Charles Maine - World Without Men

“You killed him…” Gorste echoed in cold consternation. Anne came nervously towards him and knelt down by his chair. He remained remote and frigid. She said: “I didn’t mean to tell you ever. It — it slipped out. But it’s true, Phil. I killed him for what he had done to you. I killed him so that we could be together…”

“It was suicide. He gassed himself.”

“He’d been drinking heavily one night. He wanted coffee.

I put four sleeping tablets in it. When he was unconscious I dragged him into the kitchen, and, well,… I’m not sorry, darling; I’ve never regretted it.”

Gorste stood up, leaving her kneeling by the chair, and paced heavily across the room. “You murdered your husband,” he said hollowly. “You were unfaithful to him and then you murdered him.”

Anger began to flush into Anne’s face. She stood up slowly, staring intently at Gorste who, still pacing the floor, took care not to look at her.

“You talk,” she said, “as if you never had anything to do with it. If I was unfaithful it was because of you. If I hadn’t killed Drewin we wouldn’t have been married now.”

“What appals me is that it’s happening all over again,” said Gorste in a thin strained voice. “You’ve been playing around with some other man behind my back, and you’re having his child. You thought you could pass it off as mine, but it won’t work. How long will it be before you decide to murder me, too? How long?”

“You fiend!”

“Coming from you that’s funny. I just can’t believe it; that you could actually kill a man in cold blood. There wasn’t even a fight or an argument. You doped his coffee, then pushed his head in the gas oven. That’s about as cold-blooded as you can get.”

“So… what are you going to do about it?”

Gorste looked at her for the first time in minutes. His face was a mask; there was hate in his eyes. “We’re through, Anne. I don’t want an unfaithful wife, and I won’t protect a murderess. Get out and go to your lover. Get out! That’s all.”

“You’re a stupid fool, Philip,” she said angrily. “There isn’t any lover, and what I did was for you. Can’t you get that into your thick skull?”

“You’re a liar,” he said firmly.

She lost control of herself at that point, and flung herself at him, beating at his face with clenched fists, and biting his wrists as he tried to restrain her. And the tears came abruptly, and crying and moaning she tried to hurt the man who she felt had hurt her. Gorste became angry and struck at her. She fell, caught her head against the edge of the coffee table, and lay still.

When he had confirmed that she was dead, Gorste’s first reaction was to telephone for the police. He dialled the first three digits without feeling, his mind drained of all thought or emotion. Then he hesitated and replaced the phone.

It was an accident, of course. He hadn’t deliberately tried to kill her or hurt her in any way. She had slipped — the rest had been inevitable.

What would the average man have done? It was an accident and he would not have wasted time in confirming death. He would have called a doctor; then the doctor could call the police if he thought it necessary.

He picked up the phone again and dialled a number. The doctor’s voice came over the line.

“This is Philip Gorste, I —”

“Ah, Mr. Gorste,” interrupted the doctor cheerfully, “I’ve been meaning to ring you. The lab report came in today. You know, about your sterility test…. You were wrong, completely wrong!”

“Meaning?” said Gorste, hardly able to concentrate on the other’s words.

“Meaning you’re not sterile and never were sterile. No reason why you shouldn’t have a family of twenty if you wish. Unless, perhaps, your wife…”

“Yes, my wife,” Gorste echoed bitterly.

“Perhaps I ought to examine her, just to make sure. Not that she’s sterile, but sometimes there can be a slight physical impediment which can be corrected.”

“She’s sterile enough, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. You’d better come over and examine her right now.”

The doctor hesitated an instant, as if he had detected some strange and convincing inflexion in Gorste’s voice. Then he said: “I’ll be there without delay, Mr. Gorste. Give me five minutes.”

Gorste hung up dejectedly, then lifted the phone again and dialled the police.

The big flame-coloured letters of the neon sign spelled Sterilin. Each letter was a convoluted glass tube fifty feet tall, and the word was clamped high on the wall of the Wasserman building, glaring its message into the night like a danger beacon. It dominated Piccadilly Circus, swamping all the other neon lights in its vicinity. You could see it from across the river, and on a clear night the letters of the word could be made out from the top of the Microwave Tower in Highgate, nearly six miles away.

Buttonight visibility was not good. The sign peered harshly through a semi-opaque curtain of persistent drizzle, frustrated and confined, but seeking compensation in the wet surface of the road where the reflection, broken and shimmering in the rain film, echoed glowing fragments of the word — Sterilin.

Piccadilly Circus was almost deserted. The rain had sent the evening pleasure seekers scuttling into movies and theatres and restaurants. There was not much traffic. Drivers whose destination lay beyond the West End preferred the metallic air-conditioned luxury of the Metrocircle Tunnel with its four-lane, plastic-surfaced road, or the wide ambitious highway of the elevated Central Bypass, poised like an in finite bridge across the tops of the taller buildings.

The statue of Eros was floodlit, as it had been for the past half century. The arrow no longer pointed towards Shaftesbury Avenue; instead it was aimed accurately at the gigantic Sterilin sign. The change in orientation had been surreptitiously introduced some four or five years ago, and few people realized that Sir Bernard Wasserman was behind it Sir Bernard had, in fact, pulled a few influential wires, and the statue had been turned on its pedestal one night to face and complement the message of the neon sign. Eros and Sterilin: symbols of the early years of the twenty-first century, if you stopped to think about it, but not many people bothered to think at all. They were too busy being happy.

It was part of Brad Somer’s job to do a great deal of thinking, however. But not tonight. Wasserman wasn’t on his mind, nor was he consciously aware of the giant word glaring incandescently at him through the rain. It was simply one of the things you took for granted, a part of the Piccadilly décor, as familiar and unremarkable as the Guinness clock in years gone by; and not only in Piccadilly, for Sterilin, in scarlet neon, could be seen in most main roads and streets in most cities and towns in the country or in the world.

He was waiting for a girl. Six or seven other men were waiting for girls, too. It was a popular occupation in the age of atomics and automation and applied happiness. They were all standing on the island at the centre of Piccadilly Circus, under the luminous shadow of Eros, becoming progressively wetter as each minute passed by. Occasionally they eyed each other covertly, and each looked cold and damp and treasonably miserable, out of key in this ecstatic world of 2021. But it was only a temporary modulation of mood brought about by the weather. In due course, and one by one, came the girls, and the transient gloom of the patient males dispersed like fine frost in morning sunshine.

Somer’s girl was late, and soon he was alone on the island. It continued to rain and he continued to wait. The raindrops bounced and pattered on the shining wet road, creating ephemeral craters that came and went like snapshots. Cars sighed and they sped wearily past, throwing a gentle spray into the air from hooded wheels.