Baby Is Three (4 page)

Let me tell you something about modern women and therefore something about Flower—something you might not reason out unless you get as old and objective as I’ve somehow lived to become.

Used to be, according to what I’ve read, that clothes ran a lot to what I might call indicative concealment. As long as clothes had the slightest excuse of functionalism, people in general and women in particular made a large fuss over something called innate modesty—which never did exist; it had to be learned. But as long as there was weather around to blame clothes on, the myth was accepted. People exposed what the world was indifferent to in order to whip up interest in the rest. “Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty,” one of the old books
says. Clothes as weatherproofing got themselves all mixed up with clothes as ornament; fashions came and went and people followed them.

But for the past three hundred years or so there hasn’t been any “weather” as such, for anyone, here or on Earth. Clothes for only aesthetic purposes became more and more the rule, until today it’s up to the individual to choose what he’s going to wear, if anything. An earring and a tattoo are quite as acceptable in public as forty meters of iridescent plastiweb and a two-meter coiffure.

Now, most people today are healthy, well-selected, and good to look at. Women are still as vain as ever. A woman with a bodily defect, real or imagined, has one of two choices: She can cover the defect with something artfully placed to look as if that was just the best place for it, or she can leave the defect in the open, knowing that no one today is going to judge her completely in terms of the defect. Folks nowadays generally wait until they can find out what kind of human being you are.

But a woman who has no particular defect generally changes her clothes with her mood. It might be a sash only this morning, but a trailing drape this afternoon. Tomorrow it might be a one-sided blouse and clinging trousers. You can take it as a very significant thing when such a woman
always
covers up. She’s keeping her natural warmth, as it were, under forced draft.

I didn’t go into all this ancient history to impress you with my scholastics. I’m using it to illustrate a very important facet of Flower’s complex character. Because Flower was one of those forced-draft jobs. Except on the sun-field and in the swimming pools, where no one ever wears clothes, Flower always affected a tunic of some kind.

The day Judson arrived, she wore a definitive example of what I mean. It was a single loose black garment with straight shoulders and no sleeves. On both sides, from a point a hand’s-breath below the armpit, down to the hipbone, it was slit open. It fastened snugly under her throat with one magne-clasp, but was also slit from there to the navel. It did not quite reach to mid-thigh, and the soft material carried a light biostatic electrical charge, so that it clung to and fell away from her body as she moved. So help me, she was a walking demand for the revival of the extinct profession of peeping Tom.

This, then, was what horned in on my first few words with Judson. I should have known from the way she looked that she was planning something—something definitely for herself. I should have been doubly warned by the fact that she took the trouble to speak up just when she did—just when I told Jud he was a certifiable Outbounder if I ever saw one.

So then and there I made my big mistake. “Flower,” I said, “this is Judson.”

She used the second it took me to speak to suck in her lower lip, so that when she smiled slowly at Jud, the lip swelled visibly as if by blood pressure. “I
am
glad,” she all but whispered.

And then she had the craft to turn the smile on me and walk away without another word.

“… Gah!” said Judson through a tight glottis.

“That,” I told him, “was beautifully phrased. Gah, indeed. Reel your eyeballs back in, Jud. We’ll drop your duffel off at the Outbound quarters and—
Judson!”

Flower had disappeared down the inner ramp. I was aware that Judson had just started to breathe again.

“What?” he asked me.

I waddled over and picked up his gear. “Come on,” I said, and steered him by the arm.

Judson had nothing to say until after we found him a room and started for my sector. “Who is she?”

“A hardy perennial,” I said. “Came up to Curbstone two years ago. She’s never been certified. She’ll get around to it soon—or never. Are you going right ahead?”

“Just how do you handle the certification?”

“Give you some stuff to read. Pound some more knowledge into you for six, seven nights while you sleep. Look over your reflexes, physical and mental. An examination. If everything’s all right, you’re certified.”

“Then—Out?”

I shrugged. “If you like. You come to Curbstone strictly on your own. You take your course if and when you like. And after you’ve
been certified, you leave when you want to, with someone or not, and without telling anyone unless you care to.”

