Doob looked up at the window. Amelia tucked her hair behind her ear and drew back from the glass. He trudged back to the lodge on legs stiff with cold. He was thinking about those frozen sperm samples and eggs. How long would they last? It was known that such cells could be thawed and used to produce normal babies after as long as twenty years in the freezer. Cosmic rays might complicate things. A single ray passing through a human body might damage a few cells—but bodies had a lot of spare cells. The same ray passing through a single-celled sperm or egg would destroy it.
The bottom line was that every man now on Earth could ejaculate into a test tube, every woman could go in for the much more complicated process of having her eggs harvested, embryos could be gathered and put on ice by the millions, but none of it would make a bit of difference unless there were healthy young women willing to receive those donations into their own wombs and gestate them for nine months. In time the population would grow. A new generation of—to put it bluntly—functional uteruses would come online in fourteen or fifteen years. And a second generation would be available in thirty. But by then, many of the frozen samples that the people of Earth were pinning their hopes on would be past their expiration dates.
Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program. But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans.
The system of camps where the young people chosen in the Casting of Lots would be taken for training and selection was going to be a roach motel for boys. Young men would go in, but they wouldn’t come out. Save for a few lucky exceptions.
He had been drifting toward the lodge for a couple of minutes, nagged by the vague sense that there was something he ought to be doing.
Talking to the media. Yes, that was it. Normally, camera crews would be homing in on him. And normally he would be trying to dodge them. But not today. Today he was willing to stand around and talk, to be Doc Dubois for the billions of people out there in TV land. But no one was coming after him. Anchors of many nations were gazing soulfully into their teleprompters, intoning prepared remarks. Journalists of lesser stature—tech bloggers and freelance pundits—were filing their reports. Doob noticed a familiar face, Tavistock Prowse, off in a corner of the parking lot. He had set up a tablet on a tripod, aimed its camera at himself, and clipped on a wireless mike, and was delivering some kind of a video blog entry, probably for the website of Turing magazine, which had employed him lo these many years. Doob had known him for two decades. He looked terrible. Tav had showed up this morning. He didn’t have the credentials or the access to get the advance warning, so all of this was news to him. Doob had pinged him a few times last night, on Twitter and Facebook, trying to give him a heads-up so that his old friend wouldn’t be wrong-footed by the announcement, but Tav hadn’t responded.
It didn’t seem like a great moment to be doing an impromptu interview with Tav and so Doob pretended he had not seen him. He flashed his credentials at the Secret Service guys stationed at the lodge’s entrance, but this was just to be polite—they knew who he was and had already pulled the door open for him.
He passed the elevators and climbed the stairs to the room, just to get blood moving in his extremities. Amelia had left the door ajar. He hung up the DO NOT DISTURB placard, locked the door behind him, and collapsed into a chair. She was still at the window, leaning back perched on its broad rustic sill. This side of the lodge was facing away from the sun, but the light of the sky came in and illuminated her face, showing the beginnings of lines below her eyes, around her mouth. She was second-generation Honduran American, some kind of complicated African-Indian-Spanish melange, big eyed, wavy haired, alert, birdlike, but with that essentially positive nature that any schoolteacher needed to have. It was a good trait in current circumstances.
“Well, that’s over,” she said. “It must be a big load off of your mind.”
“I have ten interviews in the next two days,” he said, “explaining the whys and the wherefores. But you’re right. That’s easy, compared to breaking the news.”
“It’s just math,” she said.
“It’s just math.”
“What about after that?” she asked.
“You mean, after the next couple of days?”
“Yeah. Then what?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” he admitted. “But we have to keep gathering data. Refining the forecast. The more we know about when the White Sky is going to happen, the better we can plan the launch schedule, and everything else.”
“The Casting of Lots,” she said.