by Hank Davis
We could still hear her; she didn’t switch off. “Why, you big baboon, I came outside because you sent a search party to clear everybody out,” and, “How would I know about a safety line rule? You’ve kept me penned up.” And finally. “We’ll see!”
I dragged him away and he told the boss electrician to go ahead. Then we forgot the row for we were looking at the prettiest fireworks ever seen, a giant St. Catherine’s wheel, rockets blasting all over it. Utterly soundless, out there in space—but beautiful beyond compare.
The blasts died away and there was the living quarters, spinning true as a flywheel—Tiny and I both let out sighs of relief. We all went back inside then to see what weight tasted like.
It tasted funny. I went through the shaft and started down the ladders, feeling myself gain weight as I neared the rim. I felt seasick, like the first time I experienced no weight. I could hardly walk and my calves cramped.
We inspected throughout, then went to the office and sat down. It felt good, just right for comfort, one-third gravity at the rim. Tiny rubbed his chair arms and grinned, “Beats being penned up in D-113.”
“Speaking of being penned up,” Miss Gloria said, walking in, “may I have a word with you, Mr. Larsen?”
“Uh? Why, certainly. Matter of fact, I wanted to see you. I owe you an apology, Miss McNye. I was—”
“Forget it,” she cut in. “You were on edge. But I want to know this: how long are you going to keep up this nonsense of trying to chaperone me?”
He studied her. “Not long. Just till your relief arrives.”
“So? Who is the shop steward around here?”
“A shipfitter named McAndrews. But you can’t use him. You’re a staff member.”
“Not in the job I’m filling. I am going to talk to him. You’re discriminating against me, and in my off time at that.”
“Perhaps, but you will find I have the authority. Legally, I’m a ship’s captain, while on this job. A captain in space has wide discriminatory powers.”
“Then you should use them with discrimination!”
He grinned. “Isn’t that what you just said I was doing?”
We didn’t hear from the shop steward, but Miss Gloria started doing as she pleased. She showed up at the movies, next off shift, with Dalrymple. Tiny left in the middle—good show, too; Lysistrata Goes to Town, relayed up from New York.
As she was coming back alone he stopped her, having seen to it that I was present. “Umm—Miss McNye . . .”
“Yes?”
“I think you should know, uh, well . . . Chief Inspector Dalrymple is a married man.”
“Are you suggesting that my conduct has been improper?”
“No, but—”
“Then mind your own business!” Before he could answer she added, “It might interest you that he told me about your four children.”
Tiny sputtered. “Why . . . why, I’m not even married!”
“So? That makes it worse, doesn’t it?” She swept out.
Tiny quit trying to keep her in her room, but told her to notify him whenever she left it. It kept him busy riding herd on her. I refrained from suggesting that he get Dalrymple to spell him.
But I was surprised when he told me to put through the order dismissing her. I had been pretty sure he was going to drop it.
“What’s the charge?” I asked.
“Insubordination!”
I kept mum. He said, “Well, she won’t take orders.”
“She does her work okay. You give her orders you wouldn’t give to one of the men—and that a man wouldn’t take.”
“You disagree with my orders?”
“That’s not the point. You can’t prove the charge, Tiny.”
“Well, charge her with being female! I can prove that.”
I didn’t say anything. “Dad,” he added wheedlingly, “you know how to write it. ‘No personal animus against Miss McNye, but it is felt that as a matter of policy, and so forth and so on.’ ”
I wrote it and gave it to Hammond privately. Radio techs are sworn to secrecy but it didn’t surprise me when I was stopped by O’Connor, one of our best metalsmiths. “Look, Dad, is it true that the Old Man is getting rid of Brooksie?”
“Brooksie?”
“Brooksie McNye—she says to call her Brooks. Is it true?”
I admitted it, then went on, wondering if I should have lied.
It takes four hours, about, for a ship to lift from Earth. The shift before the Pole Star was due, with Miss Gloria’s relief, the timekeeper brought me two separation slips. Two men were nothing; we averaged more each ship. An hour later he reached me by supervisors’ circuit, and asked me to come to the time office. I was out on the rim, inspecting a weld job; I said no.
“Please, Mr. Witherspoon,” he begged, “you’ve got to.” When one of the boys doesn’t call me “Dad”, it means something. I went.
There was a queue like mail call outside his door; I went in and he shut the door on them. He handed me a double handful of separation slips. “What in the great depths of night is this?” I asked.
“There’s dozens more I ain’t had time to write up yet.”
None of the slips had any reason given—just “own choice”.
“Look, Jimmie—what goes on here?”
“Can’t you dope it out, Dad? Shucks, I’m turning in one, too.”
I told him my guess and he admitted it. So I took the slips, called Tiny and told him for the love of Heaven to come to his office.
Tiny chewed his lip considerable. “But, Dad, they can’t strike. It’s a non-strike contract with bonds from every union concerned.”
“It’s no strike, Tiny. You can’t stop a man from quitting.”
“They’ll pay their own fares back, so help me!”
“Guess again. Most of ’em have worked long enough for the free ride.”
“We’ll have to hire others quick, or we’ll miss our date.”
