by Philip Wylie
When, later that evening, they returned to his apartment, he was in a mood she had not previously observed. She saw quickly that their customary routine was not to be. He would not order their double whisky with double doses of Aphron and then hurry her to lovemaking into another night so erotic and so compelling, so repetitive and yet so diverse that they would be lost in each other for hours.
He simply entered the living room behind her and sprawled on the divan, his face drawn, his attention turned inward.
She switched off the observing instruments and quietly sat down, but not beside him. Instead, she settled gracefully on a nearby, deeply upholstered chair and waited to learn what his wishes would be.
“It’s so cruel!” he finally said, with quiet force.
“What is, dear?”
“Those old people, dancing, for one thing. But they are merely one thing. The whole system is cruel. Impersonal! Breed babies like stock! Erase human beings the moment they become useless for production, or the instant they are found guilty of criticism! Turning human beings into robots, then! Machines! With no means of self-expression or even self-direction. Just—animals, tamed to obey, for the end of increasing their numbers and their obedience! It’s damnable!”
He then glanced anxiously at the high part of the walls.
“I turned it all off,” she said gently.
“Thank God!”
She moved beside him, now. “I know what you mean,” she said softly. “And others know.” As his eyes met hers she put her life on the line! “They are organizing to rebel. We are.”
For several heartbeats there was silence. Then, Glenn said, “Oh.”
Her face showed fear. “I thought, Glenn—?”
“That you could seduce me into—helping?”
“Oh, God, no! Never that!”
Then he smiled. “I’m sorry. I know. It was love.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“What else?”
He thought for a while. “All right. Any plans—for me?”
“Plans?” She was so honestly, so obviously puzzled that, if Glenn had had any further reservations, which he did not, he would have been assured about her one more, unneeded time.
He hugged her and whispered into her ear, “Then—hadn’t we better make some?”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“Well, because none of us ever got as far as to think you might help.”
“You didn’t?”
Her eyes were glowing, ardent, trusting and yet sad. “Well, I at least told you.”
“So,” he responded, grimly, “I know. What, exactly?”
“That very secretly, in every major city, men and women are planning, rather getting together to plan a way to beat, to break the Corporation.”
“Of which I am expected to be a Board Member, soon.”
She nodded and put her head against his shoulder. In a muffled voice, she said, “Where, of course, there, you could become the keystone of the revolt.”
“Who is closest—inside—now?”
“Me,” she whispered.
He pulled away and took her shoulders, saw she was silently weeping, watched her tears leak slowly down her cheeks and then the cause hit him.
“I think I understand,” Glenn said, with an emptiness in his voice. “If I—you and I—work against them, we’ll have to play everything their way.”
“Yes.”
“You and I can’t go on, this way.”
“No.” Her chin was lifted and her eyes were rifle-straight. “We couldn’t have, anyhow.”
That startled him for an instant. Afterward, he nodded. “I suppose that’s true. I simply was so—”
“—me, too. So much in love I wouldn’t look ahead even a day.”
“And all it means, then,” he finally answered, “is giving up each other, which we’d have had to, anyhow.”
“Not—entirely.”
“No.” Glenn kissed her fiercely. “Not entirely. Just enough to spread my damned Alpha-plus around, according to the directions of the system.”
She nodded. In his arms, later, she felt cold, and since his own heart was in that state, they could for a time only hold each other, in search for a warmth that no longer could be easily found.
Leandra, not Glenn, ended that miserable spell. She giggled.
“If there’s anything funny …?” he said soberly.
“You won’t think so,” Leandra replied—and giggled again.
“Try me.”
“Well I can just imagine how difficult it will be for you to make love to all those Alpha-plus hungry females—when you will always wish it was me.”
“So much, that, maybe”—he smiled faintly—“it’ll turn out I can’t!”
“Drugs’ll fix that.”
“So? Doubtless true. If it is—what’s funny?”
“Really it isn’t, I guess. But I just thought. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the authority on Glenn Howard. You know! Even when you said you didn’t care anymore whether the switch was on or off. Whether ‘they’ watched us, or not. It still was mostly—off. So I am supposed to be able to report all sorts of intimate things about you. Preferences—what you find—distasteful—”
“About you, nothing.”
She kissed him for that. “All right. But it puts me in a position to—well—choose—anyhow, recommend—”
“Other women!”
“Yes.”
“Be damned!” He shifted his position. “All right. You select my ladies and I’ll be as unfaithful to you as, in every case, I’m able. My beloved’s orders carried out, right?”
She said, “Goody!” and didn’t mean it.
Now, though, Glenn knew, everything had changed. Everything important insofar as love went. And everything about his place in the new Los Angeles. He had become a covert rebel. He had been in a risky position from the start. His situation, from now on, would be infinitely more dangerous. But this had to be, since he felt that any attempt to crush the Corporation was worth more lives than all those in this city and more loves than, he thought, there would ever be again—if this system prevailed to the end of time.
She began to talk as they lay side by side, awake and alert because they could not sleep.
“The group began to form about two years ago,” Leandra began in a murmur. “Some of the top scientists, some executives in minor positions, but nobody inside, or nearer there, than I. I had a friend, a woman friend, who let me know. I joined. And when I did I found a reason for rebellion that I hadn’t imagined possible. Glenn!” She raised on an elbow and whispered the bitter words: “For over two years the air outside has been perfectly safe!”
“What!”
“Perfectly safe. People could live on the surface, now. All this staying underground isn’t necessary.”
“But I—!”
