[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took
over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys!
I've always said that even if Sis is seven years older than me--and a
girl besides--she don't always know what's best. Put me on a spaceship
jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves
husbands in the one place they're still to be had--the planet
Venus--and you know I'll be in trouble.
Bad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into.
Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggled
out of my acceleration hammock and started for the door of our cabin.
"Now you be careful, Ferdinand," Sis called after me as she opened a
book called _Family Problems of the Frontier Woman_. "Remember you're
a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you."
I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in
front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their
hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's
crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government
to run ships. I felt free all over--and happy. Now was my chance to
really see the _Eleanor Roosevelt_!
* * * * *
It was hard to believe I was traveling in space at last. Ahead and
behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out
of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white
doors--on and on and on. _Gee_, I thought excitedly, this is _one big
ship_!
Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of
stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing
that gave the feel of great empty space like I'd read about in _The Boy
Rocketeers_, no portholes, no visiplates, nothing.
So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned
left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading
inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix
going _purr-purr-purrty-purr_ in the comforting way big machinery has
when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the
way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were
portholes on the hull.
I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on
the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the
ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like
the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat 68 where we should go in
case of emergency. I looked for the _important_ things.
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, _I 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 for 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 _I_ came from, a man spoke his piece
when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side."
"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 dead-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."