The Perfect Planet

The time of troubles in the Human Federation of Worlds had passed, and now expeditions were going out to planets where colonies had been established before The Hiatus of the wars, two centuries ago. Captain Speers and Lieutenant Moodie had been sent to Artemis. Speers had obtained his commission in the Space Service by accident; he went into the wrong room at a civil-service examination center, seeking a professorship in social history, and came out an officer. But the methods of the classroom proved to be as efficient in this position as he had hoped they would be in his originally-sought vocation. After winning innumerable medals and citations in the Civil Wars, he had been chosen to captain one of the rediscovery expeditions. The fact that Lieutenant Moodie was not only younger, and female, and less fully educated made it possible for Speers to continue his pedagogy during the voyage. Artemis, he explained to her, was not founded as a colony but as a milk farm. Then he had to explain the explanation. For Artemis was not a farm at all, but a species of school where women of over-ample figure resorted in order to be starved and pummelled into more meager proportions.