H. L. Gold (ed), page 18
As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn’t decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now, I’d be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what’s right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do.
Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in them, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages.
“In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of companionway,” they had the words etched into the glass, “break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion.”
I read the “following fashion” until I knew it by heart. Boy, I said to myself, span>hope we have that kind of disaster. I’d sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea!
And all the time I was alone. That was the best part.
Then I passed Deck Twelve and there was a big sign. “Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!” A big sign in red.
I peeked around the corner. I knew it—the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I’d ever dreamed existed in the Universe.
There wasn’t anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look …
But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. “Passengers not permitted—”
Well! Didn’t I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days ? Sure, ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. And didn’t I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men.
“Technically, Ferdinand, I’m the only passenger in our family. You can’t be one, because, not being a citizen, you can’t acquire an Earth Passport. However, you’ll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause— ‘Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining’— and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men.”
Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb things. I’m old enough, I guess, to know that it isn’t what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn’t be on their way to Venus to hook husbands.
Still, if I wasn’t a passenger, the sign didn’t have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that, but at least it was an argument I could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law.
I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I’d ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one!
Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall in glowing red letters were the words, “Lifeboat 47. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!” Another one of those signs.
I crept up to the porthole nearest it and could just barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn’t see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press.
That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had on the outer keeps back home in Undersea. But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key—might as well see if that’s it, I figured.
“Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame.”
For a second, I thought I’d hit it just right out of all the million possible combinations— The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I’d been a baby sardine.
I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I’d ever seen.
He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time.
His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back.
And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-the-way-in brown I’d seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation—the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders.
I hadn’t seen hair like that on a man except maybe in history books; every man I’d ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared right through.
His eyes.
They didn’t blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I’d seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws.
“Green shatas!” he said suddenly. “Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash.”
Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes.
I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. “My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr.—Mr.—”
“Hope for your sake,” he said to me, “that you aren’t what you seem— tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura.”
“What?”
“A ‘nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways.”
“Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren’t they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from ? Why did you say you hope—”
He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that lined the lifeboat. “Questions you ask,” he said in his soft voice. “Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister.”
“I‘m not a dryleg,” I told him proudly. “We’re from Undersea.”
“Dryhorn, I said, not dryleg. And what’s Undersea?”
“Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns.” And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms.
He nodded. He’d heard about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth’s oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets.
He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in the Maternal Revolution.
He almost squeezed my arm when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat.
“Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four.”
“How’s that?”
“The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the twentieth century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he’s not much to boast about.”
The stranger nodded violently. “Not on Earth, he isn’t. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!”
He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn’t been able to find any who were willing to come out to his lonely little islands ; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn’t know “it’s a woman’s world,” like the older boys in school used to say.
The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn’t know he had to register at a government-operated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window fo’r saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine!—he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court!
“Told me a man wasn’t supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where came from, a man spoke his piece when he’d a mind to, and his woman walked by his side.”span>
“What happened?” I asked breathlessly.
“Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated.” His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. “But I wasn’t going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the dread-dry dust of the misbegotten, God-forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn’t dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand him. When I did, I was almost ill. “Y-you mean,” I choked, “th-that you’re b-breaking the law right now? And I’m with you while you’re doing it?”
He leaned over the edge of the bunk and stared at me very seriously. “What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?”
After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. “You’re right. I’ve also become a male outside the law. We’re in this together.”
He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men.
“Ferdinand your label? That’s not right for a sprouting tadpole. I’ll call you Ford. My name’s Butt. Butt Lee Brown.”
I liked the sound of Ford. “Is Butt a nickname, too?”
“Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven’t found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties— the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were saving for a girl.”
“You had a lot of brothers, Mr. Butt?”
He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. “Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys—all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn’t float Jock MacGregor’s ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up.”
I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. “Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?”
“Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford.” He frowned and sighted at the light globe. “No more’n twelve—not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I’m a peaceable planter. Way I figure it, violence never accomplishes much that’s important. My brother Sas, now—”
He had just begun to work into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn’t at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer’s diet.
Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mudgrapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept my jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway …
I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter’s friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part and tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. But no matter what, he would never let me hold it.
“Sorry, Ford, old tad,” he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. “But way I look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you’ve grown enough so’s your pop feels you ought to have a weapon, why, then’s the time to learn it and you might’s well learn fast. Before then, you’re plain too young to be even near it.”
“I don’t have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don’t even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she—”
“She’ll marry some fancy dryhorn who’s never been farther south than the Polar Coast. And she’ll stay head of the family, if 1 know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way, Fordie,” he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, “that sister. She ever … ?”
And he’d be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he’d vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn’t know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I’d ‘tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we’d never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but—yes, I’d guess Evelyn knew about as much as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure-pump regulation.
How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me?
Sis had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods.
“I am very sorry, Miss Sparling,” he said with pretty heavy sarcasm, “but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that—Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit, though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact—”
“Pardon me, sir,” I broke in, “but doesn’t dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, Purser—Wang Li’s third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn’t meet for most of the year?”
The purser nodded slowly. “I forgot,” he admitted. “Sorry, ladies, but the boy’s right. Please make the correction in your notes.”
But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn’t take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right down on the Council floor and debate it out with her. “Ferdinand,” Sis said, “let’s go back to our cabin.”
The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. “I’ve been reading up on Venusian geography in the ship’s library,” I told her in a hurry.
“No doubt,” she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. “But you aren’t going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship’s library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. She would not have allowed—this Terran Agent—”
