Charles Maine - World Without Men

“Let me explain one or two things,” she said quietly. “This business of morality: It starts off as a condition imposed by society and it is based on one indisputable fact — that women are fertile. The object of social morality is to keep pregnancy within the husband-wife family relationship; in other words, to preserve the family unit, which is the basic component of any organized society.”

Gorste nodded uncertainly.

“If you admit that, then it follows that any act which could result in extramarital pregnancy is antisocial and there fore immoral. Isn’t that true of all relationships between men and women?”

“You mean… yes, I see what you mean. It could be true, I suppose. The only thing is that there can be a great deal of immorality which would not result in pregnancy be cause the people concerned have taken certain precautions.”

“That is exactly my point, Mr. Gorste. The morality we are talking about was crystallized a long, long time ago when what you call certain precautions just weren’t avail able, when all women were fertile, except on the naturally ‘safe’ days. The definition was clear cut in those times, and extra-marital pregnancy was a very real danger. Today, of course, there is no such danger, apart from the occasional, inevitable accident. Women can arrange their fertility to suit their own convenience, or, as is more often the case, men do the arranging for them.”

Gorste finished his drink and E.J. promptly refilled his glass. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “that contraception is resulting in more and more extramarital relationships.”

“And premarital. Do you doubt it?”

“Yes, I do,” Gorste said firmly. “I don’t think there has been any slackening of morality during the past generation. If anything moral principles are higher.”

“Is that the voice of your conscience speaking?”

“No, but I do believe in conscience; and there you have the real morality. People don’t change internally, however much society might evolve.”

“Let’s sit down,” E.J. suggested. She led the way to the settee, and Gorste followed her mechanically, nursing his glass and feeling just a little airy as the gin permeated his system. He sat beside her, reclining comfortably against the resilient back, his shoulder touching E.J.’s.

“Conscience,” E.J. murmured, speaking confidentially, close to his ear, “is a simple matter of conditioning. As a scientist you should know that. It’s a kind of distortion of the child mind induced by parental control, education, the instilling of a sense of what is right and wrong according to the standards of the day. The conscience of an aborigine would differ considerably from that of a big city man, and no doubt the conscience of an ancient Egyptian would vary widely from yours and mine. Even today moral conscience is largely a matter of geography. In the East a man may have four wives and feel perfectly pious about it; but in the West bigamy is a crime. So you see, Mr. Gorste, conscience is a variable quantity.”

“All right,” said Gorste pensively. “But what are you trying to prove?”

She placed a cool, smooth hand on his, and the shock of the contact vibrated momentarily through his body. “I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m trying to talk ordinary sense. And, of course, it all comes back to Sterilin.”

“I thought it would.”

“You think too much; that’s your trouble, Mr. Gorste.” He looked at her, finding her face very close and her eyes mischievous. Her fingers tightened impulsively on his hand, but he resisted an impulse to return the token caress.

“Sterilin,” she continued, “is going to accelerate the process of moral emancipation. After all, once you eliminate fertility, with one hundred percent reliability, then the whole significance of sex is altered.”

“Hedonism,” Gorste remarked.

“No. Hedonism is essentially a defiance of conventional conduct — a kind of anarchy. Sterilin cannot produce Hedonism, but it may well disassociate sex from pregnancy, with ultimate benefit to the whole of mankind. There will inevitably be profound changes in morality…, changes for the better.”

“That is a point of view,” Gorste conceded. “But contraceptives in one form or another have existed for longer than I have, and they haven’t destroyed morality.”

E.J. smiled enigmatically “Sterilin is different. It is a tablet, and it will last for six months; it has a long-term effect. The entire psychology of Sterilin administration is different, and the psychology of Sterilin users will be different, too.”

“I think you’re wrong, E.J.”

“We shall see. Meanwhile, it is for you to go ahead and perfect Sterilin in tablet form. And it is for me to plan the commercial exploitation. I’m relying on you, Mr. Gorste.” Her voice, Gorste thought, was becoming husky, and the light from the window was failing as the heavy rain clouds moved sluggishly across the darkening sky. He placed his empty glass on the floor, and glanced at his watch.

“I suppose I ought to be getting back to the lab,” he said uncertainly. “It has been a most interesting discussion, and I can see your point of view, though I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

He tried to stand up, but E.J. took his arms and pushed him back into the settee, very gently and too intimately. The blood beat in his head

“There’s all the time in the world, Mr. Gorste,” she whispered. “I haven’t finished with you yet.”

Gorste allowed himself to be seduced. He had known all along that it would finish this way, but his reluctance had been half-hearted from the beginning, and towards the end his own eagerness disgusted him. E.J. was exquisitely feminine, more so than he would have imagined, but she was also too smoothly professional, and her movements were those of a connoisseur, and he realized eventually that he had been exploited. The executive-employee relationship had not survived the first gin and tonic, and when it was all over he knew that he could no longer even remain an employee.

The first thing E.J. said — and it was an acrid question — was: “What price your moral conscience now, Mr. Gorste?”

Gorste sat beside her on the settee, biting his lip in the semi-darkness. The thing was done and he felt sick and ashamed. The image of Anne hovered accusingly in the obscure depths of his mind. E.J. had proved her point: conscience was a conditioned veneer, and morality was a function of fertility — or sterility, whichever way you liked to look it it. He was sterile, and it might well have been the sub-conscious awareness of his advantageous incapacity that had weakened his resolve. After all, no harm had been done. There could be no physical repercussions in terms of pregnancy. But he knew that he was making excuses, and that he bad been guilty of the supreme act of infidelity. Despite his moralizing and high-toned attitude, the big boss of Biochemix and future exploiter of Sterilin had made him eat his words here, in this very room, on this very settee.

Gorste’s mind returned irrelevantly to the dead, dissected monkey in the laboratory. Point of origin, he thought. Where is it all starting, this kind of licentious indulgence: in micro-tome sections of a simian ovary under a binocular micro-mope. And where will it finish, in the long run? In world-wide mass sterility artificially induced by Sterilin and its derivatives? In a rapidly falling birth rate? In an insidious decay of moral inhibitions, the destruction of conscience, an irrevocable plunge into moral agnosticism…?

“The word “amoral” checked his train of thought. It was a concept he had overlooked in trying to define his own attitude to the problem of Sterilin and to what had so recently taken place in this room. It was a loophole that he seized upon momentarily with a distinct feeling of relief, for, of course, amorality implied the non-recognition of accepted moral standards and behaviour One had one’s own standards, and one acted in good faith in accordance with those standards, acknowledging no higher authority. E.J.’s conduct, for in stance, could hardly be defined as immoral since she was aware of no conflict within herself, and there was no sense of having sinned against some arbitrary by-law of the soul imposed by conscience. She simply acted outside the pattern of conventional morality, in a bona fide manner. She was amoral, without a moral sense or code.