James E. Gunn

“ 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." ”

“ The darkness was gone. Ives was sprawled on the after couch, apparently unconscious. Johnny [Pg 48] was smiling in his sleep. The Captain was snoring stertorously, and Paresi was curled up like a cat on the floor. The sunlight streamed in through the forward viewports. The manual wheel gleamed on the bulkhead, unbroken.
Hoskins looked at the sleeping crew and shook his head, half-smiling. Then he stepped to the control console and lifted a microphone from its hook. He began to speak softly into it in his gentle, unimpressive voice. He said:
"Reality is what it is, and not what it seems to be. ”

“ It is not enough to uncover a conspiracy; you must find a motive. I had discovered the motive behind the Great Conspiracy.
Baby books were not written to teach parents how to care for their children; baby books were written to sell baby books. And magazines published articles about babies to sell magazines to mothers.
Valid reasons. If they had not existed, there would have been no baby books, no women's magazines. But this had far-reaching consequences: the market for baby books and women's magazines was the great, proliferating population of new parents. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Paresi stood up. "Why, they are. In the last analysis, so is suicide."
"I'll think about that," said Hoskins softly.
"Paresi!" spat Anderson. "Medic or no, you'll watch your mouth!"
"Sorry, Captain. That was panic seed. Hoskins—"
"Don't explain it to me," said the engineer mildly. "I know what you meant. Suicide's the direct product of survival compulsions—drives that try to save something, just as fight and flight are efforts to save something. I don't think you need worry; immolation doesn't tempt me. I'm too—too interested in what goes on. What are you going to do about Ives?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through the hull?"
Hoskins, who knew the hull, how it was made, how fitted, how treated once it was in place, snorted at the idea.
"If it was a gas," said Paresi, "there'd be diffusion. And convection. If it were poisonous, we'd all be dead. If not, the chances are we'd smell it. And the counter's not saying a thing—so it's not radioactive."
"You trust the counter?" asked Ives bitterly.
"I trust it," said Paresi. His near-whisper shook with what sounded like passion. "A man must have faith in something. ”

“ It is surprising that a man who was the father of two children should accuse himself of depopulating the Earth. And yet it is because I was the father of two children that it happened.
Pre-natal care of mothers and post-natal care of infants were subjects of compelling interest in those days, arriving monthly in the burgeoning women's magazines and annually in the proliferous child-care manuals. Pediatricians and mothers besieged parents with advice, and we consumed everything with catholic appetite: logical, illogical, sensible, insensible, nonsensical, self-contradictory. ”

“ 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." ”

“ In other words, none of us is a balanced individual. And the imbalances are chosen to match and blend, so that we will react as a balanced unit. Sure I know Johnny's bugaboos, and Hoskins', and yours. They were all in my indoctrination treatments. I know all your case histories, all your psychic push-buttons."
"And yours?" demanded the Captain.
"Hoskins, for example," said Paresi. "Happily married, no children. Physically inferior all his life. Repressed desire for pure science which produced more than a smattering of a great many sciences and made him a hell of an engineer. ”

“ Paresi grinned broadly, and the exchange between them was clear: Why do you needle the kid? and Quiet, Engine-room. I know what I'm doing. Hoskins shrugged, and, with Ives, crossed to the communications desk.
Ives ran his fat, skilled hands over the controls and peered at his indicators. "It's more than a good landing," he grunted. "That squeak-box we homed in on can't be more than a hundred meters from here. First time I've ever seen a ship bullseye like that."
Johnny locked his gimbals, ran a steady, sensitive hand over the turn of the console as if it were a woman's flank. ”

“ And what, in a woman's eyes, was time to a father?
The second type of mis-statement was a pure omission. The thing the baby books didn't mention was that most women felt ten times worse during their second pregnancies. [1] At this time life became almost unbearable for them—and it was, as a consequence, completely unbearable for their husbands.
Not one baby book or article mentioned that fact. That it was a fact I proved by a personal survey. Every mother questioned revealed that she felt horrible during her second pregnancy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Look at him playing chess, making of this very real situation a theoretical abstraction ... like leaving a marriage for deep space.
"Johnny we know about. Brought up with never failing machines. Still plays with them as if they were toys, and like any imaginative child, turns to his toys for reassurance. He needs to be a hero, hence the stars....
"Ives ... always fat. Learned to be easy-going, learned to laugh with when others were laughing at, and bottling up pressures every time it happened. A large appetite. He's here to satisfy it; he's with us so he can eat up the galaxies...." ”

“ With women, things are always worse, and they are born with all the knowledge they will ever need.
Babies could be divided into two kinds: "most" and "occasional." Consider, for instance, the following quotation: "Most babies in the early months sleep from feeding to feeding; an occasional baby won't fall into this pattern but insists on being sociable after his meals." ”

“ 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." ”

“ He went to the acceleration couch and sat down. "I want out," he said. He waved away the professional comment he could see forming on Paresi's lips and went on, "Not claustrophobia, Nick. Getting out of the ship's more important than just relieving our feelings. If the trouble with the port is being caused by some fantastic something outside this ship, we'll achieve a powerful victory over it, purely by ignoring it." ”

“ The makers of baby foods, baby apparel, and baby accessories went next, then the women's magazines when they lost their advertising. In a few years, the condition hit the schools; one by one they closed their doors.
It was a creeping paralysis. The toy makers and sellers collapsed. The clothing industry couldn't survive longer. The shoe-makers were hardest hit. Food consumption dropped. All over the country, farmers went broke.... ”

“ Fred said gravely, "that this multiplies our problem of what to do with Fweep over one hundred times."
"What problem?" asked Grampa. "The only problem we got is how we're gonna spend the cash. We're in business—the gravity business. We'll call it Gravity, Incorporated, and we can reclaim every little hunk of rock in the Solar System. Each one of those little fellows is worth a fortune! We'll give the satellites and the asteroids Earth-normal gravities and atmospheres and, by golly, we're rich!"
"Rich?" Joyce echoed. ”

“ Paresi dismissed the remark with a shrug. "I still say that while we have been astonished, frightened, puzzled and frustrated, we have not been seriously threatened. Our water and food and air are virtually unlimited. Our ability to live with one another under emergency situations has been tested to a fare-thee-well, and all we have to do is recognize the emergency as such and that ability will rise to optimum." He smiled suddenly. "It could be worse, Ives." ”

“ 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." ”

“ He lumbered to his feet and went aft, where he rolled to the couch and was almost instantly asleep.
The others congregated far forward around the controls, and for a long moment stared silently at the sleeping pilot.
"I don't get it," murmured Ives.
"He really thought he flew us out, didn't he?" asked Hoskins.
Paresi nodded. "Had to. There isn't any place in his cosmos for machines that don't work. Contrary evidence can get just so strong. Then, for him, it ceased to exist. A faulty cigarette lighter irritated him, a failing airlock control made him angry and sullen and then hysterical. ”

“ Hoskins, check the landing-suits—food, water, oxygen, radio, everything. Earth-type planet or no, we're not fooling with alien viruses. Johnny, I want you to survey this valley in every way you can and plot a minimum of three take-off vectors."
The crew fell to work, Ives and Hoskins intently, Johnny off-handedly, as if he were playing out a ritual with some children. Paresi bent over a stereomicroscope, manipulating controls which brought in samples of air-borne bacteria and fungi and placed them under its objective. Captain Anderson ranged up beside him. ”