“It’s a little late to convince her of that with the baby on the way,” Daddy said dryly.
“I suppose so. Still, we might abort the baby and give a warning. Well, we can bash it all out tomorrow,” Mr. Persson said, and he signed off.
“Dinner’s ready,” I said. “What was all that about?”
Daddy said, “Oh, it’s a woman named MacReady. She’s had four children and none of them have made it through Trial. She wanted one more try and the Ship’s Eugenist said no. She went ahead anyway.”
It put a bad taste in my mouth.
“She must be crazy,” I said. “Only a crazy woman would do a thing like that. Why don’t you examine her? What are you going to do with her, anyway?”
“I’m not sure how the Council will vote,” Daddy said, “but I imagine she will be allowed to pick out a colony planet and be dropped there.”
There are two points—one is population and the other is Trial—on which we cannot compromise at all. The Ship couldn’t survive if we did. Imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have children every time the notion occurred to them. There is a limit to the amount of food that we have space to grow. There is a limit to the amount of room that we have in which people could live. It may seem that we are not very close to these limits now, but they couldn’t last even fifty years of unlimited growth. This woman had four children, not one of which turned out well enough to survive. Four chances is enough.
What Daddy was suggesting for the woman sounded over-generous to me, and I said so.
“It’s not generosity,” Daddy said. “It’s simply that we have to have rules in the Ship in order to live at all. You play by the rules or you go elsewhere.”
“I still think you’re being too easy,” I said. It wasn’t a light matter to me at all.
Somewhat abruptly, Daddy changed the subject. He said, “Hold still there. How’s your eye today? It’s looking much better, I think. Yes, definitely better.”
When Daddy doesn’t agree with me and he doesn’t want to argue, he slips out by teasing.
I turned my head away. “My eye’s all right,” I said. It was, too, since the bruise had faded away almost completely.
At dinner, Daddy asked, “Well, after two weeks, how do you like Geo Quad? Has it turned out as badly as you thought it would?”
I shrugged, and turned my attention to my food. “It’s all right, I guess,” I mumbled.
That’s all I could say. It just wasn’t possible for me to admit that I was both unhappy and unpopular, both of which were true. There are two reasons I started off wrong in Geo Quad, one big one and one small one.
The small one was school. As I’ve said, the only kids who are supposed to know how you stand are the others at the same level in each subject, people just like you. In practice, though, everybody has a pretty good idea of just where everybody else is and those at the top and bottom are expected to blush accordingly. I’ve never been able to blush on command, and, as a newcomer, it was all the harder for me because of it. It is not good to start by being singled out.
The big reason, on the other hand, was completely my fault. When we moved, I knew I wasn’t going to like Geo Quad, and it mattered not at all what anybody there thought of me. By the time it sank through to me that I was really and truly stuck in Geo Quad and that I’d better step a little more lightly, my heel marks were already plain to see on more than one face.
As it turned out, my position and my conduct interacted to bring me trouble. This is how things go wrong—and this is just a sample:
At the beginning of the week, the whole school went down to the Third Level on an educational jaunt. The afternoon was really more in the nature of a holiday because we older ones had seen the rows of broad-leaf plants they raise for carbon dioxide/oxygen exchange more than once before. At the end of the day we were coming back home to Geo Quad by shuttle and to pass the time some of us girls were playing a hand game. I was included because I was there and