“Worse than that, Tiny—we won’t finish. By next dark period you won’t even have a maintenance crew.”
“I’ve never had a gang of men quit me. I’ll talk to them.”
“No good, Tiny. You’re up against something too strong for you.”
“You’re against me, Dad?”
“I’m never against you, Tiny.”
He said, “Dad, you think I’m pig-headed, but I’m right. You can’t have one woman among several hundred men. It drives ’em nutty.”
I didn’t say it affected him the same way; I said, “Is that bad?”
“Of course. I can’t let the job be ruined to humor one woman.”
“Tiny, have you looked at the progress charts lately?”
“I’ve hardly had time to—what about them?”
I knew why he hadn’t had time. “You’ll have trouble proving Miss Gloria interfered with the job. We’re ahead of schedule.”
“We are?”
While he was studying the charts, I put an arm around his shoulder. “Look, son,” I said, “sex has been around our planet a long time. Earthside, they never get away from it, yet some pretty big jobs get built anyhow. Maybe we’ll just have to learn to live with it here, too. Matter of fact, you had the answer a minute ago.”
“I did? I sure didn’t know it.”
“You said, ‘You can’t have one woman among several hundred men.’ Get me?”
“Huh? No, I don’t. Wait a minute! Maybe I do.”
“Ever tried jiu jitsu? Sometimes you win by relaxing.”
“Yes. Yes!”
“When you can’t beat ’em, you jine ’em.”
He buzzed the radio shack. “Have Hammond relieve you, McNye, and come to my office.”
He did it handsomely, stood up and made a speech—he’d been wrong, taken him a long time to see it, hoped there were no hard feelings, etc. He was instructing the home office to see how many jobs could be filled at once with female help.
“Don’t forget married couples,” I put in mildly, “and better
ask for some older women, too.”
“I’ll do that,” Tiny agreed. “Have I missed anything, Dad?”
“Guess not. We’ll have to rig quarters, but there’s time.”
“Okay. I’m telling them to hold the Pole Star, Gloria, so they can send us a few this trip.”
“That’s fine!” She looked really happy.
He chewed his lip. “I’ve a feeling I’ve missed something. Hmm—I’ve got it. Dad, tell them to send up a chaplain for the Station, as soon as possible. Under the new policy, we may need one anytime.”
I thought so, too.
EXPEDITION
by Fredric Brown
Back when astronauts were an exclusively men-only club, Fredric Brown considered not only some possible outcomes of admitting the superior sex (as Heinlein put it) to the club, but also one particular such outcome of using a gender-blind approach to picking the crew of a Martian expedition. . . .
“The first major expedition to Mars,” said the history professor, “the one which followed the preliminary exploration by one-man scout ships and aimed to establish a permanent colony, led to a great number of problems. One of the most perplexing of which was: how many men and how many women should comprise the expedition’s personnel of thirty?
“There were three schools of thought on the subject.
“One was that the ship should be comprised of fifteen men and fifteen women, many of whom would no doubt find one another suitable mates and get the colony off to a fast start.
“The second was that the ship should take twenty-five men and five women—ones who were willing to sign a waiver on monogamous inclinations—on the grounds that five women could easily keep twenty-five men sexually happy and twenty-five men could keep five women even happier.
“The third school of thought was that the expedition should contain thirty men on the grounds that under those circumstances, the men would be able to concentrate on the work at hand much better. And it was argued that since a second ship would follow in approximately a year and could contain mostly women, it would be no hardship for the men to endure celibacy that long. Especially since they were used to it; the two Space Cadet schools, one for men and one for women, rigidly segregated the sexes.
“The Director of Space Travel settled this argument by a simple expedient. He—yes, Miss Ambrose?” A girl in the class had raised her hand.
“Professor, was that expedition the one headed by Captain Maxon? The one they called Mighty Maxon? Could you tell us how he came to have that nickname?”
“I’m coming to that, Miss Ambrose. In lower schools you have been told the story of the expedition, but not the entire story; you are now old enough to hear it.
“The Director of Space Travel settled the argument, cut the Gordian knot by announcing that the personnel of the expedition would be chosen by lot, regardless of sex, from the graduating classes of the two space academies. There is little doubt that he personally favored twenty-five men to five women—because the men’s school had approximately five hundred in the graduating class and the women’s school had approximately one hundred. By the law of averages the ratio of winners should have been five men to one woman.
“However, the law of averages does not always work out on any one particular series. And it so happened that on this particular drawing, twenty-nine women drew winning chances, and only one man won.
“There were loud protests from almost everyone except the winners, but the Director stuck to his guns; the drawing had been honest and he refused to change the status of any of the winners. His only concession to appease male egos was to appoint Maxon, the one man, as captain. The ship took off and had a successful voyage.
“And when the second expedition landed, they found the population doubled. Exactly doubled—every woman member of the expedition had a child, and one of them had twins, making a total of exactly thirty infants.
“Yes, Miss Ambrose, I see your hand, but please let me finish. No, there is nothing spectacular about what I have thus far told you. Although many people would think loose morals were involved, it is no great feat for one man, given time, to impregnate twenty-nine women.
