by Philip Wylie
“Now,” he said, his voice deep and amused as he moved swiftly out of instant reach, “why in hell did I think of French maid before I even saw anything but that lovely hair and your back elevation?”
She rocked back on folded legs and for a moment her face was disconcerted, dashed, but only for a moment. “Aha! I am French! Rather, my mother and father. Who were visiting Los Angeles a long while ago. And so, saved. I am Lysette.”
“The cutest damn Lysette who ever woke me up that way, at least as far as I recall!”
She laughed. Then, for another brief space, she gazed at his body, specifically, and said, at the end, “Non?”
Glenn had remembered his surroundings in time. He waved an arm about in a circle. “Too much audience!”
She shrugged and that was gallic, too. “Me? I do not mind? You? How silly! In another minute or two—”
“Yes,” he said, wryly. “Look, Lysette. Is the coffee here? The toast? Juice? Or did you come in alone, first?”
That brought silver mirth. “In the living room.” She tossed a light robe at him and he donned it while she dressed—in the same time. Glenn had already noted how quickly the current dress-style came off, and went back on. She moved toward the door. “Is there anything—else?”
He gave a negative head-motion. The door was opened. “You do not like French girls? Or young ones? Or, maybe, brunettes?”
“What a dreadful thought!”
“I can be rung for, anytime. La-la—’voir!” The bell-jingle laughter went away on the silent hall carpeting.
Glenn consumed his modest breakfast, his routine one, thoughtfully. Then he dressed, choosing from the rather elaborate wardrobe a “suit” with the most sombre and dark hue and the minimal area of transparency. In an hour, he was to start a tour of the city. That would be his routine for some days.
He looked forward to it with interest.
To pass time, he examined the titles of the books that covered a whole wall. Pretty complete selection, he thought, for the time Leandra had. If he read them all, he’d know as much about modern, underground L.A. and how it came into being, as anybody was allowed to know, he thought. There was, on another wall, a map of the city, dated 2015. He studied it with attention that soon wandered—in a way it would, at odd times, and would for a long time, he imagined.
The map blurred and he looked into space. In his mind, he was back in 1971 and in his own Howard Building, that giant and modernistic skyscraper in downtown L.A. He saw people and among them, of course, Linda, his super-bright secretary. He had planned things to do for this day—and then with a shock he came back to reality. He sat down, wondering about them all: friends, relations, men he admired and trusted, important men, men and women he employed, the best, and paid to be, editors, writers, every sort of radio and television professional and technician, pilots for his own and company planes—the faces were numberless and for each, the same sad thought came.
When and how, where and in what way did it end for Max, Bill, Sam, Stan, Maxie, Hank, Lana, Ethel, Lillian, Sue, Tony, another Sam, and on, and on. One unanswerable question for all—one, for most if not all—with some unknowable but horrifying answer.
His door chimes sounded. He abandoned that miserable reverie and crossed the room. His eyes sparkled with expectation—Leandra—but when he swung the door wide and he began his planned embrace, his intended sign of capitulation, it was another girl, woman.
Tall, as was Leandra, five eight, about, with blonde hair, too, but blue eyes and much more emphatic contours. Scandinavian, he thought. And very beautiful, classically so. Perfect features, wonderfully deep blue near-violet eyes and a voice that was the young, fresh, true sound that Eula Baker had, in some imitated, exaggerated, or artificial and specifically meant form. “Good morning, Mr. Howard. I’m your guide for the day. My name’s Donna Bronson.” She had seen his commencement of a hug and how it had been checked and it made her smile, directly—and sympathetically? Seemed so to him—anyhow, a smile with some understanding that what he’d commenced was intended for—Leandra. She must know that, but not mind.
“Come in, then, and hello!”
She came in with grace. Ballet? Not that sort. She moved with natural ease, with the sure use of strength under that perfect skin, under the tissues that curved it, and covered the muscles her motions guaranteed—invisible sinews, as in many women, the sound ones with that lush yet not plump, not quite soft type. Her hair was all one sort of blond, though—like grain, like some tinted wood-heart, apple or maybe pear. Not white, not tow-colored, but evenly pale and lively. He always noticed a woman’s hair if he had noticed the woman at all; eyes, then hair. Hers wasn’t coarse but not fine-spun, either. It looked heavy around her shoulders, as if lifting it would give a sense of weight.
