“What are you going to do with him?” Relke asked, nodding at the corpse.
“Promote him to supervisory engineer and give him a raise.”
“Christ but they hire smart boys for the snooper team, don’t they? What’s your I.Q., friend? I bet they had to breed you to get smart.”
The checker grinned. “You looking for an argument, Slim?”
Relke shook his head. “No, I just asked a question.”
“We’re going to take him back to Copernicus and bury him, friend. It takes a lot of imagination to figure that out, doesn’t it?”
“If he was a class three laborer, you wouldn’t take him back to Copernicus. You wouldn’t even bury him. You’d just chuck him in a fissure and dynamite the lip.”
The man smiled. Patient cynicism was in his tone. “But he’s not a class three laborer, Slim. He’s Mister S.K. Brodanovitch. Does that make everything nice and clear?”
“Sure. Is Parkeson around?”
The checker glanced up and snickered. “You’re a chum of his, I guess? Hear that, Clyde? We’re talking to a wheel.”
Relke reddened. “Shove it, chum. I just wondered if he’s here.”
“Sure, he’s out here. He went over to see that flying bordello you guys have been hiding out here.”
“What’s he going to do about it?”
“Couldn’t say, friend.”
Novotny came back with an extra suit.
“Joe, I just remembered something.”
“Tell me about it on the way back.”
They suited up and went out to the runabout. Relke told what he could remember about the cell meeting.
“It sounds crazy in a way,” Novotny said thoughtfully. “Or maybe it doesn’t. It could mess up the Party’s strike plans if Parkeson brought those women back before sundown. The men want women back on the moon project. If they can get women bootlegged in, they won’t be quite so ready to start a riot on the No Work Without a Wife theme.”
“But Parkeson’d get fired in a flash if—”
“If Parliament got wind of it, sure. Unless he raised the squawk later himself. UCOJE doesn’t mention prostitution. Parkeson could point out that some national codes on Earth tolerate it. Nations with delegates in the Parliament, and with work teams on the moon. Take the African team at Tycho. And the Japanese team. Parkeson himself is an Aussie. Whose law is he supposed to enforce?”
“You mean maybe they can’t keep ships like that from visiting us?”
“Don’t kid yourself. It won’t last long. But maybe long enough. If it goes on long enough, and builds up, the general public will find out. You think that wouldn’t cause some screaming back home?”
“Yeah. That’ll be the end.”
“I’m wondering. If there turns out to be a profit in it for whoever’s backing d’Annecy, well—anything that brings a profit is pretty hard to put a stop to. There’s only one sure way to stop it. Kill the demand.”
“For women? Are you crazy, Joe?”
“They could bring in decent women. Women to marry. That’ll stop it.”
“But the kids. They can’t have kids.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s the problem, and they’ve got to start solving it sometime. Hell, up to now, they haven’t been trying to solve it. When the problem came up, and the kids were dying, everybody got hysterical and jerked the women back to Earth. That wasn’t a solution, it was an evasion. The problem is growth-control—in low gravity. It ought to have a medical answer. If this d’Annecy dame gets a chance to keep peddling her wares under the counter, well—she’ll force them to start looking for a solution.”
“I don’t know, Joe. Everybody said homosexuality would force them to start looking for it—after Doc Reiber made his survey. The statistics looked pretty black, but they didn’t do anything about it except send us a shipful of ministers. The fairies just tried to make the ministers.”
“Yeah, but this is different.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Half the voters are women.”
“So? They didn’t do anything about homosex—”
“Relke, wise up. Listen, did you ever see a couple of Lesbians necking in a bar?”
Relke snickered. “Sure, once or twice.”
“How did you feel about it?”
“Well, this once was kind of funny. You see, this one babe had on—”
“Never mind. You thought it was funny. Do you think it’s funny the way MacMillian and Wickers bill and coo?”
“That gets pretty damn nauseating, Joe.”
“Uh-huh, but the Lesbians just gave you a giggle. Why?”
“Well, I don’t know, Joe, it’s—”
“I’ll tell you why. You like dames. You can understand other guys liking dames. You like dames so much that you can even understand two dames liking each other. You can see what they see in each other. But it’s incongruous, so it’s funny. But you can’t see what two fairies see in each other, so that just gives you a bellyache. Isn’t that it?”
“Maybe, but what’s that got to do with the voters?”
“Ever think that maybe a woman would feel the same way in reverse? A dame could see what MacMillian and Wickers see in each other. The dame might morally disapprove, but at the same time she could sympathize. What’s more, she’d be plenty sure that she could handle that kind of competition if she ever needed to. She’s a woman, and wotthehell, Wickers is only a substitute woman. It wouldn’t worry her too much. Worry her morally, but not as a personal threat. Relke, Mme. d’Annecy’s racket is a personal threat to the home girl and the womenfolk.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Half the voters are women.”
Relke chuckled. “Migod, Joe, if Ellen heard about that ship…”
“Ellen?”
“My older sister. Old maid. Grim.”
“You’ve got the idea. If Parkeson thinks of all this…” His voice trailed off. “When is Larkin talking about crippling that ship?”
“About sundown, why?”
“Somebody better warn the d’Annecy dame.”
The cosmic gunfire had diminished. The Perseid shrapnel still pelted the dusty face of the plain, but the gram-impact-per-acre-second had dropped by a significant fraction, and with it fell the statistician’s estimate of dead men per square mile. There was an ion storm during the first half of B-shift, and the energized spans of high voltage cable danced with fluttering demon light as the trace-pressure of the lunar “atmosphere” increased enough to start a glow discharge between conductors. High current surges sucked at the line, causing the breakers to hiccup. The breakers tried the line three times, then left the circuit dead and waited for the storm to pass. The storm meant nothing to the construction crews except an increase in headset noise.
Parkeson’s voice came drawling on the general call frequency, wading waist-deep through the interference caused by the storm. Relke leaned back against his safety strap atop the trusswork of the last tower and tried to listen. Parkeson was reading the Articles of Discipline, and listening was compulsory. All teams on the job had stopped work to hear him. Relke gazed across the plain toward the slender nacelles of the bird from Algiers in the distance. He had gotten used to the ache in his side where Kunz had kicked him, but it was good to rest for a time and watch the rocket and remember brown legs and a yellow dress. Properties of Earth. Properties belonging to the communion of humanity, from which fellowship a Looney was somehow cut off by 238,000 miles of physical separation.
“We’ve got a job to finish here,” Parkeson was telling the men.
Why? What was in space that was worth the wanting? What followed from its conquest? What came of finishing the job?
Nothing.