A Hole In Space

A moment later he did wonder.

What are the biological package probes?

But the wonder was that he had never wondered.

He knew what and where they were: heavy fat cylinders arranged around the waist of the starship's hull. Ten of these, each weighing almost as much as Corbell's own life-support system. He knew their mass distribution. He knew the clamp system that held them to the hull and he could operate and repair the clamps under various extremes of damage. He almost knew where the probes went when released; it was just on the tip of his tongue... which meant that he had had the RNA shot but had not yet seen the instructions.

But he didn't know what the probes were for.

It was like that with the ship, he realized. He knew everything there was to know about a seeder ramship, but nothing at all about the other kinds of starships or interplanetary travel or ground-to-orbit vehicles. He knew that he would be launched by linear accelerator from the Moon. He knew the design of the accelerator-he could see it, three hundred and fifty kilometers of rings standing on end in a line across a level lunar mare. He knew what to do if anything went wrong during launch. And that was all he knew about the Moon and lunar installations and lunar conquest, barring what he had watched on television over two hundred years ago.

What was going on out there? In the two weeks since his arrival (awakening? creation?) he had seen four rooms and two rooftops, glimpsed a rectilinear cityscape from a bridge, and talked to one man who was not interested in telling him anything. What had happened in two hundred years?

These men and women who slept around him. Who were they? Why were they here? He didn't even know if they were corpsicle or contemporary. Contemporary, probably; not one of them was self-conscious about the facilities.

Corbell had raised buildings in all sorts of strange places, but he had never jumped blind. He had always brushed up on the language and studied the customs before he went. Here he had no handle, nowhere to start. He was lost.

Oh, for someone to talk to!

He was learning in enormous gulps, taking in volumes of knowledge so broad that he hadn't realized how rigidly bounded they were. The State was teaching him only what he needed to know. Every bit of information was aimed straight at his profession.

Rammer.

He could see the reasoning. He would be gone for several centuries. Why should the State teach him anything at all about today's technology, customs, politics? There would be trouble enough when he came back, if he-come to that, who had taught him to call the government the State? How had he come to think of the State as all powerful? He knew nothing of its power and extent.

It must be the RNA training. With data came attitudes below the conscious level, where he couldn't get at them.

That made his skin crawl. They were changing him around again!

Sure, why shouldn't the State trust him with a seeder ramship? They were feeding him State-oriented patriotism through a silver needle!

He had lost his people. He had lost his world. He would lose this one. According to Pierce, he had lost himself four times already. A condemned criminal had had his personality wiped four times. Corbell's goddamned skeleton had probably been ground up for phosphates. But this was the worst: that his beliefs and motivations were being lost bit by bit to the RNA solution while the State made him over into a rammer.

There was nothing that was his.

He failed to see Pierce at the next exercise period. It was just as well. He was somewhat groggy. As usual he ate di

He looked up during study period the next day and found Pierce watching him. He blinked, fighting free of a mass of data on the attitude jet system that bled plasma from the inboard fusion plant that was also the emergency electrical power source, and asked, "Pierce, what's a biological package probe?"

"I would have thought they would teach you that. You know what to do with the probes, don't you?"

"The teaching widget gave me the procedures two days ago. Slow up for certain systems, kill the fields, turn a probe loose and speed up again."

"You don't have to aim them?"

"No. I gather they aim themselves. But I have to get them down below a certain velocity or they'll fall right through the system."

"Amazing. They must do all the rest of it themselves." Pierce shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it. Well, Corbell, the probes steer for an otherwise terrestrial world with a reducing atmosphere. They outnumber oxygen-nitrogen worlds about three to one in this region of the galaxy and probably everywhere else too-as you may know, if your age got that far."

"But what do the probes do?"

"They're biological packages. A dozen different strains of algae. The idea is to turn a reducing atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere, just the way photosynthetic life forms did for Earth, something like fifteen-limes-ten-to-the-eighth years ago." The checker smiled, barely. His small narrow mouth wasn't built to express any great emotion. "You're part of a big project."

"Good Lord. How long does it take?"

"We think about fifty thousand years. Obviously we've never had the chance to measure it."

"But, good Lord! Do you really think the State will last that long? Does even the State think it'll last that long?"

"That's not your affair, Corbell. Still-" Pierce considered. "I don't suppose I do. Or the State does. But humanity will last. One day there will be men on those worlds. It's a Cause, Corbell. The immortality of the species. A thing bigger than one man's life. And you're part of it."

He looked at Corbell expectantly.

Corbell was deep in thought. He was ru

Presently he asked, "What's it like out there?"

"The stars? You're-"

"No, no, no. The city. I catch just a glimpse of it twice a day. Cubistic buildings with elaborate carvings at the street level-"

"What the bleep is this, Corbell? You don't need to know anything about Selerdor. By the time you come home the whole city will be changed."

"I know, I know. That's why I hate to leave without seeing something of the world. I could be going out to die..." Corbell stopped. He had seen that considering look before, but he had never seen Pierce actually angry.

The checker's voice was flat, his mouth pinched tight. "You think of yourself as a tourist."

"So would you if you found yourself two hundred years in the future. If you didn't have that much curiosity you wouldn't be human."

"Granted that I'd want to look around. I certainly wouldn't demand it as a right. What were you thinking when you foisted yourself off on the future? Did you think the future owed you a debt? It's the other way around, and time you realized it!"

Corbell was silent.

"I'll tell you something. You're a rammer because you're a born tourist. We tested you for that. You like the unfamiliar; it doesn't send you scuttling back to something safe and known. That's rare."

The checker's eyes said: And that's why I've decided not to wipe your personality yet. His mouth said, "Was there anything else?"

Corbell pushed his luck. "I'd like a chance to practice with a computer like the ship's autopilot-computer."

"We don't have one. But you'll get your chance in two days. You're leaving then."

IV

The next day he received his instructions for entering the solar system. He had been alive for seventeen days.