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supporting pillars that had extended forward from the Hexagon. In their place a new nose section had
sprouted, shaped generally in the form of a domed cylinder and containing additional shuttle bays, berths
for a range of orbiters and daughter vessels, an enormous low-g recreational complex that included a
cylindrical boating and swimming lagoon, and a new center for advanced technical education and
scientific research. The stern of the ship had undergone even vaster changes, its original fusion drive
having been replaced by a scaled-up antimatter system developed from the prototype successfully tested
on the Kuan-yin.
Colman had been intimately involved with the work on the new drive system as the engineering project
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leader of a team working under Bernard Fallows s direction. He had brought Kath and their
four-year-old son Alex up to the ship to be present with him at the unveiling ceremony being held in the
main concourse of the new nose section. Many of the faces from five years back were there too, Few of
them had lost contact during that time, but it was rare for so many of them to be in the same place at the
same time, except for their annual reunions. Most of D Company had assembled for the event Sirocco,
with Shirley and their twin daughters; Hanlon, who now instructed at the martial arts academy in Franklin,
with Janet and their two children; Driscoll, who had taken a rest from his touring magic show, one of
Chiron s major entertainment attractions; Stanislau, now a computer software expert; Swyley, who
directed and produced movies, usually about the American underworld, along with a couple of the pretty
girls who seemed to surround him wherever he went...and there were others. Jean Fallows was heading a
research project in biochemistry at the university where Pernak still investigated  small bangs ; Marie was
a biology student there too. Jay, now twenty and with a young son, had built an old-fashioned railroad
into Franklin now a sizable and thriving city which used full-scale steam locomotives and provided a
sight-seeing attraction and historical curiosity that every visitor to the area had to ride on at least once.
Veronica, a practicing architect, was there with Casey, Adam, and Barbara. Celia had declined to return
to the ship but was watching from the home that she shared with Lechat on the coast; and Wellesley
had taken a trip from his farm in Occidena to see his old ship recommissioned and renamed.
Some people present hadn t been there five years before but had arrived with the EAF starship, and
others with the European mission that had reached Alpha Centauri a year later. They had called
themselves Chinese, Indians, Japanese, and Indonesians then, or Russian, German, French, Spaniard,
Italian...but now they were all simply Chironians. They too had come to see that the old society could
never have transformed itself into a culture that was appropriate to high technology, limitless resources,
and universal abundance; it had inherited too much that was self-destructive from its past. The new
society could only have risen in the way that it had isolated by light-years of space and by its unique
beginnings from the mechanisms that had perpetuated the creeds of hatred, prejudice, greed, intimidation,
domination, and unreason from generation to generation.
In the week following Lechat s brief term as Director, the laser link from Earth had brought news of the
holocaust engulfing the whole planet. Then the signals had ceased, and for five years there had been
nothing. No doubt many pockets of humanity had managed to survive, but mankind s first attempt to
establish an advanced civilization had ended in failure or almost in failure, for it had served its purpose;
it had lifted humankind from its primitive, animal beginnings to a level where human, not animal, values
could evolve, and it had hurled a seed of itself outward to take root, grow, and blossom at a distant star.
And then it had died, as it had to.
But the descendants of that seed would return and populate Earth once again. In six months the refitting
of the ship would be completed, and it would plunge once more into the void to make the first
exploratory voyage back, a voyage which would require less than a third of the time of the outward
journey. Lechat would be the Mission Director, Fallows the Chief of Engineering, and Adam would head
one of the scientific teams, Colman would be returning too, as an Engineering officer; Kath would fulfill [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]