Worlds Apart Read Online Free Page B

haul them out to intercept Deucalion. If things went according to schedule, they would cut down the remaining transit time for the asteroid from nineteen years to five.
    “It’s just happening too fast,” O’Hara said. “If twothousand women have two-point-eight babies a year for five years, that’s twenty-eight thousand new mouths to feed. With six or seven hundred deaths per year, overall, that’s a population increase of about ten percent.
    “And if they all grow up to be Devonites, we have a regular yeast culture on our hands. In a couple of generations, every other person is going to be bald and holy and fucking anything that moves.” O’Hara skimmed a flat pebble out over the lake; it skipped twice, curving to the right. “I wouldn’t like to be Coordinator.”
    “Change of heart?” Ogelby said. That was her ambition.
    “I don’t know anymore. I may just sit and watch.”
    2
    When O’Hara returned to work there was a message at her console telling her to go to Level 6, Room 6000, and talk to Saul Kramer. The woman she was working for didn’t know anything about it, but a quick directory check showed that Kramer was in charge of personnel at the Department of Emergency Planning. That was pretty exciting, as was the unusual request for a face-to-face meeting—you expect a Ranking Bureaucrat to talk to you through memos, or at most on the cube.
    Her excitement took an anxious twist as she approached Room 6000. A man about her age, vaguely familiar, came out the door and walked swiftly by without greeting her, his face pale and grim.
    A white-haired woman in the stark anteroom glanced at a console and asked whether she was Marianne O’Hara, and said that Mr. Kramer would see her. As O’Hara pushed open his door she remembered where she had seen the young man. Module 9B, the quarantine—a surge of adrenaline shocked her and she stopped halfway throughthe door, took a breath, and realized it couldn’t be. She didn’t have the plague; if that were it she wouldn’t be walking around free.
    Kramer’s desk was littered with paper, a rare sight. He even had a recycler in the corner, with a stack of new paper beside it. A dramatic-looking man, completely bald, large and muscular, with pale gray eyes. He looked up at her with concern. “O’Hara? Are you all right?”
    She laughed nervously. “I just frightened myself with a thought—that man who just left…”
    “Lewis Franconia.” He gestured. “Have a seat.”
    “We were together in the quarantine.”
    He nodded vigorously. “No coincidence.”
    She sat down and clasped her hands together, to stop the shaking. “Something showed up?”
    “What—no, nothing like that, nothing medical. It’s just no coincidence that you were both on Earth recently. That’s true of almost everybody who’s come in here today.”
    When O’Hara didn’t say anything, he continued. “We have a favor to ask of you. A very big favor.”
    “For Emergency Planning?”
    “We’re implementing it. But the request comes straight from the Coordinators.”
    “I’ll do what I can.”
    “We need a group of people to go back to Earth.”
    “Earth?” She leaned forward. “Now? What about the plague?”
    “You’ll be isolated in spacesuits. Sterilized by vacuum before you get out of them.” He shuffled some papers. “This is absolutely secret. Whether you say yes or no, you can’t tell anybody about it. Not even your husbands.”
    “All right.”
    “You know why New New survived the war.”
    “Sure. You can’t hurt a mountain with a shotgun.”
    He nodded. “The missiles that got the Worlds weredesigned, built, and put to bed more than eighty years ago. They were set afloat by the Americans to use against Socialist military satellites, but they weren’t deactivated after the Treaty of 2021. Just retargeted, in case the Worlds did something the States didn’t like. Fortunately for us, they were designed for use against relatively small, fragile targets. To