Psychological fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space colonies -- Fiction
"I suppose congratulations are in order," he said as the other man
threw the vehicle into gear. "Stubbs tells me the land is yours now."
The driver nodded, inching down on the accelerator. The vehicle leaped
forward. At seventy miles an hour, they swooped past the spaceship and
the knot of people standing in the shadow of the rudder stanchions.
"Hey. Slow up!" Claude yelled. "We're getting off here. We're booking
return passage on that ship!"
Whiting didn't answer.
The low slung buildings of the clearance area leaped up at them and
passed into the background. They were heading into open country now.
"Whiting! Turn around. We're staying here in the clearance area!"
Whiting's foot slacked off the accelerator. The speedometer dropped to
fifty. But the vehicle kept moving into open country. The man at the
wheel flicked a look at Claude and smiled.
"Congratulations, Mr. Marshall," he said. "You've passed the final
test."
"Test? I don't understand."
"Let me explain then," Bruce Whiting said. "In the first place my name
isn't Whiting.... It's Reed--Paul Reed. I work for the government. This
final test--the one you just went through--was designed to weed out any
undesirables who might have slipped through our screening processes
back on Earth."
"You mean this whole build up was just a test?"
The other man nodded. "We give it to every new arrival here. Now that
you've passed, I'm driving you out to your homestead site."
Claude looked back at the newly-arrived spaceship and the tiny figures
who were huddled at its base.
"All those people," he said. "You mean they still have to go through
what we did?"
The driver shook his head.
"No. Those people are going back to Earth. You see, Mr. Marshall, those
are the people who offered Leon Stubbs the bribe."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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