He realized that he was staring at her, rather looking at her like some sort of inspector. He should have felt embarrassed but she did not allow that. She just let him eye her, not smiling, not anything—though maybe she did faintly show she enjoyed what in any normal case was rudeness.
“If I were very young, and ill-mannered, I’d whistle,” he finally said.
“Whistle?”
“Unmannerly young men in my day—and grown ones, too, for that matter—when they saw an extraordinarily attractive damsel, would whistle.”
“Oh? How? Show me?” It was very calm, very interested.
He gave a wolf whistle.
She chuckled, pleasurably but with restraint. “How funny!”
He whistled again. “How appropriate! Will you sit? Coffee?”
“Thank you.”
She sat. He summoned more coffee. If they should hurry she’d have told him. There was that about this woman—for she was in her late twenties. She was candid and you knew it. She didn’t kid, hide anything, dodge, cheat or, on the other hand, she wasn’t utterly serious or solemn, either. She knew and enjoyed herself—quietly.
Seated, she looked at him almost as lengthily and nearly as closely as he’d done. “You are a very attractive man,” she said. Somebody had told her that and Glenn didn’t deny it—to do so would have been idiotic. But he wasn’t vain about his rugged and yet sensitive face, his fine eyes, high forehead, mobile countenance, deep voice, tallness, strength, any of it. Mostly, it was a born thing. The rest was merely simple to achieve by adequate care of luckily superb endowments.
“And you,” he said, after a moment, “are not one of those icy blondes, either. Usually, girls like you, seem sort of—oh—I can’t really say—”
“But you must! You meant to!” Her eyes might have flickered with mirth, but not for long and not with the unkind sort.
“You know all about me? That I came here and got a workup only yesterday?”
“All that, yes. So?”
“Well, then, day before, 1971, for me, there was a great deal of American talk, and some envy, of Swedish girls and Scandinavian sex freedom. Girls in posters who had—”
“My form? Color? I’m Swedish, by descent.”
“And I always felt those beauties were kind of—mechanical? Like toys, big dolls, wind-up-and-dance, or whatever? Not there, quite completely.”
“Sexually?” She was damned shrewd, Glenn thought, and a bit ahead. She saw he meant—exactly, sexually. “Maybe many were. Are. Not only my sort, Swedish, blonde, with a figure that has those measurements—the near to extreme ones. We haven’t had any sexual relations, Mr. Howard, have we?” She watched him blush slightly. “So you don’t know now? Well, that you will have to learn for yourself—though I will be happy to cooperate!” She chuckled pleasantly.
And that did it. She wasn’t the cool kind, for sure.
And yet—!
The coffee came—to his annoyance.
His annoyance turned into surprise at being that.
And surprise to anger. Frustrated anger. Bessie. Leandra. Lysette—a near thing! And now, Donna. Happy to cooperate. His narrowed eyes roamed around the top of the walls where the bugs were, proba
bly.
She was pouring coffee for him, then herself, as if she had always poured coffee for him, with this ease, with calm, with her cool-daffodil-milky-skin covering a passion and a willingness. They couldn’t know about Bessie. The others, they knew all about. Sooner or later, audience or not, he knew.
She sat down and sipped before saying, “Your sexual frustrations have frustrated us.” Said it amiably, even, he realized, compassionately.
“You read minds?”
She smiled gently. “Not at all. Your behavior—with your record, what I have of it—adds up.”
He decided to try to change the subject. “I know that I’m to get a guided tour. But not of what. Or in what order.”
