The Collection (70 page)

On September 17th, 1972, 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.

By the end of that day, the puzzled investigators-and there
was quite a large group interested by then-knew that in every city checked, the
same thing had happened. The births, all over the Western Hemisphere and in
Europe, for that day had averaged about the same-three boys for every thirteen
girls.

Back-checking showed that the trend had started almost a
week before, but with only a slight predominance of girls. For only a few days
had the discrepancy been obvious. On the fifteenth, the ratio had been three
boys to every five girls and on the sixteenth it had been four to fourteen.

The newspapers got the story, of course, and kicked it
around. The television comics had fun with it, if their audiences didn't. But
four days later, on September 21st, only one child out of every eighty-seven
born in the country was male. That wasn't funny. People and governments
started to worry; biologists and laboratories who had already started to
investigate the phenomenon made it their number one project. The television
comics quit joking about it after one crack on the subject by the top comedian
in the country drew 875,480 indignant letters and lost him his contract.

On September 29th, out of a normal numbers of births in the
United States, only forty-one were boys. Investigation proved that every one
of these was a late, or delayed, birth. It became obvious that no male child
had been conceived, during the latter part of December of the previous year,
1971. By this time, of course, it was known that the same condition prevailed
everywhere-in the countries of the Eastern Alliance as well as in the United
States, and in every other country and area of the world-among the Eskimos, the
Ubangi and the Indians of Tierra del Fuego.

The strange phenomenon, whatever it was, affected human
beings only, however. Births among animals, wild or domesticated, showed the
usual ratio of the two sexes.

Work on both space stations continued, but talk of war-and
incidents tending to lead to war-diminished. The human race had something new,
something less immediate, but in the long run far worse to worry about.
Despite the apparent inevitability of war, few people thought that it would
completely end the human race; a complete lack of male children definitely
would. Very, very definitely.

And for once something was happening that the United States
could not blame on the Eastern Alliance, and vice versa. The Orient--China and
India in particular-suffered more, perhaps, than the Occident, for in those
countries male offspring are of supreme emotional importance to parents. There
were riots in both China and India, very bloody ones, until the people realized
that they didn't know whom or what they were rioting against and sank back into
miserable passivity.

In the more advanced countries, laboratories went on
twenty-four-hour shifts, and anyone who knew a gene from a chromosome could
command his weight in paper currency for looking-however futilely-through a
microscope. Accredited biologists and geneticists became more important than
presidents and dictators. But they accomplished no more than the cults which
sprang up everywhere (though mostly in California) and which blamed what was
happening on everything from a conspiracy of the Elders of Zion to (with
unusually good sense) an invasion from space, and advocated everything from
vegetarianism to (again with unusually good sense) a revival of phallic
worship.

Despite scientists and cults, despite riots and resignation,
not a single male child was
^.
born anywhere in the world during the
month of December, 1972. There had been isolated instances, all quite late births,
during October and November.

January of 1973 again drew a blank. Not that everyone
qualified wasn't trying.

Except, perhaps, the one person who was slated to do more
than anyone else-well, almost anyone else-about the matter.

Not that Capt. Raymond F. Carmody, U.S.S.F., retired, was a
misogynist, exactly. He liked women well enough, both in the abstract and in
the concrete. But he
^'
d been badly jilted once and it had cured him
of any desire whatsoever for marriage. Marriage aside, he took women as he
found them-and he had no trouble finding them.

For one thing, don't let the word "retired
^"
fool you. In the Space Service, rocket pilots are retired at the ripe old age
of twenty-five. The recklessness, reaction-speed and stamina of youth are much
more important than experience. The trick in riding a rocket is not to do
anything in particular; it's to be tough enough to stay alive and sane until
you get there. Technicians do the brain-work and the only controls are braking
rockets to help you get down in one piece when you land; reaction-speed is of
more importance than experience in managing them. Neither speed nor experience
helps you if you've gone batty en route from spending days on end in the equivalent
of a coffin, or if you haven't what it takes not to die in a good landing. And
a good landing is one that you can walk away from after you've recovered
consciousness.

That's why Ray Carmody, at twenty-seven, was a retired
rocket pilot. Aside from test flights on and near Earth, he
^'
d made
one successful flight to the Moon with landing and return. It had been the
fifteenth attempt and the third success. There had been two more successful
flights thereafter-altogether five successful round trips out of eighteen
tries.

But each rocket thus far designed had been able, barely, to
carry fuel to get itself and its crew of one back to Earth, with
almost-starvation rations for the period required. Step-rockets were needed to
do even that, and step-rockets are terrifically expensive and cumbersome
things.

At the time Carmody had retired from the Space Service, two
years before, it had been conceded that establishment of a permanent base of
any sort on the Moon was completely impracticable until a space station,
orbited around the Earth, had been completed as a way-station. Comparatively
huge rockets could reach a space station with relative ease, and starting from
a station in open space and against lesser gravitational pull from Earth,
going the rest of the way to the Moon would be even simpler.

But we're getting away from Ray Carmody, as Carmody had got
away from the Space Service. He could have had a desk job in it after old age
had retired him, a job that would have paid better than he was making at the
moment. But he knew little about the technical end of rocketry, and he knew
less, and cared nothing, about administrative detail work. He was most
interested in cybernetics, which is the science of electronic calculating
machines. The big machines had always fascinated him, and he'd found a job
working with the biggest of them all, the one in the building on a corner of
the grounds of the Pentagon that had been built, in 1968, especially to house
it.

