The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

JAMES TIPTREE, JR. The Last Flight of Dr. Ain

DR. Ain was recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague saw him in an aisle seat while coming back from the toilet. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain’s huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain’s response. If he had not had the flu like everyone else that autumn, he would have turned back to speak with Ain, but he shuffled on to his seat.

The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: a tall, thin, nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line, staring at her; and since he already had his raincoat with him, she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on.

They both saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O’Hare was late getting underground. Neither of them saw the woman.

The wounded, dying woman.

Nobody recalled him on the flight to New York, but the 2:40 jet carried an Ames on the checklist, which was thought to be a misspelling of Ain. It was. The plane had circled for an hour while Ain watched the smoky seaboard monotonously tilt, straighten, and tilt again.

The woman was weaker now. She coughed, picking weakly at the scabs on her face that were half-hidden behind her hair. Her hair, Ain saw, that great hair which had been so splendid, was drabbed and thinning. He looked to seaward, willing himself to think of cold, clean breakers. On the horizon he saw a vast spreading black rug. Somewhere a tanker had opened its vents. The woman coughed again. Ain closed his eyes. It was the dead time of afternoon.

He was picked up next while checking in for the BOAC[16] flight to Glasgow. Kennedy-Underground was a boiling stew of people breathing each other’s reek, the air-conditioning unequal to the hot September evening. The check-in line swayed and sweated, staring dully at the newscast. Save the last Green Mansions[17]—a conservation group was protesting the defoliation and drainage of the Amazon basin. Several people recalled the beautifully colored shots of the new clean bomb. The line squeezed together to let a band of uniformed men go by. They were wearing buttons inscribed: Who’s Afraid?[18]

That was when a woman noticed Ain. He was holding a news-sheet and she heard it rattling in his hand. Her family hadn’t caught the flu, so she looked at him sharply. Sure enough, his forehead was sweaty. She herded her kids to the side away from Ain. He was using Instac throat spray, she remembered. She did not think much of Instac; her family used Kleer. While she was looking at him, Ain suddenly thrust his head down and stared in her face, with the spray still floating above him. That made her mad. Such inconsiderateness! She turned her back. She did not recall him talking to any woman, but she perked up her ears when the clerk read off Ain’s destination. Moscow!

The clerk recalled that too, with disapproval. Ain checked in alone, he reported. No woman had been ticketed for Moscow, but it would have been easy enough to split up the tickets. By that time they were sure she was with him.

Ain’s flight went via Iceland with an hour’s delay at Kevlavik. Ain walked over to the airport park, breathing gratefully the sea-filled air. Every so often he shuddered. Under the whine of bulldozers, the sea could be heard running its huge paws up and down the keyboard of the land. In the little park were yellowed birches, and a flock of wheateaters foraged by the path. Next month they would be in North Africa. Two thousand miles of tiny wing-beats, Ain thought. He threw them some crumbs from a packet in his pocket.

The woman seemed stronger here. She was panting in the sea air, her large eyes fixed on Ain. He saw that the birches were as gold as those where he had first seen her, the day his life began. Squatting down to watch a shrewmouse, he had been, when he caught the falling ripple of green and recognized the shocking naked girl-flesh, creamy, pink-tipped among the golden bracken, coming towards him. Young Ain held his breath under stress, his nose on the sweet moss and his heart going crash—crash—and then he was staring at the outrageous fall of that hair down her narrow back, watching it dance around her heart-shaped buttocks while the shrewmouse ran over his paralyzed hand. The lake was utterly still, dusty silver under the misty sky, and she made no more than a muskrat’s ripple to rock the floating golden leaves. The silence closed back, the trees burning silent like torches where the naked girl had walked the wild wood, and Ain’s eye’s were shining. For a time he believed he had seen an Oread.[19]

Ain was last on board for the Glasgow leg. The stewardess recalled dimly that he had stayed awake. She could not identify the woman; there were a lot of women on board. And babies. Her passenger list had had several errors.

