may go forth to the stars. But for you—you have seen the answer.
“Old blood runs thin. Thin blood runs cold. Cold blood dies. Let the walls crack.”
There was a murmuring in the shadows that Ross could not hear. Then the voice again, saying a sort of good-by.