“So. What is that to you?”
“The Keohula Mine,” he explained painfully, “is the only mine on Ganymede in full operation.”
“I still—I’m afraid I still don’t understand. Stewart, please tell me in words of one syllable, but tell me fast. What is it?”
He looked up, noticing how terrified she was. She had no idea what be was talking about, but she had always had remarkable instincts. Almost telepathic.
“With the Keohula Mine sold, and for a good price, Solar Minerals feels it is uneconomic to maintain an installation on Ganymede. There are therefore shutting it down, effective immediately.”
Marian raised her hands to her mouth in horror. “And that means—that means—”
“That means they no longer need a Ganymede Department. Or a Ganymede Department Chief.”
“But they won’t send you back to your old job!” she cried. “That would he too cruel! They couldn’t demote you, Stewart, not after you’ve gone and had another child on the strength of your raise! There must be another department, there must be—”
“There isn’t,” he told her with a tongue that felt like cardboard. “They’re shutting down operations on all the Jovian satellites. I’m not the only one affected. There’s Cartwright of the Europa desk and McKenzie of Io—they both have seniority over me. From now on, Solar Minerals is going to lean heavily on its holdings on Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and light everywhere else.”
“Well, what about those planets? They’ll need department heads at Solar Minerals, won’t they?”
Raley sighed helplessly. “They have them. And assistant department heads. Good men who know their work, who’ve handled it for years. And as far as your next question goes, honey, I’ve spoken to Jovian Chemicals about a transfer. No go. They already have a Ganymede Department and the man handling it is very satisfactory. All day I kept trying one angle after another. But tomorrow, I’ll be back in Ore Shipments.”
“At your old salary?” she whispered. “Seven thousand territs a year?”
“Yes. Two thousand less than I’m getting now. Two thousand less than the minimum for four children.”
Marian’s hands crept up to her eyes, which filled, abruptly, with tears. “I’m not going to do it!” she sobbed. “I’m not! I’m not!”
“Honey,” he said. “Honey-baby, it’s the law. What can we do?”
“I absolutely—I absolutely refuse to decide which—which one of my children I’m going to—to give up!”
“I’ll get promoted again. I’ll be making nine thousand territs in no time. More, even. You’ll see.”
She stopped crying and stared at him dully. “But once a child is put up for adoption, the parents can’t reclaim it. Even if their income increases. You know that, Stewart, as well as I. They can have other children, but they can’t ever have the superfluous child back.”
Of course he knew that. That regulation had been framed by the FPB to protect the foster-parents and encourage adoption into higher-bracket families. “We should have waited,” he said. “Damn it, we should have waited!”
“We did,” she reminded him. “We waited six months, to make certain your job was secure. Don’t you remember the night that we had Mr. Halsey to dinner and he told us that you were working out very well and were definitely on your way up in the organization? ‘You’ll have ten children yet, Mrs. Raley,’ he said, ‘and my advice is to get started on them as soon as possible.’ Those were his exact words.”
“Poor Halsey. He couldn’t meet my eyes all through the executive conference this afternoon. Just before I left the office, he came up and told me how sorry he was, how he’d look out for me in the very next promotion list. But he pointed out that practically everybody’s retrenching these days: it’s been a bad year for extra-terrestrial products. And when I move back into my old job in Ore Shipments, I bump back the man who took my place. He moves down and bumps back somebody else. It’s hell all around.”
Marian dried her eyes with determined waves of the dashboard breezespout. “Our problem’s enough for me, Stewart. I’m not interested in anybody else right now. What can we do?”
He leaned back and grimaced. “The best I could think of—I called my lawyer. Cleve said he’d be down this evening after dinner to go over the whole matter with us. If there’s an out, Cleve will find it. He’s handled a lot of FPB appeals.”
She inclined her head in recognition of this effort. “That’s a beginning. How much time do we have?”
“Well, I have to file a Notice of Superfluity form tomorrow morning. We have two weeks to decide which—which child.”
Marian nodded again. They sat there, letting the automatic pilot throb the jetabout to its destination. After a while, Stewart Raley reached across the seat and took his wife’s hand. Her fingers curled about his fingers spasmodically.
“I know which child,” said a voice from behind them.
They both turned around sharply. “Lisa!” Marian gasped. “I forgot you were here! You’ve been listening!”
Lisa’s round cheeks were glistening with wetness. “I’ve been listening,” she admitted. “And I know which child it has to be. Me. I’m the oldest. I’m the one who should be put up for adoption. Not Penny or Susie or Mike, but me.”
