 What is the Trial?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that scrawniness to last much longer. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to the Ship. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach if it's really going to come back. And I've seen things that looked good that I couldn't keep on my stomach. One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have draft animals. The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight, as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything else in the Solar System in 2041. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that could have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have had to be domesticated from scratch. There were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures alive. That one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me. The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us to Forton for protection."
 proving your ability to survive on your own
 your chance to find a suitable partner  your first flight away from Earth  proving your ability to survive on your own  defending your right to have children