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51150_1 | 51150_1_0 | You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.
Story:
Venus Is a Man's World
BY WILLIAM TENN
Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE
[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."
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 mud-grapes 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 I 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—"
"Paddlefoot," I sneered.
Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. "Now that's a term," she said carefully, "that is used only by Venusian riffraff."
"They're not!"
"Not what?"
"Riffraff," I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!
"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus."
"Does it, now?" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. "Tell me more."
"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary—with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later."
"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!"
"Nobody!" I insisted. "They're my own ideas!"
"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand—after I have found a good, steady husband, of course—and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?"
I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.
"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?"
A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. "One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit."
"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?"
"Nobody! Nobody! "
"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand—"
"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford."
"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand...."
After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.
All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.
The door opened on the signal, "Sesame." When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.
He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.
"An honor, Miss Sparling," he said in that rumbly voice. "Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft."
So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.
"First, Mr. Brown," she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, "you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?"
He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.
"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none," Sis added caustically.
Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.
"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus."
"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before—"
"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world."
"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown." Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, "What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?"
He cocked his head and considered a moment. "Look," he said finally,
"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat—don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?"
"Yes," she said bitterly. "You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?"
"No, Sis, he didn't," I was beginning to argue. "All he wanted—"
"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences."
"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?"
He waved his hands at her impatiently. "I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's."
Sis actually staggered back. "Let's? Let's what ? Are—are you daring to suggest that—that—"
"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too."
I was so excited I just had to yell: "Gee, Sis, say yes !"
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
| 82 | 28,164 | 28,166 | 28,206 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| Ferdinand is a young man accompanying his sister Evelyn on a spaceliner called the Eleanor Roosevelt with 300 hundred other women. The final destination of the spaceship is Venus, where the women hope to find a husband. Although women are in charge, the crew of the ship is all men. Ferdinand decides to explore the ship, and he encounters a large red sign forbidding passengers from entering the next deck. Despite being hesitant at first, he decides to break the law anyway because he is technically not a passenger on the ship. Ferdinand is amazed to see the stars, the moon, and another spaceliner take off in space. Unfazed by the next sign that tells unauthorized personnel to leave, he goes to the porthole and tries to figure out a way to open it by trying various methods. Suddenly, the door opens, and a large man plucks him inside by the throat. The man recognizes him as a brother to one of the Anura, which he defines as a herd of women looking for mates. Ferdinand explains his childhood in the Undersea and his parents, to which the other man listens intently. He also mentions that he and his sister have left Earth because she realized there would be no future there. All men have either died in wars, become negatively affected by radioactivity, or gone off to the planets. Then, the older man explains that there are little to no women on Venus, and he had no idea that women were in charge when he first went to Earth to find a wife. He had been arrested and was charged but decided to become a stowaway instead. The man, who introduces himself as Alberta (Butt) Lee Brown, gives Ferdinand the nickname Ford and talks more about his past. Eventually, he asks more about Evelyn, and Ferdinand does not overthink his intentions when he answers. Later, Evelyn then forces Ferdinand to go to a geography lecture with her, where she continuously asks questions and takes notes. However, she does not write down his answer after he corrects the purser and instead takes him back to the cabin to lecture him. They begin to debate, and Ferdinand begins to use the words and knowledge he learned from Butt. Evelyn is suspicious that somebody has been feeding him rebellious opinions, and she begins to hound him for answers after seeing he has a photo of her in his pocket. He then takes Evelyn to see Butt, and she begins to lecture him about breaking the law. While the both of them debate over Butt’s status as a criminal and stowaway, he suddenly suggests that they should get married. Evelyn is surprised by his proposal, and Ferdinand eagerly urges her to accept it. |
51150_1 | 51150_1_1 | You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.
Story:
Venus Is a Man's World
BY WILLIAM TENN
Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE
[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."
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 mud-grapes 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 I 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—"
"Paddlefoot," I sneered.
Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. "Now that's a term," she said carefully, "that is used only by Venusian riffraff."
"They're not!"
"Not what?"
"Riffraff," I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!
"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus."
"Does it, now?" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. "Tell me more."
"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary—with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later."
"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!"
"Nobody!" I insisted. "They're my own ideas!"
"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand—after I have found a good, steady husband, of course—and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?"
I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.
"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?"
A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. "One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit."
"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?"
"Nobody! Nobody! "
"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand—"
"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford."
"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand...."
After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.
All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.
