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Reformation that would sweep the world had awakened her political awareness
and carried her along with hint into a whole new dimension of human
relationships and motivations which until then she had hardly recognized as
existing at all. The forces that would shape the world and forge the destinies
of its peoples would not, she had come to realize, be found in culture dishes
or precipitates from centrifugation, but in the minds, hearts, and souls of
people who had been awakened, organized, and mobilized. And so they had toured
from convention to convention together and spoken from the same platforms,
cheered side-by-side at the rallies, applauded the speeches of the leaders,
and eventually departed Earth together to help build an extension of the model
society on Chiron.
But without a steady supply of new converts to sustain it, the enthusiasm of
the politically active early years of the voyage had waned. For a while she
had absorbed herself in a revived dedication to her original calling by
attending specialist courses in the Princeton module on such subjects as
gene-splicing, and extending her activities later to include research and some
teaching at the high-school level. Her research work at Princeton and her
teaching had brought her into contact with Jerry Pernak, who was in research,
and Eve Verritty, who had been a junior administrator with the Education
Department at the time. In fact it was Jean who had first introduced them to
each other.
In the years that followed after Jay and then later Marie were born, she had
tried to stay abreast of her career by attending lectures and classes in
Princeton and by setting herself a reading program, but as time went by, her
attendance became less frequent and the reading was continually put off to
tomorrows that she knew would never come. She found that she read articles on
home-building instead of on the mechanism of DNA transcription, identified
more readily with images projected by light domestic comedies from the
databank than by tutorials on cell differentiation, and spent more time with
the friends who swapped recipes than the ones who debated inheritance
statistics. But she had raised two children that her standards told her she
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had every right to be proud of. She was entitled to rewards for the sacrifices
she had made. And now Chiron was threatening to steal the rewards away.
The thought sent a quiver of resentment through her as she sat on the sofa
below the large wall screen, watching the face of Howard Kalens as he
denounced Wellesley's "policy of indecisiveness" as a contributory factor to
the killing of the soldier who had been shot the previous night, and called
for "some positive initiative toward taking the firm grasp that the
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teryear.txt situation so clearly demands."
"A boy of twenty-three," Kalens had said a few minutes previously. "Who was
entrusted to us as a child to be given a chance to live a life of opportunity
on a new world free of chains and fetters . . . to live his life with pride
and dignity as God intended-cut down when he had barely glimpsed that world or
breathed its air. Bruce Wilson did not die yesterday. His life ended when he
was three years old." -
Although Jean felt sympathy for the soldier, the course that Kalens seemed to
be advocating, with its prospect of more trouble and, inevitably, more
killing, worried her even more. Why did it always have to be like this? she
asked herself. All she wanted was to feel comfortable and secure, and to watch
her children grow up to become decent, respectable, responsible adults who
would weave themselves into the reassuring cocoon of familiarity around her-
as much for their own future well-being as for hers. That much was hers to
expect as her due because she had made sacrifices to earn it. It threatened
nobody. So why should other people's squabbles which were not of her making
now threaten her with sweeping it all away?
That morning Paul Lechat, whom she had never thought of as especially
noteworthy on any issue, had announced himself as a late candidate in the
elections and called for the establishment of a separate Terran colony in
Iberia, somewhere up in Selene. He wanted to allow the people from
Earth to pursue their own pattern of living without disruptive influences for
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