The Project Gutenberg EBook of Where There's Hope, by Jerome Bixby

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Title: Where There's Hope

Author: Jerome Bixby

Illustrator: Kelly Freas

Release Date: December 19, 2009 [EBook #30715]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

_The women had made up their minds, and nothing--repeat,
nothing--could change them. But _something_ had to give...._

WHERE THERE'S HOPE

By Jerome Bixby

Illustrated by Kelly Freas

"If you called me here to tell me to have a child," Mary Pornsen said,
"you can just forget about it. We girls have made up our minds."

Hugh Farrel, Chief Medical Officer of the Exodus VII, sighed and leaned
back in his chair. He looked at Mary's husband. "And you, Ralph," he
said. "How do you feel?"

Ralph Pornsen looked at Mary uncomfortably, started to speak and then
hesitated.

Hugh Farrel sighed again and closed his eyes. It was that way with all
the boys. The wives had the whip hand. If the husbands put up an
argument, they'd simply get turned down flat: no sex at all, children or
otherwise. The threat, Farrel thought wryly, made the boys softer than
watered putty. His own wife, Alice, was one of the ringleaders of the
"no babies" movement, and since he had openly declared warfare on the
idea, she wouldn't even let him kiss her good-night. (For fear of losing
her determination, Farrel liked to think.)

He opened his eyes again to look past the Pornsens, out of the curving
port of his office-lab in the Exodus VII's flank, at the scene outside
the ship.

At the edge of the clearing he could see Danny Stern and his crew, tiny
beneath the cavernous sunbeam-shot overhang of giant leaves. Danny was
standing up at the controls of the 'dozer, waving his arms. His crew was
struggling to get a log set so he could shove it into place with the
'dozer. They were repairing a break in the barricade--the place where
one of New Earth's giant saurians had come stamping and whistling
through last night to kill three c