'Drive them out,' Cordovir shouted. 'Before they corrupt us!' All the females rushed off to kill the monsters.
112 'They have death-sticks,' Hum observed. 'Do the females know ?' 'I don't believe so,' Cordovir said. He was completely calm now. 'You'd better go and tell them.' 'I'm tired,' Hum said sulkily. 'I've been translating. Why don't you go ?' 'Oh, let's both go,' Cordovir said, bored with the youngster's adolescent moodiness. Accompanied by half the villagers they hurried off after the females. They overtook them on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the object. Hum explained the death-sticks while Cordovir considered the problem.
'Roll stones on them!' he told the females. 'Perhaps you can break the metal of the object.' The females started rolling stones down the cliffs with great energy. Some bounced off the metal of the object. Immediately, lines of red fire came from the object and females were killed. The ground shook.
'Let's move back!' Cordovir said. 'The females have it well in hand, an4 this shaky ground makes me giddy.' Together with the rest of the males they moved to a safe distance and watched the action. Women were dying right and left, but they were reinforced by women of other villages who had heard of the menace. They were fighting for their homes now, their rights, and they were fiercer than a man could ever be. The object was throwing fire all over the cliff, but the fire helped dislodge more stones which rained down on the thing. Finally, big fires came out of one end of the metal object.
A landslide started, and the object got into the air just in time. It barely missed a mountain; then it climbed steadily, until it was a little black speck against the larger sun. And then it was gone.
That evening, it was discovered that fifty-three females had been killed. This was fortunate since it helped keep down the surplus female population. The problem would become even more acute now, since seventeen males were gone in a single lump. 113 Cordovir was feeling exceedingly proud of himself. His wife had been gloriously killed in the fighting, but he took another at once.
'We had better kill our wives sooner than every twenty-five days for a while,' he said at the evening Gathering. 'Just until things get back to normal.' The surviving females, back in the pen, heard him and applauded wildly.
'I wonder where the things have gone,' Hum said, offering the question to the Gathering.
'Probably away to enslave some defenceless race,' Cordovir said.
'Not necessarily,' Mishill put in and the evening argument was on. 114 Every science fiction enthusiast remembers the thrill of his first exposure to the concept of space travel — the glory of man's voyaging between the planets and even between the stars. But modern adult science fiction has largely grown away from the mechanics of space travel itself; the voyage is taken for granted as part of the background, and the story isfocussed on the results. Here, however, one of the brighter new authors in the field shows that the story of the space ship is not exhausted; inevitably in that remote interstellar future, there will be the Mapping Command, whose duties are never finished and whose voyages of discovery may be as exciting as that of Magellan - and as perilous.