It was, of course, known as Junior to its intimates.

Carmody's job, specifically, was Operative, Grade I, and the
Grade I meant that-despite his fame as one of the few men who had been to the
Moon and lived to tell about it, and despite his ultra-honorable discharge with
the grade of captain-his life had been checked back to its very beginning to be
sure that he had not, even in his cradle, uttered a careless or subversive
word.

There were only three other Grade I Operatives qualified to
ask Junior questions and transmit his answers on questions which involved
security-and that included questions on logistics, atomics, ballistics and
rocketry, military plans of all sorts-and everything else the military forces
consider secret, which is practically everything except the currently preferred
color of an infantryman's uniform.

The Eastern Alliance would undoubtedly have traded three
puppet dictators and the tomb of Lenin to have had an agent, or even a
sympathizer, as a Grade I Operative on Junior. But even the Grade II
Operatives, who handled only problems dealing with non-classified matters, were
checked for loyalty with extreme care. Possibly lest they might ask Junior a
subversive question or feed a subversive idea into his electronic equivalent of
a brain.

But be that as it may, on the afternoon of February 2, 1963,
Ray Carmody was the Operative, of course; dozens of technicians were required
from time to time to service junior and feed him, but only one Operative at a
time fed data into him or asked him questions. So Carmody was alone in the
soundproofed control room.

Doing nothing, however, at the moment. He'd just fed into
Junior a complicated mess of data on molecular structure in the chromosome
mechanism and had asked Junior -for the ten-thousandth time, at least-the
sixty-four dollar question bearing on the survival of the human race: Why all
children were now females and what could be done about it.

It had been quite a chunk of data, this time, and no doubt
junior would take quite a few minutes to digest it, add it to everything else
he'd ever been told and synthesize the whole. No doubt in a few minutes he'd
say, "Data insufficient." At least at this moment that had been his
only answer to the sixty-four dollar question.

Carmody sat back and watched Junior
^'
s complicated
bank of dials, switches and lights with a bored eye. And because the
intake-mike was shut off and Junior couldn
^'
t hear what he was saying
anyway, and because the control room was soundproofed so no one else could hear
him, either, he spoke freely.

^"
Junior,
^"
he said, "I'm
afraid you
^'
re a washout on this particular deal. We've fed you
everything that every geneticist, every chemist, every biologist in this half
of the world knows, and all you do is come up with that `data insufficient
^'
stuff. What do you want-blood?

"Oh, you're pretty good on some things. You're a whiz on
orbits and rocket fuels, but you just can
^'
t understand
women,
can
you? Well, I can't either; I'll give you that. And I
^'
ve got to admit
you
^'
ve done the human race a good turn on one deal-atomics. You
convinced us that if we completed and used H-bombs,
both
sides would
lose the coming war. I mean
lose.
And we
^'
ve got inside
information that the other side got the same answer out of your brothers, the
cybernetics machines over there, so they won't build or use them, either.
Winning a war with H-bombs is about like winning a wrestling match with hand
grenades; it's just as unhealthful for you as for your opponent. But we
weren't talking about hand grenades. We were talking about women. Or I was.
Listen, Junior-"

A light, not on junior's panel but in the ceiling, flashed
on and off, the signal for an incoming intercommunicator call. It would be from
the Chief Operative, of course; no one else could connect-by intercommunicator
or any other method-with this control room.

Carmody threw a switch.

"Busy, Carmody?
^"

"Not at the moment, Chief. Just fed Junior that stuff
on molecular structure of genes and chromosomes. Waiting for him to tell me it
^'
s
not enough data, but it'll take him a few minutes yet."

^"
Okay. You're off duty in fifteen minutes.
Will you come to my office as soon as you
^'
re relieved? The President
wants to talk to you.
^"

Carmody said,
^"
Goody. I'll put on my best
pinafore.
^"
He threw the switch again. Quickly, because a green
light was flashing on Junior's panel.

He reconnected the intake- and output-mikes and said,
"Well, Junior?
^"

^"
Data insufficient," said Junior's
level mechanical voice.

Carmody sighed and noted the machine's answer on the report
ending in a question which he had fed into the mike. He said, "Junior, I'm
ashamed of you. All right, let
^'
s see if there's anything else I can
ask and get an answer to in fifteen minutes."

He picked up a pile of several files from the table in front
of him and leafed through them quickly. None contained fewer than three pages
of data.

"Nope," he said,
^"
not a thing here
I can give you in fifteen minutes, and Bob will be here to relieve me
then."

He sat back and relaxed. He wasn't ducking work; experience
had proven that, although an AE7 cybernetics machine could accept verbal data
in conformance with whatever vocabulary it had been given, and translate that
data into mathematical symbols (as it translated the mathematical symbols of
its answer back into words and mechanically spoke the words), it could not
adapt itself to a change of voice within a given operation. It could, and did,
adjust itself to understanding, as it were, Carmody
^'
s voice or the
voice of Bob Dana who would shortly relieve him. But if Carmody started on a
given problem, he'd have to finish it himself, or Bob would have to clear the board
and start all over again. So there was no use starting something he wouldn't
have time to finish.