Tonight Ry, the leader (as nearly as the Martian word can be translated), and Khee, his administrative assistant and closest friend, sat and meditated together until the time was near. Then they drank a toast to the future -- in a beverage based on menthol, which had the same effect on Martians as alcohol on Earthmen - and climbed to the roof of the building in which they had been sitting. They watched towards the north, where the rocket should land. The stars shone brilliantly and unwinkingly through the atmosphere.
In Observatory No. I on Earth’s moon, Rog Everett, his eye at the eyepiece of the spotter scope, said triumphantly, "Thar she blew, Willie. And now, as soon as the films are developed, we’ll know the score on that old planet Mars.” He straightened up - there’d be no more to see now - and he and Willie Sanger shook hands solemnly. It was an historical occasion.
“Hope it didn’t kill anybody. Any Martians, that is. Rog, did it hit dead centre in Syrtis Major?”
“Near as matters. I’d say it was maybe a thousand miles off, to the south. And that’s damn close on a fifty-million-mile shot. Willie, do you really think there are any Martians?”
Willie thought a second and then said, “No.”
He was right.
Jaycee
“WALTER, what's a Jaycee?" Mrs. Ralston asked her husband, Dr. Ralston, across the breakfast table.
“Why—I believe it used to be a member of what they called a Junior Chamber of Commerce. I don't know if they still have them or not. Why?"
"Martha said Henry was muttering something yesterday about Jaycees, fifty million Jaycees. And swore at her when she asked what he meant." Martha was Mrs. Graham and Henry her husband, Dr. Graham. They lived next door and the two doctors and their wives were close friends.
"Fifty million," said Dr. Ralston musingly. "That's how many parthies there are."
He should have known; he and Dr. Graham together were responsible for parthies—parthenogenetic births. Twenty years ago, in 1980, they had together engineered the first experiment in human parthenogenesis, the fertilization of a female cell without the help of a male one. The offspring of that experiment, named John, was now twenty years old and lived with Dr. and Mrs. Graham next door; he had been adopted by them after the death of his mother in an accident some years before.
No other parthie was more than half John's age. Not until John was ten, and obviously healthy and normal, had the authorities let down bars and permitted any woman who wanted a child and who was either single or married to a sterile husband to have a child parthenogenetically. Due to the shortage of men —the disastrous testerosis epidemic of the 1970s had just killed off almost a third of the male population of the world—over fifty million women had applied for parthenogenetic children and borne them. Luckily for redressing the balance of the sexes, it had turned out that all parthenogenetically conceived children were males.
"Martha thinks," said Mrs. Ralston, "that Henry's worrying about John, but she can't think why. He's such a good boy."
Dr. Graham suddenly and without knocking burst into the room. His face was white and his eyes wide as he stared at his colleague. "I was right," he said.
"Right about what?"
"About John. I didn't tell anyone, but do you know what he did when we ran out of drinks at the party last night?"
Dr. Ralston frowned. "Changed water into wine?"
"Into gin; we were having martinis. And just now he left to go water skiing—and he isn't taking any water skis. Told me that with faith he wouldn't need them."
"Oh, no," said Dr. Ralston. He dropped his head into his hands.
Once before in history there'd been a virgin birth. Now fifty million virgin-born boys were growing up. In ten more years there'd be fifty million—Jaycees.
"No," sobbed Dr. Ralston, "no!"
Pi in the Sky
ROGER JEROME PHLUTTER, for whose absurd surname I offer no defense other than it is genuine, was, at the time of the events of this story, a hard-working clerk in the office of the Cole Observatory.
He was a young man of no particular brilliance, although he performed his daily tasks assiduously and efficiently, studied the calculus at home for one hour every evening, and hoped some day to become a chief astronomer of some important observatory.
Nevertheless, our narration of the events of late March in the year 1999 must begin with Roger Phlutter for the good and sufficient reason that he, of all men on earth, was the first observer of the stellar aberration.
Meet Roger Phlutter.
Tall, rather pale from spending too much time indoors, thickish, shell-rimmed glasses, dark hair close-cropped in the style of the nineteen nineties, dressed neither particularly well nor badly, smokes cigarettes rather excessively... .
At a quarter to five that afternoon, Roger was engaged in two simultaneous operations. One was examining, in a blink-microscope, a photographic plate taken late the previous night of a section in Gemini. The other was considering whether or not, on the three dollars remaining of his pay from last week, he dared phone Elsie and ask her to go somewhere with him.
Every normal young man has undoubtedly, at some time or other, shared with Roger Phlutter his second occupation, but not everyone has operated or understands the operation of a blink-microscope. So let us raise our eyes from Elsie to Gemini.
A blink-mike provides accommodation for two photographic plates taken of the same section of sky hut at different times. These plates are carefully juxtaposed and the operator may alternately focus his vision, through the eyepiece, first upon one and then upon the other, by means of a shutter. If the plates arc identical, the operation of the shutter reveals nothing, but if one of the dots on the second plate differs from the position it occupied on the first, it will call attention to itself by seeming to jump back and forth as the shutter is manipulated.
Roger manipulated the shutter, and one of the dots jumped. So did Roger. He tried it again, forgetting—as we have—all about Elsie for the moment, and the dot jumped again. It jumped almost a tenth of a second. Roger straightened up and scratched his head. He lighted a cigarette, put it down on the ash tray, and looked into the blink-mike again. The dot jumped again when he used the shutter.
Harry Wesson, who worked the evening shift, had just come into the office and was hanging up his topcoat. "Hey, Harry!" Roger said. "There's something wro ng with this blinking blinker."
"Yeah?" said I Harry.
"Yeah. Pollux moved a tenth of a second."
"Yeah?" said harry. "Well, that's about right for parallax. Thirty-two light years—parallax of Pollux is point one o one. Little over a tenth of a second, so if your comparison plate was taken about six months ago, when the earth was on the other side of her orbit, that's about right."
"But, Harry, the comparison plate was taken night before last. They're twenty-four hours apart."
"You're crazy."