THE ABANDONED OF YAN BY DONALD F. DALEY The Abandoned have neither rights nor hopes. They only have revenge! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] After her husband left her, Marigold filed a protection-request form and an availability form. She did not do this immediately. She stayed up for the better part of the night, hoping that he would come back. She could not bring herself to believe that he would really walk out on her and leave her available for confiscation, or for the slavery pool. She also thought for quite a while about the possibility of somehow getting back to Earth, where she would not be available for either. She even went to the fantastic expense of televiewing there to talk with her father and mother. They had been shocked and unfriendly. They had said good-by with a finality which left little room for doubt as to what they thought of an Abandoned. They had never had one in their family, they had pointed out, neither of them, and they did not intend to have one in their family now. They had warned her that they intended to report the call to the Beta III Protection People. This did not worry her much. The call almost certainly had been monitored anyway. If they wanted to go to the considerable extra expense of reporting it, in order to impress the Protection People with their loyalty, that was their own lookout. She understood that, now, she had no family. She thought for a moment of going up-ramp to say good-by to the children, but she knew that this would not help. Besides, it was illegal. They were no longer hers. She was an Abandoned. She had never known what a tremendously harrowing experience filling out an availability form could be. Name, age, Sector, race, size-classification, beauty-index, fertility tests, personality scores, aptitudes, psyche-rating and so on, and so on and so on. It was like undressing for an auction. The protection-request form was much simpler, except for that one question: STATUS? Her hand shook almost uncontrollably as she wrote. _Abandoned._ After that she did not know what to do. She had stood for nearly twenty minutes before the document file, listening, thinking desperately that he would come back; that if she only waited a few minutes more he would come back. She had made herself refreshment. She had sat with the filled-out documents on her lap looking, from time to time, longingly at the entrance-ramp. But he had not come back. Finally, with a low moaning sound, she had pushed the papers through the document file slot. She made the deadline by a scant three minutes.