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in the now," Mecmother began. "Do you understand that?"

"Y-yes, I understand. You are—planned—fixed before."

"That's right, Adam. We are pre-set. We have a very large number of choices and actions, but we are not infinite."

"Infinite?"

"We are limited in the help we can give you. We were real—like you—a long, long time ago. We exist now only to help you and the other children. We are here to educate you, to love and console you—and one other thing. We are here to settle your conflicts, to make sure you don't hurt each other."

"But I didn't hurt anyone, Mecmother!"

"Not yet, Adam, but avoiding the others the way you do could be the first sign of trouble."

"How do you know? How can you talk if you aren't real?"

"What you hear is a combination of recorded words that are electronically put together to answer an almost infinite number of your questions. But do not think of me as not real. I was merely in another time. Do you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Then you also are able to see that your ability to reason things—to understand what I am telling you now, for instance, is a remarkable thing."

"You mean because I'm not like the others?"

"You have a superior mind. You are the leader, but do not regard yourself as better than the others. You have more intelligence, yes, but do not look down on your cousins for that. They may develop other qualities better than yours. Stay simple, Adam, and you will be able to live among them and thereby make the human race live again. The name of this ship is Destiny. Do you know why?"

"Yes—I know."

"Be with the other children then. Play with them. You'll need each other to live on New Earth—eleven years from now."

He thought sullenly, how can I play with them when they're flat? But he didn't object out loud to Mecmother. He didn't like her this way. Explanation was Mecteacher's job and discipline Mecfather's. Mecmother should be warm and loving.

Mecteacher appeared and asked Adam to call in the other children so the science lesson could start.

He found them tanning in the sunroom, their unclothed bodies evenly browned from invisible light. They followed Adam without question, but seemed to take a long time doing it. Joseph insisted first in donning clothes, but he put on protective clothing first. Then, realizing the absurdity of it, he switched to his formality suit—the loose-fitting robe Mecteacher instructed the children to wear to lend dignity to the classwork.

During Joseph's delay, the girls ambled off somewhere and returned only when Adam shouted after them in exasperation. Quickening his pace, Adam reached the classroom first and asked Mecteacher, "Are the other children—deep?"

"Deep? Yes, Adam, Mecfather explained that to you. Why are you confused? It's us, the mecs, who are flat. The other children are healthy, living beings. The cells from which all of you were born were selected after years of controlled breeding. Your parents were the finest the human race could produce—intelligent, strong, healthy, high survival quotient. Is this what you mean by deep?"

"Partly, but also—feeling. I think I feel things better."

The other children waddled in, took their seats and switched on robomonitors in the ritual of classroom procedure. They all looked at Mecteacher in the central panel.

Mecteacher motioned Adam to his chair-desk and began the lesson. He described Old Earth and how it circled Old Sol with the other worlds and the way the moons circled the planets—all of them condensed into spheres and all the spheres turning in harmony.

He interrupted himself when Mary's robomonitor registered only partial comprehension. "What don't you understand, Mary? Is it sphere?"

"I know what a sphere is," she said, remembering a previous lesson. "A sphere is an apple or an orange—"

Mecteacher detected a covert wince from Adam's monitor. The teacher appeared to Adam on his desk panel where the others couldn't see or hear. "Do not think this is because she is not—deep, Adam. She is only seven and not as advanced for her age as you are. You understand how we mecs are pre-set?"

"Yes."

"In the classroom, then, if we don't go fast enough for you, try to be patient. We can only deviate within set limits. It is not a new problem, Adam. On Earth, it impeded the educational system from the beginning."

Simultaneously with his conversation with Adam, Mecteacher held up an apple on the central panel and re-explained the age-old analogy between the apple and the Earth, the red skin and the Terran crust, and further, the supposition that New Earth ahead would be like Old Earth and the apple.

Eve wanted to know whether New Earth would have a New Moon.

"That's an interesting question, Eve. But we are still too many millions of miles away to know yet. Before you are ready to leave the ship, you will know."

In the months that passed, Adam tried associating more with the other children. He played their games, which seemed to him to be played without a purpose, but they wouldn't or couldn't play his—with one exception.

