Damon Knight: Orbit 18

In the barn is a rich earth shit smell. In the roost the birds flutter and cluck at the flashlight. Max says, “We have a dozen birds but we’re only getting about eight eggs a day. So we must have a couple hens not doing their jobs.” He lifts a brown one which squawks indignantly. Barb takes the light. The hen’s eyes gleam yellow and she squirms. “Down,” says Max. “Keep it out of her eyes, Barb.”

He carries the bird into the adjoining toolshed, away from the others, and snaps on the light. He says to Andrews, “Now the first thing you do is check the claws. If the hen’s not laying, the yellow pigment that should go into the yolk gets into the beak and claws and around the vent.” He turns the hen over and she squawks. “Pretty good. Now you check the vent—” He pushes the tail feathers aside and a pink puckered hole appears. “It should be moist and bleached—no yellow—and this one looks pretty good.” Abruptly Max lays his fingers beside the vent. “Check the pelvic bone for clearance, make sure the eggs have room to get out—” He flips the hen back right-side. “Yeah, she looks like a layer. Give her a white tag, Barb.” The girl has a handful of colored plastic rings—she snaps a white one around the bird’s gnarled leg. Max takes the hen back in, emerges with another. “When they stop laying,” he says, “they start looking a lot better. The muscles firm up and the feathers get slicker. So I get very suspicious when I see a healthy-looking bird like this one.” He flips her over. The hen thrashes wildly, flaps the air with frantic wings. “Oh, baby,” says Max, “you’re much too active. You’re looking too good to be spending much time in the laying box.” He holds her firmly. “Hm. Vent looks okay, though. Two fingers here . . . Give her a yellow, Barb.”

After eleven hens there is only one definite cull, one red tag already in a separate cage. Max brings in the last bird. “This is a sex-linked. I would be very surprised if she wasn’t laying. Still, you can never tell. The only way you find out for sure is to kill ’em and check the egg tree. I killed a cull once that had an egg all ready to drop out. Ate the chicken, fried the egg. But we lost a layer. Another thing, they moult in July and they don’t lay while they’re moulting. Every poultry book I’ve ever read says, come July, you can forget about eggs.”

As soon as Max starts poking in the feathers the bird explodes in frenzy. The claws kick, the wings flail, feathers fly. Max puts a hand on the bird’s neck. If you choke ’em a little, it calms ’em.” The hen does not calm though and Max shifts her further upside down, A claw catches at his shirt. “Ow! Shit!” He drops the hen and Barb grabs her. “You hurt?” “No. Just a scratch.” She holds the bird while Max probes. He spreads the feathers to show Edwards the dry tight yellow vent. “Ahh.” Max lifts her, calm now, and drops her in the cage with the other cull. She flutters once and is still.

He smiles at Edwards. “Dinner.”

“We’ve got two for tomorrow,” Max shouts, coming in. “One of the sex-links was a cull.” They enter the living room. The group here seems smaller. Byrne says, “You like our chickens, Colonel?”

Edwards, still high, tries not to laugh. “Fine birds. Very interesting.”

“Sit down. Let’s talk. I’ve been interested in you a long time, Colonel.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I saw you on television a few days ago.”

“Oh.” Edwards shrivels. He remembers Charlotte’s estimation of his performance, which must certainly have come from Byrne.

“Interesting. Unexpected. You find your hero’s role unsatisfying?”

“Uh . . .”

“I ask out of professional interest. As a writer, I’ve been analyzing the roles of the hero in our culture and our literature.” Byrne rolls a cigarette, tobacco. Edwards is still stoned, time is still doing strange things. “It seems to me, Colonel, that outside of sports, the space program is our only source of heroes these days. Politicians are certainly on the outs; since Vietnam we’ve forsaken our military heroes; so what’s left us but our astronauts, our explorers?”

“What indeed?”

“And yet it’s a strange heroism, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“How do you find it strange?”

“Being inside it.”

Byrne looks at Edwards with sudden intensity, as if to exclude the rest of the group. “I don’t think it’s heroism at all, really. Not in the traditional sense of the word. People talk about exploring frontiers, but we know that’s nonsense. You have your flight plan, your agenda; to call that heroic is ... well, picture Ulysses following a triple-A roadmap. That takes no bravery, no excellence, none of the heroic qualities.

“Now I’m not being derogatory, Colonel. What I see here is an evolution of our heroic archetypes. Heroes arise from drama of course, and the major dramatic periods in history were during Greek and Reformation times. It’s interesting then to consider the difference between the Greek and Christian traditions: the Greeks admired men of action, of heroic deeds. Christianity respects the martyrs, the sufferers. We see a move from the active to the passive, from masculine to feminine.”

“Watch it, Eric,” said Barb. “Male chauvinism.”

Byrne looks at her, vaguely annoyed. “Well, no. You must realize that the feminine is separable from the female. What’s called male chauvinism is the equating of the two, the stereotyping of woman into feminine roles; and the implied value judgment. I may speak, for instance, of Barbara having a certain masculinity, or of Robert being somewhat feminine, without offense. We understand that there are certain classical definitions of masculine and feminine, unconnected with sex.

“Now the Christian iconography”—back to Edwards now, he feels the terminology is intended to intimidate him—“is primarily feminine, in its use of the Virgin, and the apotheosis of the passive—in fact the whole notion of Immaculate Conception rather avoids the issue of male versus female—whereas the more primitive religions were more assertive, dramatic, masculine. The earliest gods were fertility gods. The Greek heroes were men of action. Christians are martyrs. There’s the move from sex to sexlessness, masculinity to femininity.

“Colonel Edwards, our latest hero, shows that the trend has even reached American culture. America has traditionally been masculine. Frontiers, and all that. It’s interesting that the Moon is the first frontier America has drawn back from. And Colonel Edwards, as a hero, I think we must admit, is a bit of a woman.”

Edwards stands. The room wavers before him. “Fuck you, Byrne,” he enunciates.

“I, ah, meant no personal offense, Colonel. As I said . . .”

“Like hell you didn’t. You thought you could toss some big words around and dazzle the poor dumb Air Force jock. Well, the colonel, Mr. Byrne, is not so dumb. The colonel has a doctorate, among other things, and throwing convoluted insults in the third person at him does not fool him.”

“I assure you, I was not trying . . .”

“Shove it! Listen, Byrne, you go through ten years of training, of being whipped and spun and starved into shape, you go out and study tensor calculus until you know how and why every control in a rocket works, and you go through the agonies of waiting to be chosen for a mission and maybe later rejected and having two of your best friends die while they’re training— you go through all of that yourself and then maybe I’ll let you sit there and tell me I’m a bit of a woman, but from where you sit now you’re more of a woman to me than your goddamned hens out there!”