A Woman's Place Read online

visiting, such as an old-fashionedfarm kitchen had once been. A little room, opening off it, would be hersleeping room. She raised her eyebrows questioningly, and Sam explainedthey would build a small, separate bunkhouse for himself and Lt. Harper.

  She had a curious sense of displeasure at the arrangement. She knew sheshould be pleased at their understanding of the need for privacy. Therewas no point in becoming primitive savages. She should be grateful thatthey shared her determination to preserve the civilized codes. She toldherself, rather severely, that the preservation of civilized mores wasextremely important. And she brought herself up short with a shockingquestion, equal to a slap in the face.

  _Why?_

  She realized then she had intuitively known from the first that theywould never get back to Old Earth. Her instincts had been functioning,insuring their lives, where intellect had failed them completely. Shetried to laugh scornfully at herself, in feminist tradition. Imagine!Katheryn Kittredge, Career Woman, devoted to the intellectualadvancement of Man, thinking that mere cooking and cleaning and mendingwas the supremely important thing.

  But she failed in her efforts to deride herself. The intellectualdiscussions among the small groups of intelligent girls back on OldEarth were far away and meaningless. She discovered she was a littleproud and strangely contented that she could prepare edible food.Certainly the two men were not talented; and someone had to accept theresponsibility for a halfway decent domestic standard and comfort.

  As, for example, with the walls of the cabin halfway up, it wasnecessary to point out that while they may be going to put the littlecookstove--welded together out of metal scrap--in the cabin, there wasno provision for a fireplace. How would they keep warm through the longwinter months this year, and in the years to come?

  Lt. Harper had started to say something. Then he shrugged and a hopelesslook came over his face.

  "Perhaps you are right, Miss Kitty," he said humbly. "It may be spring,at that, before we can finish trying the more obvious combinations.We're trying to...." He broke off, turned away, and began to mark offthe spot where they would saw down through the logs to fit in afireplace.

  * * * * *

  Later that day, she overheard him tell Sam that, theoretically at least,there could be millions of versions of the Earth, each removed aninfinitesimal point from the next. There was the chance the flaw in thetorque motor, which still eluded him, might not automatically take themback to the right cross-section, even if he found it. They might have tomake an incredible number of trials, and then again they might hit it onthe very next combination.

  "And you might not!" she cut into the conversation, with perhaps moreacid in her voice than she intended. "It might not be your next, nortomorrow, nor next spring--nor ever!"

  Odd that she had felt an obscure satisfaction at the stricken looks ontheir faces when she had said it. Yet they had it coming to them. It wastime someone shocked them into a sense of reality. It took a woman to bea realist. She had already faced the possibility and was reconciled toit. They were still living in an impossible dream.

  Still she was sorry. She was sorry in the way she had always regrettedhaving to make a bad boy in kindergarten go stand with his face to thewall. She tried to make up for it that evening.

  "I understand," she said as they sat near the campfire outside thehalf-finished cabin. "You alter the torque, then try the various radiowave bands in the new position."

  They both looked at her, a little surprised.

  "It must be a slow and tedious procedure," she continued.

  "Very," Sam said with a groan.

  A shifting air current, carrying the sound of the waterfall, gave her anidea.

  "Too bad you can't borrow the practice of Tibetan monks," she mused."They tie their prayers to a wheel, set it in a running stream. Everyturn of the wheel is a prayer sent up to their gods. That way they canget their praying done for them while they go about the more urgentmatters of providing a living for themselves and their families."

  She hadn't meant it to be so pointed, implying that all they were doingwas sending up futile prayers to unheeding gods, implying they should begiving more attention to setting in winter stores. But even so....

  "Miss Kitty," Sam said in a kind of awe. "You are a wonderful woman!"

  In spite of her sudden flush of pleasure, she was irritated. As pointedas she had made it, he had missed it.

