A Man of Family Read online

  “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.”

  “Lisa insists that she’s the one who should be put up for adoption,” Raley explained. “She heard us talking about it.”

  Boettiger picked up a sheet covered with notes and shook it out. “Lisa’s right, of course. She’s the oldest. Now, let’s review the situation. You two married on a salary of three thousand territs a year, the minimum for one child. That’s Lisa. Three years later, accumulated raises brought your income up two thousand. That’s Penelope. Another year and a half, another two thousand. Susan. Last year, in February, you took over the Ganymede desk at nine thousand a year. Mike. Today, you were demoted and went back to seven thousand, which is a maximum three-child bracket. Does that cover it?”

  “That covers it,” his host told him. The story of my adult life, he thought: in a couple of sentences. It doesn’t cover the miscarriage Marian almost had with Penny or the time the handi-robot short-circuited near the play-pen and we had to take six stitches in Susie’s head. It doesn’t cover the time—

  “All right, then, Stew, let’s hit the income possibilities first. Do either of you have any hope of a sizable amount of money coming in soon, a legacy, say, or some piece of property that may substantially increase in value?”

  They looked at each other. “Both Stewart’s family and mine,” Marian answered slowly, “are three- or four-child bracket people. There won’t be much of an estate. And all we own, besides the house and the furniture and the jetabout, are some government bonds and a little Solar Minerals stock that won’t be worth much more than we paid for it for a long, long time.”

  “That takes care of income. Let me ask you people this, then—”

  “Wait a minute,” Raley burst out. “Why does it take care of income? Suppose I get a part-time job, working weekends or evenings here in New Hampshire?”

  “Because the license to have a child is predicated on the income from a normal thirty-hour week,” the lawyer pointed out patiently. “If the father has to work additional time in order to reach or maintain that income, his child sees that much less of him and, in the legal phrase, ‘is denied the normal prerogatives of a normal infancy.’ Remember, the rights of the child are absolutely paramount in present-day law. There’s no way around it.”

  Stewart Raley stared at the opposite wall. “We could emigrate,” he said in a low voice. “There are no birth-control regulations on Venus or any of the other colonies.”

  “You’re thirty-eight, Marian is thirty-two. They like ’em young, real young, on Mars and Venus—not to mention the fact that you’re an office worker, not a technician or a mechanic or farmer. I doubt very much that you could get a permanent extraterrestrial visa. No, the income possibilities are out. That leaves Special Hardship. Is there any claim you could think of under that heading?”

  Marian saw a straw and clutched at it. “There might be something. I had to have a Caesarean when Mike was born.”

  “Um.” Cleveland Boettiger reached for another document and studied it. “According to your medical data sheet, that was because of the child’s position in the womb at birth. It is not expected to interfere in any way with future child-bearing. Anything else? Any negative psychological reports on Lisa, for example, that would make it inadvisable for her to transfer to another set of parents at this time? Think.”

  They thought. They sighed. There was nothing.

  “Pretty much as I thought, then, Stew. It definitely doesn’t look good. Well, suppose you sign this and hand it in with the Notice of Superfluity tomorrow. I’ve filled it out.”

  “What is it?” Marian asked, peering anxiously at the paper he had handed them.

  “A Request for a Delay in Execution. The grounds I’ve given are that you were eminently satisfactory in your job and that therefore the demotion may be only temporary. It won’t stand up once the FPB sends
an investigator to your main office, but that will take time. You’ll get an extra month to decide which child and—who knows?—maybe something will turn up by then. A better job with another outfit, another promotion.”

  “I couldn’t get a better job with another outfit these days,” Raley said miserably. “I’m lucky to have the one I do, the way things are. And a promotion is out for at least a year.”

  There was a screech outside as a jetabout landed on their lawn.

  “Company?” Marian wondered. “We weren’t expecting anyone.”

  Her husband shook his head. “Company! The last thing in the world we want tonight is company. See who it is, Marian, and tell them please to go away.”

  She left the living room, waving to the handi-robot, as she went, to refill Boettiger’ s empty glass. Her face was stiff with pain.

