Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “How? How? He’s the scientist. I’m not. I simply eliminate that ‘how’ from my thinking. The worrisome thing about it is that he doesn’t think in small ways about small issues. I’m afraid that’s just what he meant—that he was going to change some factor in humanity that is responsible for this power we have over men.”

  “Oh…really,” said Jenny. She looked up at Lucinda, moved her hands uneasily. “Lucinda, I know how great the doctor is, and how much you think of him, but—no one man could do such a thing! Not outside of his own home.” She grinned fleetingly. “Probably not inside of it, for very long…I never understood just what sort of a scientist he is. Can you tell me, I mean, aside from any secret projects he might be on? Like Bob, now; Bob’s a high-temperature metallurgist. What is the doctor, exactly?”

  “That’s the right question to ask,” Lucinda said, and her voice was shadowed. “Dr. Lefferts is a—well, the closest you could get to it would be to call him a specializing non-specialist. You see, science has reached the point where each branch of it continually branches into specialties, and each specialty has its own crop of experts. Most experts live in the confines of their own work. The doctor was saying just the other day that he’d discovered a fluorine-boron step-reaction in mineralogy that had been known for so long that the mineralogists had forgotten about it—yet it was unknown to metallurgy. Just as I said a moment ago, his mind is great, and—different. His job is to draw together the chemists and the biologists, the pure mathematicians and the practical physicists, the clinical psychologists and the engineers and all the other-ists and -ologies. His specialty is scientific thought as applied to all the sciences. He has no assignments except to survey all the fields and transfer needed information from one to the other. There has never been such a position in the Institute before, nor a man to fill it. And there is no other institute like this one on earth.

  “He has entree into every shop and lab and library in this Institute. He can do anything or get anything done in any of them.

  “And when he said ‘I shall alter it,’ he meant what he said!”

  “I never knew that’s what he did,” breathed Jenny. “I never knew that’s what…who he is.”

  “That’s who he is.”

  “But what can he change?” Jenny burst out. “What can he change in us, in all men, in all women? What is the power he’s talking about, and where does it come from, and what would…will…happen if it’s changed?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucinda said thoughtfully, “I—do—not—know. The blonde in the convertible…that sort of thing is just one of the things a woman naturally does, because she is a woman, without thinking of it.”

  Unexpectedly, Jenny giggled. “You don’t plan those things. You just do them. It’s nice when it works. A better roast from the butcher. A reminder from one of the men at the bank that a cheque’s overdrawn, in time to cover it.”

  “I know,” smiled Lucinda, “I know. It’s easy and inaccurate to say that all those men are on the prowl—or all those women either. A few are, but most are not. The willingness of men to do things for women has survived even equal opportunities and equal pay for women. The ability of women to get what they want from men lies completely in their knowledge of that willingness. So the thing my husband wants to alter—will alter—lies in that department.”

  “Lucinda, why don’t you just ask him?”

  “I shall. But I don’t know if I’ll get an answer. If he regards it as a security matter, nothing will get it out of him.”

  “You’ll tell me, won’t you?”

  “Jenny, my sweet, if he tells me nothing, I can’t tell you. If he tells me and asks me to keep his confidence, I won’t tell you. If he tells me and puts no restrictions on it, I’ll tell you everything.”

  “But—”

  “I know, dear. You’re thinking that it’s a bigger thing than just what it might mean to the two of us. Well, you’re right. But down deep I’m confident. I’d pit few women against most men and expect them to win out. But anytime all womankind is against all mankind, the men don’t stand a chance. Think hard about it, anyway. At least we should be able to figure out where the attack is coming from.”

  “At least you admit it’s an attack.”

  “You bet your sweet life it’s an attack. There’s been a woman behind most thrones all through history. The few times that hasn’t been true, it’s taken a woman to clean up the mess afterward. We won’t give up easily, darling!”

  “’The north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow,’ and so on,” said Lucinda as she lit the fire. “I’m going to need a new coat.”

  “Very well,” said Dr. Lefferts.

  “A fur coat this time.”

  “Fur coats,” pronounced the doctor, “are impractical. Get one with the fur inside. You’ll keep warmer with less to carry.”

  “I want a fur coat with the fur outside, where it shows.”

  “I understand and at times admire the decorative compulsions,” said the doctor, rising from the adjusted cube he used for an easy chair, “but not when they are unhealthy, uneconomical, and inefficient. My dear, vanity does not become you.”

  “A thing that has always fascinated me,” said Lucinda in a dangerously quiet voice, “in rabbits, weasels, skunks, pumas, pandas, and mink, and all other known mammals and marsupials, is their huge vanity. They all wear their fur outside.”

  He put on his pince-nez to stare at her. “Your logic limits its factors. I find such sequences remarkable because of the end results one may obtain. However, I shall not follow this one.”

  “If you’re so preoccupied with efficiency and function,” she snapped, “why do you insist on wearing those pince-nez instead of getting corneal lenses?”

