“Aw, shuddup.” The computer returned obediently to its meditations.
Fallows sat back in his chair and cast a routine eye around the monitor room. Everything seemed to be running smoothly at the crew stations beyond the glass partition behind his console, and the other displays confirmed that all else was as it should be. The reserve tank to Number 2 vernier motor had been recharged after a slight course-correction earlier and was checking out at “Ready” again. All the fuel, coolant, primary and standby power, hydraulic, pneumatic, gas, oil, life-support, and instrumentation subsystems servicing the Drive Section were performing well within limits. Way back near the tail, the banks of gigantic fusion reactors were gobbling up the 35 million tons of hydrogen that had been magnetically ram scooped out of space throughout the twenty-year voyage and converting over two tons of its mass into energy every second to produce the awesome, 1.5-mile-diameter blast of radiation and reaction products that would have to burn for six months to slow the 140-million-ton mass of the Mayflower II down from its free-cruise velocity.
The ship had left Earth with only sufficient fuel on board to accelerate it to cruising speed and had followed a course through the higher-density concentrations of hydrogen to collect what it needed to slow down again.
Fallows glanced at the clock in the center of the console. Less than an hour before Waiters was due to take over the watch. Then he would have two days to himself before coming back on duty. He closed his eyes for a moment and savored the thought.
Only three months to go! His children had often asked him why a young man in his prime would turn his back on everything familiar and exchange twenty years of his life for a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri. They had good reason, since their futures had been decided more than a little by his decision. Most of the Mayflower II’s thirty thousand occupants were used to being asked that question. Fallows usually replied that he had grown disillusioned by the spectacle of the world steadily rearming itself toward the same level of insanity that had preceded the devastation of much of North America and Europe and the end of the Soviet empire in the brief holocaust of 2021, and that he had left it all behind to seek a new start somewhere else. It was one of the standard answers, given as much for self-reassurance as anything else. But in his private moments Fallows knew that he really didn’t believe it. He tried to pretend that he didn’t remember the real reason.
He had been born almost at the end of the Lean Years following the war, so he didn’t remember about that period, but his father had told him about the times when fifty million people lived amid shantytown squalor around the blackened and twisted skeletons of their cities and huddled in lines in the snow for their ration of soup and bread at government field-kitchens; about his mother laboring fifteen hours a day cutting boards for prefabricated houses to put two skimpy meals of beef broth and rice from the Chinese food ships on the table each day and to buy one pair of utility-brand pressed-paper shoes per person every six months; about his older brother killed in the fighting with the hordes that had come plundering from the Caribbean and from the south.
The years Fallows remembered had come later, when the slender fingers of gleaming new cities were beginning to claw skyward once more from the deserts of rubble, and new steel and aluminum plants were humming and pounding while on the other side of the world China and IndiaJapan wrestled for control over the industrial and commercial might of the ‘East. Those had been stirring years, vibrant years, inspiring years. Fallows remembered the floodlit parades .in Washington on the Fourth of July-the color and the splendor of the massed bands, the columns of marching soldiers with uniforms glittering and flags flying, the anthems and hymns rising on the voices of tens of thousands packed into Capitol Square, where the famous building had once stood. He remembered strutting into a high-school ball in his just acquired uniform of the American New Order Youth Corps and pretending haughtily not to notice the admiring looks following him wherever he went. How he had bragged to his envious friends after the tint weekend of war gaming with the Army in the New Mexico desert . . . the exhilaration when America reestablished a permanently manned base on the Moon.