Odem Garfunkel wakes to find he has not reached his dream destination, but for a lifetime of emergency maintenance. He repairs the aged USS Mayflower, then settles to live the rest of his life aboard ship... alone.
Due to an on-going technical problem, he hatches a plan to revive his lover, Dr. Yeva Pavlov. As he will never see the Promised Land, he devises a plan to breed the next generation of Janitors. He resuscitates her, but she refuses to bring children into the New World when the pillars of the Old-World Order are asleep in their pods ready to resume control after the landing.
Eventually, they resolve the problem in a most unexpected way, and Alex feels happy to start a family. They have three children, each with a learning difficulty. Their mistake is assuming that all human functions will automatically produce the same results as on Earth. The dream about breeding generations of maintenance engineers to maintain the ship seems an impossibility. Odem wants to wake another female traveller so he can have 'normal' children, and to widen the gene pool. Alex cannot countenance such an outcome and moves to protect her children and her very role in the future of mankind. The eternal dilemma of the roles of men and women and their functions within the 'family' are examined with the future in mind. In this gripping and thought provoking sci-fi novel, focus is applied to the intrinsic values of society.
Homo-Sapiens all but destroyed Earth, this novel questions the basic ethics of our society. Since the emergence of modern man, religion has acted as the cement for the building blocks of human development as well as social evolution. The author wonders if it will be the same in the future.