  He turned and began talking excitedly to Lt. Harper. Yes, of course,they could rig up an automatic method instead of doing it by hand. Itcould be done faster and more smoothly with electric motors, but theidea was the same. If Lt. Harper could rig a trip to kick the warp overanother notch each time, they could run it night and day. Just let somekind of alarm bell start ringing, if they hit anything at the other end!

  The two of them jumped to their feet then, grabbed her arms, squeezedthem, and rushed away to the little shed they'd constructed beside thelifeship to hold some of their scattered equipment.

  She felt vaguely regretful that she had mentioned it.

  * * * * *

  Still she gained a great deal. The men finished the cabin in a hurryafter that, and they put up their own bunkhouse in less than a week.Both jobs were obviously not done by experts, and she had fussed atthem, although not unkindly, because she had had to chink such widecracks with a mixture of clay and dried grass.

  She moved into the larger cabin, discovered a dozen roof leaks duringthe first hard rain they'd had; got them patched, began molding clayinto dishes and containers, started pressuring the boys to build her aceramics kiln, began to think about how their clothes would eventuallywear out and how she would have to find some way to weave cloth toreplace them. Day by day she was less irritable, as the boys settledinto a routine.

  "I do believe," she said to herself one day, "I would be disappointed ifthey found a way back!" She straightened up and almost spilled thecontainer of wild rice she had been garnering from the swampy spot atthe upper reaches of the lake. "Why! The very idea of saying such athing, Katheryn Kittredge!" But her heart was not in the self chiding.

  But what reason, in heaven's name, would they have for staying here?Three people, marooned, growing old, dying one by one. There was nochance for Man's survival here. From the evidence about them, they hadcome to the conclusion that on this New Earth, in the tree of evolution,the bud to grow into a limb of primates had never formed.

  She turned and looked at the tall, straight pines ahead of her. She sawthe deciduous hardwoods, now gold and red, to one side of her. Behindher the lake was teeming with fish. The spicy smell of fall was allaround her, and a stray breeze brought a scent of grapes she hadoverlooked when she was gathering all she could find to make a wine topleasantly surprise the boys.

  She thought of the flock of wild chickens which had learned to hangaround the cabin for scraps of food, the grunting lazy pigs, grown quitetame, begging her to find their acorns for them, the nanny goat with twohalf-grown kids Lt. Harper had brought back from a solitary walk he hadtaken.

  New Earth was truly a paradise--and all to be wasted if there were notMan to appreciate it truly.

  A thought knocked at her mind, but she resolutely shut it out, refusedit even silent verbalization.

  Yet, while she stooped over again and busied her hands with strippingthe rice from the stalks without cutting them on the sharp dry leaves,she found herself thinking about Mendelian law. Line breeding fromfather to daughter, or brother to sister--in domestic animals, ofcourse--was all right in fixing desirable traits, providing certainrecessives in both the dam and the sire did not thus become dominant.

  "There, Katheryn Kittredge," she mumbled with satisfaction. "Assumingthe responsibilities of domesticity has not made you forget what youlearned."

  But the danger of fixing recessives into dominants through inbreedingwas even less with half-brothers and sisters. Now daughters byone--er--sire could be bred to another sire to get only a quarterrelationship t
o a similar cross from the other father--er--sire. Shemust work it out with a stylus in smooth clay. The boys had preemptedevery scrap of paper for their pointless calculations. But she couldremember it, and it would be valuable in breeding up a desirablebarnyard stock.

  Yet it was odd that she assumed two males and only one female!

  * * * * *

  Then and there, standing ankle deep in the bog of wild rice, muddy toher knees in her torn coveralls, slapping at persistent mosquitoes, shecame to terms with herself. In the back of her mind she had known it allthe time. All this was without meaning unless there was Man--and acontinuity of Man. Even so little as this gathering of wild rice, beforethe migrating ducks got it, was without meaning, if it were merely tostave off death from a purposeless existence. If there were no otherfate for them than eventually to die, without posterity, then they mightas well