We try not to think about those people as if they’re dead. I don’t mean the thousand or so who won’t revive. Even the ones who do will be like the dead arisen, vague memories suddenly come back to life. I’ll be eighty-eight years old. Hully gee, as Stephen Crane had a character obscurely say. Holy God.

There was a memo on my queue, on everyone’s queue, asking whether I’d like an extra room. What would I put in it? Or whom?

Out of curiosity I went down to the ag level. There are a few lights on, for the technicians who are wandering around in a state of shock. Bare tanks, a smell of stale rot. The place where I used to sit and smell the herbs is just a big square of damp gravel, waiting to be sterilized. It must be devastating for the people who work here every day. I wonder whether any of them ever went to Earth, and experienced winter. I don’t guess the comparison is accurate. I liked winter. It was alien, stark, and scary, and the air smelled like the air of another planet. That blizzard in England, in Dover. It was sterile like this—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—but under the snow was the promise of spring, of rebirth. This will be green again, in a year or three. But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.

CATEGORIES

PRIME

When the plants died, the population of Newhome was 9,012, 6,032 of whom were classified as “supernumeraries,” more or less along for the ride. The remaining 2,980 were divided into five categories:

There were also 344 people who were supernumerary but had children in category V; they were given the option of staying awake if, like O’Hara, the idea of waking up younger than their children did not appeal to them. All but forty-eight chose sleep.

About a third of the first four categories had to go into the deep freeze over the next year. Of course every department felt that it had already been cut to the bone. There was a lot of infighting and horse trading.

There was always the program that created me, Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion, but it was less useful than it had been at the beginning of the trip. You could take a particle physicist, say, from group III, and record the personality factors that make a good particle physicist, and then tali a youngster from group V and “inoculate” him or her with those traits. Then put the actual physicist to sleep.