“Man, when you people say ‘voluntary’ you’re not just talking!”

“There’s no other way to handle a thing like this. And you can bet that we get more people Out this way than we ever would on a compulsory basis. In the long run, I mean, and this is a long-term project … six thousand years long.”

He walked silently for a time, and I was pretty sure I knew his thoughts. For Outbounders there is no return, and the best possible chance they have of survival is something like fifty-four per cent, a figure which was arrived at after calculations so complex that it might as well be called a guess. You don’t force people Out against those odds. They go by themselves, driven by their own reasoning, or they don’t go at all.

After a time Judson said, “I always thought Outbounders were assigned a ship and a departure time. With certified people leaving whenever they feel like it, what’s to prevent uncertified ones from doing it?”

“That I’m about to show you.”

We passed the Coordination offices and headed out to the launching racks. They were shut off from Top Central Corridor by a massive gate. Over the gate floated three words in glowing letters:

SPECIES
GROUP
SELF

Seeing Jud’s eyes on it, I explained, “The three levels of survival. They’re in all of us. You can judge a man by the way he lines them up. The ones who have them in that order are the best. It’s a good thought for Outbounders to take away with them.” I watched his face. “Particularly since it’s always the third item that brings ’em this far.”

Jud smiled slowly. “Along with all that bumbling you carry a sting, don’t you?”

“Mine is a peculiar job,” I grinned back. “Come on in.”

I put my palm on the key-plate. It tingled for a brief moment and then the shining doors slid back. I rolled through, stopping just inside the launching court at Judson’s startled yelp.

“Well, come on,” I said.

He stood just inside the doors, straining mightily against nothing at all. “Wh—wh—?” His arms were spread and his feet slipped as if he were trying to force his way through a steel wall.

Actually he was working on something a good deal stronger than that. “That’s the answer to why uncertified people don’t go Out,” I told him. “The plate outside scanned the whorls and lines of my hand. The door opened and that Gillis-Menton field you’re muscling passed me through. It’ll pass anyone who’s certified, too, but no one else. Now stop pushing or you’ll suddenly fall on your face.”

I stepped to the left bulkhead and palmed the plate there, then beckoned to Judson. He approached the invisible barrier timidly. It wasn’t there. He came all the way through, and I took my hand off the scanner.

“That second plate,” I explained, “works for me and certified people only. There’s no way for an uncertified person to get into the launching court unless I bring him in personally. It’s as simple as that. When the certified are good and ready, they go. If they want to go Out with a banquet and a parade beforehand, they can. If they want to roll out of bed some night and slip Out quietly, they can. Most of ’em do it quietly. Come on and have a look at the ships.”

We crossed the court to the row of low doorways along the far wall. I opened one at random and we stepped into the ship.

“It’s just a room!”

“They all say that,” I chuckled. “I suppose you expected a planettype space job, only more elaborate.”

“I thought they’d at least
look
like ships. This is a double room out of some luxury hotel.”

“It’s that, and then some.” I showed him around—the capacious food lockers, the automatic air recirculators, and, most comforting of all, the synthesizer, which meant food, fuel, tools and materials converted directly from energy to matter.

“Curbstone’s more than a space station, Jud. It’s a factory, for one thing. When you decide to go on your way, you’ll flip that lever by the door. (You’ll be catapulted out—you won’t feel it, because of the stasis generator and artificial gravity.) As soon as you’re gone, another ship will come up from below into this slot. By the time you’re clear of Curbstone’s gravitic field and slip into hyperdrive, the new ship’ll be waiting for passengers.”

“And that will be going on for six thousand years?”

“More or less.”

“That’s a powerful lot of ships.”

“As long as Outbounders keep the quota, it is indeed. Nine hundred thousand—including forty-six per cent failure.”

“Failure,” said Jud. He looked at me and I held his gaze.

