The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

by Lisa Yaszek

  Michael’s head shot up suddenly. “Stop laughing! Stop it!” He covered his face with his hands and Lida felt sick; he was crying.

  She paused, her eyes filled with bitterness and contempt. Then she smiled wearily, feeling strangely akin to the vacuum outside them. There was only a sudden decision and she made it. This was her exit and to hell with heroes!

  She bowed to them scornfully, waving aside their fears with a flippant sweep of her hand. Only one regret remained now. They could have chosen fairly, made a pretense of flipping a coin. She looked cocky and defiant now, gathering tools for her job. A grin twisted her mouth into a quivering scarlet line. Would she make a television headline? Would they name a ramp after her, or, perhaps, some day, a rocket division? There were several photos of her in newspaper files; she hoped they would pick a good one when they ran the story. Oh, hers would be a heroic end.

  She put aside the word “end” mentally and turned her attention to what had to be done. Her decision made, she would have to act swiftly or the sacrifice would be useless. The cabin’s interior was becoming unreal and horrible with apathy. She ignored the others; they were like figures in a nightmare.

  The outer door had been destroyed, no doubt about that. Erik was almost blown from the cabin when he opened the inner door. She would need magnetic clamps from the outset; the neutralizing effect of the airlock between the two doors was gone; that spelled doom for the one who ventured beyond the cabin. Once out, there was no returning. The force of escaping air would not permit it.

  On the black, glistening floor of the cabin lay Erik’s glittering, iridium-woven spacesuit. He had ventured that much at least, pulled it from a locker and tossed it to the floor. Fortunately the gyroscopes were working. She stepped into the suit, smiling grimly. It was much too long and wide all over. Her fingers were swift and sure, adjusting the steel clamps.

  Michael was still in a semi-coma. Erik was watching her reflection. He knew what she was doing. His shoulders were rigid now, but he made no move to stop her. And now memory played the final ironic trick. She recalled Michael saying, with his arm around her shoulders, “When we get to Mars, you’ll be the glamor girl of the planet. It’ll be wonderful, Lida—just the two of us.” His eyes had hinted at things he did not put into words and even though she knew that nothing of the kind would happen so long as there were three of them, she had been glad for him then.

  She jerked up the front zipper, trying to close her memories with the same motion. There weren’t many seconds to spare now. She fastened the tools to her belt, checked them and with them her signal sending button with the receiving set on the instrument board. Then, with shaking hands she could not help, she picked up the helmet.

  Michael looked up suddenly, incredulity filling his eyes. Erik wheeled around from the teleplate.

  “Lida!” he said, his voice hoarse.

  Gone was the bitterness and contempt now. “So long, Erik,” she replied softly. “I’ll do the best I can. Watch for the signal on the control board. I’ll send it through when the rocket nozzles are clear—that is, if I’m not blown from the ship.”

  He swayed for an instant, lurched over to where she stood. “I can’t let you do it. Give me the suit, Lida. I’ll go.” She looked at him, cynical and proud, her eyes glittering like steel and her small chin thrust forward determinedly. These words he had said—what were they but words he flung from him, reaching out to pull together the tatters of his self-respect? She pitied him.

  “There’s no time for that now,” she replied crisply. “Good luck.”

  On a sudden impulse she darted over to Michael and struck him sharply across the face. He looked up suddenly, his eyes widening in amazement. “Aren’t you going to say—goodbye?”

  “Lida,” he muttered, “don’t go. Don’t leave us now; it won’t do any good, Lida. Take off the suit and we’ll all go together.”

  She shook her head defiantly. “No! There’s still time. Goodbye, Michael.” She fastened on the helmet, her hands cold. Steeling herself against the sudden chill of terror that was seeping through her, she forced herself to the inner door. She pressed the electric release, her hands, heavily swathed, clinging to the steel ring. The panel slid open slowly; a buzzing sound would be filling the cabin now, but she could not hear it. She could feel their eyes on her. With a magnetic clamp in readiness, she waited for the moment when the aperture would be wide enough. Then suddenly, pressing the button in reverse, she plunged through and was hurtled against the wall of the air lock. The magnetic clamp held!

  Breathing a deep sigh of relief, Lida glanced around her. The inner door was shut already; this, then, was her final goodbye. There could be no returning to the cabin. She was conscious of a dull, throbbing pain in her arm. It was numb from the impact. Frantically, trying to save time, she worked it up and down until gradually life returned to it. Then she made her way to the ragged-edged gash in the hull. Nothing remained of the outer door. Clinging to a large metal splinter, she made a hurried survey.

  The path of the meteor and the damage it had done was clearly visible. It had ploughed a deep welt-like furrow in the side of the ship and piled melted metal and large chunks from the side over the nozzle ends. There were probably meteor fragments as well. But her job would be easy even so. Judicious blasting with the torch would take care of everything. Placing a heavily padded foot in the still glowing furrow, she detached a magnetic clamp from her belt.

