The stars changed with the passing years. The blue giant Adam used to watch from the darkside port was now a diamond chip lost in starmilk night. Ahead, a new jewel grew larger in the quartz port, a sapphire blazing hot and big—bigger than any star in his memory, closer than the Destiny had ever come to a star.
Adam understood why the star was so big. He was eighteen Old Earth years of age now and the star was New Sol. Soon there would be a New Earth and maybe a New Moon. His destiny was near, his job decided. He would locate the planet, orbit it, search for a clear space and land. Then he and the others—
The others. The repulsive, flighty, inconsistent trio. They were alike, all right, with never a serious thought in their heads. Why weren't they concerned with their destiny as he was? If he were a genius as the mecs once told him, why weren't the others also geniuses? They all came from the best stock of Old Earth. No, it wasn't just that he was supernormal; the others were—flat, undeep.
For years, he had kept peace by yielding to their demands. He suffered their company, succumbed to their activities. But every so often, when he felt especially disgusted, he retreated to his private sanctum under the deck. This was such a time now, he felt, as Eve and Mary giggled over to him.
They were not nude as had been the custom aboard the ship ever since he turned off the mecs. They had clothes draped over parts of them that seemed somehow to make them more than nude. But they wore red coloring on their lips that he thought was repulsive.
He ducked behind the couch, clicked open the familiar combination and descended into the only peace he ever knew. He sat at a chair-table he had lowered into the compartment long ago, and peered pensively at the drawings before him. If Mecteacher were here, he thought, the orbit wouldn't be so difficult to calculate. He'd explain how to do it.
And then, he wondered, would Mecteacher have taught the others how to be deep? Or was depth something inside, something that could not be altered by education? If this were a world with other people, he thought, would my cousins be considered abnormals—or would I?
He pondered the question for a moment, then decided, as he had so often in the past, that it was truly the cousins who were the flat ones. They were deviants from an average that couldn't exist on the Destiny, but which must have once existed elsewhere. They had been flat at seven—perhaps when children are supposed to be flat, as Mecmother had suggested—but they stayed that way. At eighteen, as at seven, they still played the same games with scarcely any variation.