The door opened on the signal, "Sesame." When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.
He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.
"An honor, Miss Sparling," he said in that rumbly voice. "Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft."
So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.
"First, Mr. Brown," she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, "you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?"
He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.
"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none," Sis added caustically.
Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.
"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus."
"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before—"
"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world."
"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown." Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, "What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?"
He cocked his head and considered a moment. "Look," he said finally,
"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat—don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?"
"Yes," she said bitterly. "You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?"
"No, Sis, he didn't," I was beginning to argue. "All he wanted—"
"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences."
"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?"
He waved his hands at her impatiently. "I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's."
Sis actually staggered back. "Let's? Let's what ? Are—are you daring to suggest that—that—"
"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too."
I was so excited I just had to yell: "Gee, Sis, say yes !"
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
| 82 | 28,164 | 28,166 | 28,206 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| Ferdinand Sparling is accompanying his older sister, Evelyn, on a trip to Venus. Society on Earth is ruled by women, and there are barely enough men for each, so many women take a trip to Venus, where men are in surplus, to find a husband. Ferdinand and Evelyn are aboard the Eleanor Roosevelt. Ferdinand decides to explore the ship alone, coming across rooms and areas that passengers are not allowed to go past; he notes that he wasn't really a passenger, because men weren't citizens, and explores them anyway. Ferdinand comes across Lifeboat 47, whose doors are voice activated. He tries to open the doors, and is then pulled inside by a strange, large man with long hair. Ferdinand introduces himself, and quickly learns that the man is a Venusian. Ferdinand tells him about Undersea, where he and Evelyn are from, and his family, including the death of his parents and Evelyn's decision to migrate in search of a husband afterwards. The man tells Ferdinand about growing up on Venus, about how there, it was still a man's world. He had visited Earth to find a wife, but unaware of society there, was quickly in trouble and sentenced to prison. To avoid going broke, he stowed away on the ship. The man introduces himself as Butt, his full name being Alberta Lee Brown, and begins calling Ferdinand "Ford". Butt continues telling stories of Venus, such as stories of his brothers, Venusian songs and vocabulary, and Butt's blaster, a weapon that he does not allow Ford to touch. Ferdinand begins visiting Butt regularly, bringing him fresh fruit from the dining hall. Butt starts to gain interest in Evelyn, and Ferdinand answers questions about her for him. One day, Ferdinand and Evelyn are in a geography lecture, where Ferdinand discusses dunging, a concept that has been censored by Earth's libraries. This makes Evelyn suspicious, and she interrogates Ferdinand about where he got the information. Ferdinand digs his hole deeper, using Venusian vocabulary and sharing ideas of male dominance. Evelyn then finds a picture of her in Ferdinand's pocket, and demands to know what man he is speaking to. Ferdinand confesses and tells Evelyn about Butt, and he takes her to visit him. There, she yells at Butt, and threatens legal action, and Butt then makes a surprising proposal; he suggests the two get married. |
51150_1 | 51150_1_2 | You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.
Story:
Venus Is a Man's World
BY WILLIAM TENN
Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE
[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."
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 mud-grapes 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 I 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—"
"Paddlefoot," I sneered.
Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. "Now that's a term," she said carefully, "that is used only by Venusian riffraff."
"They're not!"
"Not what?"
"Riffraff," I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!
"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus."
"Does it, now?" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. "Tell me more."
"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary—with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later."
"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!"
"Nobody!" I insisted. "They're my own ideas!"
"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand—after I have found a good, steady husband, of course—and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?"
I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.
"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?"
A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. "One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit."
"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?"
"Nobody! Nobody! "
"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand—"
"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford."
"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand...."
After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.
All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.
The door opened on the signal, "Sesame." When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.
He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.
"An honor, Miss Sparling," he said in that rumbly voice. "Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft."
So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.
"First, Mr. Brown," she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, "you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?"
He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.
"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none," Sis added caustically.
Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.
"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus."
"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before—"
"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world."
"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown." Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, "What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?"
He cocked his head and considered a moment. "Look," he said finally,
"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat—don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?"
"Yes," she said bitterly. "You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?"
"No, Sis, he didn't," I was beginning to argue. "All he wanted—"
"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences."
"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?"
He waved his hands at her impatiently. "I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's."
Sis actually staggered back. "Let's? Let's what ? Are—are you daring to suggest that—that—"
"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too."
I was so excited I just had to yell: "Gee, Sis, say yes !"
