Bonnie felt she couldn't possibly turn around as the door opened behind her. She heard Mark's moment of hesitation, his slow steps on the carpet. Ashby was smiling a little and nodding. Then she felt the hard grip of Mark's hands on her shoulders. He drew her up and turned her to face him. Her eyes were wet.
"Bonnie—" he said softly.
Ashby turned to the window again. The gantry cranes were hoisting machinery in Hull Three. Maybe he had been wrong about there not being enough time between now and takeoff for Mark and Bonnie to discover each other all over again. They worked pretty fast. But then, as he had mentioned, why waste time at their age?
They were smiling, holding tight to each other as Ashby turned back from the window.
"They tell me I passed," said Jorden. "I'm sorry about taking your best Social Examiner away from you—but as you told me in the beginning this colonization business is a family affair."
"Yes—that happens to be one of the few things I was right about." Ashby motioned them to the chairs. "Through you we located our major error. It was our identifying rebellion with colonization ability. Colonization is not a matter of rebellion at all. The two factors merely happen to accompany each other at times. But the essence of colonization is a growth factor—of the kind you so very accurately described when Bonnie pushed you into digging up some insight on the matter. It is so often associated with rebellion because rebellion is or has been, historically, necessary to the exercise of this growth factor.
"The American Colonists, for example, were rebels only incidentally. As a group, they possessed a growth factor forcing them beyond the confines of the culture in which they lived. It gave them the strength for rebellion and successful colonization. And it is so easy to confuse colonists of that type with mere cutthroats, thugs, and misfits. The latter may or may not have a sufficiently high growth factor. In any case, their primary drive is hate and fear, which are wholly inadequate motives for successful colonization.
"The ideal colonist does not break with the parent body, nor does he merely extend it. He creates a new nucleus capable of interchange with the parent body, but not controlled by it. He wants to build beyond the current society, and the latter is not strong enough to pull him back into it. Colonization may take everything else of value in life and give nothing but itself in return, but the colonists' desire for new life and growth is great enough to make this sufficient. It is not a mere transplant of an old life. It is conception and gestation and birth.
"Our present society allows almost unlimited exercise of the growth factor in individuals, regardless of how powerful it may be. That is why we have failed to colonize the planets. They offer no motive or satisfaction sufficient to outweigh the satisfactions already available. As a result we've had virtually no applicants coming to us because of hampered growth. You are one of the very few who might come under our present approach. And even a very slight change of occupational conditions would have kept you from coming. You didn't want the department leadership offered you, because it would limit the personally creative functions you enjoyed. That one slim, hairbreadth factor brought you in."