Later, standing a few hundred feet from Zeta's base, I'd found the order of impressiveness reversed. The great ship was a tower of fifteen hundred feet, blacking out the stars like a geometric mountain; while the crater's twenty-thousand-foot ringwall, so far away in all directions, was no more obtrusive than a decorative hedge. This ship, I thought, is the intelligent comet on which we'd be passengers until the day we died, some two and a fraction light-years away from home. We were guaranteed immortality, though, in our offspring. Our descendants would very literally become flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, as our bodies were resurrected to vegetable life in the hydroponic tanks of the ship.
We Lapins clustered close together on the moon-dust, staring up the sides of our ship. Her upper reaches were hidden by the globular bulge of the enormous thrust-chamber, where kiloton capsules of nuclear fuel would be fired, three a second, to blast us into space. In this great ship our children would be born and would die, and our grandchildren as well. From the Zeta, our aged great-grandchildren, limping down long ladderways to the exit-hatches on the arms of their teen-aged grandsons, would step onto the soil of a planet that circled Alpha Centauri.
One hundred and twenty-five years from now, I thought, clasping the Firebird's hand in mine. So little in history, so big in human lives!
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Brooklyn Bridge had been brand-new. U.S. Grant, defrauded and cancer-ridden, was gritting his teeth against the pain to write his memoirs. President Chester A. Arthur had just signed into law a bill prohibiting polygamy in the territories.
As far away as those things lay our goal.
We entered the sublunarian chambers beneath the ship. Dr. McQueen had preceded us here; and under his direction the Orion Zeta had been made as aseptic as the Big Tank itself. Colonel Barrett and his subordinates who'd train us to operate the Zeta would have to wear sterility-suits aboard her, and would enter through the formaldehyde sump that was now her only entrance. Even the dust of the moon was not entirely sterile.
The Firebird took my arm to urge me toward the liquid gateway to the ship, eager to see our new home. "Wait," I said, holding her back till all the others had gone through the antiseptic pool.
"Cold feet, Johnny?" she teased me.
"Gloria Moss once told me, Firebird, that a healthy respect for tradition is essential to the organic strength of a group such as ours," I said. "So...." I bent and picked the Firebird up, her weight moon-trimmed to that of a three-year-old. She put her arms around my neck as I carried her down the ladder into the poisonous decontamination tank that was our front door to Alpha Centauri.