 How long did it take for the passengers to form a police force?
Two years in a sardine can. The Weblor I had taken off on the first trip to Antheon five years before with a thousand families, reached the planet with less than five hundred surviving colonists. Upon the return to Earth a year later, the crew's report of suffering and chaos during the year's outgoing voyage was twisted, distorted and fragmentary. "We have conquered the problem of small groups in space—witness the discovery of Antheon, for example—but when there are large groups, control is more difficult." It ended with passengers engaging in open warfare with each other and the crew. "No weapons were allowed on the ship, but you must remember the colonists were selected for their intelligence and resourcefulness. They utilized these attributes to set up weapon shops to arm themselves." We don't think anything is going to happen, but if it does, we want to get an impersonal, unprejudiced view. Basically, it was an instrument which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure of a crowded solar system. A gigantic, hollow spike, the ship would never land anywhere, but would circle Antheon as it circled Earth, shuttling its cargo and passengers to the promised land, the new frontier. A space-borne metropolis, it would be the home for three thousand persons outward bound, only the crew on the return trip. The captain's briefing room was crowded, the air was heavy with the breathing of so many men, and the ventilators could not quite clear the air of tobacco smoke that drifted aimlessly here and there before it was caught and whisked away. To make it easier for you, I suggest you think of this journey strictly from the observer viewpoint. He said it was significant that all en route had passed stability tests, and that it was to the ship's discredit that someone with criminal tendencies should have been permitted aboard. This, then, was what happened when you took three thousand strangers and stuck them in a can for a year. On the thirty-fourth day a witness turned up who said he had seen a man emerging from Janssen's compartment with the black case. She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of the ship. Branson remained seated behind his desk, unperturbed, saying, "I have no crewmen to spare for police duty."
 79 days
 94 days  79 days  31 days  52 days