Woman's Touch by Evelyn E. Smith

Name: Woman's Touch
Author: Evelyn E. Smith

"Woman's Touch" follows two young couples—Ned and Jane McComb, and Danny and Judy Field—assigned by the Extrasolar Survey Service to a five-year posting on the remote planet Furbish, tasked only with charting the world and establishing a fueling and repair station. Captain Harnick, who delivers their orders, stresses repeatedly that Furbish's native life-forms—small, blue-skinned, goblinlike bipeds with no apparent social organization or means of communication—are to be left strictly alone: not domesticated, not hunted, not interfered with in any way. The captain privately worries that the wives, rather than their husbands, are the ones likely to disregard this directive. While the men fly reconnaissance missions in the helicopter, mapping the planet's icebound polar regions and confirming the natives' harmlessness, Judy and Jane grow bored with restricted domestic life in the prefab cottage. Judy, the more headstrong of the two, persuades the reluctant Jane to approach the natives directly, reasoning that Harnick is too far away and too cheap to have forbidden genuine contact. Their first encounter goes badly: a native, frightened, knocks Jane down and pelts them with stones, and other natives soon join in gleefully. When the husbands return, they build a wall to serve as an alternative target, which only partially works, since the natives' rock-throwing "game" escalates and their numbers increase. The turning point comes when the women notice natives collapsing from exhaustion and malnutrition—their communal stone-throwing has kept them from gathering food. Defying instructions again, Judy and Jane feed them soup, discovering that the natives can digest terrestrial food and take to it eagerly. This act of nourishment triggers a chain of unexpected development: the natives begin acquiring language, starting with words like "oup" (soup) and "orridge" (porridge), and display artistic and musical talent—drawing recognizable portraits, singing in true, sweet harmony. Despite the husbands' halfhearted objections and citations of Harnick's rules, Judy takes charge of "civilizing" the Furbishians, bathing them, playing them music, and organizing informal English lessons, while the men—unable to resist their wives' momentum—end up building stone houses for the natives to replace their caves. Over the intervening years, the small outpost blooms into a full settlement: stone dwellings, a Christmas tree of woven branches and glowing native bladder-lanterns, a trained choir singing carols in charmingly mangled English, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and murals. When Captain Harnick returns with Lieutenant Wilkins expecting to find four isolated, monotony-worn colonists, he instead discovers a thriving settlement and is aghast, accusing the team of exploiting and enslaving the natives. The four humans insist otherwise: the natives are willing, even joyful, participants who love their new occupations, and the couples explicitly refuse to see the natives as a labor source, favoring "culture"—music, art, sport—over labor or mechanical tasks, at which the natives show little aptitude or interest. Judy has ambitions for a stadium, a museum, a school, and even resists letting ordinary supply ships land, fearing the natives' impressionable nature might be "contaminated" by coarse crews. The story's final ironic twist emerges physically: the four humans, having subsisted so long on native roots and Furbishian food after their own rations gave out, have themselves turned a distinct shade of blue—unconsciously assimilated by the planet and its people even as they believed themselves to be uplifting an inferior race. Wilkins, surveying the transformed colony, realizes the Terrestrial Government now has an unplanned colony on its hands. The tale is a light satirical inversion of colonial "civilizing mission" tropes, using breezy domestic-comedy dialogue and the "orders vs. wifely disobedience" frame to needle assumptions about intelligence, culture, and who civilizes whom—concluding with the suggestion that contact and mutual influence, once begun, cannot be contained by policy, and that the touch of "uplift" changes the uplifter as much as the uplifted.

By Evelyn E. Smith · First published 1957 · Genre: Science Fiction, Satire, Soft Science Fiction · 8,378 words

First lines

The orders were to leave the natives of the new planet strictly alone. But those surveyors' wives were women, and women don't obey orders -- or leave people alone!

"Now, don't get the idea that this is a universe-shaking assignment," Captain Harnick warned the four young people. "The planet's of no particular importance; otherwise we would never have assigned an untried team."

What this Textopian page supports

Woman's Touch is listed on Textopian as a short story by Evelyn E. Smith, dated 1957 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Work type: Short story
Author: Evelyn E. Smith
Date: 1957 CE
Language: English
Genres: Science Fiction, Satire, Soft Science Fiction, Comic Science Fiction, Social Commentary
Length: 8,378 words
Structure: 1 section, 206 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Genres

Science Fiction — Space exploration, alien planet (Furbish), extraterrestrial creatures, advanced technology (scout ships, heat suits, communications), and the Extrasolar Survey Service form the foundational framework.
Satire — Pervasive satirical attack on colonialism, bureaucratic orders, gender hierarchies, and the concept of 'civilization'—the surveyors' well-intentioned cultural uplift of the natives mirrors and critiques real-world imperial missions.
Soft Science Fiction — Prioritizes social, cultural, and anthropological implications over hard science or technical detail; the story's concern is civilization development and cultural transmission, not engineering or physics.
Comic Science Fiction — Sustained lighthearted, humorous tone throughout; comedy derives from absurd situations (natives throwing rocks, the wives' defiance), incongruity (simple aliens becoming cultured), and dialogue.