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
| 82 | 28,164 | 28,166 | 28,206 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| Ferdinand is on a spaceship with his elder sister. The ship is jam-packed with females going to Venus in search of husband and he exits the cabin while the women are still in their hammocks. The women at his times have all the rights and do all the important things since the Male Desuffrage Act, so the boy is admitted to the ship on behalf of his sister. He explores the empty ship in search of portholes and after some hesitation enters a forbidden area. There he looks at the stars and then tries to open a lock on the lifeboat. A huge scary man appears with a blaster and frighteningly cold gaze. Ferdinand explains that he comes from Undersea, an area on Earth, and tells his family story - his parents being one of the first married couples in Undersea and dying a while ago, leading to his sister's decision to migrate to Venus. The stranger, Butt, tells about the lack of women on Venus and his travel to Earth in search of a wife without any idea "it's a woman's world". So he got in trouble with the law and stowed away on this ship. His many brothers were killed in a rising and only one is left. From that day on Ferdinand keeps visiting the stowaway bringing fruits and listening to stories about Venus. Butt teaches the boy to use the blaster without giving it not hold and constantly asks about Evelyn, the sister. Once, Ferdinand attends a geography lecture on the ship with his sister and corrects the lecturer about Venusian geography. Evelyn starts eliciting where the boy learned that and the boy tells about real men working on Venus. Sis gets angry with those masculine ideas and doesn't believe them to come from a little boy. Ferdinand tries to lie but Sis suppresses him into confession and he leads her to Butt. She tells Butt about all the laws he has broken while the least responds with an appeal to sense. Suddenly, Butt simply proposes a mutually beneficial marriage to stop the debate. |
51150_1 | 51150_1_3 | You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.
Story:
Venus Is a Man's World
BY WILLIAM TENN
Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE
[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."
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 mud-grapes 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 I 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—"
"Paddlefoot," I sneered.
Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. "Now that's a term," she said carefully, "that is used only by Venusian riffraff."
"They're not!"
"Not what?"
"Riffraff," I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!
"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus."
"Does it, now?" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. "Tell me more."
"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary—with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later."
"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!"
"Nobody!" I insisted. "They're my own ideas!"
"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand—after I have found a good, steady husband, of course—and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?"
I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.
"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?"
A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. "One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit."
"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?"
"Nobody! Nobody! "
"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand—"
"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford."
"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand...."
After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.
All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.
The door opened on the signal, "Sesame." When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.
He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.
"An honor, Miss Sparling," he said in that rumbly voice. "Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft."
So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.
"First, Mr. Brown," she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, "you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?"
He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.
"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none," Sis added caustically.
Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.
"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus."
"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before—"
"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world."
"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown." Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, "What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?"
He cocked his head and considered a moment. "Look," he said finally,
"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat—don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?"
"Yes," she said bitterly. "You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?"
"No, Sis, he didn't," I was beginning to argue. "All he wanted—"
"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences."
"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?"
He waved his hands at her impatiently. "I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's."
Sis actually staggered back. "Let's? Let's what ? Are—are you daring to suggest that—that—"
"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too."
I was so excited I just had to yell: "Gee, Sis, say yes !"
Question:
What is the plot of the story?
Answer:
| 82 | 28,164 | 28,166 | 28,206 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| Ferdinand Sparling is a passenger aboard that spaceship Eleanor Roosavelt. He lives in a future society in which only women are citizens of Earth, and he is traveling to Venus with his sister Evelyn where she is in search of a husband. Women are seen as intellectuals and the only ones fit to work in positions like the government. As everyone sleeps just after the ship has taken off, Ferdinand decides to explore the ship. He comes to the hull of the ship, the crew are still asleep. In the hull are multiple doors leading to lifeboats. Ferdinand manages to open one of them, and is pulled into the lifeboat by a huge, intimidating looking man. He relates to Ferdinand how he is from Venus and had traveled to Earth to find a wife. Once he got to Earth, he realised that the planet was run by women, and when he didn't realise he has to book into a government run hotel for transient males, assaulted a barman and resisted arrest and was held for contempt in court, he decided to escape back to Venus as a stowaway. When Ferdinand attends a geography lecture with his sister, and reveals the knowledge that he has acquired from spending his days with the Venusian Butt Lee Brown, his sister becomes suspicious. He eventually gets the information that he has been spending time with a stowaway out of him. He takes her to see Butt, where she interrogates him. He tells her how he has enough money for a ticket, but doesn't want to get caught and face charges back on Earth. He tells her how he has admired her from the stories that Ferdinand has told of her, and asks her to marry him. THE END. |
49897_3 | 49897_3_0 | You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.