At Glasgow airport a waiter remembered that a man like Ain had called for Scottish oatmeal, and eaten two bowls, although of course it wasn’t really oatmeal. A young mother with a pram saw him tossing crumbs to the birds. When he checked in at the BOAC desk, he was hailed by a Glasgow professor who was going to the same conference at Moscow. This man had been one of Ain’s teachers. It was now known that Ain had done his postgraduate work in Europe. They chatted all the way across the North Sea.

“I wondered about that,” the professor said later. “‘Why have you come round about?’” I asked him. He told me the direct flights were booked up. (This was found to be untrue; Ain deliberately avoided going to Moscow apparently as an amateurish attempt to avoid attention.)

The professor spoke with relish of Ain’s work.

“Brilliant? Oh, aye—and stubborn, too, very stubborn. It was as though a concept—often the simplest relation, mind you—would stop him in his tracks, fascinate him, so he would hunt all ’round it instead of going on to the next thing, as a more docile mind would. Truthfully, I wondered at first if he could be just a bit thick. But you recall who it was said that the capacity for wonder at matters of common acceptance occurs in the superior mind? And of course, so it proved when he shook us all up over that enzyme coding business. A pity your government took him away from his line, there… No, he said nothing of this, I say it to you, young man. We spoke in fact largely of my work. I was surprised to find he’d kept up. He asked me what my sentiments about it were, which surprised me again… Now, understand, I’d not seen the man for five years, but he seemed—well, perhaps just tired, as who is not? I’m sure he was glad to have a change; he jumped out for a leg-stretch wherever we came down. Oslo, even at Bonn. Oh yes, he did feed the birds, but that was nothing new for Ain… His social life when I knew him? Radical causes? Young man, I’ve said what I’ve said because of who it was that introduced you, but I’ll have you know it is an impertinence in you to think ill of Charles Ain, or that he could do a harmful deed… Good evening.”

The professor said nothing of the woman in Ain’s life. Nor could he have, although Ain had been much with her in the university time. No one had seen how he was obsessed with the miracle, the wealth of that body… her inexhaustibility. They met privately at his every spare moment, sometimes even in public, pretending to be casual strangers under his friends’ noses, pointing out a pleasing view to each other, gravely formal. And later—what doubled intensity of love! He revelled in her, possessed her and searched over every atom of her—the sweetest springs and shadowed places and the white rounded glory in the moonlight—finding always more, always new ways to never-failing delights. The danger of her frailty was far off then in the rush of birdsongs and the springing leverets of the meadow. On dark days she might cough a bit, but so did he. In those years he had had no thought to the urgent study of disease…

At the Moscow conference nearly everyone noticed Ain at some point or another, which was to be expected in view of his professional stature. Ain was late in; a day’s reports were over, and his was to be on the third and last. It was a small high-calibre meeting. Many people spoke with Ain, and several sat with him at meals. No one was surprised that he spoke little, since he was a retiring man except on a few memorable occasions of hot argument. He did strike some of his friends as a bit tired and jerky. An Indian molecular engineer who saw him with the throat spray kidded him about bringing over Asian flu. A Swedish colleague recalled that Ain had been called away to the transAtlantic phone at lunch; and when he returned Ain had volunteered the information that something had turned up missing in his home lab. There was another joke, and Ain said cheerfully, “Oh yes, quite active.” At that point one of the Chicom[20] biologists swung into his daily propaganda chore about bacteriological warfare and accused Ain of manufacturing biotic weapons. Ain took the wind out of his sails by saying: “You’re perfectly right.” By tacit consent, there was very little talk about military applications, industrial dusting, or subjects of that type. And nobody recalled seeing Ain with any woman other than old Madame Vialche, who could scarcely have played Mata Hari.[21]

Ain’s own speech was bad, even for him. He always had a poor public voice, but his ideas were usually expressed with the lucidity so typical of the first-rate original mind. This time he seemed muddled, with little new to say. His audience excused this as the muffling effects of security. He then got somehow into a tangled point about the course of evolution in which he seemed to be trying to show that something was very wrong indeed. When he wound up with a reference to Hudson’s bell bird “singing for a later race,”[22] several listeners wondered if he were drunk.

