"A Mr. Macdonald to see you, Mr. Escher."
Claude Escher flipped the intercom switch.
"Please send him right in."
That was entirely superfluous, he thought, because MacDonald would come
in whether Escher wanted him to or not.
The door opened and shut with a slightly harder bang than usual and
Escher mentally braced himself. He had a good hunch what the problem
was going to be and why it was being thrown in their laps.
MacDonald made himself comfortable and sat there for a few minutes,
just looking grim and not saying anything. Escher knew the psychology
by heart. A short preliminary silence is always more effective in
browbeating subordinates than an initial furious bluster.
He lit a cigarette and tried to outwait MacDonald. It wasn't
easy--MacDonald had great staying powers, which was probably why he was
the head of the department.
Escher gave in first. "Okay, Mac, what's the trouble? What do we have
tossed in our laps now?"
"You know the one--colonization problem. You know that when we first
started to colonize, quite a large percentage of the male population
took to the stars, as the saying goes. The adventuresome, the gamblers,
the frontier type all decided they wanted to head for other worlds, to
get away from it all. The male of the species is far more adventuresome
than the female; the men left--but the women didn't. At least, not in
nearly the same large numbers.
"Well, you see the problem. The ratio of women to men here on Earth is
now something like five to three. If you don't know what that means,
ask any man with a daughter. Or any psychiatrist. Husband-hunting isn't
just a pleasant pastime on Earth. It's an earnest cutthroat business
and I'm not just using a literary phrase."
He threw a paper on Escher's desk. "You'll find most of the statistics
about it in that, Claude. Notice the increase in crimes peculiar to
women. Shoplifting, badger games, poisonings, that kind of thing. It's
quite a list. You'll also notice the huge increase in petty crimes, a
lot of which wouldn't have bothered the courts before. In fact, they
wouldn't even have been considered crimes. You know why they are now?"
Escher shook his head blankly.
"Most of the girls in the past who didn't catch a husband," MacDonald
continued, "grew up to be the type of old maid who's dedicated to
improving the morals and what-not of the rest of the population. We've
got more puritanical societies now than we ever had, and we have more
silly little laws on the books as a result. You can be thrown in the
pokey for things like violating a woman's privacy--whatever that
means--and she's the one who decides whether what you say or do is a
violation or not."
Escher looked bored. "Not to mention the new prohibition which
forbids the use of alcohol in everything from cough medicines to hair
tonics. Or the cleaned up moral code that reeks--if you'll pardon the
expression--of purity. Sure, I know what you mean. And you know the
solution. All we have to do is get the women to colonize."
MacDonald ran his fingers nervously through his hair.
"But it won't be easy, and that's why it's been given to us. It's your
baby, Claude. Give it a lot of thought. Nothing's impossible, you know."
"Perpetual motion machines are," Escher said quietly. "And pulling
yourself up by your boot-straps. But I get the point. Nevertheless,
women just don't want to colonize. And who can blame them? Why should
they give up living in a luxury civilization, with as many modern
conveniences as this one, to go homesteading on some wild, unexplored
planet where they have to work their fingers to the bone and play
footsie with wild animals and savages who would just as soon skin them
alive as not?"
"What do you advise I do, then?" MacDonald demanded. "Go back to the
Board and tell them the problem is not solvable, that we can't think of
anything?"