“It’s not something that comes easily. Not something that just occurred to me, either.”
“Have you discussed this fantasy with John?”
“Not with anyone. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“If it’s bothering you—”
“It’s not that exactly. I’m just trying to get a handle on…whatever it is. It’s related. Hard to express.”
“Because it’s complicated? Or because it’s hurtful.”
He was silent for a minute; smoldering, I guess. “You jump at this damned thing as if it were the greatest gift in the world—instead of what it is, a golden opportunity to go down to the surface of a poisoned planet and risk your life teaching ignorant savages how to grow crops.”
“Someone has to do it, Dan.”
“Not my wife! But you accept it without question because of this damned sense of personal destiny. Don’t you?”
Caught me off balance. “That may be part of it. I also want to…to do well—”
“You’re doing fine right here. You’ve got the Engineering Board wrapped around your finger; you have more day-to-day influence than I have, in Start-up. And you don’t think twice about throwing it away because this stunt is more in line with your destiny.”
“Don’t shout.”
“All right. How am I wrong?”
“It’s not a ‘stunt.’ Normalization of our relations with Earth has to start somewhere. There’s no United Nations.”
“Still doesn’t mean that you have to do it.”
“I’m the best qualified.”
“That could be… if so, why risk our best on another Zaire-type mission? What if what they really want is hostages? What if they plan to kill you all and take the shuttle?”
“We’ve taken care of that. If anyone else tried to start it they’d turn JFK Interplanetary into a radioactive hole.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh, I know.” I wished I could see his face. “I’ll concede that there’s some danger. But we’re well prepared. Better prepared than you are for Newhome. After all…a craft of unproven design using a brand-new propulsion system for a century-long trip to an unexplored planet. I’m just going to New York City. I’ve been there before.”
“Sure. Give my regards to Broadway.” He rolled over again.
3 
We left it at that, neither open break nor accommodation. An uneasy kind of truce. I suppose I should have done some deep soul-searching, straighten out how I felt about Daniel, but there was no time in the busy two days that followed. Perhaps I made sure there was no time.
The Mercedes had room for twenty people besides myself and the pilot. I’d approached over sixty before I got the right mixture of people who were not only properly qualified but also crazy enough to go:
Anzel, Murray
28
dentist
Byer, Clifford
27
horticulturist
Devon, Ran
30
mechanic, folk arts
Dore, Louise
21
mechanic
Guideau, Suzanne
32
farmer, paramedic
Friedman, Steven
37
native, military engineer
Itoh, Son
40
MD, nutritionist
Long, Albert
30
MD, farming
Mandell, Maria
22
animal husbandry
Marchand, Carrie
48
systems analysis, farming
Munkelt, Ingred
30
communications, security
O’Brien, Sara
27
backup pilot, security
Richards, Robert
33
mechanic, engineer
Rockefeller, Jack
23
native, farming, tinkerer
Smith, Thomas
41
education
Ten, Ahmed
51
paramedic, anthro., exp.
Tishkyevich, Galina
40
biologist
Thiele, Martin
22
farming, security
Volker, Harry
27
med. technician
Wasserman, Sam
18
security, genius
We had flatscreen shots of the Westchester area in various wavelengths that told our agricultural people what would grow best there. In two days they cloned and forcegrew thousands of seedlings, enough to get a balanced farm going. They immunized mating pairs of appropriate breeds of rabbits, goats, chickens, and several kinds of fish. We were going to be a kind of reverse Ark.
A large part of our preparation for the trip was learning how to keep these beasts and plants alive during the two-day transfer to braking orbit. I took the training along with all of the farmer types. I also spent a few hours with the security people, while the police trained them in various degrees of mayhem control, and organized and attended hasty seminars in immunology, psychology of adolescence, first aid, and so forth. But it was obvious that what we all needed was years of specific and intensive study. We should have foreseen this and begun training a long time ago.
The day we left I got to be a Personality, interviewed by Jules Hammond. That was bad. He had to overdra-matize the thing, and in trying to mitigate that I wound up looking like a self-effacing heroine. Watching it on the news was excruciating. John and I made love in the morning and later Daniel and I fucked out of a sense of necessity, and at midnight I boarded the Mercedes with a minimum of enthusiasm.
We didn’t drop at a steady rate, which for some reason would have been wasteful of fuel. Instead there were “burn intervals,” various times when we suddenly went from zerogee to 1.5 or two gees. The computer usually timed these for periods when I was trying to sleep, so I could be entertained by nightmares of falling.
The landing was interesting, too interesting. The “interplanetary” in JFK Interplanetary meant that it had one automated landing pad for Class I ships like the Mercedes. (Unlike Zaire, it didn’t have a runway long enough for a conventional landing.) Of course the automation was long since dead. So our pilot had to bring the ship in on its tail, using instruments that had last been calibrated two years before the war. We hit very hard. The humans were all right, strapped into soft acceleration couches, but both the rabbits were killed, and the goats suffered eight broken legs. Maria Mandell stayed aboard, tending to the poor creatures, while most of us went outside to meet the groundhogs.
We were no doubt an imposing sight, all wearing identical gray coveralls with plastic breathers and surgical gloves, five of us carrying flamethrowers. At any rate, most of the groundhogs stayed hidden, with just one brave representative coming down the tarmac with his hands in the air.
As he approached, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t planned what to say on this historic occasion. What I came up with was, “Hello?”
“Can I put my hands down?” he said.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” I said. “Where are the others?”
“Watching.” He hesitated and then turned around and waved. “They’ll be down in a minute.”
“I don’t like it,” Steve Friedman said. He had been a professional soldier before the war. “We’re really exposed.”
“We don’t have any weapons,” the man said.
“Sure.” Steve’s eyes were focused beyond him, searching from place to place. The building we faced was mainly tiers of opaque black glass windows, enough to hide an army of snipers. The ground was cluttered with hulks of rusting machinery, which I supposed we could hide behind if we had to. But then a door opened with a loud squeak and the rest of the groundhogs came out, looking very scared and not at all dangerous.