Read Baby Is Three for Free Online

of a ship. “Oh … I didn’t know there was anyone here!” she said, and came toward us with a long, easy stride. “Am I in the way?”
    “You—in the way, Tween?” I answered. “Not a chance.”
    I was very fond of Tween. To these jaded old eyes she was one of the loveliest things that ever happened. Two centuries ago, before variation limits were as rigidly set as they are now, Eugenics dreamed up her kind—olive-skinned true-breeds with the silver hair and deep ruby eyes of an albino. It was an experiment they should never have stopped. Albinoism wasn’t dominant, but in Tween it had come out strongly. She wore her hair long—really long; she could tuck the ends of it under her toes and stand up straight when it was loose. Now it was braided in two ingenious halves of a coronet that looked like real silver. Around her throat and streaming behind her as she walked was a single length of flame-colored material.
    “This is Judson, Tween,” I said. “We were friends back on Earth. What are you up to?”
    She laughed, a captivating, self-conscious laugh. “I was sitting in a ship pretending that it was Outside. We’d looked at each other one day and suddenly said, ‘Let’s!’ and off we’d gone.” Her face was luminous. “It was lovely. And that’s just what we’re going to do one of these days. You’ll see.”
    “ ‘We’? Oh—you mean Wold.”
    “Wold,” she breathed, and I wished, briefly and sharply, that someone, somewhere, someday would speak my name like that. Andon the heels of that reaction came the mental picture of Wold as I had seen him an hour before, slick and smooth, watching the shuttle passengers with his dark hunting eyes. There was nothing I could say though. My duties have their limits. If Wold didn’t know a good thing when he saw it, that was his hard luck.
    But looking at that shining face, I knew it would be her hard luck.
    “You’re certified?” Judson asked, awed.
    “Oh, yes,” she smiled, and I said, “Sure is, Jud. But she had her troubles, didn’t you, Tween?”
    We started for the gate. “I did indeed,” said Tween. (I loved hearing her talk. There was a comfortable, restful quality to her speech like silence when an unnoticed, irritating noise disappears.) “I just didn’t have the logical aptitudes when I first came. Some things just wouldn’t stick in my head, even in hypnopedia. All the facts in the universe won’t help if you don’t know how to put them together.” She grinned. “I used to hate you.”
    “Don’t blame you a bit.” I nudged Judson. “I turned down her certification eight times. She used to come to my office to get the bad news, and she’d stand there after I’d told her and shuffle her feet and gulp a little bit. And the first thing she said then was always, ‘Well, when can I start retraining?’ ”
    She flushed, laughing. “You’re telling secrets!”
    Judson touched her. “It’s all right. I don’t think less of you for any of his maunderings … You must have wanted that certificate very much.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Very much.”
    “Could—could I ask why?”
    She looked at him, in him, through him, past him. “All our lives,” she said quietly, “are safe and sure and small. This—” she waved back towards the ships—“is the only thing in our experience that’s none of those things. I could give you fifty reasons for going Out. But I think they all come down to that one.”
    We were silent for a moment, and then I said, “I’ll put that in my notebook, Tween. You couldn’t be more right. Modern life gives us infinite variety in everything except the magnitude of the things we do. And that stays pretty tiny.” And, I thought, big, fat,superannuated station officials, rejected by one world and unqualified for the next. A small chore for a small mind.
    “The only reason most of us do puny things and think puny thoughts,” Judson was saying, “is that Earth has too few jobs like his in