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This was the worst rub of all: there were women, and they were gorgeous. A little smaller than most Earth women, with bright eyes, and high, arched eyebrows, looking forever as if they had heard the most priceless joke. Their faces conformed to the most rigid standards of Caucasian beauty. Their legs, so delicate, so tapering, so fantastically small of ankle, were breath-taking. Their clothes, which would have driven a Parisian designer to suicide, were draped carelessly over the most exquisite figures. True, they were a little deficient in one department, and this was explained, before they were granted liberty, by Dr. Flandeau. The women of Engraham, he said, did not bear children.
This announcement was not received with special gloom, for until then, none of the crew had seen an Engrahamite woman. But Willy Lanham, a dark-haired, skinny boy from Tennessee, asked, unhappily, "Don't they even go in for games or nothin'?"
Flandeau understood instantly. He shook his head sadly. "I should think not. It has been a long time since they have observed the normal functions. The women are mainly for decoration, although it is said that some are also created for brains. They are a most strange people."
After this—granted these agonizing liberties, and able to see that which was biologically unattainable—the crew became so demoralized that not even Kosalowsky's discovery of the works of Wilhelm Reik relieved the deep gloom.
However, they had reckoned without the superior genius of Dick Blunt. Blunt received Flandeau's news as unhappily as the others, and, like the rest, was made miserable by the sight of the glorious damozels. But he was a reasonable man and he put his reasoning powers to work. Soon he alone was cheerful. He went around with the absorbed, other-world look of a physicist grappling with a problem in ionospheric mathematics without the use of an IBM calculator. One day he went on Liberty alone. He did not return until the fall of night, and when he came in his elation was so immoderate that the others thought there must be bars on Engraham after all.
"I have found the answer to our question," he said.
No one needed to ask what question. O'Connors hurried to pour Blunt a drink.
"I have spent the day pursuing this answer logically," said Blunt. "I have done what any thoughtful man would do. I have read up on it."
"How?" cried Henderson.