Forever Free by Joe Haldeman Page A

sleeves and slapping paint around. Man allotted us one shuttle every five days, so we had to plan carefully what and whom to take up when.
    The "whom" was something we had to work out now. There were 150 slots to fill, and they couldn't just be random people. Marygay and Charlie and Diana and I all made up independent lists of the kinds of skills we'd need, and then met at our place and merged the lists and added a few more possibilities.
    We had nineteen volunteers from Paxton—one had changed his mind after the meeting—and after we fit each of us to a job assignment, we publicized the plan and asked for volunteers planet-wide, to fill the other 131 berths.
    In a week, we had 1,600 volunteers, mostly from Centrus. There was no way the four of us could interview all of them, so first we had to winnow through the applications. I took 238 who had technical occupations and Diana took 101 who were medical. We split the rest up evenly. I wanted, at first, to give priority to veterans, but Marygay talked me out of it. That was more than half the volunteers, but it wasn't necessarily the most qualified half. The proportion of them who were congenital malcontents and troublemakers was probably high. Did we want to be locked up in a box with them for ten years?
    But how could we tell which of the applicants might be unstable, on the basis of a few paragraphs? The people who said some version of "You've got to take me; Man is driving me crazy!" were just echoing my own sentiments, but they might also be revealing an inability to get along with others, which would make them bad company in our mobile prison.
    Both Diana and Marygay had studied psychology in school, but neither claimed any expertise in the detection of loonies.
    We narrowed the applications down to four hundred, and wrote back a form letter emphasizing the negative aspects of the ten-year joyride. Isolation, danger, privation. The absolute certainty of returning to a completely alien world.
    About 90 percent of the people wrote back and said okay; I've already taken these things into consideration. We dropped the ones who didn't respond before the deadline, and scheduled holo interviews with the others.
    We wanted to wind up with a list of two hundred, fifty of them being alternates, to be called if we lost people from death or cold feet. Marygay and I interviewed half, Charlie and Diana the other half. We gave a slight edge to married couples or people in some long-term relationship, but tried not to give het preference over homo. You could argue that the more homosexuals, the better, since they were unlikely to add to the population. We couldn't handle more than a dozen, maybe twenty, children.
    Charlie and Diana would take longer than Marygay and I, since Diana had to keep clinic hours. Marygay and I were in the twenty-day recess between semesters.
    That also meant that Bill and Sara were home, underfoot. Sara spent a lot of time on her room, trying to finish up a large rug before school started. Bill's big project for the twenty days was to talk us out of this insane quest.
    "What're you running away from?" was his basic question. "You and Mom won't let go of that damned war, and we're going to lose you to it, centuries after it's over."
    Marygay and I argued that we weren't running away from anything. We were taking a leap into the future. A lot of our volunteers were his age or a little older, who had also grown up with Man, but had a less sanguine view of them.
    About two weeks into the recess, Bill and Sara dropped their separate bombshells. I'd spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen, fixing polenta and eggs with the last greens of the season, listening to Beethoven and enjoying not talking to strangers over the holo. Bill had set the table without being asked, which I should have recognized as a danger sign.
    They ate in relative silence while Marygay and I talked about the day's interviews—mostly about the rejects, who made for better conversation than the sane,