“Now you shush up, Lisa Raley. Your father and I will decide what to do. It’s more than possible that nothing will happen. Nothing at all.”
“I’m the oldest, so I should be put up for adoption. That’s what my teacher says is supposed to happen. My teacher says that the young children are afaffected more than older children. And my teacher says that it’s a very good thing, because you’re sure to be adopted by a very rich family and you get more toys and better schools and and all sorts of things. My teacher says that maybe you’re a little s-sad at first, but you have so many good things happening to you, that—that you get to be very ha-happy. And anyway, my teacher says, that’s the way it has to be, ’cause that’s the law.”
Stewart Raley hit the seat hard. “That’s enough! Your mother said she and I will decide.”
“And besides,” Lisa went on defiantly, wiping her face with one hand, “besides, I don’t want to be a member of a three-child family. All my friends are four-child family girls. I’d have to go back to those poky old friends I used to have, and I—”
“Lisa!” Raley roared. “I’m still your father! Do you want me to prove it to you?”
Silence. Marian switched back to manual for the landing. She took the baby from the twelve-year-old and they all got out of the jetabout without looking at each other.
Raley took a moment before entering the house to adjust the handi-robot from “Gardening” to “Waiting on Tables.” Then he followed the whirring metal figure through the door.
The trouble was that Lisa was right. All other things being equal, the oldest child was the usual choice for outside adoption. For her, it was a much less traumatic experience. And the Family Planning Bureau would select the new parents carefully, from among the horde of applicants, and see to it that the transfer was made as smoothly and happily as possible. Child psychologists would make twice-weekly visits for the first few years, insuring the maximum adjustment to the new situation.
Who would the new parents be? Probably someone like Ed Greene’s brother-in-law, Paul, someone whose income had far outstripped the permissible family. That could be due to a variety of reasons: a lazy, unconventional wife, latent sterility in either partner to the marriage, a suddenly necessary hysterectomy. In any case, something that left them without the means of achieving the only kind of prestige that mattered.
You could have a real flossy jetabout—but you might have bought it on credit and still owe ten years’ worth of salary on it. You might have an enormous home in expensive estate-filled Manitoba, where the top executives of the New York Business Area lived side by side with their opposite numbers from the Chicago and Los Angeles Business Areas, a home whose walls were paneled in rare Martian woods and which was replete with every kind of specialized robot—but, for all anyone knew, you might be doing it by carrying a mortgage which was slowly but surely choking you into financial submission.
Children, now, children were definite. You couldn’t have a child on credit, you didn’t have a child because you were expecting business to get better. You only had a child when the FPB, having accepted you and your wife heredity-wise and environment-wise, decided your income was large enough to give that child all the advantages it deserved. Every child a family had represented a license that the FPB issued only after the most searching investigation. And that was status.
That was why you didn’t have to give job data or references when you were buying something on time if you could pull out a six-child license. The clerk just took down your name and address and the serial number on the license—and that was that. You walked out of the store with the merchandise.
All through supper, Raley thought about that. He couldn’t help feeling doubly guilty over his demotion in Solar Minerals when he remembered what his first thought was on the morning the license to have Mike arrived. It was a jubilant now we get into the country club, now they’ll invite us to join. He’d been happy about the permission to have another baby, of course—he and Marian both loved kids, and in quantity—but he’d already had three by then; it was the fourth child which was the big jump.
“Well,” he said to himself, “and which father wouldn’t have felt the same way? Even Marian, the day after Mike’s birth, began calling him ‘our country-club son’.”
Those were happy, pride-filled days. They’d walked the Earth, Marian and he, like young monarchs on their way to coronation. Now—
Cleveland Boettiger, Raley’s lawyer, arrived just as Marian was scolding Lisa into bed. The two men went into the living room and had the handi-robot mix them a drink.
“I won’t sugar-coat it, Stew,” the lawyer said, spreading the contents of his briefcase on the antique coffee-table that Marian had cleverly converted from an early twentieth-century army foot-locker. “It doesn’t look good. I’ve been going over the latest FPB rulings and, in terms of your situation, it doesn’t look good.”
“Isn’t there any chance? Any angle?”
“Well, that’s what we’ll try to find tonight.”
Marian came in and curled up on the sofa next to her husband. “That Lisa!” she exclaimed. “I almost had to spank her. She’s already beginning to look on me as a stranger with no authority over her. It’s maddening.”