  “I don’t see,” Stewart Raley exclaimed, “why the FPB has to be that rigid and meticulous in interpreting the birth-control statutes! Can’t they give a guy a little lee-way?”

  “They do,” the lawyer reminded him as he put the papers carefully back in the briefcase. “They certainly do. After the child has been approved and conceived, you’ re allowed a drop in income up to nine hundred territs—a concession to the unexpected. But two thousand, a whole two thousand…”

  “It’s unfair, though, it’s damned unfair! After you have a child and raise it, for it to be taken away by a minor bureau of the world government is—”

  “Now, Raley, don’t be an ass!” Boettiger said sharply. “I’m your lawyer and I’ll help you to the limits of my professional competence, but I won’t sit here listening to you make noises that I know you don’t believe yourself. Either family planning on a world-wide basis makes sense, or it doesn’t. Either we make sure that each and every child is a wanted child, a valued child, with a solid chance for a decent, happy, fulfilled life, or we go back to the irresponsible, catch-as-catch-can childbearing methods of the previous centuries. We both know that intelligent family planning has made the world a far better place. Well, Form 36A is the symbol of family planning—and the Notice of Superfluity is just the reverse side of the coin. You cannot reasonably have one without the other.”

  Raley bowed his head and spread his hands. “I don’t argue with that, Cleve. It’s just—it’s just—”

  “It’s just that the shoe happens to pinch you right now. I’m sorry for that, deeply sorry. But the way I feel is this: If a client comes to me and tells me he absent-mindedly flew his jetabout over a restricted area, I’ll use all my legal education and every inch of my dirty mind to get him off with as low a fine as possible. When he goes further, though, and starts telling me that the traffic regulations are no good—then I get impatient and tell him to shut up. And that’s all the birth-control statutes are: a series of regulations to make the reproductive traffic of the human race flow more efficiently.”

  The voices from the entrance hall stopped abruptly. They heard Marian make a peculiar noise, halfway between a squeal and a scream. Both men leaped to their feet and ran through the archway to her.

  She was in the foyer, standing beside Bruce Robertson. Her eyes were shut and she had one hand on the wall as if it alone kept her from falling.

  “I’m sorry I upset her, Stew,” the book illustrator said rapidly. His face was very pale. “You see, I want to adopt Lisa. Frank Tyler told me what happened today.”

  “You? You want to—But you’re a bachelor!”

  “Yes, but I’m in a five-child bracket income. I can adopt Lisa if I can prove that I can give her as good a home as a married couple might. Well, I can. All I want is for her last name to be changed legally to Robertson—I don’t care what name she uses in school or with her friends—and she’ll go on staying here, with me providing for her maintenance. The FPB would consider that the best possible home.”

  Raley stared at Boettiger. The lawyer nodded. “It would. Besides that, if the natural parents express any wishes for a feasible adoptive situation, the weight of administrative action tends to be thrown in that direction. But what would you be getting out of that, young man?”

  “I’d be getting a child—officially,” Robertson told him. “I’d be getting a kid I could talk about, boast about, when other men boast about theirs. I’m sick and tired of being a no-child bachelor. I want to be somebody.”

  “But you might want to get married one day,” Raley said, putting his arm about his wife, who had let a long breath out and turned to him. “You might want to get married and have children of your own.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Bruce Robertson said in a low voice. “Please don’t pass this on, but there’s amaurotic idiocy in my hereditary background. The only woman who’d ever marry me would be a sterile one. I doubt that I’ll ever get married, but I certainly won’t ever have kids. This—this is my only chance.”

  “Oh, darling,” Marian sobbed happily in Raley’s arms. “It will work. It really will work!”

  “All I ask,” the book illustrator went on uncertainly, “is the privilege of coming here once in a while, to kind of see Lisa and see what’s going on with her.”

  “Once in a while!” Raley roared. “You can come every night. After all, you’ll be like a member of the family. Like a member of the family? You’ll be a member of the family; man, you’ll be the family!”

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