"Your ship?" Pepe had gone to stand at the edge of the dome, looking down at the monster machines and Uncle Pen's neat little flyer, so different from the rocket spaceplanes we had seen in the old video holos. "Can it go to other planets?"
"It can." He nodded. "The planets of other suns."
Tanya's eyes went wide, and Pepe asked, "How does it fly in space with no rocket engines?"
"It doesn't," he said. "It's called a slider. It slides around space, not through it."
"To the stars?" Tanya whispered. "You've been to other stars?"
"To their of other stars." He nodded gravely. "I hope to go again when my work here is finished."
"Across the light-years?" Casey was awed. "How long does it take."
"No time at all." He smiled at our wonderment. "Not in slider flight. Outside of space-time, there is no time. But there are laws of nature, and time plays tricks that may surprise you. I could fly across a hundred light-years to another star in an instant of my own time and come back in another instant, but two hundred years would pass here on Earth while I was away."
"I didn't know." Her eyes went wider still. "Your friends would all be dead."
"We don't die."
She shrank away as if suddenly afraid of him. Pepe opened his mouth to ask something, and shut it without a word.
He chucked at our startlement. "We've engineered ourselves, you see, more than we've engineered the Earth."
Casey turned to look out across the shadowed craters at the huge globe of Earth, the green Americas blazing on the sunlit face, Europe and Africa only a shadow against the dark. He stood there a long time and came slowly back to stand in front of Uncle Penn.
"I'm going down to see the new Earth when I grow up." His face set stubbornly. "No matter what you say."
"Are you growing wings?" Uncle Penn laughed and reached a golden arm to pat him on the head. "If you didn't know, the impact smashed all your old rocket craft to junk."
He drew quickly back.
"Really, my boy, you do belong here." Seeing his hurt, Uncle Penn spoke more gently. "You were cloned for your work here at the station. A job that ought to make you proud."
Casey made an angry swipe across his eyes with the back of his hand and swallowed hard, but he kept his voice even.
"Maybe so. But where's any danger now?"
Uncle Penn had an odd look. He took a long moment to answer.
"We are not aware of any actual threat from another impacting bolide. All the asteroids that used to approach Earth's orbit have been diverted, most of them steered into the sun."
"So?" Casey's dark chin had a defiant jut. "Why did you want to dig us up?"
"For history." Uncle Penn looked away from us, up at the huge, far-off Earth. "I hope you'll try to understand what that means. The resurfaced Earth had lost nearly every trace of our beginning. Historians were trying to prove that we had evolved on some other planet and migrated here. Tycho Station is proof that Earth is the actual mother world. I've found our roots here under the rubble."
"I guess you can be proud of that," Casey said, "but who needs the station now?"
"Nobody, really." He shrugged, with an odd little twist of his golden lips, and I thought he felt sorry for Casey. "If another disaster did strike the Earth, which isn't likely at all, it could be repeopled by the colonies."
"So you dug us up for nothing?"
"If you knew what I have done," Penn leaned and reached as if to hug him, but he shrank farther away. "It wasn't easy! We've had to invent and improvise. We had to test the tissue cells still preserved in the cryostat, and build new equipment in the maternity lab. A complex system. It had to be tested." He smiled down into Tanya's beaming devotion. "The tests have turned out well."
"So we are just an experiment?"
"Aren't you glad to be alive?"
"Maybe," Casey muttered bitterly. "If I can get off the Moon. I don't want to sit here till I die, waiting for nothing that will never happen!"
Looking uncomfortable, Penn just reached down to lift Tanya up in his arms.
"We were meant for more than that," Casey told him. "I want a life."
"Please, my dear boy, you must try to understand." Patiently, Uncle Pen furry head. "The station is a precious historic monument, our sole surviving relic of the early Earth and early man. You are part of it. I'm sorry if you take that for a misfortune, but there is certainly no place for you on Earth."
)
