Charles Maine - World Without Men

Beyond the door was the immense foyer, and beyond that the glass doors opening on the airport itself, with its massive runways intermeshed like the canals of Mars. A double-decker coach was waiting outside the doors to convey the passengers over the half mile of concrete to the departure point where the giant jet liner waited in silent, powerful impatience.

A sense of freedom filtered into his mind, lightening his step and adding a certain zest to his movements. He began to whistle. The worst was over. Lecia had kept faith with him There was nothing he could do about her now; one man couldn’t fight the immense closely integrated secret security force of a powerful government Escape was the only solution.

He was halfway to the glass door when an arm gently linked into his. His heart raced momentarily He forced himself to look round.

Rona was walking beside him, smiling pleasantly. He didn’t dare stop. The glass door was only a dozen yards away.

“I’m surprised at you, Brad,” Rona said quietly “I thought you liked me, honestly I did.”

He said nothing, but walked forward with urgent steps She tugged at his arm.

“I never knew a guy in such a hurry. It’s not very complimentary, Brad. A girl has to study her own interests these days.”

He stopped abruptly, turning to face her, and fighting the sudden fear that gnawed at his abdomen. Uncertainty under mined his resolve, uncertainty about her, uncertainty about himself.

“Rona,” he said, “I had a sudden recall. I have to get back to the States on this flight. It’s a personal matter…”

“It’s more personal than you think,” she replied softly.

Something glinted below eye level. Glancing down he saw distinctly the barrel of a small automatic pistol peering from her clenched fist. And then he became aware of two stationary figures standing like shadows behind her — gaunt, lean men with eyes of granite.

“Come with me, Brad,” she said.

He looked once towards the glass door and the airline coach filling with passengers. It might have been a billion light years away. Without feeling or reaction he allowed her to take his arm again, this time with firmer fingers, and permitted himself to be guided obliquely across the foyer to a staircase.

It was a small office on the first floor, with a wide window overlooking the runways. The desk and the chairs wore a thin film of dust, and the room possessed an atmosphere of stagnation and desolation strangely out of keeping with the ultra-modern décor of the airport building. He was aware of a quality of disuse, of isolated privacy.

The gaunt men moved apart, one to the window and one to the door, and remained motionless, hands in pockets, eyeing him stonily. Only Rona remained friendly and warm, regarding him archly with a hint of veiled amusement. She was still holding the gun.

“For an honest man with nothing on his conscience you ask very few questions,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what this is all about?”

He shook his head slowly. His mind had already sealed it self off from the immediate present and was casting around for a line of action. The coach would be just about full now. ready to move off to the departure point. He had a mirute, perhaps less. There was no time to talk or listen.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way, Brad,” Rona went on. “The State rates security very highly, and as a servant of the

State it is my unpleasant duty to carry out its policy. I’m sorry it had to be you. I was beginning to develop a genuine affection for you.”

A pause while she weighed the gun speculatively in her hand.

“Brad Somer, I am arresting you under the Emergency Regulations of the Social Stability Act for subversive activity contrary to internal security. I must ask you to accompany me to Security Headquarters.”

The gaunt men began to close in on him. With each step they took he sensed his future diminishing and darkening. A brightly lucid thought illuminated his mind in an instant of self-criticism. Why did men facing certain death so often refrain from risking their lives? Inaction could achieve nothing: action could not achieve less, but it might secure an ad vantage.

He kicked her legs from under her with one vicious swing of his foot, then instantly flung himself on top of her and grappled for the gun. The men were flitting bat shadows on either side of him. The gun was in his hand and his finger was squeezing the trigger of its own volition. There was no sound, just the barely inaudible click of some internal mechanism and the faint sighing of displaced air as the slugs were hurled from their chambers. Dope slugs, he thought briefly, non-lethal, anaesthetic, but nonetheless effective.

It was all over before he realized it. Rona and the two men lay paralysed and immobile on the floor, looking in some way strangely unreal, like a single frame from a slow-motion movie. His heart was pounding violently and his lungs were gasping for air, but there was no time to waste.

He slipped the dope pistol into his pocket then rushed from the room and down the stairs, almost throwing himself across the foyer towards the glass door. The coach was beginning to move. In one final, punishing effort he caught up with it and forced the door open. Helping hands seized him. A moment later he was lying almost prostrated in one of the deep resilient seats, and voices around him were talking. “Gee, mister, you nearly didn’t make it.”

“How come you didn’t hear the flight warning?”

“That was some run, friend. World record I’d say…” He didn’t care. The past had suddenly slipped away from him, and the future was warm and welcoming.

The jet liner took off dead on time, and ascended rapidly to thirty-thousand feet, where it leaped forward on booster jets and broke through the sound barrier without sound or vibration. Twenty minutes later, when the automatic pilot took over, the aircraft was cruising at a steady 3,500 knots.

Brad sat slumped in his window seat, lost in a kind of thought that didn’t involve thinking, staring out at the white cloud masses far below. Facing the tail, he was aware that the sun was on his right, casting shadows across the features of his fellow passengers almost opposite.

He recognized his lack of emotion as a symptom of psycho logical shock. Too many things had happened in too short a time. It was one thing to be a roving journalist in pursuit of facts, but it was quite another thing to be the pursued, to find yourself suddenly and unwittingly the victim of ruthlessly applied security. To witness the sudden disintegration of people you knew: Rona, the real Rona, then Lecia, and to find the web of intrigue spread all around you, was to realize abruptly the sinister strength of the shadow you were investigating and to appreciate fully the true nature of its power. In the long run, when it came to the point, personal life always seemed more important than the threat of universal death.

It was over now. There might be trouble with security in America, but it would only be trouble. He felt that the American government didn’t take the problem of concealing the gradual elimination of the male sex quite so seriously as in Britain. Perhaps it was because the U.S.A. had always been dominated by women, and men had always played a somewhat subordinate part in the social structure; but that was just a glib theory, he knew.

In less than one hour he would be back on his native soil, able to breathe freely and able to think again with a mind uninhibited and unconstricted by fear and apprehension. And he had the story now, with enough confirmation to give it strength, ready to break on an unsuspecting world. The scoop of all time — the story of mass male suicide.

After a while it came to him that the sunlight filtering through the cabin windows had moved, though he was unable at first to define exactly how. But presently he realized that, curiously, the sun was no longer on his right, but was shining from the left. Unable to comprehend this unexpected change of orientation he peered through the window, at tempting to make sense from nonsense.