World Without Men, page 15
I’m seventy-five today I’m an old man, though I don’t feel a day over sixty. There can't be long to go for me, and I’ve nothing to lose any more Just to look around, that’s all I ask. To break loose for a while and be free. I keep asking, but they give evasive answers. But I’ve nothing to lose if I force the issue. They can’t kill me while I can still produce what they want for their incubators and test tubes, and even if they do, well, death isn’t so very far away in any case.
I’ll do it. Tonight. Now.
XIV
Exactly what it was he intended to do, Old Gavor would have been hard put to define. There was an urgency in his mind that had to be relieved on a tactical basis, for there was no way of thinking ahead He knew nothing of the building in which he had lived for more years than he cared to remember. His entire world consisted of four air-conditioned, thermostatically heated rooms, comfortably furnished, and the usual toilet accessories. He had never explored beyond the heavy roller door at the end of the corridor. Nor did he know whether his apartment was above or below ground level, for there were no windows to guide him.
Escape, in the first instance, was a simple matter of getting beyond the roller door, which was always kept locked from the outside. It was opened only when one of his attendants entered or left the apartment, at his summons, or to bring him food and drink. The door, which seemed to be electrically operated, would roll back, remain stationary for about four seconds, then quickly close again. That was his only avenue of escape.
His mind pecked at the problem alertly, in a superficial, birdlike way. Ordinarily there could be no chance of his rushing the door as the attendant entered or left, for the women assigned to look after him were strong and well-versed in the art of self-defence The solution to the problem would obviously have to be a violent one.
He picked up a chair, weighing it speculatively in his hands. The thing was made of chrome tube and flexible plastic; it was light, easy to swing, but hard enough to serve as a weapon.
He carried the chair down the short corridor to the roller door, then, leaving it there, returned to his room and pressed a wall button. Immediately he returned to the roller door and picked up the chair, holding it above his head, hands tightly clenched on the chrome tubing of the back.
A brief eternity seemed to pass before the door began to move. Old Gavor took a deep breath and waited. In a moment the door was open and the dark, olive skinned girl was looking at him with startled eyes. He hesitated no longer, but swung the chair downwards with all the force his frail muscles could exert. The sound of the blow was sickening.
One instant the girl was standing there; next instant she was a crumpled shape on the floor.
Dropping the chair, he seized her arms and dragged her into the corridor. Exultation bubbled within him. The girl was unconscious, the door was open, and there was nothing to prevent his escape.
Except the chair. Forgetting about it momentarily in the exertion of the moment, he stepped backwards after moving the girl. His foot struck something, and a hard shape poked into the back of his knees. He went over with a crash, his legs tangled in chrome tube and plastic.
Cursing luridly he pushed himself to his feet, holding an injured shoulder, and threw himself towards the door. He was a fraction too late. Within inches of it he was dismayed to see the gleaming wall of metal glide swiftly across the opening with scarcely a sound.
Angry and frustrated he glared at the door, then beat upon its cold hard surface with his bare hands. There were no indentations, no cavities, no sign of a concealed keyhole. The door was impregnable.
On the other hand, there had to be a way of opening it from the inside. The attendants could do it, though he had never learned how. Perhaps some electronic device, a hidden transmitter concealed in their clothing, transmitting an impulse signal at the touch of a button. The girl was still unconscious, so there was time to find out.
Hurriedly with trembling fingers he patted the brief clothing she wore, but could feel nothing beyond the soft shape of her body underneath. His hands began to linger a little. And then he came across the belt.
It was beneath her dress, apparently clipped round her waist. He could follow the shape of it with his fingers, and it seemed to him to be thicker than a belt might reasonably be expected to be, and on its surface he could feel the protruding discs of buttons.
In triumph he flung back the dress, exposing the lower part of her body. The belt was of some flexible metal, blue-gray in colour, and on either side of the centre clip were four silver push-buttons. Excitement possessed him; he might be old, but he was no fool when it came to the point.
He struggled with the clip to release the belt, but it refused to open. Baffled for a moment he stared at it, then realized abruptly that he was wasting time. All that was necessary was to press the right button, and the door would open — but which button?
As he sat reflectively, making up his mind, the girl stirred, just a spasmodic movement of one leg, and suddenly the belt did not seem to matter any more. Until she moved she had been a body, but with the movement came a sense of animation, of life, and she became a woman. Something mischievous began to jig about in his brain. He was an old man, was he? Well, he could show them just how old he was. There was plenty of life in the old skeleton yet.
I'll press the button later, he thought. There’s no hurry. I can afford to wait a few minutes.
The act of rape proved to be more difficult than he had imagined, and he realized that he was old, after all — very old. But he persevered in a mood of aggressive stubbornness, and presently he felt ashamed of himself.
He pressed the silver buttons one by one. At the fifth con tact the roller door opened.
