“Samay. Why won’t you say it right?”
“Look,” Broben confided, “I’m already trying to get used to learning repairs from a dame. Throw me a bone here.”
Samay pulled a board from a slot in the access panel. To Broben it looked like a road map. “A dame is a woman?” she asked.
“Yeah. You know, a broad. A skirt. Not that anybody here ever heard of a skirt.”
She frowned at the panel and slotted it back. “Women don’t teach engineering and mechanics where you come from?”
“Huh? No, women can teach whatever they want to, I guess.” Broben shrugged. “Mostly they don’t learn it in the first place.”
“Why not?”
“Why in the world would they want to? What would they do with it?”
Samay didn’t hear a bit of condescension in Broben’s tone. The man was genuinely puzzled. “So where you come from,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to do something that I’ve done here for most of my life?”
Broben thought about it. “It’s like this,” he said. “There’s things men do and things women do. Some places just belong to them, see? And if you go to ’em, you feel like you’re trespassing. Like if I was to knit a sweater, or something, people would start to wonder if I was a little confused. Follow?”
“No. I don’t follow.”
“Well, maybe it don’t matter. ’Cause to be honest with you the war’s got everything pretty shook up and turned around back home. Like for instance, our crate was put together by girls. Our bomber.”
“Your aircraft was built by children?”
“What gave you that idea? It was built by dames, like I said. Girls.”
“But—” She shook her head. “Never mind. Your warplane was built by women.”
He nodded proudly. “Built in half a day by a whole platoon of Rosie Riveters.”
“So necessity is removing social sanctions,” she said.
“What’s that in English?”
“A war of survival changes cultural priorities,” Samay explained. “It strips us down to fundamentals.”
“What if I don’t want to be stripped to my fundamentals?”
“You don’t have a choice. The scale of your war demanded that your society’s priorities change to accommodate it. Women entering the technical labor force. A nonprofessional military.”
“Maybe so,” said Broben. “But at least it hasn’t got so bad that dames have to join the army and start shooting people.” He shook his head. “Women are the ones we’re supposed to protect, not the ones doing the protecting.”
Samay laughed and turned back to the loader. “Our military has as many women as men,” she said, folding down another panel. This one housed rows of little rectangles. “I did my five years.”
Broben looked confounded. “You were in the army?” He mimed firing a rifle.
She nodded as she pulled a tool from a holder and used it to pull out one of the rectangles. “I still am, if they need me. Everyone is.” She held the rectangle up to the light and squinted at it. “We’re only eleven hundred people,” she told Broben. “It’s no more unnatural for me to serve than it is for your women to build warplanes. We’re all protecting what we believe in.”
“Well, I believe in dames.”
She laughed and put the rectangle back in place. “I’ll make you a prediction,” she said. “When your war ends, those kinds of things won’t go back to the way they were before it started.”
“Ah, that’s a sucker bet. I mean, how can they? Winning changes things.”
“I’m not talking about victory. I’m talking about unwritten rules. The ways you live. Work. Mate. Your women won’t go back to—what was it? Fabricating sweaters?” She shook her head. “Oh, some will, of course. Maybe most. But some are going to want to keep making aircraft. Or fly them. And some of those will try to figure out how to make them better. Make them more efficient, produce them more efficiently.” She grinned at the look on Broben’s face. “I predict much change in your future, lieutenant.”
“Sister, there’s already been too much change in my future.”
She laughed. Broben asked what she was looking for in the little rectangles. “Broken circuits,” she replied.
“They’re some kind of fuses?” he said.
“And relays, yes.”
“Try pushing on them.”
She looked skeptical but humored him, quickly pushing all the little plastic rectangles in the fuse box. She stopped at one and frowned. She glanced at Broben, reached to the loader’s dashboard, and moved a joystick. The forklift rose.
Broben looked smug. “You’ll get my bill,” he said.
She held out a felt-tip pen and indicated the fusebox panel. “Sign,” she said.
“You fixed it, not me,” Broben protested.
She shook the pen. “You’re part of it now,” she said. “Sign your name.”
Feeling oddly as if he were setting his name to some historical document, Broben signed.
Much change in your future, lieutenant.
Broben wound through the maze of stacks, preoccupied with unaccustomed notions. Microminiaturization. Servo motors. Printed circuits. Printed batteries. Gyro steering. Women in the work force who weren’t secretaries or schoolteachers. Women who built cars. Who repaired cars. Owned repair shops. Managed auto factories. Hell, you’d have to come up with a new word for that one; they sure as hell wouldn’t let you call them foremen.
A war of survival changes cultural priorities.
Sammy didn’t know the half of it. In Mobile, Alabama, Negroes were building warships right alongside white men. A lot of people weren’t thrilled about it, but everyone knew it had to be done. And after the war was over, were they supposed to lay down their wrenches and go back to saying Yassuh, Missah Benny, like Shorty imitating Rochester? Because at that point that’s what it would be: Imitation.
Hell, maybe it always was.
The war had yanked America out of the sinkhole of the Great Depression and initiated the biggest tooling-up the world had ever seen. You got so lost in its mass of cogs that you couldn’t see the greater machinery that enabled it. Unheard-of levels of production, transportation, technology. Change. A country suddenly more powerful and resourceful than even its own people had realized.
And how was that gonna play out after Hitler ate a lead sandwich? Would America say Yassuh, Missah Benny after this was over?
Broben didn’t think so.
It loomed before him, all that change. Its scale and its extent were unforeseeable, but it was big and it was certain and it would touch almost everything before this war was settled.
Sammy was right. There would be no going back.
Broben realized he’d been wandering aimlessly among the Fabrication stacks and workers. He grinned sheepishly and waved at the staring people and made his way back to the room with the Magic Jumpsuit Machine, where Martin stood before the humming contraption, deep in discussion with that hobo-looking guy, what was his name? Bigtoe? Palo Alto?
Palto, that was it. Martin and Palto stood side by side, looking down at one of those World’s Fair television gizmos people here pulled from their pockets like road holes in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Martin was holding out a cigarette and pointing to it as if explaining it to the man. He broke off when he saw Broben coming toward them. “You all right, lieutenant?” he asked.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Martin shrugged. “I don’t know. You just look like a faraway fella.”
“I been working on a forklift,” said Broben. “What’re you two talking about? It looked very significant.”