  “Functional living is a pattern which includes all predictable phenomena,” he said reasonably. “One of these is habit. I recognize that I shall continue to like pince-nez as much as I shall continue to dislike rice pudding. My functionalism therefore includes these glasses and excludes that particular comestible. If you had the fur-coat habit, the possibility of a fur coat would be calculable. Since you have never had such a coat, we can consider the matter disposed of.”

  “I think some factors were selected for that sequence,” said Lucinda between her teeth, “but I can’t seem to put my finger on the missing ones.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said,” appended Lucinda distinctly, “that speaking of factors, I wonder how you’re coming with your adjustments of human nature to eliminate the deadliness of the female.”

  “Oh, that. I expect results momentarily.”

  “Why bother?” she said bitterly. “My powers don’t seem to be good enough for a fur coat as it is.”

  “Oh,” he said mildly, “were you using them?”

  Because she was Lucinda, she laughed. “No, darling, I wasn’t.” She went to him and pressed him back into the big cubicle chair and sat on the arm. “I was demanding, cynical, and unpleasant. These things in a woman represent the scorched earth retreat rather than the looting advance.”

  “An excellent analogy,” he said. “Excellent. It has been a long and bitter war, hasn’t it? And now it’s coming to an end. It is an extraordinary thing that in our difficult progress toward the elimination of wars, we have until now ignored the greatest and most pernicious conflict of all—the one between the sexes.”

  “Why so pernicious?” she chuckled. There are times when it’s rather fun.

  He said solemnly, “There are moments of exhilaration, even of glory, in every great conflict. But such conflicts tear down so much more than they build.”

  “What’s been so damaging about the war between the sexes?”

  “Though it has been the women who made men, it has been largely men who have made the world as we know it. However, they have had to do so against a truly terrible obstacle: the emotional climate created by women. Only by becoming an ascetic can a man avoid the oscillations between intoxication and distru
st instilled into him by women. And ascetics usually are already insane or rapidly become so.”

  “I think you’re overstating a natural state of affairs.”

  “I am overstating,” he admitted, “for clarity’s sake, and off the record. However, this great war is by no means natural. On the contrary, it is a most unnatural state of affairs. You see, homo sapiens is, in one small but important respect, an atypical mammal.”

  “Do tell.”

  He raised his eyebrows, but continued. “In virtually all species but ours, the female has a rigidly fixed cycle of conjugal acceptability.”

  “But the human female has a—”

  “I am not referring to that lunar cycle, unmentionable everywhere except in blatant magazine advertisements,” he said shortly, “but a cycle of desire. Of rut.”

  “A pretty word.” Her eyes began to glitter.

  “Mahomet taught that it occurred every eight days, Zoroaster nine days, Socrates and Solomon agreed on ten. Everyone else, as far as I can discover, seems to disagree with these pundits, or to ignore the matter. Actually there are such cycles, but they are subtle at best, and differ in the individual from time to time, with age, physical experience, geography, and even emotional state. These cycles are vestigial; the original, natural cycle disappeared early in the history of the species, and has been trembling on the verge ever since. It will be a simple matter to bring it back.”

  “May I ask how?”

  “You may not. It is a security matter.”

  “May I then ask what effect you expect this development to have?”

  “Obvious, isn’t it? The source of woman’s persistent and effective control over man, the thing that makes him subject to all her intolerances, whims, and bewildering coyness, is the simple fact of her perennial availability. She has no regular and predictable cycle of desire. The lower animals have. During the brief time that a female mouse, a marten, or a mare is approachable, every male of her species in the vicinity will know of it and seek her out; will, in effect, drop everything to answer a basic call. But unless and until that call occurs, the male is free to think of other things. With the human female, on the other hand, the call is mildly present at all times, and the male is never completely free to think of other things. It is natural for this drive to be strong. It is unnatural indeed for it to be constant. In this respect Freud was quite correct; nearly every neurosis has a sexual basis. We are a race of neurotics, and the great wonder is that we have retained any of the elements of sanity at all. I shall liberate humanity from this curse. I shall restore the natural alternations of drive and rest. I shall free men to think and women to take their rightful places as thinking individuals beside them, rather than be the forced-draught furnaces of sexual heat they have become.”

  “Are you telling me,” said Lucinda in a small, shocked voice, “that you have found a way to—to neuterize women except for a few hours a month?”

  “I am and I have,” said Dr. Lefferts. “And incidentally, I must say I am grateful to you for having turned me to this problem.” He looked up sharply. “Where are you going, my dear?”

  “I’ve got to th-think,” said Lucinda, and ran from the room. If she had stayed there for another fifteen seconds, she knew she would have crushed his skull in with the poker.

  “Who-oh, Lucinda? How nice. Come in…why, what’s the matter?”

  “Jenny, I’ve got to talk to you. Is Bob home?”

  “No. He’s got night duty at the high-temperature lab this week. Whatever is wrong?”

  “It’s the end of the world,” said Lucinda in real anguish. She sank down on the sofa and looked up at the younger woman. “My husband is putting a—a chastity belt on every woman on earth.”

  “A what?”

  “A chastity belt.” She began to laugh hysterically. “With a time-lock on it.”