“Yes,” I said. “The forty-six per cent who are not expected to get where they are going. The ones who materialize inside solid matter. The ones who go into the space-time nexus and never come out. The ones who reach their assigned synaptic junction and wait, and wait, and wait until they die of old age because no one gets to them soon enough. The ones who go mad and kill themselves or their shipmates.” I spread my hands. “The forty-six per cent.”

“You can convince a man of danger,” said Judson evenly, “but nobody ever believed he was really and truly going to die. Death is something that happens to other people. I won’t be one of the forty-six per cent.”

That was Judson. I wish he was still here.

I let the remark lie there on the thick carpet and went on with my guided tour. I showed him the casing of the intricate beam-power apparatus that contained the whole reason for the project, and gave him a preliminary look at the astrogational and manual maneuvering equipment and controls. “But don’t bother your pretty little head about it just now, I added. “It’ll all be crammed into you before you get certified.”

We went back to the court, closing the door of the ship behind us.

“There’s a lot of stuff piled into those ships,” I observed, “but the one thing that can’t be packed in sardine-size is the hyper-drive. I suppose you know that.”

“I’ve heard something about it. The initial kick into second-order space comes from the station here, doesn’t it? But how is the ship returned to normal space on arrival?”

“That’s technology so refined it sounds like mysticism,” I answered. “I don’t begin to understand it. I can give you an analogy, though. It takes a power source, a compression device, and valving to fill a pneumatic tire. It takes a plain nail to let the air out again. See what I mean?”

“Vaguely. Anyway, the important thing is that Outbound is strictly one way. Those ships never come back. Right?”

“So right.”

One of the doors behind us opened, and a girl stepped out of a ship. “Oh … I didn’t know there was anyone here!” she said, and came toward us with a long, easy stride. “Am I in the way?”

“You—in the way, Tween?” I answered. “Not a chance.”

I was very fond of Tween. To these jaded old eyes she was one of the loveliest things that ever happened. Two centuries ago, before variation limits were as rigidly set as they are now, Eugenics dreamed up her kind—olive-skinned true-breeds with the silver hair and deep ruby eyes of an albino. It was an experiment they should never have stopped. Albinoism wasn’t dominant, but in Tween it had come out strongly. She wore her hair long—really long; she could tuck the ends of it under her toes and stand up straight when it was loose. Now it was braided in two ingenious halves of a coronet that looked like real silver. Around her throat and streaming behind her as she walked was a single length of flame-colored material.

“This is Judson, Tween,” I said. “We were friends back on Earth. What are you up to?”

She laughed, a captivating, self-conscious laugh. “I was sitting in a ship pretending that it was Outside. We’d looked at each other one day and suddenly said, ‘Let’s!’ and off we’d gone.” Her face was luminous. “It was lovely. And that’s just what we’re going to do one of these days. You’ll see.”

“ ‘We’? Oh—you mean Wold.”

“Wold,” she breathed, and I wished, briefly and sharply, that someone, somewhere, someday would speak my name like that. And
on the heels of that reaction came the mental picture of Wold as I had seen him an hour before, slick and smooth, watching the shuttle passengers with his dark hunting eyes. There was nothing I could say though. My duties have their limits. If Wold didn’t know a good thing when he saw it, that was his hard luck.

But looking at that shining face, I knew it would be her hard luck.

“You’re certified?” Judson asked, awed.

“Oh, yes,” she smiled, and I said, “Sure is, Jud. But she had her troubles, didn’t you, Tween?”

We started for the gate. “I did indeed,” said Tween. (I loved hearing her talk. There was a comfortable, restful quality to her speech like silence when an unnoticed, irritating noise disappears.) “I just didn’t have the logical aptitudes when I first came. Some things just wouldn’t stick in my head, even in hypnopedia. All the facts in the universe won’t help if you don’t know how to put them together.” She grinned. “I used to hate you.”

“Don’t blame you a bit.” I nudged Judson. “I turned down her certification eight times. She used to come to my office to get the bad news, and she’d stand there after I’d told her and shuffle her feet and gulp a little bit. And the first thing she said then was always, ‘Well, when can I start retraining?’ ”

She flushed, laughing. “You’re telling secrets!”