“How could you possibly have boys but not girls?”
“Because of the gene changes in Spacer men,” Ben said. “That part is true, you see. There are changes caused by cosmic radiation. The first men in space were damaged, but there were no mutants.
The damage was invisible and silent: a tiny change in the cells that reproduce life, actually in just one chromosome pair in those cells, but it was a consistent change that happened every time to every man who came into space. Oh, there were a few other changes. I’m only eighteen, and I’m already graying fast; I’ll be white-haired before I’m twenty. And we seem to live a little longer than the average Earthman—our scientists say that our body cells don’t age quite as fast, which helps make up for the high death rate from accidents in space. But these are minor things. The change in the sex-determining chromosomes is something else altogether.”
“You mean the X-Y pair?”
Ben Trefon nodded. “In Earthmen, women carry a complete pair of chromosomes to determine the sex of the child, while men carry an incomplete pair. One of their X chromosomes is already incomplete—the Y chromosome. When a child is conceived, a combination of an X with an X becomes a female child, while an X and a Y results in a male child.”
“Well, anybody knows that,” Joyce Barron exclaimed. “That’s simple high-school genetics.”
“But it’s also Earth genetics,” Ben said. “In space the single X chromosome that men carry is damaged. Our scientists still don’t know how, exactly; some of the genes in the X chromosome are just put out of commission, so that the X behaves like a Y. And as long as Spacer men can provide only Y
chromosomes, they can never father girls, only boys.”
“Then you mean that all of the women who have been kidnapped from Earth have become Spacer wives?” Tom said.
“Not all of them. No girl has ever been forced to become a mauki, and there are always a few who refuse to marry, but not very many. For most of them our life has become their life, and they are as loyal to us as any Spacer man.”
“But where do the mutants come from?”
“From your own imagination, nowhere else. There aren’t any mutants. Not one. Nowhere. No army of monsters in space getting ready to invade Earth.”
Tom Barron was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “But our scientists… they actually saw mutant children of men who had been in space.”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think they did, not really. In the days after the Great War everyone on Earth was bitter, and thousands of lies were told, even by scientists. There must have been some Earthmen who believed that what the Spacers had done was good, and wanted to let them come home.
They had to be convinced that exile was the only fate the conspirators deserved. And if people listen to a lie long enough, they come to believe it. Even intelligent, well-trained scientists can have blind spots, as far as the truth is concerned.”
Joyce Barron stood up and made some coffee in the galley. The three sat drinking it in silence.
Presently the girl said, “If what you are saying is true, you had to kidnap women from Earth. It wasn’t a matter of choice, but sheer necessity.”
“That’s right,” Ben Trefon said. “We have always held to a rigid quota—only enough women to marry Spacer men as they reached maturity.”
“And there never has been an invasion of Earth planned? There’s nothing for Earth people to be afraid of?”
“There never has been. There isn’t.”
“But that would mean that this war, right now, is pointless,” Joyce said.
“Pointless and foolish. Based on false premises, on nothing more than ignorance and superstition,” Ben said.
“I wish we could believe you,” Tom said. “If this is true, it would mean that Joyce has nothing worse to fear than becoming a Spacer’s wife.”
“That’s right,” Ben replied. “But it means something else, something that you haven’t thought of. You couldn’t have thought of it when you boarded the ship, and by now the damage is done.” Tom looked startled. “Damage?”
“If you want to call it that. At least, you’ve crossed a line since you came aboard. We’ve been in space a little too long for you to turn back. Whether you like it or not, you’re a Spacer now, just like me.”
It was not yet dawn when Ben Trefon lifted the little S-80 up into the Martian sky and turned its nose southeast into the sunrise. Below them the desert surface soon became distinct, and Ben began moving the ship close to the surface in a wide zig-zagging path, searching mile upon mile of the surface as it became visible.
“If we move East, we can take advantage of the most sunlight,” he said to Tom, who was watching the view screen with him while Joyce prepared the morning meal. “By the time we reach the nightline again, we will have covered all the inhabited part of the planet. There are no houses in the polar regions, and I know the locations of most of the spacer houses and plantations in the temperate and equatorial zones. This way we can find out very quickly what, if anything, is left.” There had been little sleep for any of them that night. For hours through the Martian night they had talked, without embarrassment, without holding back anything. Ben had told them of the Spacers’ life, of the great Spacer stronghold at Asteroid Central where the major schools, drydocks, laboratories and factories were to be found, of the nomadic life the Spacers led, of their homes scattered across the solar system, and of the things that they had hoped and dreamed of. And Joyce and Tom had told Ben of their life on Earth’s crowded surface, as citizens born and raised on the mother planet.
There had been much to talk about, and it had been a strange conversation, sometimes hot with anger, sometimes confusing, sometimes dazzlingly revealing as they searched for some sort of common ground for understanding. First they needed to find things that they could agree upon. Then they searched out their differing beliefs about each other, the false-hoods and superstitions that had made up the greatest bulk of the things that they “knew” about each other.
It was a frightening and eye-opening conversation for all concerned. Many of the things that were “common knowledge” on Earth about Spacers and their life made Ben’s skin crawl, yet he found that there were many things that Spacers “knew” about Earthmen that seemed to fill the Barrons with horror and amazement as well. Ben discovered that his own mental picture of Earth as a vast military garrison-state, with its powerful government police, its injustice, its cruelty and its dictatorial tyranny simply did not jibe with the picture Tom and Joyce drew of their world: a gathering of free nations united in terror and desperation against a frightful threat from the skies, yet a world in which the rights of individuals were jealously guarded, a world in which the everyday life of most of the people was happy, with the same breadth of human emotions and the same concern for human dignity that had always marked the Spacer culture.
As they talked there were many things they flatly did not believe of each other, or would not agree upon. But more and more Ben Trefon had the strange feeling that Tom and Joyce were not lying to him, but actually telling him what they believed. At the same time, he sensed that his own forthright statement of the truth as he knew it was making a deep impression on the two Earth people. It was obviously hard for them to set aside, even momentarily, the beliefs they had held all their lives. Yet Ben was certain that they were puzzled by what he was saying, groping to believe him, trying somehow to fit his viewpoint into their own thoughts and make sense of it.
Above all, the long night’s talking revealed a subtle change of attitude on the part of all of them. Much of their earlier hostility was gone, and they no longer listened to each other with flat distrust or disbelief.