Fredric Brown - The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

“Swell,” I said. “I did what?”

“Gave me the answer what to use for reinforcing foundations. You solved the problem.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah. Didn’t he, Mike?”

Michaelina looked as puzzled as I must have. She said, “He was kidding. He said to use the stuff in the empty crates, didn’t he?”

Reagan grinned again. “He just thought be was kidding. That’s what we’re going to use from now on. Nothing. Look, Chief, it’s like the conditioner—so simple we never thought of it. Until you told me to use what was in the empty crates, and I got to thinking it over.”

I stood thinking a moment myself, and then I did what Reagan had done the day before—hit myself a whack on the forehead with the heel of my palm.

Michaelina still looked puzzled.

“Hollow foundations,” I told her. “What’s the one thing widgie birds won’t fly through? Air. We can make buildings as big as we need them, now. For foundations, we sink double walls with a wide air space between. We can—”

I stopped, because it wasn’t “we” anymore. They could do it after I was back on Earth looking for a job.

And Thursday went and Friday came.

I was working, up till the last minute, because it was the easiest thing to do. With Reagan and Michaelina helping me, I was making out material lists for our new construction projects. First, a three-story building of about forty rooms for a headquarters building.

We were working fast, because it would be midperiod shortly, and you can’t do paperwork when you can’t read and can write only by feel.

But my mind was on the Ark . I picked up the phone and called the radiotype shack to ask about it.

“Just got a call from them,” said the operator. “They’re warped in, but not close enough to land before midperiod. They’ll land right after.”

“O.K.,” I said, abandoning the hope that they’d be a day late.

I got up and walked to the window. We were nearing mid-position, all right. Up in the sky to the north I could see Placet coming toward us.

“Mike,” I said. “Come here.”

She joined me at the window and we stood there, watching. My arm was around her. I don’t remember putting it there, but I didn’t take it away, and she didn’t move.

Behind us, Reagan cleared his throat, He said, “I’ll give this much of the list to the operator. He can get it on the ether right after midperiod.” He went out and shut the door behind him.

Michaelina seemed to move a little closer. We were both looking out the window at Placet rushing toward us. She said, “Beautiful, isn’t it, Phil?”

“Yes,” I said. But I turned, and I was looking at her face as I said it. Then—I hadn’t meant to—I kissed her.

I went back, and sat down at my desk, She said, “Phil, what’s the matter? You haven’t got a wife and six kids hidden away somewhere, or something, have you? You were single when I had a crush on you at Earth Polytech—and I waited five years to get over it and didn’t, and finally wangled a job on Placet just to—Do I have to do the proposing?”

I groaned. I didn’t look at her. I said, “Mike, I’m nuts about you. But—just before you came, I sent a two-word radiotype to Earth. It said, ‘I quit.’ So I’ve got to leave Placet on this shuttle of the Ark , and I doubt if I can even get a teaching job, now that I’ve got Earth Center down on me, and—”

She said, “But, Phil!” and took a step toward me.

There was a knock on the door, Reagan’s knock. I was glad, for once, of the interruption. I called out for him to come in, and he opened the door.

He said, “You told Mike yet, Chief?”

I nodded, glumly.

Reagan grinned. “Good,” he said; “I’ve been busting to tell her. It’ll be swell to see Ike again.”

“Huh?” I said. “Ike who?”

Reagan’s grin faded. He said, “Phil, are you slipping, or something? Don’t you remember giving me the answer to that Earth Center radiotype four days ago, just before Mike got here?”

I stared at him with my mouth open. I hadn’t even read that radiotype, let alone answered it. Had Reagan gone psychopathic, or had I? I remembered shoving it in the drawer of my desk. I jerked open the drawer and pulled it out. My hand shook a little as I read it: REQUEST FOR ADDITIONAL ASSISTANT GRANTED. WHOM DO YOU WANT FOR THE JOB?

I looked up at Reagan again. I said, “You’re trying to tell me I sent an answer to this?”

He looked as dumbfounded as I felt.

“You told me to,” he said.

“What did I tell you to send?”

“Ike Witt.” He stared at me. “Chief, are you feeling all right?”

I felt so all right something seemed to explode in my head. I stood up and started for Michaelina. I said, “Mike, will you marry me?” I got my arms around her, just in time, before midperiod closed down on us, so I couldn’t see what she looked like, and vice versa. But over her shoulder, I could see what must be Reagan. I said, “Get out of here, you ape,” and I spoke quite literally because that’s exactly what he appeared to be. A bright yellow ape.

The floor was shaking under my feet, but other things were happening to me, too, and I didn’t realize what the shaking meant until the ape turned back and yelled, “A flight of birds going under us, Chief! Get out quick, before—”

But that was as far as he got before the house fell down around us and the tin roof hit my head and knocked me out. Placet is a crazy place. I like it.

On September 16th in the year 1962, things were going along about the same as usual, only a little worse. The cold war that had been waxing and waning between the United States and the Eastern Alliance—Russia, China, and their lesser satellites—was warmer than it had ever been. War, hot war, seemed not only inevitable but extremely imminent.

The race for the Moon was an immediate cause. Each nation had landed a few men on it and each claimed it. Each had found that rockets sent from Earth were inadequate to permit establishment of a permanent base upon the Moon, and that only establishment of a permanent base, in force, would determine possession. And so each nation (for convenience we’ll call the Eastern Alliance a nation, although it was not exactly that) was engaged in rushing construction of a space station to be placed in an orbit around Earth.

With such an intermediate step in space, reaching the Moon with large rockets would be practicable and construction of armed bases, heavily garrisoned, would be comparatively simple. Whoever got there first could not only claim possession, but could implement the claim. Military secrecy on both sides kept from the public just how near to completion each space base was, but it was generally—and correctly—believed that the issue would be determined within a year, two years at the outside.

Neither nation could afford to let the other control the Moon. That much had become obvious even to those who were trying desperately to maintain peace.

On September 17th, 1962, a statistician in the birth record department of New York City (his name was Wilbur Evans, but that doesn’t matter) noticed that out of 813 births reported the previous day, 657 had been girls and only 156 boys.

He knew that, statistically, this was practically impossible. In a small city where there are only, say, ten births a day, it is quite possible—and not at all alarming—that on any one given day, 90% or even 100%, of the births may be of the same sex. But out of so large a figure as 813, so high a ratio as 657 to 156 is alarming.

Wilbur Evans went to his department chief and he, too, was interested and alarmed. Checks were made by telephone—first with nearby cities and, as the evidence mounted, with more and more distant ones.