Edward Llewellyn - Prelude to Chaos

A hay loft on a warm summer night is a magic place to make love. Something that a thousand generations of farmgirls and farmboys have known but which most men and women of my generation have never discovered.

I discovered it that night and later I slept the sweetest sleep I had slept in years. An outlaw, being hunted across a nation going down into chaos, I awoke as refreshed as if I was a young man without a worry to Ms name. If such a freak exists!

The sunlight was streaming in through the open door and Judy was sitting up naked, pulling bits of hay from her hair. I started to stroke her back, and then, in default of anything better to say, I asked, “What’s all this stuff about Impermease?”

“Impermease?” She turned to look at me. That’s not the kind of subject to bring up on the morning after our marriage. But I guess you’d better know.”

“Not if it makes you serious!” I objected.

“Gavin—we’ve got to be serious again. So I’ll start by telling you what I’ve found out about why everything’s breaking down.”

I lay back in the hay. “Okay! If you must!”

She raised herself on one elbow and started to deliver a lecture on female reproductive physiology. “Every month my ovaries release an egg that was formed and stored in me six months before I was born.”

I studied her stomach, trying to decide where her ovaries were. Then I started stroking it.

She pushed my hand away. “I was born with every fertile egg I’ll ever have already inside me.”

“But you weren’t born looking like you do now. So it’s only been during the last few years that anybody’s wanted to fertilize one of ’em.”

She didn’t smile. “Ever heard of a drug called thalidomide?”

“Vaguely. It damaged babies, didn’t it? Way back in the last century.”

“It was the safest sedative known at the time, except for one terrible side effect If a woman took it during her first three months of pregnancy her baby might be born without arms or legs. Thalidomide checked the development of the limb buds in the fetus.”

I sat up, feeling sick. This was not the kind of thing I like to discuss with a naked woman.

She rammed her point home. “What do you think would have happened if thalidomide had checked the development of the Fallopian tubes? The tubes that take the eggs from the ovary to the uterus?”

I didn’t want to think about such unpleasant possibilities, but Judith’s expression demanded an answer. “I guess it would have the same effect as tying ’em. The girl would grow up sterile.”

“Right. But how would anyone know her tubes weren’t there? It’s easy to recognize there’s something wrong when a baby’s bom without arms. How would you recognize a baby without tubes?”

“Well—you wouldn’t. Not until she tried to get pregnant. Twenty years later, maybe 1” I started pulling on my clothes, my sex-drive abolished. “Is that what Impermease does? Block off a girl’s tubes before she’s born?”

“The effect’s much the same. The mechanism’s not so simple as blocking the tubes. If it was only the tubes, they could be fixed by surgery these days. Impermease hits the eggs. Prevents them from ever dividing. It’s a selective inhibitor of cell division.”

I extracted the meaning of that statement after a little thought. “Some woman told me that was how Noncon worked. The monthly pill she was taking. As long as she took one a month she couldn’t get pregnant. But if she stopped taking it she could. She swore by it. The great liberator she called it. Had three kids too—none of ’em mine,” I added quickly.

“If those kids were girls they were born sterile. Noncon’s the trade name for Impermease. Impermease when it’s been colored, scented, and packaged in heart-shaped containers!” “Good God!” I stared at her. “I don’t get it. I thought the idea was to stop the woman from getting pregnant. Not to sterilize the fetus when she did.”

“That was the idea. They didn’t know that the traces of Impermease remaining in the woman’s body weren’t enough to stop her from getting pregnant But were enough to cross the placental barrier and sterilize the eggs in the fetus. Because of the time lag, about twenty years, they only found out when the birth rate among girls wanting babies started to fall!”

“So all those women who were taking Noncon are going to have sterile daughters!”

“All the women who’ve been taking Noncon since the late nineties have been having sterile daughters. They’re only starting to discover that now. And most sexually active women in North America have been taking their monthly ‘liberator’ for the last twenty-five years. They’re still taking it!” She came to sit beside me. “I haven’t. My mother didn’t She was one of the earliest converts to the Teacher. And he forbade the use of any drug or chemical developed after 1990.” “How the hell did he know?”

‘The Light warned him. Not against Impermease specifically. Against all post-1990 chemicals.”

“Good for the Light!” I spat in sudden anger. “Typical Jehovah! Warn the elect in vague terms. But don’t tell ’em why or what. Save the dumb obedient faithful! Let the infidels die.”

“I wouldn’t push your God’s sense of humor too far!”

I returned to the subject at hand. “So the ladies of the Affluence have been having sterile daughters. But the vast majority of women don’t belong to the Affluence. They can’t afford to buy colored, scented, and prettily packaged contraceptives. Yet you speak as if this thing’s worldwide. How come?”

“Impermease stops cell division, but very selectively. It stops rapidly dividing cells. Such as cancer cells. It’s sold as a cancer prophylactic under the trade name Bancan. Black tablets in a container with a crushed crab on the cover.”

“Christ! I took those once when I thought—” I stopped, suddenly ashamed of an empty fear. For months I’d been afraid to show my wart to the doc.

“You and a hell of a lot of other people. Cancerphobia— fear of cancer—has been endemic in Europe and North America for years. Men as much as women. Bancan won’t have harmed you! If only the stuff had made mens’ balls drop off it would have saved a lot of women from a lot of misery.” “Christ! So Bancan’s Impermease too! And masses of people take it regularly.” I looked at the floor. “And the FTA wouldn’t have dared to stop the sale of Bancan. Not even if they’d known.”

“Well, they know now! And they’re trying to stop it being used without facing the public. The Bancan you buy today is a placebo.”

Another bit of Administration flim-flam! But one I could excuse. I thought of the howl if they’d tried to ban it openly. “So they’ve stopped it. But I still don’t see how that affects the non-affluent. They can’t afford Bancan any more than their women can afford Noncon.”

“Impermease is easy and cheap to produce. For over twenty years they’ve been making it by the megakilo.” Judith sighed, then clenched her fists. “Not to sell as expensively packaged tablets of Noncon and Bancan. When I described how it stopped division in rapidly dividing cells I gave the clue to its third use. Probably by far its most important use. It stops cell division in insect pupa. So it’s a first-class insecticide. And the insects never have a chance to develop resistance. It’s now the pesticide of choice all over the world. Mogro—the farmer’s friend. Without it the cost of food would quadruple and most farmers would go bankrupt.”

“And millions would starve in the famines. That seems a legitimate use for Impermease. As long as the farmer’s daughter keeps her hands out of the insecticides. I suppose—” I looked up at her. “Oh no!”