During deceleration I began to search the sky beyond the Hoatzin every day, with an all-frequency sweep that ought to pick up signals as soon as our drive went to reduced thrust. We didn’t pick up the Ark until the final day and it was no more than a point on the microwave screen for most of that. The image we finally built up on the monitor showed a lumpy, uneven ball, pierced by black shafts. Spiky antennas and angled gantries stood up like spines on its dull grey surface. I had seen the images of the Ark before it left the Solar System, and all the surface structures were new. The colonists had been busy in the seventy-seven years since they accelerated away from Ganymede orbit.
We moved in to five thousand kilometers, cut the drive, and sent a calling sequence. I don’t remember a longer five seconds, waiting for their response. When it came it was an anti-climax. A pleasant-looking middle-aged woman appeared on our screen.
“Hello,” she said cheerfully. “We received a message that you were on your way here. My name is Kleeman. Link in your computer and we’ll dock you. There will be a few formalities before you can come inside.”
I put the central computer into distributed mode and linked a navigation module through the com-net. She sounded friendly and normal but I didn’t want her to have override control of all the Hoatzin’s movements. We moved to a position about fifty kilometers away from the Ark, then Kleeman appeared again on the screen.
“I didn’t realize your ship had so much mass. We’ll hold there, and you can come in on a pod. All right?”
We usually called it a capsule these days, but I knew what she meant. I made McAndrew put on a suit, to his disgust, and we entered the small transfer vessel. It was just big enough for four people, with no air lock and a simple electric drive. We drifted in to the Ark, with the capsule’s computer slaved through the Hoatzin. As we got nearer I had a better feel for size. Two kilometers is small for an asteroid, but it’s awfully big compared with a human. We nosed into contact with a landing tower, like a fly landing on the side of a wasp’s nest. I hoped that would prove to be a poor analogy.
We left the capsule open and went hand-over-hand down the landing tower rather than wait for an electric lift. It was impossible to believe that we were moving at almost nine thousand kilometers a second away from Earth. The stars were in the same familiar constellations, and it took a while to pick out the Sun. It was a bright star, but a good deal less bright than Sirius. I stood at the bottom of the tower for a few seconds, peering about me before entering the air lock that led to the interior of the Ark. It was a strange, alien landscape, with the few surface lights throwing black angular shadows across the uneven rock. My trips to Titan suddenly felt like local hops around the comfortable backyard of the Solar System.
“Come on, Jeanie.” That was McAndrew, all brisk efficiency and already standing in the air lock. He was much keener than I to penetrate that unfamiliar world of the interior.
I took a last look at the stars, and fixed in my mind the position of the transfer capsule — an old habit that pays off once in a thousand times. Then I followed McAndrew down into the lock.
A few formalities before you can come inside. Kleeman had a gift for understatement. We found out what she meant when we stepped in through the inner lock, to an office-cum-schoolroom equipped with a couple of impressive consoles and displays. Kleeman met us there, as pleasant and rosy-faced in the flesh as she had seemed over the com-link.
She waved us to the terminals. “This is an improved version of the equipment that was on the original ship, before it left your system. Please sit down. Before anyone can enter our main Home, they must take tests. It has been that way since Massingham first showed us how our society could be built.”
We sat at the terminals, back-to-back. McAndrew was frowning at the delay. “What’s the test, then?” he grumbled.
“Just watch the screen. I don’t think that either of you will have any trouble.”
She smiled and left us to it. I wondered what the penalty was if you failed. We were a long way from home. It seemed clear that if they had been improving this equipment after they left Ganymede, they must apply it to their own people. We were certainly the first visitors they had seen for seventy-five years. How had they been able to accept our arrival so calmly?
Before I could pursue that thought the screen was alive. I read the instructions as they appeared there, and followed them as carefully as possible. After a few minutes I got the knack of it. We had tests rather like it when I first applied to go into space. To say that we were taking an intelligence test would be an oversimplification — many other aptitudes were tested, as well as knowledge and mechanical skills. That was the only consolation I had. McAndrew must be wiping the floor with me on all the parts that called for straight brain-power, but I knew that his coordination was terrible. He could unwrap a set of interlocking, multiply-connected figures mentally and tell you how they came apart, but ask him to do the same thing with real objects and he wouldn’t be able to start.
After three hours we were finished. Both screens suddenly went blank. We swung to face each other.
“What’s next?” I said. He shrugged and began to look at the terminal itself. The design hadn’t been used in the System for fifty years. I took a quick float around the walls — we had entered the Ark near a pole, where the effective gravity caused by its rotation was negligible. Even on the Ark ’s equator I estimated that we wouldn’t feel more than a tenth of a gee at the most.
No signs of what I was looking for, but that didn’t mean much. Microphones could be disguised in a hundred ways.
“Mac, who do you think she is?”
He looked up from the terminal. “Why, she’s the woman assigned to…” He stopped. He had caught my point. When you are two light-years from Sol and you have your first visitors for seventy-five years, who leads the reception party? Not the man and woman who recycle the garbage. Kleeman ought to be somebody important on the Ark.
“I can assist your speculation,” said a voice from the wall. So much for our privacy. As I expected, we had been observed throughout — no honor system on this test. “I am Kal Massingham Kleeman, the daughter of Jules Massingham, and I am senior member of Home outside the Council of Intellects. Wait there for one more moment. I will join you with good news.”
She was beaming when she reappeared. Whatever they were going to do with us, it didn’t seem likely they would be flinging us out into the void.
“You are both prime stock, genetically and individually,” she said. “I thought that would be the case when first I saw you.”
She looked down at a green card in her hand. “I notice that you both failed to answer one small part of the inquiry on your background. Captain Roker, your medical record indicates that you bore one child. But what is its sex, condition, and present status?”
I heard McAndrew suck in his breath past his teeth, while I suppressed my own shock as best I could. It was clear that the standards of privacy in the System and on the Ark had diverged widely in the past seventy-seven years.
“It is a female.” I hope I kept my voice steady. “Healthy, and with no neuroses. She is in first level education on Luna.”
“The father?”
“Unknown.”
I shouldn’t have been pleased to see that now Kleeman was shocked, but I was. She looked as distressed as I felt. After a few seconds she grabbed control of her emotions, swallowed, and nodded.
“We are not ignorant of the unplanned matings that your System permits. But hearing of such things and encountering them directly are not the same.” She looked again at her green card. “McAndrew, you show no children. Is that true?”