Story:
The Gravity Business
By JAMES E. GUNN
Illustrated by ASHMAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he—and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?
The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.
It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.
As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.
A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.
Then all was quiet—outside.
Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. "Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!"
Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.
"Now, Grampa," Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. "That landing was pretty rough, Junior."
Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. "I know it, Fred," he said, frowning. "This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth."
Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, "Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,
'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'"
"That's enough, Four," Junior interrupted. "Never mind what I said."
Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.
"And, Four," Reba said automatically, "don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful."
Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.
"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'" Four complained. "Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'"
"That's different," Reba said.
Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. "See!" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. "That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again."
"Stop picking on Junior," Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. "I'm sure he did the best he could."
"Anybody talks about gravitational pull," Grampa said, snorting,
"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago."
"Go back to your games, Grampa," Fred said impatiently. "We've got work to do."
Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. "You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?"
"It belongs to all of us," Four said shrilly. "You gave us all a sixth share."
"That's right, Four," Grampa muttered, "so I did. But whose money bought it?"
"You bought it, Grampa," Fred said.
"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?"
"You, Grampa," Fred said.
"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?"
"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills," Joyce said bitterly, "and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!"
"Well, now," Grampa protested, "I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone."
"You're never going to die, Grampa," Joyce said harshly. "Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company."
"Well, now," said Grampa, blinking, "how'd you find out about that? Well, now!" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. "I'll get you this time!"
Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. "You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?"
Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. "I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner."
"That's simple," Four said without hesitation. "The winning strategy is to—"
"Don't be a kibitzer!" Grampa snapped. "When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!" He snorted indignantly.
Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.
"Look!" he said suddenly. "This planet not only has flora—it has fauna." He rushed to the air lock.
"Four!" Reba called out warningly.
"It's all right, Reba," Four assured her. "The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum."
"What about macro-organisms—" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. "That boy!" she said to Junior.
"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy."
But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. "Well, what's all the mystery?"
"No use bothering the others yet," Junior said, his face puzzled. "You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit."
"Quit!"
"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it won't budge!"
The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, "Fweep? Fweep?"
Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. "Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!"
"You mean Fweep?" Four asked in astonishment.
"I mean that thing, whatever you call it." Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. "Get it out!"
Four's eyes widened farther. "But Fweep's my friend."
"Nonsense!" Joyce said sharply. "Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!"
"Fweep?" queried the raspberry lips. "Fweep?"
"If it's Four's friend," Reba said firmly, "it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room."
Joyce stood up indignantly. "Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!" She glared malignantly at Grampa. "If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.
"Fweep?" asked the blob.
"Sure," Four said. "Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep."
Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.
Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. "Good for you, Reba!" he said admiringly. "For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve."
"Why, thanks, Grampa," Reba said, surprised.
"I like you, gal. Never forget it."
"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!"
"You bet he would!" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, "Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow."
Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. "Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too." Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. "And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather."
Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. "What you doing, Four?"
"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings," Four said absently. "The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle."
"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?"
"You get the other one figured out?"
"It was easy," Grampa said breezily, "once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each—"
"That's right," Four agreed. "I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts."
Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.
Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. "Thought you'd say that," he said, picking out the box. "Help yourself." With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. "Ahhh!" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.
"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?" Four asked.
"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—"
"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?"
"Yep," Grampa said. "Too easy."
Four thought a moment. "There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—"
"Sounds good, boy," Grampa said eagerly. "Whip it up for me."
"Okay, Grampa." Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.
Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.
Its gelatinous form jiggled. "Hic!" it said.
As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. "Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on."
The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.
"Any luck?" Reba asked brightly.
"Do we look it?" Junior grumbled.
"Where's Joyce?" asked Fred. "Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!"
The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:
"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?"
"No," Fred said slowly, "and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it."
"Then what makes this planet so heavy?" Reba asked.
Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. "Your guess is as good as anybody's."
"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock," Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. "This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!" She glared venomously at Grampa.
"We've still got Fweepland," Four said solemnly.
"Fweepland?" Reba repeated.
"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium."
"A good thing, too," Junior said glumly, "because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here—involuntary colonists."
Joyce spun on him. "You're joking!" she screeched.
"I wish I were," Junior said. "But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize."
