Free Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein Page B

while he feeds me liters of tea. I really am a good listener because you never can tell when you will pick up something useful—and all in the world any woman has to do to be considered “charming” by men is to listen while they talk.
    But Captain Darling is not the only astrogator in the ship. He gave me the run of the control room; I did the rest. The second officer, Mr. Savvonavong, thinks it is simply amazing how fast I pick up mathematics. You see, he thinks he taught me differential equations. Well, he did, when it comes to those awfully complicated ones used in correcting the vector of a constant-boost ship, but if I hadn’t worked hard in the supplementary course I was allowed to take last semester, I wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Now he is showing me how to program a ballistic computer.
    The junior third, Mr. Clancy, is still studying for his unlimited license, so he has all the study tapes and reference books I need and is just as helpful. He is near enough my age to develop groping hands . . . but only a very stupid male will make even an indirect pass unless a girl manages to let him know that it won’t be resented, and Mr. Clancy is not stupid and I am very careful to offer neither invitation nor opportunity.
    I may kiss him—two minutes before I leave the ship for the last time. Not sooner.
    They are all very helpful and they think it is cute of me to be so dead serious about it. But, in truth, practical astrogation is much harder than I had ever dreamed.
     
     
    I had guessed that part of the resentment I sensed—resentment that I could not fail to notice despite my cheery “Good mornings!”—lay in the fact that we were at the Captain’s table. To be sure, the Welcome in the Tricorn! booklet in each stateroom states plainly that new seating arrangements are made at each port and that it is the ship’s custom to change the guests at the Captain’s table each time, making the selections from the new passengers.
    But I don’t suppose that warning makes it any pleasanter to be bumped, because I don’t expect to like it when I’m bumped off the Captain’s table at Venus.
    But that is only part—
    Only three of the passengers were really friendly to me: Mrs. Grew, Girdie, and Mrs. Royer. Mrs. Royer I met first, and at first I thought that I was going to like her, in a bored sort of way, as she was awfully friendly and I have great capacity for enduring boredom if it suits my purpose. I met her in the lounge the first day and she immediately caught my eye, smiled, invited me to sit by her, and quizzed me about myself.
    I answered her questions, mostly. I told her that Daddy was a teacher and that Mother was raising babies and that my brother and I were traveling with our uncle. I didn’t boast about our family; boasting is not polite and it often is not believed—far better to let people find out nice things on their own and hope they won’t notice any unnice things. Not that there is anything unnice about Daddy and Mother.
    I told her that my name was Poddy Fries.
    “ ‘Poddy’?” she said. “I thought I saw something else on the passenger list.”
    “Oh. It’s really ‘Podkayne,’ ” I explained. “For the Martian saint, you know.”
    But she didn’t know. She answered, “It seems very odd to give a girl a man’s name.”
    Well, my name is odd, even among Marsmen. But not for that reason. “Possibly,” I agreed. “But with Martians gender is rather a matter of opinion, wouldn’t you say?”
    She blinked, “You’re jesting.”
    I started to explain—how a Martian doesn’t select which of three sexes to be until just before it matures . . . and how, even so, the decision is operative only during a relatively short period of its life.
    But I gave up, as I could see that I was talking to a blank wall. Mrs. Royer simply could not imagine any pattern other than her own. So I shifted quickly. “Saint Podkayne lived a very long time ago. Nobody actually knows