“We begin with education. The part of it we feel you most need to know: sex education. Public grade school and then high school. You see, there’s where perhaps the greatest social changes have happened. And we feel that if you see the educational process you will understand a great deal about modern attitudes and behavior that are unfamiliar to you. Your—culture—was, of course, basically antisexual—”
“Not for everybody! And there was a ‘sex revolution’ going on—”
“With mistaken aims.” She folded her legs under herself like a big cat, a mature cat, not a fat cat but with that mystifying self-confidence secure cats have. “We know that a sexually ungratified human being is emotionally and intellectually disturbed and so … inefficient … for one thing; unable to devote his or her best to any other activity, whatever.”
Glenn smiled and that stopped her. “I have had a friend who held that theory.”
She was quietly severe. “It is no theory, now. Fact. Again, in your time, the simple truth that male and female, from birth, have sexual desires and the capacity for their gratification—something various authorities had proven and communicated to the public in your day but was not given any public value. Even notice.”
He shrugged. “A few groups of people were trying to put that circumstance to use. Give sexual opportunities to children of eight or over—if my reporters were correct.”
“Eight years too late!” She sounded “teacherish” he thought.
Again, all he could do was shrug. She continued in that rather teacher-to-pupil manner. “All sorts of neuroses in your era were traced to sexual desires of children for parents—unfulfillable, owing to your taboos.” She waited till she saw he wasn’t going to argue. “But whoever even suggested that those destructive characteristics might never have occurred, if there had been no taboos? Our researches have shown the mere theory occurred to few people in your time. Gordon and Phillips made the observation. And your ‘groups’ did make the effort—but at age eight and over—it was far too late.”
He settled back in his chair and let her talk. She began to explain the hardships of the early years, in this underground area. There was not food enough, water enough of a potable sort, for everybody, at times. There was even a possible threat of air-shortage, as one main regenerating plant failed and another seemed likely to. The population had to be reduced to the numbers that could be sustained. That meant the elderly, who couldn’t contribute anything, and defective infants, cripples and chronically diseased people—had to be sacrificed.
It also meant that more knowledge about genetics, more, even, than the considerable amount gathered by research from Glenn’s day to the final day of refuge, was required. In that field science had made great strides. This prefaced her next subject, the necessity of applying the old and new knowledge to the population. Glenn had, of course, heard something about that, already. He said so and then put the questions that had left him puzzled:
“Marriage is out, then? But Bob Baker—”
“We marry if we wish; and divorce is simple, too.”
“But”—his perplexity was great—“only if you match up genetically?”
She was slightly impatient. “Not at all! The female, sometimes, may be allowed to have a child, rarely two, by her husband. Many women are allowed no children. Many males are not permitted to father offspring. The genetic result would be dangerous. Or risky. Minimally, unsatisfactory. You don’t seem to see! Reproductive mating has nothing, nothing whatever to do with marriage, or with people not married. A huge computer is programmed with the genetic profile, every tiny datum, of each person after birth, or for those alive before the computer was available. This gives a ‘cross-match’ rating. It classifies the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Omegas—who cannot breed—in ways that show exactly which women should be allowed to have a child, two, or, rarely, three. Not four—we cannot sustain that high a population growth for now, and some years ahead. With the females classified, and the males similarly, it is quite simple for the computer to print out not only which woman should have what number of children, but, equally important, which males of those many categories would be the best fathers. When you have that information, then, you cannot err in a mating meant to reproduce.”
He got it, quite clearly enough for his judgment, about there. She amplified till he broke in:
“But, God Almighty! That’s stock breeding! What animals are made to do—for just such ends! Best of breed in each next foaling, litter, hatch!”
“You seem to find that wrong?”
“I do, by Jesus, I do! And why? Can a machine actually evaluate the human qualities that are human? Mind, spirit, imagination, logic, intellect, learning-ability, personality—the nonmechanical, nonphysical qualities that make a person specifically appealing, devoted, trustworthy, lovable to specific others?”
“What you think of as a ‘machine’ can make sure its infant-results will not have any of the thousand genetic liabilities that most persons had in some degree in your day. That surely is a positive value.”
