Don Fenton is off on a fishing trip to Mexico
when a series of coincidences results in his sharing a small plane with Ruth Parson and her grown
daughter. Both women strike him as a bit strange,
reticent but not unfriendly. While Fenton is
mildly aware that they are not unattractive, he is
uninterested in them except as temporary traveling companions. The relationship is prolonged,
however, when a malfunction results in their
crashing in a remote part of the Yucatan. Fenton
and the older woman set out to find fresh water,
while the daughter remains at the plane with the
injured pilot.
Fenton is somewhat intrigued by the woman,
who initially dispenses only the most innocuous
bits of information about herself, later revealing
that she is a single mother whose daughter has
never met her father. Although not unfriendly, she
remains distant, and tactfully but firmly arranges
things so that there is no question of physical intimacy between them. Fenton still feels no strong attraction, and a minor injury restricts his movement
even further. The first evening, they have a strange
encounter with another party, seeing only that
party’s lights. After this encounter Parsons becomes even more reticent. In due course we learn
that she stole a recording device from a party of
young alien students secretly visiting Earth, and
that they are searching for it to prevent it from
falling into the hands of the authorities and revealing their presence. The ultimate confrontation
takes an unexpected twist when the two women
ask for and are granted permission to leave Earth
with the aliens, an Earth that the older woman has
described as a world of men, in which women
manage to survive but do not prosper.
Although the story is obviously an indictment
of gender discrimination, it is more effective than
most because it is firm but not strident. Moreover,
Tiptree draws the narrator Fenton as a reasonable
man; he is kind, thoughtful, and undoubtedly he
believes that men and women are equal. What he
fails to recognize is that the semblance of equality
is a fragile one that could be cast aside immediately
if circumstances changed. Ruth Parsons and her
daughter will have no difficulty adapting to life on
a world dominated by aliens, because they have
spent their entire lives on a world dominated by
what is, to them, an alien race.