"It's these '23 models," Grampa put in disgustedly. "They never were any good."
The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.
Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, "If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth," he amended. "You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it."
"That's just supposition," Junior said stubbornly. "The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D."
"Maybe the polarizer is broken," Fred suggested.
Grampa snorted. "Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to."
"Then it goes deeper," Junior insisted. "It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?"
Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. "Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth—"
"Let's not get up on any pulpits," Fred growled. "Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?"
Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. "Well," he said, "at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?" The smile faded. "No, I guess you don't."
He cleared his throat professorially. "Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses."
The faces were still blank and unillumined.
"Gravity is similar to light," he pressed on. "In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted."
The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. "That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do."
"Now wait a minute!" Grampa protested. "That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'"
"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer," Joyce snapped.
"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible."
Grampa squinted at her sagely. "That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it."
"But you don't really know why it works," Junior persisted.
"Well, no," Grampa admitted. "Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it."
"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?" Joyce demanded ironically.
"Well, now," Grampa said in bafflement, "it rightly should, you know."
"We're stuck," Reba said softly. "We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—"
"Which," Joyce interrupted, "might get picked up in a few centuries."
"And make the best of what we've got," Reba went on, unheeding. "If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want."
"You know the law: one child per couple," Joyce reminded her frigidly.
"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me."
Junior frowned at his wife. "I believe you're actually glad it happened."
"I could think of worse things," Reba said.
"I like your spunk, Reb," Grampa muttered.
"Speaking of children," Junior said, "where's Four?"
"Here." Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.
"Fweep?" it queried hopefully.
"Not now," said Four.
"Where've you been?" Reba asked anxiously. "What've you been doing?"
"I've been all over Fweepland," Four said wearily, "trying to locate its center of gravity."
"Well?" Fred prompted.
"It shifts."
"That's impossible," said Junior.
"Not for Fweep," Four replied.
"What do you mean by that?" Joyce suspiciously asked.
"It shifted," Four explained patiently, "because Fweep kept following me."
"Fweep?" Junior repeated stupidly.
"Fweep?" Fweep said eagerly.
"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave."
The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. "I got it figured out, Four," he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. "A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—"
"Not now, Grampa," Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.
The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.
"Rat poison?" Four asked.
Joyce started guiltily. "How did you know?"
"There's no use trying to poison Fweep," Four said calmly. "He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all."
"What level does he use?" Junior wanted to know.
"Point the scintillation counter at him."
Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.
Junior looked at the counter's dial. "He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?"
"He uses ordinary matter," Four said. "He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago."
"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?" Junior said unbelievingly.
Four nodded. "And that 'skin' of his—whatever it is he uses for skin—is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead."
Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. "Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass."
"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us." Four giggled at the thought.
Joyce glared at him furiously. "Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!"
"I don't figure it's a whim," Grampa said. "Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move."
"I don't care why that thing does it," Joyce said icily. "I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it."
"How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy."
"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?"
"We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet."
"Well?"
"Probably he's immortal."
"And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically.
"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures."
"But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now."
"Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now."
Reba looked at Fweep kindly. "We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway."
"I thank him for nothing," Joyce snapped. "He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !"
Fred turned impatiently on his wife. "Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!"
Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. "Fred!" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.
Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. "Well, boy," he said to Fred, "I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you."
Fred stood up apologetically. "I'd better go calm her down," he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.
"Give her one for me!" Grampa called.
Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.
"Makes you think, doesn't it?" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.
"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result."
"What I can't understand," Junior said thoughtfully, "is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep us from being squashed—and then quit."
"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from," Four explained. "All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped."
"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?" Grampa said.
"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop."
"He's no more improbable than people," said Four.
"Less than some I've known," Grampa conceded.
"If he can eat anything," Reba said, "why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?"
"He wants to be helpful," Four replied without hesitation, "and he's lonely. After all," he added wistfully, "he's never had any friends."
"How do you know all these things?" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. "Can you talk to it?"
Behind her, Fred said, "Now, Joyce, you promised—"
"But this is important," Joyce cut him off eagerly. "Can you? Talk to it, I mean?"
"Some," Four admitted.
"Have you asked it to let us go?"
"Yes."
"Well? What did it say?"
"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him."
At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.
"Fwiend," it said.
"Well, now," Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, "that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep."
In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, "That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but—"
"Joyce!" Reba cried, horrified. "Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—"
"Never mind, Reba," Four said evenly. "It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution."