“Admitted. But how does one remain human when one is, say, married, in love with the spouse, and gets a notice from the Corporation that next Tuesday, the wife will start bedding Mr. Jack Pierce, stranger. Or the husband will, on next Wednesdays and Saturdays, for four months, undertake to impregnate the following Class C Beta females, listed by name and address below? I suppose no marriage is even dented by those orders?”
She sighed. “It isn’t like that, for one thing. Why it’s not, you’ll learn at the schools—and soon. We have a lovely little resort on a lake where, for five days every month, nominated people gather. Good food, music, sports, and evenings of lovemaking. The mood is almost, I’d think, like what you might call religious—but happy-religious. Why? Because we are brought up from birth to know all about sex, and sexual or erotic relationships. No sadism, no masochism. Just that any two people once ‘graduated,’ you’d say, can have sex relations any time they want, married or not, if both want. And no jealousy because there’s no double standard, no—what was it called?—‘cheating’ possible, no inhibitions—no reason for them.” He tried to interrupt. “Wait! Another factor. All men and women, unless on one of those fertile holidays or on special permit, is kept medically sterile. Simple drug treatments. You therefore cannot get pregnant or cause a woman to become pregnant, unless you’re allowed, because all males and females receive medication that makes both highly fertile only when desired. Then they’re made abounding in superactive sperm and, ovary-wise, ideally ready for fertilization.”
For a long time he sat silently.
What he finally said, rather suddenly and without inner preface, was, “You married?”
She laughed heartily. “Of course! And I have two kids. But a three-child permit! So—look out!”
“Look out?”
“You’re an Alpha-plus, as I believe you know. There are only seventeen males with that rating in the city. So you are found to be very, very, very popular—and duty-bound by law, to be very, very, very generous.” Her smile was radiant. “Now do you see?”
“No.”
She sighed and tried another tack. “Look at it this way. You’re a woman and want to become a mother. You may or may not have found and married a man you like to live wit
h and raise kids with—if allowed. You—and he, naturally want as near ‘perfect’ sons or daughters as possible. Back in your genetic Dark Ages people didn’t even think of what bad inheritance the married pair might pass along. Didn’t know, usually. Couldn’t know, often. So when the flawed babies came, it was regarded as bad luck. Act of God, maybe. But suppose you could know, as mother, as husband, how to avoid all these genetic miseries? Would a man and wife be ‘loving’ to let her bear offspring that both knew might be or likely would be defective? When that risk need no longer be run by any mother or her husband?”
“If human beings were rational—” he began.
“But they can be! What you overlook, here, is that your idea of a married couple today still envisages them as they felt in the past. Suppose, though, that both the husband and wife have grown up from infancy, having erotic relations with anyone desired at any time? Suppose they expect to continue in that, after marriage? Now do you understand?”
Intellectually, Glenn supposed he did. Emotionally, he found this system repugnant. “I’ll have to think and learn more to form any opinion,” he finally said. “Suppose we start the tour?”
She seemed reluctant to leave but she assented.
The tour was designed to start with kindergarten sex classes. It did not. Donna drove her small car toward the East Grade School but she braked when half way and turned into a building complex that housed High School classes, only. She had seemed increasingly uncomfortable in the latter part of the drive and as she parked in the paved yard where there were scores of similar “electro’s,” Glenn realized she was in pain.
She stepped down and gave him a grimace for a smile. “I can’t go farther till I use the John.” She added, as she writhed visibly, “Look around if you want. I’ll be on the top floor for a good while, damn it!”
She ran into the building.
Glenn got out and studied the car. It was not very interesting. Evidently they’d found a way to make a battery that would furnish all the speed and the distance needed in these dug-out cities. The body was plastic, not metal, the engine an electric motor of a fairly conventional sort and the whole vehicle was made to last, not for looks. Most of the cars he’d seen were the same. After all, he thought, a “city” of less than twelve or even up to fifty thousand didn’t require anything faster or of longer range … whatever that was. Trucks were similarly powered and there were some fancier cars, but a car-buff of his days, Glenn thought, would be fearfully disappointed. All those supersized, streamlined, glittering vehicles of science fiction or of motor-magazine prediction had never been developed. No point.