  Space lay around her and, as she worked, she felt a nameless dread seep into her being. The face of the planet was directly above. Desperately, she tried not to look at it. Despite her efforts, she could not help but glance upward at its looming immensity, cringing as she did so. It was so horribly large—falling on her. It seemed to be drawing her up, the way an electromagnet catches a piece of scrap-iron. And around her was space, space filled with pinpoints, billiard balls, and footballs of light. She knew she must not stop to look at them. They would charm away her senses and burn out her eyes. She knew this without ever having been told. There was a horror in space, not anything alive, but a dread that chilled and stole away one’s life.

  Slowly, carefully, she made her way up the side of the ship, using her torch, when necessary, to clear obstructions. Finally she reached the nose, rested against the boldly painted nameplate Ares. A sense of the horrible irony of the situation struck her. If they had immediately fired the forward rockets when the meteor struck, the tremendous blast furnace would have melted the obstruction, for, she saw now, it was very slight. Given a chance to harden, however, it was a different story; to blast now, with it there, would blow out the tubes.

  She understood, now, why men who had faced all manner of Terrestrial dangers had become weak and helpless here. They had been fools, all of them, to come on this flight without conditioning—space was no place for humans unless they had been conditioned to it gradually. And they had thought themselves so clever in the way they had evaded the requirements for a license.

  She pressed the signal button at her waist as the last trace of the obstruction was eaten away. An instant later, there was an answering flash in the small metal tube next to it; they had been watching the control button. A single tear ran down her nose as she thought: “I hope they go to hell, damn them.”

  Pulling her hand from the magnetic clamp, she straightened up stiffly, and, with a hard, quick push jumped clear of the ship. It swerved suddenly and with dizzying violence knocked her clear of their rockets. She had not considered the imminence of them before. The thought of being charred. . . .

  Earth loomed above her. She had not the acceleration of the ship. Soon it would leave her behind. She would float out here in an orbit of her own, a second moon. Perhaps a meteor would strike her some day; perhaps in the future space-voyagers would find her and bring her home. Soon, within an hour at the most, there would be no more air. But why wait hours? With a sudden movement, she threw open the helmet of
her suit.

  The ship was gone now. Michael and Erik were safe. And something tenuous had clamped itself over her nose and mouth so that she could no longer breathe. For an instant she struggled, lungs bursting, as in the throes of a nightmare. Her thoughts cried out, “Michael! Michael!”

  The darkness gathered her in.

  1941

  JUDITH MERRIL

  That Only a Mother

  MARGARET reached over to the other side of the bed where Hank should have been. Her hand patted the empty pillow, and then she came altogether awake, wondering that the old habit should remain after so many months. She tried to curl up, cat-style, to hoard her own warmth, found she couldn’t do it any more, and climbed out of bed with a pleased awareness of her increasingly clumsy bulkiness.

  Morning motions were automatic. On the way through the kitchenette, she pressed the button that would start breakfast cooking—the doctor had said to eat as much breakfast as she could—and tore the paper out of the facsimile machine. She folded the long sheet carefully to the “National News” section, and propped it on the bathroom shelf to scan while she brushed her teeth.

  No accidents. No direct hits. At least none that had been officially released for publication. Now, Maggie, don’t get started on that. No accidents. No hits. Take the nice newspaper’s word for it.

  The three clear chimes from the kitchen announced that breakfast was ready. She set a bright napkin and cheerful colored dishes on the table in a futile attempt to appeal to a faulty morning appetite. Then, when there was nothing more to prepare, she went for the mail, allowing herself the full pleasure of prolonged anticipation, because today there would surely be a letter.

  There was. There were. Two bills and a worried note from her mother: “Darling, why didn’t you write and tell me sooner? I’m thrilled, of course, but, well one hates to mention these things, but are you certain the doctor was right? Hank’s been around all that uranium or thorium or whatever it is all these years, and I know you say he’s a designer, not a technician, and he doesn’t get near anything that might be dangerous, but you know he used to, back at Oak Ridge. Don’t you think . . . well, of course, I’m just being a foolish old woman, and I don’t want you to get upset. You know much more about it than I do, and I’m sure your doctor was right. He should know . . .”

  Margaret made a face over the excellent coffee, and caught herself refolding the paper to the medical news.

  Stop it, Maggie, stop it! The radiologist said Hank’s job couldn’t have exposed him. And the bombed area we drove past . . . No, no. Stop it, now! Read the social notes or the recipes, Maggie girl.

  A well-known geneticist, in the medical news, said that it was possible to tell with absolute certainty, at five months, whether the child would be normal, or at least whether the mutation was likely to produce anything freakish. The worst cases, at any rate, could be prevented. Minor mutations, of course, displacements in facial features, or changes in brain structure could not be detected. And there had been some cases recently, of normal embryos with atrophied limbs that did not develop beyond the seventh or eighth month. But, the doctor concluded cheerfully, the worst cases could now be predicted and prevented.

  “Predicted and prevented.” We predicted it, didn’t we? Hank and the others, they predicted it. But we didn’t prevent it. We could have stopped it in ’46 and ’47. Now . . .