The big security break came right at the end, when he suddenly began to describe the methods he had used to mutate and redesign a leukemia virus. He explained the procedure with admirable clarity in four sentences and paused. Then he said other sentences about the effects of the mutated strain. It was maximal only on the higher primates, he said; recovery rate among the lower mammals and other orders was close to 100%. As to vectors, he went on, any warm-blooded animal served. In addition, the virus retained viability in most environmental media and performed very well airborne. Contagion rate was of course extremely high. Almost off-hand, he added that no test primate or accidentally exposed human had survived beyond the twenty-second day.

These words fell into a silence broken only by the running feet of a Chicom delegate making for the door. Then a gilt chair went over as an American bolted after him. Ain seemed unaware that his audience was in a state of unbelieving paralysis. It had all come so fast. A man who had been blowing his nose was staring popeyed around his handkerchief. Another who had been lighting a pipe grunted as his fingers singed. Two men chatting by the door had missed his words entirely, and their laughter chimed into a dead silence in which echoed Ain’s words: “—really no point in attempting.”

Later they found he had been explaining that the virus utilized the body’s own immunomechanisms, and so defense was by definition hopeless.

That was all. Ain looked around vaguely for questions and then started down the aisle. By the time he got to the door, people were swarming after him. He wheeled about and said rather crossly, “Yes, of course it is very wrong. I told you that. We are all wrong. Now it’s over.”

An hour later they found he had gone, having apparently reserved a Sinair[23] flight to Karachi. Our security men caught up with him at Hong Kong. By then he seemed really very ill, and went with them peacefully. They started back to the States via Hawaii. His captors were civilized types; they saw he was gentle and treated him accordingly. They took him out handcuffed for a stroll at Osaka. He had no weapons or drugs on him, and they let him feed his crumbs to the birds, and listened with interest to his account of the migration routes of the common brown sandpiper. He was very hoarse. At that point, he was wanted only for the security thing. There was no question of a woman at all.

He dozed most of the way to the islands; but when they came in sight, he pressed to the window and began to mutter. The security man behind him got the first inkling that there was a woman in it, and turned on his recorder.

“… blue, blue and green until you see the scabs. Oh my girl! Oh beautiful, you won’t die. I won’t let you die. I tell you, my girl, it’s all over now, hold on, it’s over… Lustrous eyes, look at me, let me see you now alive my girl. Oh great queen, my sweet body, my girl, have I saved you? Oh terrible to know, and noble—Chaos’ girl green-robed and blue, in golden light… the thrown and spinning ball of life against black space. Have I saved you?”

On the last leg, he was obviously feverish.

“She may have tricked me, you know,” he said confidentially to the government man. “You have to be prepared for that, of course. I know her!” He chuckled confidentially. “She’s no small thing. But wring your heart out—”

Coming over San Francisco, he was merry. “Don’t you know the otters will go back in there? I’m certain of it. That fill won’t last, there’ll be a bay there again.”

They got him on a stretcher at Hamilton Air Base,[24] and he went unconscious shortly after takeoff. Before he collapsed, he’d insisted on throwing the last of his birdseed on the field.

“Birds are of course, warm-blooded,” he confided to the agent who was handcuffing him to the stretcher. Then Ain smiled gently and lapsed into inertness. He stayed that way almost the whole remaining ten days of his life. By then, of course, no one really cared. Both the government men had died quite early, just after they finished analyzing the birdseed and throat-spray. The woman who had seen him at Kennedy was only just then feeling sickish.

The tape-recorder they had put by his bed functioned right on through, but if anybody cared to replay it, they would have found little babbling. “Gaea[25] Gloriatrix!” he crooned. At times he was grandiose and tormented. “Our life, your death!” he yelled. “Our death would have been your death too, no need for that, no need—” At other times he was accusing. “What did you do about the dinosaurs?” he demanded. “How did you fix them? Did they annoy you? Cold. Queen, you’re too cold! You came close to it this time, my girl,” he raved. And then he wept and caressed the bedclothes and was maudlin.

Only at the end, lying in his filth and thirst, still chained where they had forgotten him, he was suddenly coherent. In a light, clear voice, as one might ask one’s lover what to take on a summer picnic, he asked the recorder happily:

“Have you ever thought about bears? They have so much—funny they never came along further. By any chance were you saving them, girl?” And he chuckled in his ruined throat until he died.