He was in a corridor without windows, mellowly lit by a luminous ceiling. It curved on either side to vanishing point, and was level. It might have been high in the air or deep beneath the ground; there was no way of knowing. In one direction or die other lay escape: it might have been one hundred feet away, or one thousand yards. There might have been a staircase, or an elevator, or a pneumatic drop shaft, or a spiral incline. It was all in the future, and in some curious way time and space became intermingled, for each step forward was a second in time, and the seconds and distance merged so that the two were no longer independent. He counted the seconds and he counted the footsteps, and be hind all was the rhythm of his own heartbeat, counting off the moments to release or annihilation.
The building was deserted, it seemed, and he came upon a staircase leading to an upper level. He ascended cautiously, flexing his ankles to avoid making any sound. Another corridor, another flight of stairs, but he kept ascending. And presently there were no more stairs, and the corridor he was in was a cul-de-sac. There were doors, four of them, in the corridor, but they were of the metal roller type, and there was no way of opening them. If he had had the patience and common sense to remove the electronic belt from the olive skinned girl he raped not so long ago, he would have been able to open the doors. Perhaps behind those doors were the other last men of the world, sealed away forever until the liberating moment of death.
There was no time to pause and worry about them, if indeed they existed at all. Time was running out. The olive skinned girl might be conscious by now, or she might be missed. At any moment the alarm might be raised. Escape became a precision operation, a matter of split second timing, difficult enough when you are seventy-five.
This must be the top, for there were no more stairs, and no elevators. There was nothing left but to descend, as quickly as possible on feeble legs. Four flights, five, six and seven. And still the building was deserted. Could it be that there was only one woman in the entire structure? But no, for he had seen several different faces, three or four, and there was also the Mistress in charge. In charge of what? A prison of some kind? How large or how small a staff would be required to run such an establishment?
There was no answer to his question, and the building remained silent. Perhaps they thought escape was impossible, or unlikely. Perhaps they believed the prisoners would prefer the austere comfort of their apartment cells to what lay outside. Perhaps the outside world had become so alien that no man would voluntarily seek to escape into it?
There could be no turning back. He had committed a criminal act by any code of conduct, and the need for escape became more pressing as each second ticked by. But where was the outside world? How could he locate it in a tall building of windowless corridors and stairs, with uniform temperature and illumination so that each level was identical with the one above and the one below?
Descend. Quickly at first, then more slowly, for he was still an old man, and his energy had been drained by rape. Level after level of steel, metal, and plastic curving corridors and roller doors, featureless, identical, with no humanity, faced him. Perhaps he was now descending below ground level. Any one door might be the exit to the outside world, but there was no way of opening it. He had exchanged one prison for another. There was no escape, and he could no longer remember the location of his own apartment; it was lost in the maze of levels and corridors and doors.
After an hour he began to tire, and he sat on a stair to think. He remembered, with a certain sense of irony, that at no time had any special precautions been taken to prevent violent escape. The female attendants had always been unarmed and vulnerable. Presently the reason permeated his brain: escape was impossible. The building was a maze, a rat trap, a geometrical structure without form or orientation. The roller doors in the corridors might well have been fakes for all he knew. Perhaps there was only one apartment: the one he vacated an eternity ago, and perhaps all the rest was an elaborate facade designed to deceive you. Perhaps the building was designed to tire the would-be escaper, to disillusion him and destroy his spirit. In an old man that would not be so difficult to accomplish.
He continued to stumble down the stairs, rapidly losing faith and enthusiasm. It must have been the fourteenth or fifteenth level, above or below ground he did not know, but he still was descending. It might be that as he was descending the levels were moving upwards in some kind of infernal squirrel cage, so that he would descend forevermore. At the twentieth level of descent he stopped. There was no exit. Escape had become an abstraction with no roots in reality. Worse still, there was no way of finding his way back to his own apartment.
And still the stairs went down, falling endlessly into a kind of bottomless pit, spiralling eternally into the abyss. He realized that he was a fool, an old fool. Why didn't he stay in his comfortable apartment and take life as it came? Why worry about the outside world when you were seventy-five? Surely it was enough to survive and be looked after by pretty girls.
There must be somebody in the building — the Mistress, the attendants. Without them he could wander forever up and down the stairs and along the silent corridors. He could thirst and starve to death in desolate isolation, surrounded by closed doors. There was nothing left to do but appeal for help. He shouted louder and louder, until presently he realized in horror that he was screaming…
She came suddenly, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, after he had abandoned all hope. She was the olive-skinned girl he raped a thousand years ago. Her face was a mask, a beautiful mask, and there was no feeling or emotion in her eyes. He pushed himself erect, feeling more like an animal than a human being. She stood on a higher stair, somehow remote and on another plane of being. Her eyes were steady and he could not face them…
"So you wanted to escape" said the girl. Her voice was calm, without rancour or hate.
