The features behind the other’s visor remained unsmiling. “Mister Fallows to you, Sergeant.” The voice was icy. “I’m sorry, but I have work to do. I presume you have as, well. Might I suggest that we both get on with it.” With that he clasped the handrails of the ‘ladder, stepped backward off the platform .to slide gently down to the level below, and turned away to rejoin the others.
Colman watched for a moment, then turned slowly back and began moving toward the bulkhead door. He didn’t feel resentful, nor particularly surprised. He’d seen it all too many times before. Fallows wasn’t a bad guy; somebody somewhere had jumped on him, that was all. “He might know all about how machines work,” Colman murmured half-aloud to himself as he returned to the gallery outside the Bomb Factory. “But he doesn’t understand how they think.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MOVIE SHOWING on the wall screen in the dining area of the Fallowses’ upper-middle-echelon residential unit in the Maryland module was about the War of 2021, and Jay Fallows was overjoyed that it had reached an end. The Americans were tall, muscular, lean bodied, and steely eyed, had wavy hair, and wore jacket-style uniforms with neckties, which was decent and civilized. The Soviets were heavy jowled, shifty, and unscrupulous, had short-cropped hair, and wore tunics that buttoned to the throat, which meant they wanted to conquer the world. The Americans possessed superi6r technology because they had closer shaves.
“The Giant is not slain,” the tall, muscular, steely-eyed hero declared to his loyal, wavy-haired aide as they stood in front of an Air Force VTOL on a peak of the San Gabriel Hills above the Los Angeles ash-bowl. “It must sleep a while to mend its wounds now its task is done. But it will rise again, hardened and tempered from the furnace. This will not have been for naught.” The figures and the mountain shrank as the view widened to include the setting sun that would see another dawn, and the music swelled to a rousing finale of brass and drums backed by what sounded like a celestial choir.
Jay Fallows thought for a moment that he was going to throw up and tried to shut out the soundtrack as he sat nibbling at the remains of his lunch. An astronomy book lay propped open on the table in front of him. Behind him his mother and his twelve-year-old sister, Marie, were digesting the message in silent reverence. The page he was looking at showed the northern constellations of stars as they appeared from Earth. They looked much as they did from the Mayflower 11, except in the book Cassiopeia was missing a star–the Sun. On the page opposite, the Southern Cross included Alpha Centauri as one of its ‘pointers, whereas from the ship it had separated and grown into a brilliant orb~ shining in the foreground. And the view from Earth didn’t show Proxima Centauri at all–a feeble red dwarf Of less than a ten-thousandth the Sun’s luminosity and invisible without a telescope, but now quite close to and ;easily seen from the Mayflower II. Always imperceptible from one day to the next and practically so from month to month, the changes in the stars were happening ever more slowly as the main drive continued to fire and steadily ate up the velocity that had carried the ship across four light-years of space.
Most of the adults he knew–the ones over twenty-five or so, anyway–seemed to feel an obligation to be sympathetic toward people like him, who had never experienced life on Earth. From what he had seen he wasn’t sure that he’d missed all that much. Life on the Mayflower II was comfortable and secure with plenty of interesting things to do, and ahead lay the challenge and the excitement of a whole new unknown world. Certainly that was something no one back on Earth could look forward to.
In the Political Science course at school, the Mayflower II’s primary mission had been described as one of “preemptive liberation,” which meant that because the Asiatics and the Europeans were the way they were, they would seize Chiron and convert it to their own corrupt ways if given the chance, and the Mayflower I1 therefore had two years to teach the Chironians how to protect themselves. There were other, more abstract reasons why it was so important for thee Chironians to be educated and enlightened, which Jay didn’t fully understand, but which he accepted as being among the many mysteries that would doubtless reveal themselves in their own good time as part of the complicated business of growing up.