  Jenny sat beside her. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t laugh like that. You’re frightening me.”

  Lucinda lay back, gasping. “You should be frightened…Listen to me, Jenny. Listen carefully, because this is the biggest thing that has happened since the deluge.” She began to talk.

  Five minutes later Jenny asked dazedly, “You mean—if this crazy thing happens, Bob won’t…won’t want me most of the time?”

  “It’s you who won’t do any wanting. And when you don’t, he won’t either…It isn’t that that bothers me so much, Jenny, now that I’ve had a chance to think about it. I’m worried about the revolution.”

  “What revolution?”

  “Why, this is going to cause the greatest upheaval of all time! Once these cycles become recognized for what they are, there will be fireworks. Look at the way we dress, the way we use cosmetics. Why do we do it? Basically, to appear to be available to men. Practically all perfumes have a musk or musk-like base for that very reason. But how long do you think women will keep up the hypocrisy of lipstick and plunging necklines when men know better—know that they couldn’t possibly be approachable all the time? How many men will let their women appear in public looking as if they were?”

  “They’ll tie us up in the house the way I do Mitzi-poodle,” said Jenny in an awed tone.

  “They’ll leave us smugly alone with easy minds for three weeks out of four,” said Lucinda, “and stand guard over us like bull elks the rest of the time, to keep other men away.”

  “Lucinda!” Jenny squeaked and covered her face in horror. “What about other women? How can we compete with another woman when she’s—she’s—and we’re not?”

  “Especially when men are conditioned the way they are. Women will want to stick to one man, more likely than not. But men—men, building up pressures for weeks on end…”

  “There’ll be harems again,” said Jenny.

  “This is the absolute, final, bitter end of any power we ever had over the beasts, Jenny—do you see that? All the old tricks—the arch half-promise, the come-on, the manipulations of jealousy—they’ll be utterly meaningless! The whole arsenal of womankind is based on her ability to yield or not to yield. And my husband is going to take the choice away from us. He’s going to make absolutely certain that at one time we can’t yield, and at another time we must!”

  “And they’ll never have to be nice to us at either time,” added Jenny miserably.

  “Women,” said Lucinda bitterly, “are going to have to work for a living.”

  “But we do!”

  “Oh, you know what I mean, Jenny! The lit-tul wife in the lit-tul home…that whole concept is based on women’s perpetual availability. We’re not going to be able to be homemakers, in that sense, at monthly intervals.”

  Jenny jumped up. Her face was chalky. “He hasn’t stopped any war,” she ground out. Lucinda had never seen her like this. “He’s started one, and it’s a beaut. Lucinda, he’s got to be stopped, even if you—we have to…”

  “Come on.”

  They started for Dr. Lefferts’ house, striding along like a couple of avenging angels.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Lefferts, rising politely. “You brought Jenny. Good evening, Jenny.”

  Lucinda planted herself in front of him and put her hands on her hips. “You listen to me,” she growled. “You’ve got to stop that nonsense about changing women.”

  “It is not nonsense and I shall do nothing of the kind.”

  “Dr. Lefferts,” said Jenny in a quaking voice, “can you really do this—this awful thing?”

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “It was quite simple, once the principles were worked out.”

  “It was quite simple? You men you’ve already—”

  Dr. Lefferts looked at his watch. “At two o’clock this afternoon. Seven hours ago.”

  “I think,” said Lucinda quietly, “that you had better tell us just exactly what you did, and what we can expect.”

  “I told you it is a security matter.”

  “What has my libido to do with national defense?”

  “That,” said the doctor, in a tone which
referred to that as the merest trifle, “is a side issue. I coincided it with a much more serious project.”

  “What could be more serious than…”

  “There’s only one thing that serious, from a security standpoint,” said Lucinda. She turned to the doctor. “I know better than to ask you any direct questions. But if I assume that this horrible thing was done in conjunction with a superbomb test—just a guess, you understand—is there any way for an H-blast to bring about a change in women such as you describe?”

  He clasped both hands around one knee and looked up at her in genuine admiration. “Brilliant,” he said. “And most skillfully phrased. Speaking hypothetically—hypothetically, you understand,” he interjected, waving a warning finger, “a hydrogen bomb has an immense power of diffusion. A jet of energy of that size, at that temperature, for even three or four microseconds, is capable of penetrating the upper reaches of stratosphere. But the effect does not end there. The upward displacement causes great volumes of air to rush in toward the rushing column from all sides. This in turn is carried upward and replaced, a process which continues for a considerable time. One of the results must be the imbalance of any distinct high or low pressure areas within several thousand miles, and for a day or two freak weather developments can be observed. In other words, these primary and secondary effects are capable of diffusing a—ah—substance placed in the bomb throughout the upper atmosphere, where, in a matter of days, it will be diffused throughout the entire envelope.”

  Lucinda clasped her hands in a slow, controlled way, as if one of them planned to immobilize the other and thereby keep both occupied.

  “And is there any substance…I’m still asking hypothetical questions, you understand—is there anything which could be added to the hydrogen fusion reaction which might bring about these—these new cycles in women?”