"Yes," Old Gavor sighed. "I had that idea. I thought it would be easy. I didn’t realize…”
"There are many things you do not realize, old man. You are out of touch with reality."
He hesitated. "Death is very close to me. Right and wrong have lost their meaning. There are things I want to do,".
"And things you have done."
He sensed the implication of her words, and nodded humbly. "I’m sorry.”
"Sorrow is meaningless. What is done is done. You sought escape and you shall have escape."
"I am no longer sure that I want it."
"We are just. You shall have what you sought. Follow me.
She turned and ascended the stairs. He followed her mechanically, stumbling over the steps, forcing himself upwards in defiance of the paralysing weariness that was creeping into his limbs. He felt cold and shivery, as if rigor mortis were invading the fibre of his body.
Two flights, three flights, he ascended, and suddenly they were facing a roller door in a corridor. She turned to him, and he thought he could detect an element of sadness in her eyes.
"You will not be the first to pass through this door," she said, "and you will not be the last. Men do not vary. Even unto death they seek to enlarge their horizons, they seek escape. I shall not stop you now. Escape if you wish."
Her fingers touched her waist, pressing a concealed but ton on the unseen belt. The door rolled aside. Old Gavor remained motionless.
"Go," she ordered.
He hesitated. "Tell me: am I the last man?"
There was a ghost of a smile on her lips. "You are what you are, Gavor. Once you are dead there will be neither men nor women on Earth. Now go."
Old Gavor walked into the corridor beyond the door and into the world.
The corridor was long and dark, and as he walked along it the air grew progressively colder. Old Gavor shivered in his sombre gray clothes. But there was a faint glow of light on the walls ahead, and he hurried towards it on his stumbling legs.
The glow became brighter and the cold became more intense, and presently the corridor came to an end. He was in the open, under a sky of midnight blue, with an immense crimson sun lying low on the horizon. Something flickered and undulated above him, and in a brief glance he observed the intermittent luminous curtains of aurora. The air howled with wind, and the ground was white with snow and ice. His breath frosted as it left his lips.
For fully a minute he stood motionless, surveying the wasteland, aware of the biting sting of cold in his flesh and bones. There was nothing on the immense white wilderness before him. It might have been a plateau in Antarctica, some bleak expanse of subzero landscape devoid of life and hope. The midnight sun glimmered dully; it was the colour of blood.
He turned towards the corridor, but it was already sealed. The gleaming width of a metal door stared blankly at him. Above and on all sides the building towered — solid, cylindrical, with no light, but reflecting the dark red glow of the polar sun from its rounded concrete surface.
Many things became clear to Old Gavor. This was the prison, a citadel in a remote frigid comer of the world. This was the last abode of man, the final sepulchre of the male sex. The freezing wind whined in his ears and plucked at his clothes, paralysing his body with every gust. He hammered on the door and screamed against the noise of the elements, but his voice was drowned in the tumult of nature.
How many men, he wondered, have perished this way-seeking freedom? How many have sought civilization, only to find raw nature? How many frozen bodies are out there in the snow and ice, dreaming the blank dreams of death while, thousands of miles away, the world they knew has reshaped itself and forgotten about them and their kind.
He hammered and screamed, but the door remained closed, and in the course of time the cold became gentle, and transformed itself into sleep. Acting on some unguessabie instinct he moved off into the snow, away from the building, towards the crimson sun, seeking privacy for the final intimate act of his life, the release of life and the acceptance of death.
If I am the last man, he thought, then this is indeed a moment of history.
Within the hour his body was buried beneath inches of snow, and the blood in his veins had crystallised into scarlet
XV
An event of major importance had occurred in biophysical laboratory number five. Cordelia, scientist in charge of experimental synthetic cytology, took the trouble to lock the incubator and lock the laboratory door before leaving the State Biophysical centre. The thing in the main thermostatically controlled incubator was so vital that she felt constrained to deliver the progress report personally to the Senior Mistress of Applied Cytology in the Ministry of Biophysical Research.
Cordelia, a woman of seventy-two, had made full use of modem cosmetic techniques, and her metabolic control had been precisely judged for more than two decades. Consequently she had all the superficial appearance of an adolescent female, except for the maturity of her eyes and the overfull roundness of her breasts and abdomen, the result of three compulsory visits to State fertility centres where induced parthenogenesis had resulted in the birth, over four years, of eight identical baby girls.
But her mind was wrinkled and leathery, impregnated with specialized science and technology, and twisted in the accepted Lesbian fashion of contemporary society. The thing in the incubator was alien and incomprehensible, but it represented success. For centuries, perhaps millennia, women scientists had laboured after the shadow, as alchemists of ancient history had sought the Philosopher’s Stone, and now, finally, the shadow had taken shape. The thing in the incubator represented the pinnacle of scientific achievement; and it might also be the problem of all time.
