A hundred ten years before, one such group found Junior. They didn’t report their find officially because they didn’t want a crowd of land speculators, promotion men, exploiters and general riffraff following. In the next months, some of the unattached men arranged to have women brought in, so the settlement must have flourished for a while.
It was a year later when some had died and most or all the rest were sick and dying that they beamed a cry of help to Pretoria, the nearest inhabited planet. The Pretorian government was in some sort of crisis at the time and relayed the message to the Sector Government at Altmark. Pretoria then felt justified in forgetting the matter.
The Altmark government, acting in reflex fashion, sent out a medical ship to Junior. It dropped anti-sera and various other supplies. The ship did not land because the medical officer diagnosed the matter, from a distance, as influenza, and minimized the danger. The medical supplies, his report said, would handle the matter perfectly. It was quite possible that the crew of the ship, fearing contagion, had prevented a landing, but nothing in the official report indicated that.
There was a final report from Junior three months later to the effect that only ten people were left alive and that they were dying. They begged for help. This report was forwarded to Earth itself along with the previous medical report. The Central Government, however, was a maze in which reports regularly were forgotten unless someone had sufficient personal interest, and influence, to keep them alive. No one had much interest in a far-off, unknown planet with ten dying men and women on it.
Filed and forgotten—and for a century, no human foot was felt on Junior.
Then, with the new furore over Galactic exploration, hundreds of ships began darting through the empty vastness, probing here and there. Reports trickled in, then flooded in. Some came from Hidosheki Mikoyama, who passed through the Hercules Cluster twice—dying in a crash landing the second time, with his tight and despairing voice coming over the subether in a final message: “Surface coming up fast now; ship-walls frictioning into red he—” and no more.
Last year, the accumulation of reports, grown past any reasonable human handling, was fed into the overworked Washington computer on a priority so high that there was only a five-month wait. The operators checked out the data for planetary habitability and to, Abou ben Junior led all the rest.
Sheffield remembered the wild hurrah over it. The stellar system was enthusiastically proclaimed to the galaxy and the name, Junior, was thought up by a bright young man in the Bureau of Outer Provinces who felt the need for personal friendliness between man and world. Junior’s virtues were magnified. Its fertility, its climate—“a New England perpetual spring”—and most of all, its vast future, were put across without any feeling of need for discretion. For the next million years, propagandists declared, Junior will grow richer. While other planets age, Junior will grow younger as the ice recedes and fresh soil is exposed. Always a new frontier; always untapped resources.
For a million years!
It was the Bureau’s masterpiece. It was to be the tremendously successful start of a program of government-sponsored colonization. It was to be the beginning, at long last, of the scientific exploitation of the galaxy for the good of humanity.