"Fwiend," said Fweep gently.
The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.
"Junior!" said Joyce, shocked.
Junior swung around impatiently. "Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work."
"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—"
"Mother!" Junior warned. "We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!"
"Well!" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.
Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. "Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet."
Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. "It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on."
"I take it all back," said Grampa. "That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.
"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave—if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.
"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points."
"That may be," Junior said stubbornly, "but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing."
"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep," Reba said, her voice soft. "No, here they come now."
Question:
Who is Fweep, and what is his significance in the story?
Answer:
| 82 | 30,210 | 30,212 | 30,278 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| Fweep is significant because he is the only creature living on Fweepland. He is a blob-shaped, raspberry-colored, gelatinous, transparent creature who sweeps up the debris that he runs over and engulfs it in his body. After he sweeps up particles, the outer inch or two of his body turns cloudy, then slowly clears. It seems he also absorbs substances from human contact since he follows a crooked path and hiccups after Grampa, who has been imbibing, pats him. He has a pseudo-mouth and makes the sound, or says the word, “Fweep.” His skin is impervious, and he has no enzymes or nervous system, so rat poison has no effect on him. Fweep immediately befriends Four.
When Four explores Fweepland to identify its center of gravity, he discovers that it shifts because Fweep is a circular polarizer. Fweep is what makes the planet so heavy and prevents the flivver’s gravity polarizer from working so the family can leave. Fweep is slightly radioactive and likely immortal and incapable of reproduction since there is no need to reproduce. Because he has circular polarization, linear polarization is uncomfortable to him, so Fweep turned of the flivver’s gravity polarizer just before they landed. Fweep wants to be helpful, but he doesn’t want Four to leave since Four is the only friend he has ever had. Fweep was lonely before he met Four. Fweep will let the Peppergrass family leave only if Four stays with him. Fweep is responsible for the family’s landing on Fweepland and their predicament of being unable to leave.
|
49897_3 | 49897_3_1 | You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.
Story:
The Gravity Business
By JAMES E. GUNN
Illustrated by ASHMAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he—and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?
The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.
It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.
As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.
A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.
Then all was quiet—outside.
Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. "Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!"
Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.
"Now, Grampa," Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. "That landing was pretty rough, Junior."
Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. "I know it, Fred," he said, frowning. "This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth."
Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, "Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,
'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'"
"That's enough, Four," Junior interrupted. "Never mind what I said."
Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.
"And, Four," Reba said automatically, "don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful."
Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.
"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'" Four complained. "Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'"
"That's different," Reba said.
Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. "See!" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. "That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again."
"Stop picking on Junior," Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. "I'm sure he did the best he could."
"Anybody talks about gravitational pull," Grampa said, snorting,
"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago."
"Go back to your games, Grampa," Fred said impatiently. "We've got work to do."
Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. "You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?"
"It belongs to all of us," Four said shrilly. "You gave us all a sixth share."
"That's right, Four," Grampa muttered, "so I did. But whose money bought it?"
"You bought it, Grampa," Fred said.
"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?"
"You, Grampa," Fred said.
"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?"
"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills," Joyce said bitterly, "and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!"
"Well, now," Grampa protested, "I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone."
"You're never going to die, Grampa," Joyce said harshly. "Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company."
"Well, now," said Grampa, blinking, "how'd you find out about that? Well, now!" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. "I'll get you this time!"
Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. "You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?"
Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. "I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner."
"That's simple," Four said without hesitation. "The winning strategy is to—"
"Don't be a kibitzer!" Grampa snapped. "When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!" He snorted indignantly.
Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.
"Look!" he said suddenly. "This planet not only has flora—it has fauna." He rushed to the air lock.
"Four!" Reba called out warningly.
"It's all right, Reba," Four assured her. "The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum."
"What about macro-organisms—" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. "That boy!" she said to Junior.
"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy."
But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. "Well, what's all the mystery?"
"No use bothering the others yet," Junior said, his face puzzled. "You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit."
"Quit!"
"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it won't budge!"
The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, "Fweep? Fweep?"
Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. "Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!"
"You mean Fweep?" Four asked in astonishment.
"I mean that thing, whatever you call it." Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. "Get it out!"
Four's eyes widened farther. "But Fweep's my friend."
"Nonsense!" Joyce said sharply. "Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!"
"Fweep?" queried the raspberry lips. "Fweep?"
"If it's Four's friend," Reba said firmly, "it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room."