  Margaret decided against the breakfast. Coffee had been enough for her in the morning for ten years; it would have to do for today. She buttoned herself into the interminable folds of material that, the salesgirl had assured her, was the only comfortable thing to wear during the last few months. With a surge of pure pleasure, the letter and newspaper forgotten, she realized she was on the next to the last button. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The city in the early morning had always been a special kind of excitement for her. Last night it had rained, and the sidewalks were still damp-gray instead of dusty. The air smelled the fresher, to a city-bred woman, for the occasional pungency of acrid factory smoke. She walked the six blocks to work, watching the lights go out in the all-night hamburger joints, where the plate-glass walls were already catching the sun, and the lights go on in the dim interiors of cigar stores and dry-cleaning establishments.

  The office was in a new Government building. In the rolovator, on the way up, she felt, as always, like a frankfurter roll in the ascending half of an old-style rotary toasting machine. She abandoned the air-foam cushioning gratefully at the fourteenth floor, and settled down behind her desk, at the rear of a long row of identical desks.

  Each morning the pile of papers that greeted her was a little higher. These were, as everyone knew, the decisive months. The war might be won or lost on these calculations as well as any others. The manpower office had switched her here when her old expediter’s job got to be too strenuous. The computer was easy to operate, and the work was absorbing, if not as exciting as the old job. But you didn’t just stop working these days. Everyone who could do anything at all was needed.

  And—she remembered the interview with the psychologist—I’m probably the unstable type. Wonder what sort of neurosis I’d get sitting home reading that sensational paper . . .

  She plunged into the work without pursuing the thought.

  February 18.

  Hank darling,

  Just a note—from the hospital, no less. I had a dizzy spell at work, and the doctor took it to heart. Blessed if I know what I’ll do with myself lying in bed for weeks, just waiting—but Dr. Boyer seems to think it may not be so long.

  There are too many newspapers around here. More infanticides all the time, and they can’t seem to get a jury to convict any of them. It’s the fathers who do it. Lucky thing you’re not around, in case—

  Oh, darling, that wasn’t a very funny joke, was it? Write as often as you can, will you? I have too much time to think. But there really isn’t anything wrong, and nothing to worry about.

  Write often, and remember I love you.

  Maggie.

  SPECIAL SERVICE TELEGRAM

  February 21, 1953

  22:04 LK37G

  From: Tech. Lieut. H. Marvell

  X47-016 GCNY

  To: Mrs. H. Marvell

    Women’s Hospital

    New York City

  HAD DOCTOR’S GRAM STOP WILL ARRIVE FOUR OH TEN STOP SHORT LEAVE STOP YOU DID IT MAGGIE STOP LOVE HANK

  February 25.

  Hank dear,

  So you didn’t see the baby either? You’d think a place this size would at least have visiplates on the incubators, so the fathers could get a look, even if the poor benighted mommas can’t. They tell me I won’t see her for another week, or maybe more—but of course, mother always warned me if I didn’t slow my pace, I’d probably even have my babies too fast. Why must she always be right?

  Did you meet that battle-ax of a nurse they put on here? I imagine they save her for people who’ve already had theirs, and don’t let her get too near the prospectives—but a woman like that simply shouldn’t be allowed in a maternity ward. She’s obsessed with mutations, can’t seem to talk about anything else. Oh, well, ours is all right, even if it was in an unholy hurry.

  I’m tired. They warned me not to sit up so soon, but I had to write you. All my love, darling,

  Maggie.

  February 29.

  Darling,

  I finally got to see her! It’s all true, what they say about new babies and the face that only a mother could love—but it’s all there, darling, eyes, ears, and noses—no, only one!—all in the right places. We’re so lucky, Hank.

  I’m afraid I’ve been a rambunctious patient. I kept telling that hatchet-faced female with the mutation mania that I wanted to see the baby. Finally the doctor came in to “explain” everything to me, and talked a lot of nonsense, most of which I’m sure no one coul
d have understood, any more than I did. The only thing I got out of it was that she didn’t actually have to stay in the incubator; they just thought it was “wiser.”

  I think I got a little hysterical at that point. Guess I was more worried than I was willing to admit, but I threw a small fit about it. The whole business wound up with one of those hushed medical conferences outside the door, and finally the Woman in White said: “Well, we might as well. Maybe it’ll work out better that way.”

  I’d heard about the way doctors and nurses in these places develop a God complex, and believe me it is as true figuratively as it is literally that a mother hasn’t got a leg to stand on around here.

  I am awfully weak, still. I’ll write again soon. Love,

  Maggie.

  March 8.

  Dearest Hank,

  Well the nurse was wrong if she told you that. She’s an idiot anyhow. It’s a girl. It’s easier to tell with babies than with cats, and I know. How about Henrietta?

  I’m home again, and busier than a betatron. They got everything mixed up at the hospital, and I had to teach myself how to bathe her and do just about everything else. She’s getting prettier, too. When can you get a leave, a real leave?

  Love,

  Maggie.

  May 26.

  Hank dear,

  You should see her now—and you shall. I’m sending along a reel of color movie. My mother sent her those nighties with drawstrings all over. I put one on, and right now she looks like a snow-white potato sack with that beautiful, beautiful flower-face blooming on top. Is that me talking? Am I a doting mother? But wait till you see her!