“What gave Captain Maxon his nickname is the fact that work on the second ship went much faster than scheduled and the second expedition did not arrive one year later, but only nine months and two days later.
“Does that answer your question, Miss Ambrose?”
NOT YET THE END
by Fredric Brown
Once again, I’ve picked two stories by Fredric Brown, who, among his many other virtues, was the master of the short-short story, putting high explosive yarns in innocent-looking small packages. We begin with some nonhuman space explorers who have discovered Earth, which would have been bad news for us, except for a slight misunderstanding. . . .
There was a greenish, hellish tinge to the light within the metal cube. It was a light that made the dead-white skin of the creature seated at the controls seem faintly green.
A single, faceted eye, front center in the head, watched the seven dials unwinkingly. Since they had left Xandor that eye had never once wavered from the dials. Sleep was unknown to the race to which Kar-388Y belonged. Mercy, too, was unknown. A single glance at the sharp, cruel features below the faceted eye would have proved that.
The pointers on the fourth and seventh dials came to a stop. That meant the cube itself had stopped in space relative to its immediate objective. Kar reached forward with his upper right arm and threw the stabilizer switch. Then he rose and stretched his cramped muscles.
Kar turned to face his companion in the cube, a being like himself. “We are here,” he said. “The first stop, Star Z-5689. It has nine planets, but only the third is habitable. Let us hope we find creatures here who will make suitable slaves for Xandor.”
Lal-I6B, who had sat in rigid mobility during the journey, rose and stretched also. “Let us hope so, yes. Then we can return to Xandor and be honored while the fleet comes to get them. But let’s not hope too strongly. To meet with success at the first place we stop would be a miracle. We’ll probably have to look a thousand places.”
Kar shrugged. “Then we’ll look a thousand places. With the Lounacs dying off, we must have slaves else our mines must close and our race will die.”
He sat down at the controls again and threw a switch that activated a visiplate that would show what was beneath them. He said, “We are above the night side of the third planet. There is a cloud layer below us. I’ll use the manuals from here.”
He began to press buttons. A few minutes later he said, “Look, Lal, at the visiplate. Regularly spaced lights—a city! The planet is inhabited.”
Lal had taken his place at the other switchboard, the fighting controls. Now he too was examining dials. “There is nothing for us to fear. There is not even the vestige of a forcefield around the city. The scientific knowledge of the race is crude. We can wipe the city out with one blast if we are attacked.”
“Good,” Kar said. “But let me remind you that destruction is not our purpose—yet. We want specimens. If they prove satisfactory and the fleet comes and takes as many thousand slaves as we need, then will be time to destroy not a city but the whole planet so that their civilization will never progress to the point where they’ll be able to launch reprisal raids.”
Lal adjusted a knob. “All right. I’ll put on the megrafield and we’ll be invisible to them unless they see far into the ultraviolet, and, from the spectrum of their sun, I doubt that they do.”
As the cube descended the light within it changed from green to violet and beyond. It came to a gentle rest. Kar manipulated the mechanism that operated the airlock.
He stepped outside, Lal just behind him. “Look,” Kar said, “two bipeds. Two arms, two eyes—not dissimilar to the Lounacs, although smaller. Well, here are our specimens.”
He raised his lower left arm, whose three-fingered hand held a thin rod wound with wire. He pointed it first at one of the creatures, then
at the other. Nothing visible emanated from the end of the rod, but they both froze instantly into statuelike figures.
“They’re not large, Kar,” Lai said. “I’ll carry one back, you carry the other. We can study them better inside the cube, after we’re back in space.”
Kar looked about him in the dim light. “All right, two is enough, and one seems to be male and the other female. Let’s get going.”
A minute later the cube was ascending and as soon as they were well out of the atmosphere, Kar threw the stabilizer switch and joined Lal, who had been starting a study of the specimens during the brief ascent.
“Vivaparous,” said Lal. “Five-fingered, with hands suited to reasonably delicate work. But—let’s try the most important test, intelligence.”
Kar got the paired headsets. He handed one pair to Lal, who put one on his own head, one on the head of one of the specimens. Kar did the same with the other specimen.
After a few minutes, Kar and Lal stared at each other bleakly.
“Seven points below minimum,” Kar said. “They could not be trained even for the crudest labor in the mines. Incapable of understanding the simplest instructions. Well, we’ll take them back to the Xandor museum.”
“Shall I destroy the planet?”
“No,” Kar said. “Maybe a million years from now—if our race lasts that long—they’ll have evolved enough to become suitable for our purpose. Let us move on to the next star with planets.”
The make-up editor of the Milwaukee Star was in the composing room, supervising the closing of the local page. Jenkins, the head make-up compositor, was pushing in leads to tighten the second to the last column.
“Room for one more story in the eighth column, Pete,” he said. “About thirty-six picas. There are two there in the overset that will fit. Which one shall I use?”
The make-up editor glanced at the type in the galleys lying on the stone beside the chase. Long practice enabled him to read the headlines upside down at a glance. “The convention story and the zoo story, huh? Oh, hell, run the convention story. Who cares if the zoo director thinks two monkeys disappeared off Monkey Island last night?”