Joyce stood up indignantly. "Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!" She glared malignantly at Grampa. "If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.
"Fweep?" asked the blob.
"Sure," Four said. "Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep."
Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.
Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. "Good for you, Reba!" he said admiringly. "For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve."
"Why, thanks, Grampa," Reba said, surprised.
"I like you, gal. Never forget it."
"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!"
"You bet he would!" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, "Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow."
Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. "Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too." Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. "And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather."
Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. "What you doing, Four?"
"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings," Four said absently. "The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle."
"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?"
"You get the other one figured out?"
"It was easy," Grampa said breezily, "once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each—"
"That's right," Four agreed. "I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts."
Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.
Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. "Thought you'd say that," he said, picking out the box. "Help yourself." With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. "Ahhh!" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.
"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?" Four asked.
"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—"
"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?"
"Yep," Grampa said. "Too easy."
Four thought a moment. "There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—"
"Sounds good, boy," Grampa said eagerly. "Whip it up for me."
"Okay, Grampa." Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.
Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.
Its gelatinous form jiggled. "Hic!" it said.
As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. "Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on."
The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.
"Any luck?" Reba asked brightly.
"Do we look it?" Junior grumbled.
"Where's Joyce?" asked Fred. "Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!"
The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:
"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?"
"No," Fred said slowly, "and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it."
"Then what makes this planet so heavy?" Reba asked.
Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. "Your guess is as good as anybody's."
"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock," Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. "This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!" She glared venomously at Grampa.
"We've still got Fweepland," Four said solemnly.
"Fweepland?" Reba repeated.
"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium."
"A good thing, too," Junior said glumly, "because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here—involuntary colonists."
Joyce spun on him. "You're joking!" she screeched.
"I wish I were," Junior said. "But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize."
"It's these '23 models," Grampa put in disgustedly. "They never were any good."
The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.
Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, "If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth," he amended. "You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it."
"That's just supposition," Junior said stubbornly. "The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D."
"Maybe the polarizer is broken," Fred suggested.
Grampa snorted. "Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to."
"Then it goes deeper," Junior insisted. "It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?"
Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. "Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth—"
"Let's not get up on any pulpits," Fred growled. "Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?"
Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. "Well," he said, "at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?" The smile faded. "No, I guess you don't."
He cleared his throat professorially. "Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses."
The faces were still blank and unillumined.
"Gravity is similar to light," he pressed on. "In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted."
The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. "That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do."
"Now wait a minute!" Grampa protested. "That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'"
"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer," Joyce snapped.
"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible."
Grampa squinted at her sagely. "That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it."
"But you don't really know why it works," Junior persisted.
"Well, no," Grampa admitted. "Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it."
"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?" Joyce demanded ironically.
"Well, now," Grampa said in bafflement, "it rightly should, you know."
"We're stuck," Reba said softly. "We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—"
"Which," Joyce interrupted, "might get picked up in a few centuries."
"And make the best of what we've got," Reba went on, unheeding. "If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want."
"You know the law: one child per couple," Joyce reminded her frigidly.
"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me."
Junior frowned at his wife. "I believe you're actually glad it happened."
"I could think of worse things," Reba said.
"I like your spunk, Reb," Grampa muttered.
"Speaking of children," Junior said, "where's Four?"
"Here." Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.
"Fweep?" it queried hopefully.
"Not now," said Four.
"Where've you been?" Reba asked anxiously. "What've you been doing?"
"I've been all over Fweepland," Four said wearily, "trying to locate its center of gravity."
"Well?" Fred prompted.
"It shifts."
"That's impossible," said Junior.
"Not for Fweep," Four replied.
"What do you mean by that?" Joyce suspiciously asked.
"It shifted," Four explained patiently, "because Fweep kept following me."
"Fweep?" Junior repeated stupidly.
"Fweep?" Fweep said eagerly.
"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave."
The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. "I got it figured out, Four," he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. "A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—"
"Not now, Grampa," Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.
The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.
"Rat poison?" Four asked.
Joyce started guiltily. "How did you know?"
"There's no use trying to poison Fweep," Four said calmly. "He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all."
"What level does he use?" Junior wanted to know.
"Point the scintillation counter at him."
Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.
Junior looked at the counter's dial. "He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?"
"He uses ordinary matter," Four said. "He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago."
"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?" Junior said unbelievingly.
Four nodded. "And that 'skin' of his—whatever it is he uses for skin—is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead."
Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. "Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass."
