Part 4

"I didn't intend to belittle your intellectual accomplishments, Dr. Bogardus," the Colonel said. "I've read your dossiers. They're impressive. When I called you untrained, what I really meant was that you're totally unskilled in terms of my own specialty. I meant that none of you knows anything of the skills of simple chemical rocketry, much less the techniques required to lift half a million tons on a nuclear-pulse thrust."

"We can learn," I said.

"I hope so," Colonel Barrett said, "because I've been ordered to teach you."

* * * * *

"We're in?" Bud Dorsey demanded.

"You're in," Colonel Barrett said. "The decision in the Pentagon went against my recommendation that professionals in rocketry be recruited for the Alpha Centauri flight. The generals liked your argument, Dr. Bogardus, that we should send a germ-free ship and a germ-free crew to a possibly germ-free planet. In a sense, this is tradition. Back in the '50s, moon-missiles were sponged down with Lysol before launching, just in case they got where they were aimed at. Our people didn't want to contaminate the moon's surface with earthly micro-organisms, cluttering up the picture for the bacteriologists who were scheduled to arrive later. The Chief of Staff said that if there is a germ-free population on one of the Centaurus planets, we must not initiate our contact with them by handing out the sort of prizes Cook's crew brought to the South Seas--measles, tuberculosis, smallpox. We can't know that even innocuous bacteria might not be fatal to a gnotobiotic, alien population. So you go."

"Colonel," I said, "I'm sure that Washington didn't give up the _Zeta_ to us out of sheer altruism. What's their real reason?"

"Where else could we get a crew of twenty-eight men and women who've given proof they can live together for a long period of time, peaceably, retaining a fair degree of sanity? Miss Moss's studies in group dynamics were most interesting to the Chief of Staff. Doubtless they did much to influence his decision in your favor."

"There's one thing I don't understand, Colonel Barrett."

"What's that, Miss Damien?" he asked.

"Why is it that you seem so unhappy about our being accepted as the _Zeta's_ crew?" she asked. "After all, you've been given the duty of training us to take her between stars. That's a pretty important assignment, isn't it, even for a bird colonel?"

"You're right, Miss Damien," Colonel Barrett said. "My new assignment is a vital one. You must forgive me if I seemed curt and unfriendly." He paused. "I've been trying to hide my feelings, but evidently I failed. You see, Miss Damien, my wife and I had headed the previous list of volunteers--the contaminated crew."

* * * * *

Looking from the ports of the rocket that had brought us from Memorial Orbital Station, I'd thought von Weizsäcker Crater the most impressive sight I'd ever seen. The _Orion Zeta_ looked from our height like nothing so much as a miniature silver cocktail-shaker, glinting at the center of the vast circle of von Weizsäcker.

Later, standing a few hundred feet from _Zeta's_ base, I'd found the order of impressiveness reversed. The great ship was a tower of fifteen hundred feet, blacking out the stars like a geometric mountain; while the crater's twenty-thousand-foot ringwall, so far away in all directions, was no more obtrusive than a decorative hedge. This ship, I thought, is the intelligent comet on which we'd be passengers until the day we died, some two and a fraction light-years away from home. We were guaranteed immortality, though, in our offspring. Our descendants would very literally become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, as our bodies were resurrected to vegetable life in the hydroponic tanks of the ship.

We Lapins clustered close together on the moon-dust, staring up the sides of our ship. Her upper reaches were hidden by the globular bulge of the enormous thrust-chamber, where kiloton capsules of nuclear fuel would be fired, three a second, to blast us into space. In this great ship our children would be born and would die, and our grandchildren as well. From the _Zeta_, our aged great-grandchildren, limping down long ladderways to the exit-hatches on the arms of their teen-aged grandsons, would step onto the soil of a planet that circled Alpha Centauri.

One hundred and twenty-five years from now, I thought, clasping the Firebird's hand in mine. So little in history, so big in human lives!

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Brooklyn Bridge had been brand-new. U.S. Grant, defrauded and cancer-ridden, was gritting his teeth against the pain to write his memoirs. President Chester A. Arthur had just signed into law a bill prohibiting polygamy in the territories.

As far away as those things lay our goal.

We entered the sublunarian chambers beneath the ship. Dr. McQueen had preceded us here; and under his direction the _Orion Zeta_ had been made as aseptic as the Big Tank itself. Colonel Barrett and his subordinates who'd train us to operate the _Zeta_ would have to wear sterility-suits aboard her, and would enter through the formaldehyde sump that was now her only entrance. Even the dust of the moon was not entirely sterile.

The Firebird took my arm to urge me toward the liquid gateway to the ship, eager to see our new home. "Wait," I said, holding her back till all the others had gone through the antiseptic pool.

"Cold feet, Johnny?" she teased me.

"Gloria Moss once told me, Firebird, that a healthy respect for tradition is essential to the organic strength of a group such as ours," I said. "So...." I bent and picked the Firebird up, her weight moon-trimmed to that of a three-year-old. She put her arms around my neck as I carried her down the ladder into the poisonous decontamination tank that was our front door to Alpha Centauri.