Across a Billion Years Read Online Free Page B

landcrawler and off we went.
    Night was falling, fast and hard. Higby V doesn’t have any moons, and it’s the sort of planet where, if you’re close to the equator, as we are, night comes on like a switch was thrown. Zit! and it’s dark. Our driver managed to keep us from going into any craters, though, and in an hour we were at the site.
    Dr. Schein, who had been here last year when the discovery was made, had arranged for three bubbleshacks to be blown, one as a laboratory and two for dormitories. In addition a big curving shield of plastic covered the hillside outcropping where the High Ones artifacts had been spotted.
    A complex moral thing developed when it came time to assign us to dorm space. I think you’ll enjoy mulling it over.
    The problem started from the fact that there are no partitions, and hence no privacy, inside the bubbleshacks. We have two unmarried Earthborn females among us, and according to the old silly tribal taboos it would be immoral and improper to let Jan and Kelly bunk with the boys. (The fact that Kelly couldn’t care less about privacy is irrelevant, since androids claim total equality with flesh-and-blood human beings, including the right to share our neuroses. Kelly has full human-female status, and to treat her otherwise would be to commit racial discrimination. Right?)
    What Dr. Schein proposed to do was put all the human males—himself, Leroy Chang, Saul Shahmoon, and myself—into one bubble, and Jan and Kelly into the other. Okay, that got around the elemental decency situation. But—
    Jan and Kelly would thereby have to bunk with the aliens, several of whom were males of their species. (Steen Steen and 408b could be excluded from that category, Steen because he/she is of both sexes and 408b because it doesn’t seem to be of either.) I guess some stuffy souls on Earth might get upset that Jan and Kelly would be dressing and undressing in front of males of any sort, even alien males. (They might get upset about Jan, anyway; stuffy types don’t seem to worry much about the living conditions of androids.) However, that wasn’t what troubled Dr. Schein. He knew that Kelly is without inhibitions; and that Jan, while she’s been observing the usual taboos around the four human males, doesn’t really think that Pilazinool or Dr. Horkkk or Mirrik pose any threat to her virtue. He was worried about offending the aliens, though. If Jan observed clothing taboos with us and not with them, couldn’t that be construed as meaning that she regarded them as second-class life-forms? Shouldn’t a girl be modest in front of all intelligent creatures, or else none? Where is the equality of galactic races, of which we hear so much, in such a case?
    I can hear you snorting with amused impatience and giving one of your typical common-sense answers. You might have pointed out that none of the aliens wear clothes themselves, or have any kind of privacy taboos, or even remotely understand why it is that Earthfolk feel they must cover certain parts of their bodies. You might also have noted that galactic equality doesn’t have anything to do with sex—which is at the bottom of our thing about clothes—and that it is perfectly proper for a girl to be modest with males of her own species without at the same time seeming to put down males of some other species. But common sense, Lorie, doesn’t always rule the universe. Dr. Schein had a long huddle with Jan, and then conferred with Saul Shahmoon and Leroy Chang, and finally—very nervously—took the matter to Dr. Horkkk. Who thought it was so wildly funny that he tied all his arms into knots, which is how the people of Thhh register uncontrollable laughter. He expressed the belief that none of the non-humans would take offense if the girls failed to be properly demure with them.
    And so it was settled. What a bunch of chimpos we Earthers can be about these primitive idiocies!
    The four of us got Mirrik the bulldozer for a bunkmate, since there