"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us." Four giggled at the thought.
Joyce glared at him furiously. "Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!"
"I don't figure it's a whim," Grampa said. "Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move."
"I don't care why that thing does it," Joyce said icily. "I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it."
"How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy."
"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?"
"We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet."
"Well?"
"Probably he's immortal."
"And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically.
"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures."
"But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now."
"Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now."
Reba looked at Fweep kindly. "We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway."
"I thank him for nothing," Joyce snapped. "He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !"
Fred turned impatiently on his wife. "Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!"
Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. "Fred!" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.
Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. "Well, boy," he said to Fred, "I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you."
Fred stood up apologetically. "I'd better go calm her down," he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.
"Give her one for me!" Grampa called.
Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.
"Makes you think, doesn't it?" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.
"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result."
"What I can't understand," Junior said thoughtfully, "is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep us from being squashed—and then quit."
"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from," Four explained. "All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped."
"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?" Grampa said.
"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop."
"He's no more improbable than people," said Four.
"Less than some I've known," Grampa conceded.
"If he can eat anything," Reba said, "why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?"
"He wants to be helpful," Four replied without hesitation, "and he's lonely. After all," he added wistfully, "he's never had any friends."
"How do you know all these things?" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. "Can you talk to it?"
Behind her, Fred said, "Now, Joyce, you promised—"
"But this is important," Joyce cut him off eagerly. "Can you? Talk to it, I mean?"
"Some," Four admitted.
"Have you asked it to let us go?"
"Yes."
"Well? What did it say?"
"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him."
At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.
"Fwiend," it said.
"Well, now," Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, "that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep."
In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, "That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but—"
"Joyce!" Reba cried, horrified. "Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—"
"Never mind, Reba," Four said evenly. "It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution."
"Fwiend," said Fweep gently.
The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.
"Junior!" said Joyce, shocked.
Junior swung around impatiently. "Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work."
"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—"
"Mother!" Junior warned. "We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!"
"Well!" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.
Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. "Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet."
Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. "It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on."
"I take it all back," said Grampa. "That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.
"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave—if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.
"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points."
"That may be," Junior said stubbornly, "but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing."
"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep," Reba said, her voice soft. "No, here they come now."
Question:
Who is Fweep, and what is his significance in the story?
Answer:
| 82 | 30,210 | 30,212 | 30,278 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| Fweep is a creature that Four finds when the Peppergrass family lands on an unknown planet. He is a gelatin-like orb about two feet in diameter that is raspberry in color, and has something resembling a mouth. However, he has an interesting ability in which he picks up particulates on the ground by rolling around. He calls this sweeping, and we find out later in the story that he is able to convert the materials in what he picks up to create radioactive matter. Because of this ability, he has a very high mass which the Peppergrass family misinterpreted as heavy metals as they were scanning the planet, which is what drew them to the planet in the first place. Fweep is also responsible for the ship's crashing: because of his mass, Fweep is a circular polarizer, which conflicted with the linear polarizer of the spaceship. Fweep and Four become instant friends when they meet, which adds another layer of complication to the relationship that the family has with Fweep. He could let the family return home, which they can't do under his gravitational pull, but Fweep does not want to let the family go if that means that Four would leave him, and Four is his only friend. This presents a moral conundrum to the family: they could return if they leave Four on the planet, but they do not want to leave a family member behind. |
49897_3 | 49897_3_2 | "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Bu(...TRUNCATED) | 82 | 30,210 | 30,212 | 30,278 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| "Fweep is a pink colored blob, and he’s about two-feet wide. He looks like gelatin, and he picks u(...TRUNCATED) |
49897_3 | 49897_3_3 | "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Bu(...TRUNCATED) | 82 | 30,210 | 30,212 | 30,278 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| "Fweep is a gelatinous life-form, unlike anything the Peppergrass family has ever seen before. Fweep(...TRUNCATED) |
50818_1 | 50818_1_0 | "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOW TO MAKE FR(...TRUNCATED) | 82 | 29,872 | 29,874 | 29,914 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| "William Manet is working in atmosphere seeder station 131-47 on Mars. He is completely alone, but d(...TRUNCATED) |
50818_1 | 50818_1_1 | "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOW TO MAKE FR(...TRUNCATED) | 82 | 29,872 | 29,874 | 29,914 | ... [The rest of the story is omitted]
| "William Manet is an extremely lonely man and is the only human who works at his station. He is part(...TRUNCATED) |
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