Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

“Group sex?”

“Yes. Anywhere from three persons up.”

“Jesus,” Tracy said. “Look, suppose I didn’t want to work out with five other people, or up, but would like to go to bed with, say, the redhead who just phoned us?”

Edmonds said reasonably, “Then why come to a group-sex center? You can pick up a single girl in any establishment, or out on the street for that matter. Would you like to go upstairs and watch?”

“Watch what?”

Edmonds explained. “Some of the groups don’t mind being watched while they perform. In fact, some of them like to be. Exhibitionists, you know. They’re in rooms that have large windows, usually with one way glass, so that you can look in and watch, but they can’t see out.”

“A voyeur’s dream world, eh?” Tracy said in disgust. “No thanks. For me, sex has always been a personal thing. I don’t want any group action and I don’t want to watch someone else getting their gun. Let’s get out of here. I’m beginning to get a bad taste in my mouth.”

Jo Edmonds finished his glass of wine and stood. “Why not, old chap,” he said, leading the way toward the door.

When they got back into the car, Tracy said sourly, “Some night on the town. What’s next?”

“Well, let me see,” Edmonds said as though considering alternatives. “There’s another club over here devoted to sadists and masochists. If you’d be interested, we could… ”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“No, not at all.”

“You mean it’s openly allowed?”

“Who could say no? They are consenting adults. Most who attend the place have fairly mild cases. They like to whip or be whipped, usually. Some like to be beaten up a bit, or to beat somebody else up. Actually, there is a touch of sadism in most of us, though we try to restrain it. And quite a bit of masochism in some. So, at any rate, if you like to whip people, or be whipped, we could go on over.”

“Now, just a minute,” Tracy protested“”Suppose you whipped somebody to death?”

Edmonds thought about it. He hadn’t started up the car as yet. He said, “I’ve never heard of such a case, though I’m not particularly up on the subject. It doesn’t seem to me that a masochist would be so to the extreme of wanting to be killed. And I rather doubt that many normal sadists wish to go to the point of killing even a consenting adult.”

“Normal sadists,” Tracy said indignantly. “How in the hell can you be a normal sadist?”

Edmonds looked at him, a twirk of humor on his easygoing face. He said, “Tracy, when indulging in preintercourse sex play, have you ever spanked a girl on her buttocks?”

Tracy scowled at him for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Yes, but she didn’t object. I think she rather liked it. It was just for fun.”

Edmonds laughed at him. “A couple of amateur sadists and masochists.”

“That wasn’t it at all, damn it!”

“Yes it was. You got a kick out of spanking her, and she got a kick out of being spanked. It probably brought on a quicker erection for you and prepared her for the act. Let’s take another example. Did you ever beat a man insensible with your fists, or by kicking him, or whatever?”

Tracy froze. “Yes.”

“Did you enjoy doing so?”

“Yes,” Tracy had to admit. “To the ultimate. He had just killed a very good friend of mine. He was a Moroccan soldier of Franco’s, a son of a bitch of a mercenary who had just killed Bud Whiteley, who was basically one of the most gentle persons I have ever met. I hit the bastard’s gun arm with an entrenching tool, disarming him. And then I went to work on him. When he was finally down, I kicked him in the side of the head. I hope the hell it killed him.”

“Very well,” the other nodded, “but you’ve just admitted that there can be pleasure in inflicting pain. Let’s take the other side of the coin. Did you ever do any boxing, that is, the sport of pugilism?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I have. In military training. What’s that got to do with it?”

“When you were boxing, did you take pleasure in taking as well as receiving? That is, you took a blow, he took a blow, and on and on until one of you won. But the whole match… was it fun?”

“I see what you mean,” Tracy admitted. “Yeah, I enjoyed the whole thing, both giving and taking, no matter who won, though, of course, I preferred to win. In fact, I preferred to give the other guy more than I took.”

“A primitive sport,” Edmonds said, starting up the car. “Today, in some places, they perform it as the Romans once did.”

“How do you mean?”

“They wear, ah, I think the term you used in your day was brass knucks.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No,” Edmonds said, as though it was the most reasonable thing in the world. “They are consenting adults. If they wish to do that to each other, who is to say them nay? And if others enjoy watching the spectacle, who is to say them nay?”

The car was moving upward now.

Tracy said desperately, “To go back a ways. Suppose one of your sadists killed one of the masochists. What would happen?”

“I would imagine that the psychiatrists of the Medical Guild would treat him.”

“Good God,” Tracy muttered.

“I would think so,” the other said judiciously. “It’s not my field, but it would seem that such a person had gone somewhat beyond normality and should be treated.”

Tracy Cogswell let his mind reel a moment or so at that before saying, “Where are we going now?”

“Well, how would you like to kill something?”

“How do you mean?”

Edmonds said, “How would you like to kill a dinosaur, or, say, a mammoth or a wooly mastadon? Did you hunt back in your own era?”

It seemed to Tracy that every time he got into a conversation in this age he wound up staring at the person he was talking to.

He said. “When I was younger I used to hunt rabbits and squirrels. I went out after deer a couple of times but had no luck. However, I always ate what I killed. My family could use meat. I didn’t just kill—”

“It’s different now,” Edmonds interrupted him. “We seldom, if ever, eat… natural meat, I suppose you’d call it. However, if you would like to shoot a dinosaur, just for the, ah, hell of it—”

“You mean you’ve got some sort of king-size shooting gallery, or whatever, where you can pot away at a mechanical monster or—”

“No,” the other man was shaking his head negatively. “I mean a real dinosaur, or, at least, as real as the biologists can reconstruct them.”

“Nonsense.”

“I beg your pardon?” Edmonds was driving manually now, and they were passing, from time to time, what seemed to be villas, sometimes restaurants, and, once, what looked like an amusement park of Tracy’s time. The whole area seemed to be something like a more sophisticated Disneyland.

Tracy said flatly, “There is no such thing as a dinosaur. That was an animal that became extinct a million years before man ever came on the scene.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised, I shouldn’t think. Though in actuality man has been changing the animal world about him for a long time. Take the dog. Both the Pekingese and the Mastiff are of the same species and can crossbreed. One was deliberately bred small, one large. Or the horse. The Shetland pony and the Percheron can crossbreed, or the horse and donkey, for that matter.”

“Listen,” Tracy snorted, “it’s a far cry from crossing a horse and donkey and getting a mule, to whomping up a dinosaur.”

“Yes. I was but using an example of man’s interfering in genetics. But you must realize that during the knowledge explosion, which has slowed down considerably but is still going on, as many breakthroughs were made in the biological fields, including genetics, as in any others. Today, the scientists, computer aided, can create just about any life form that makes sense… and some that don’t.”