Ben Bova - Exiled from Earth

The Chairman silenced Lou with an upraised hand. “My brave, impetuous young man, you are completely wrong about so many things. Firstly, I do not lie. When I offer Miss Sterne her freedom, and raise the possibility of freedom for Dr. Kori, I am not lying. Why should I? Please do me the honor of granting me honest motives.

“Secondly, the people of the world already know about your exile. We have not kept it secret. There would be no way to do so, even if we desired to. You cannot whisk away so many prominent men without anyone knowing it.”

“They … they know?”

“Of course they know. And they do not care. Do you think that the teeming billions on Earth care about a handful of scientists and engineers?” The Chairman shook his head. “No, they care about food, about jobs, about living space, about recreation and procreation.”

“But genetic engineering. I thought…” Lou felt as if he were in a glider that was spinning out of control.

“Ah yes, your work,” The Chairman said. “I admit that if you were on Earth and showing the world, step by step, that it could be done—then there would soon be an enormous demand for it. Catastrophic reaction. Everyone would want his next child made perfect.

“But today, you are only talking about the possibility of doing this sometime in the future. You might be successful next week, or next year, or next century. I confess that our public information experts have tried to make it sound more like next century than next week. And having you all out of the way has made the job that much easier.”

“And… nobody cares?”

The Chairman looked truly sad. “The people are quite accustomed to talk of scientific miracles. Rarely do they see such miracles come true.”

“But the food they eat, weather control, medicines, space expeditions…”

“All part of the normal, everyday background,” said the Chairman. “Once a miracle comes true, it quickly becomes a commonplace. And the people hardly ever connect today’s commonplaces with your talk of tomorrow’s miracles. So your promises of genetic engineering do not excite most people. Grasping politicians, yes; hungry workers and farmers, no.”

“So it’s over… completely finished. No way around it.” Lou sank back in his seat numbly.

“I am afraid so. I have lived with this problem for more than a year now, trying to find some alternative to exile. There is none. I am sorry. Somewhere, we have failed. We build gleaming technologies to turn ourselves into devils.” The Chairman shook his head. “I am ashamed of myself, of the government, of the entire society. We are doing you a dreadful injustice.”

“But you’re going ahead and doing it,” Lou muttered.

“Yes,” the Chairman shot back. “That is the most terrible part of it. I hate this. But I will do it. I know you can never accept it, never agree to it, never understand why it must be done. I am sorry.”

The four of them lapsed into a dismal silence.

Finally, the Chairman said, “As I told you, I will personally examine the matter of the rocket scientists. Dr. Kori, I cannot promise you your freedom, but I do promise to try.”

Kori nodded and tried to look grateful but not too happy, glancing sidelong at Lou.

“And Miss Sterne,” the Chairman went on, “you are free to go whenever you wish. The government will furnish you with transportation back to Albuquerque,, or any place else you may desire to go. And you will be reimbursed for the troubles that you’ve been put to, of course.”

Bonnie said, “Sir? Would it be possible for me to go to the satellite? On a temporary basis?”

Lou stared at her.

“Most of my friends are there,” Bonnie said, looking straight at the Chairman and avoiding Lou’s eyes. “Maybe I’d rather live there than anywhere else. But I can’t tell unless I’ve tried it for a while.”

The Chairman folded his hands on his thin chest and gazed thoughtfully at Bonnie. He looked as if he knew there was a lot more to Bonnie’s request than she had stated.

“How do you think the others will feel, knowing that you can return to Earth anytime you wish to?”

Bonnie’s face reddened slightly. “I… I would only stay a few weeks. I’d be willing to make a final decision then.”

“A few weeks,” the Chairman echoed. “And then you would make a decision that would be irrevocable… for the rest of your life?”

She nodded slowly.

A little smile worked its way across the Chairman’s wrinkled face. “I can picture Kobryn’s reaction. Highly irregular. But—very well, you may have a few weeks aboard the satellite. But no more.”

“Thank you!” Bonnie said. And then she turned, smiling, to Lou.

It was literally another world.

Lou never saw the satellite from the outside. He, Bonnie, and Kori were tucked into a shuttle rocket that had no viewports in the cargo / passenger module. They sat in padded plastic contour chairs amidst cylinders of gas, packing crates of foodstuffs, motors, pumps, furniture. Lou swore he could hear, through the airlock that connected to a second cargo module, the bleating of a goat or sheep.

The satellite was huge, of course; a small town in orbit. From the inside it was a strange, different kind of environment. For one thing, you always walked uphill. The corridors all curved uphill, in both directions, because the satellite was built in a series of giant wheels, one within another. Most of the living quarters were in the largest, outermost wheel, where the spin force almost equaled the full gravity of Earth’s surface. It took no extra physical effort to walk along the constantly uphill corridors because you didn’t have to work against the spin-induced gravity.

His compartment—you couldn’t call it a room—was a marvel of compactness, plastic-trimmed with aluminum spray paint. Lou thought of it as a cell. An astronaut would feel comfortable in it; a scientist on duty in a satellite for a month would put up with it; Lou realized he’d be living in it for the rest of his life.

Edmond Dantes had a bigger cell than this.

Life had already settled into something of a dull routine in the plastic little world. Lou, Kori, and Bonnie were met by a greeting committee when they stepped through the airlock from the shuttle rocket. They were shown to their quarters. After he had unpacked his lone travel bag, Lou received a phone call from Mrs. Kaufman, who was acting as her husband’s secretary now, asking him to meet with the Director’s Council right after breakfast the following “morning.”

Time, of course, was completely arbitrary aboard the satellite. So everyone ran on the same clock, set on Universal Time. When it was midnight in Greenwich, England, it was midnight aboard the satellite.

Lou spent his first “evening” prowling through the uphill corridors. He couldn’t find Bonnie, didn’t know where her quarters were or what her phone number was. Same thing for Kori. He could have asked someone,- but instead he started walking along the main corridor. It was completely featureless, bare plastic walls broken only by bare plastic doors. All alike, except for tiny room numbers on them.

There were other people drifting through the corridors, most of them strangers, but a few men and women that he had worked with at the Institute. They nodded recognition or mumbled a hello. If they were surprised to see him, or wondered why they hadn’t seen him before this, they didn’t show it in any way. All Lou could see in their faces was a vague guilt, a shame at being locked up here.

Like the living dead, Lou thought of them.

The only change in the long, sloping, featureless corridor was that every ten minutes or so there was a spiral ladderway that led up toward the next wheel, in closer to the hub of the slowly spinning satellite. After passing several of them, Lou decided to go upstairs and see what was there.