Project Gutenberg's The Minus Woman, by Russell Robert Winterbotham

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Minus Woman

Author: Russell Robert Winterbotham

Release Date: December 26, 2009 [EBook #30761]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MINUS WOMAN ***

Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Illustration]

THE MINUS WOMAN

_By
Russ Winterbotham_

What made the mass of this tiny asteroid fluctuate in defiance of
all known physical laws? It was an impossible fact--but then, so was
the girl who they knew couldn't exist!

Red Brewer had plugged his electric razor into the lab circuit and he
was running it over his pink jowls while I tried to discover what was
haywire about the balance scales.

"Have you noticed," Red said above the clatter of his shaver, "how much
less you have to shave on an asteroid?"

"I still shave every day," I said. There was something definitely wrong
with the scales. The ten-gram weight didn't balance two five-gram
weights. Instead it weighed 7.5 grams. And then, suddenly, the cockeyed
scales would get ornery and the two five-gram weights would weigh 7.5
grams and the ten-gram slug would weigh what it should.

"I don't," said Red. "I shave once a week. Back on terra I shaved every
day, but not here. And I don't even have a beard to show for it."

I didn't answer. There were tougher problems on my mind than whiskers,
but of course Red Brewer wouldn't understand them. He was good at
machinery, and with a camera, and for company on a lonely asteroid which
right now was 300,000,000 miles from the earth, but he certainly wasn't
a brain.

"What do you make of it, Jay?" he asked. "Oh, Mr. Hayling, I'm speaking
to you."

"Maybe it's your thyroid," I said. "Shut up."

"I'm twenty-seven," said Red. "Too old to have thyroids."

"You mean adenoids."

Red growled and shut off the razor. He ran his hand over his face. "I've
got a face like a school-kid's," he said. "If there was only a girl on
this god-forsaken piece of rock to see it."

There were no girls on Asteroid 57GM. Thi