I wasn't much good in school for the next few days. Dad cautioned me not to get worked up over it; they hadn't approved our applications as yet. "You know, Bill, ten times as many people apply as can possibly go."

"But most of them want to go to Venus or Mars. Ganymede is too far away; that scares the sissies out."

"I wasn't talking about applications for all the colonies; I meant applications for Ganymede, specifically for this first trip of the Mayflower"

"Even so, you can't scare me. Only about one in ten can qualify. That's the way it's always been."

Dad agreed. He said that this was the first time in history that some effort was being made to select the best stock for colonization instead of using colonies as dumping grounds for misfits and criminals and failures. Then he added, "But look, Bill, what gives you the notion that you and I can necessarily qualify? Neither one of us is a superman,"

That rocked me back on my heels. The idea that we might not be good enough hadn't occurred to me. "George, they couldn't turn us down!"

"They could and they might."

"But how? They need engineers out there and you're tops. Me—I'm not a genius but I do all right in school. We're both healthy and we don't have any bad mutations; we aren't color blind or bleeders or anything like that."

"No bad mutations that we know of," Dad answered. "However, I agree that we seem to have done a fair job in picking our grandparents. I wasn't thinking of anything as obvious as that."

"Well, what, then? What could they possibly get us on?"