Nixie waited, gave him a lick on the face to check his sleeping, then moved to his end of the bed. Mrs. Vaughn said to Mr. Vaughn, “Charles, isn’t there anything we can do for the boy?”
“Confound it, Nora. We’re getting to Venus with too little money as it is. If anything goes wrong, we’ll be dependent on charity.”
“But we do have a little spare cash.”
“Too little. Do you think I haven’t considered it? Why, the fare for that worthless dog would be almost as much as it is for Charlie himself! Out of the question! So why nag me? Do you think I enjoy this decision?”
“No, dear.” Mrs. Vaughn pondered. “How much does Nixie weigh? I…well, I think I could reduce ten more pounds if I really tried.”
“What? Do you want to arrive on Venus a living skeleton? You’ve reduced all the doctor advises, and so have I.”
“Well…I thought that if somehow, among us, we could squeeze out Nixie’s weight — it’s not as if he were a St. Bernard! — we could swap it against what we weighed for our tickets.”
Mr. Vaughn shook his head unhappily. “They don’t do it that way.”
“You told me yourself that weight was everything. You even got rid of your chess set.”
“We could afford thirty pounds of chess sets, or china, or cheese, where we can’t afford thirty pounds of dog.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Let me explain. Surely, it’s weight; it’s always weight in a space ship. But it isn’t just my hundred and sixty pounds, or your hundred and twenty, not Charlie’s hundred and ten. We’re not dead weight; we have to eat and drink and breathe air and have room to move — that last takes more weight because it takes more ship weight to hold a live person than it does for an equal weight in the cargo hold. For a human being there is a complicated formula — hull weight equal to twice the passenger’s weight, plus the number of days in space times four pounds. It takes a hundred and forty-six days to get to Venus — so it means that the calculated weight for each of us amounts to six hundred and sixteen pounds before they even figure in our actual weights. But for a dog the rate is even higher — five pounds per day instead of four.”
“That seems unfair. Surely a little dog can’t eat as much as a man? Why, Nixie’s food costs hardly anything.”
Her husband snorted. “Nixie eats his own rations and half of what goes on Charlie’s plate. However, it’s not only the fact that a dog does eat more for his weight, but also they don’t reprocess waste with a dog, not even for hydroponics.”
“Why not? Oh, I know what you mean. But it seems silly.”
“The passengers wouldn’t like it. Never mind; the rule is: five pounds per day for dogs. Do you know what that makes Nixie’s fare? Over three thousand dollars!”
“My goodness!”
“My ticket comes to thirty-eight hundred dollars and some, you get by for thirty-four hundred, and Charlie’s fare is thirty-three hundred — yet that confounded mongrel dog, which we couldn’t sell for his veterinary bills, would cost three thousand dollars. If we had that to spare — which we haven’t — the humane thing would be to adopt some orphan, spend the money on him, and thereby give him a chance on an uncrowded planet…not waste it on a dog. Confound it! — a year from now Charlie will have forgotten this dog.”
“I wonder.”
“He will. When I was a kid, Ihad to give up dogs — more than once they died, or something. I got over it. Charlie has to make up his mind whether to give Nixie away…or have him put to sleep.” He chewed his lip. “We’ll get him a pup on Venus.”
“It won’t be Nixie.”
“He can name it Nixie. He’ll love it as much.”
“But — Charles, how is it there are dogs on Venus if it’s so dreadfully expensive to get them there?”
“Eh? I think the first exploring parties used them to scout. In any case they’re always shipping animals to Venus; our own ship is taking a load of milch cows.”