When There’s No Man Around
This first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1977.
Goodyear Tires had an ad campaign in the mid-1970s showing a woebegone young woman kneeling beside her car with a flat tire, all alone on a deserted highway in the middle of the night. The caption read, “When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.”
This story is dedicated to all those poor, helpless women everywhere.
“Sandrust!” Lucy Stargos said exasperatedly as she kicked the unfeeling machine for the third time. Neither her ejaculation nor her kick did any good, however. The sand tractor still refused to start.
Outside the insulated tractor dome, the Martian night pressed in with cold fixedness and the stars stared down unabashed, the Martian atmosphere being too thin to w