He showed them how to turn off the artificial gravity in the recroom and they became obsessed with the same physical euphoria he had discovered for himself. But even while in free-fall, Adam maintained his need for reason and couldn't indulge their pointless pastimes for long. Often, when he grew tired of free-falling, he visited his lonely chamber under the deck and explored the working parts of the ship.

On almost each occasion when he returned, he was caught by one of the mecs and punished with fiercely glowing red panels. Remembering a previous conversation with the mecs, Adam reasoned that their present dissatisfaction with him was not real. After all, he recalled, they were pre-set. They had to act like that when he disobeyed them. Going against them wasn't necessarily the same as doing wrong.

It took an act of will and intelligence far in advance of his seven years, for Adam realized that if he continued like this, the conditioning would eat at his brain like acid and guilt would rise in the etch. So, from under the ship's deck, he turned the mecs permanently off.

The stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big—bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the Destiny had ever come to a star.

Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others—

The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were—flat, undeep.

For years, he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him.

They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive.

He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it.

And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals—or would I?

He pondered the question for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the Destiny, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven—perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested—but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation.

He heard them rummaging above, attempting again and again to pull open the hatch. It had happened this way for years: They'd try to open the trapdoor for an hour or two, then give it up and turn their attention to something else. They never thought to turn the handle. Maybe an undeep person wouldn't be able to reason the combination clicks, but only a completely flat one would persist in pulling when it always ended in failure.

Possibly, he thought, the cosmic rays had been more destructive to their egg cells. Or maybe the alien radiations subtracted something from the other cells to add to his. If this were true, he was partly a product of the others and owed his depth to them.

Adam felt sorry for his cousins then and wished he hadn't hurt them by avoiding their presence. Despite their undepth, they must have feelings. The mecs probably wouldn't have been able to give them depth but, he remembered, the other role of the mecs was to prevent each one of them from harming the others. In their role as arbitrator, Adam realized, they might have stopped him from hurting them so.

Filled with remorse, he left his desk-chair and walked stoop-shouldered under the low ceiling. At the trapdoor, he opened the combination on the inside lock handle and pushed upward. It wouldn't open. He tried again, but it wasn't the lock that was stuck. They must have slid something heavy over the hatch, something he couldn't move.

He tried calling to them, but his voice was lost in the insulative metal of the deck. Finally he sat down, conserving his strength for a final onslaught.

If he couldn't open the hatch, he realized vividly it would be not only his failure, but the failure of the human race.

But maybe it did not have to be so. Maybe the differences in the others weren't biological—maybe they were environmental. And with that thought, he made his way through the narrow passageway and reversed his deed of eleven years past. He turned the mecs back on.

Returning to the hatch, he reworked the combination to make sure it was not the lock that held him. He pushed upward with all his strength, steadily with increasing pressure, until the beads of perspiration turned into gulleys that streamed down his face.

Exhausted, he crawled back to his chair and lay across the desk littered with calculations of a landing he would never make. The soft luminescence from the Destiny's nuclear engines crept forward and caressed him.

In the aft recroom, Eve and Mary were admiring Joseph's strength in being able to push the heavy couch over Adam's trapdoor.

Three wall panels lit red. All the mecs appeared together. "It's time for your science lesson," one said. "But where is Adam?"

"He's in the trapdoor," they answered flatly.

The panel turned green, reserving its redness for the delinquent Adam when he would choose to appear.

Mecteacher began, "Now about the Solar System...."

But the cousins didn't listen. Joseph had turned the gravity switch off and they were too busy floating upended, trying new positions, laughing at each other's ridiculous postures in the ship without bottom. The game was not a new one, but it was newly discovered and they reveled in its glories.

Month after month, they played their weightless games while the mecs implored them to come down. The constellations shifted in the visiports. New Sol grew larger and then smaller as the Destiny sped toward its unseen planet.

In the recroom, the mecvoices were only noises to the trio now, annoying noises that could be silenced, they discovered, with forceful kicks to the red-glowing panels.

When all the mecscreens had been smashed and the weightless games grew boring, Mary looked out the sunroom port. She was surprised to see a rust-yellow sphere hanging in the sky. She watched it seriously for a time, frowning as it

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