“Let me explain. The Board, the Corporation, our—rulers—they know that if everybody in the underground cities, or even lots of us, found out that fact—there’d be a rush from these caverns—these hell-holes. No force could prevent that exodus! And once we were out—or, accurately, once whoever got out alive was out—no such government as this one could maintain control. The Board—and the police-military who support it—couldn’t handle a liberated, external population. Couldn’t track them down—out there! Even the police-military themselves—if they really knew it was safe on the surface—would disintegrate. That’s sure. So they are obliged to keep the truth, about the surface being all right, from spreading. Of course, it leaked, finally. You see?”
He saw. That act of unspeakable repression had been done simply to hang on to the reins of power. It was not difficult to “see,” but only incredible as a human act, and utterly insupportable.
“Good God!” he eventually whispered.
“What?”
“Why … a while back—I was in a street up above—in breathing gear—and I spotted a bird!”
“I
never saw a live bird,” she murmured.
He comforted her. “I know. It was a tern. And there must be other things alive there, too. Which people will see. So the big lie cannot be enforced for long, can it?”
“I’m afraid,” she answered, “it can. I even think, now, that if you finally prove up, and become a Board Member, your main job will be to keep the lid on that situation.”
He felt a stir of excitement. “That’s it! And if I do reach that post—if I am given charge of all communications—except the classified lines—why I, myself, could—”
“You could,” she answered, gently.
He embraced her with fervor; but Leandra pulled away. “We mustn’t,” she whispered. “Not, if you and I are going to start playing the roles we must. Instead, save your lovely desires, darling, for morning. And somebody else.”
“Like who?”
“Oh, how about Lysette? She’s cute.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ABSOLUTE POWER, ABSOLUTE CORRUPTION
On the last day of November Glenn received notice that an emergency meeting of the Board of Directors of USA, Inc. would be held on December 10th. In addition to the engraved and gold-leaf-imbedded lettering of the formal notice, there came a letter from the President saying that Glenn Howard would attend the special session as a full-fledged and highly esteemed Board member and Director of all Public Communications Media in the Corporation (United States) because “said Glenn Howard had shown his rapid assimilation of masses of information and his fresh and exceedingly helpful grasp of his now officially confirmed Directorship as well as remarkable skill, loyalty, realism and patriotism.”
“Et cetera,” Glenn disgustedly said to himself—not aloud. For he was now at end-November, occupying the Director’s Suite in the Home Offices of Howard Associates as they had been built, underground, by his business heirs, for occupancy when and if the dreaded surface-departure-time ever came. And in a sense his heirs had done well by—the company Glenn had owned. His three subterranean floors covered about five acres in the middle of the new L.A. and underneath his second L.A. edifice, a skyscraper that made his 1971 building look like a small box with a few windows.
Running the media and above all the nation-wide super-TV programs like those he’d seen—wall-sized, often—wasn’t any problem. His news and information people were skilled at guessing what the Board would want reported, or want kept quiet; and, too, when the Board member criticisms or ideas came, these scores of experts were clever at following all such, and also, making the sourest or dullest brainstorm from above seem minimally either one.
USA was heavily wired before the final day, for some thousands of channels, and its visaphone system had replaced the old talk-hear phones long before the Death Wind rose. As Glenn gathered facts about his “empire” and as he became acquainted with his staff and then the rest of his people he found he was adored by his female employees and greatly liked by the males. For though Glenn was clearly a Corporation devotee and a stickler for its rules, he, as a person, had a kind of confident, easy and amiable way of giving orders, of (rarely) rebuking personnel, of making suggestions or criticisms, that was quite atypical of the subchiefs of the departments and of all other bosses, in 2017.
He was also amusing in a new way, to everybody.
He plainly enjoyed more than most the constant sexual relationships that were the principal pleasures and rewards by this sex-avid, sexually near-inexhaustible folk. His part was so public that it might have been trying for the most uninhibited of the populace. And he evidently had a deep, nearly universal fondness for the women with whom he was obliged, with some minor power of choice, to sleep—the ladies selected by the Commissioner of Genetic Control who, however, was guided by Leandra to a degree the man never imagined.
Except for the frequent sense of ache when his Alpha-plus activities—or business pressures—made long gaps between the times he was able to spend with Leandra, Glenn now began to feel (because, largely, he forced himself toward the feeling) that being with so many lovely females was, indeed, fun, or, say, exciting in a way! In a sufficient way, so that Glenn soon understood the hold this regulated and registered but enormously permissive and constantly stimulated cultural factor furnished the controllers, the Board and the President. After all, as he said to Leandra one night, “ancient religions were founded on sex-openness and the act; later religions found that by grabbing the whole sexual-relations performance and subjecting it to the utmost repression possible, these faiths, Christian, Communist, and so on, could keep their people in an even greater thrall. When a church forbade all sexual behavior but one sort, and called all else sin, evil, pornographic, obscene, filthy and so on, permitting only the church-sanctified “right” act, the pressure of the actual sexual nature of female and male was, always, high and liable to blow up the containing authority, the church, and its dogma. But not soon!
You were born and immediately church-baptized or state-enslaved. Your infant lusts were harshly put down and you were perhaps circumcised by church mandate with the notion that barbarism would lessen friction and so, the temptation to the next, natural act, masturbation. Adult-child sex acts were horrors to church and state, with ex-communication and prison the penalty. Premarital or extramarital sex was forbidden and the ban was backed by mountains of ancient doctrine, punished by ten thousand statutes. Even the church-wed were still, often, expected to make love only to try to cause pregnancy and any other such effort, especially if its impregnating likelihood was abolished, had to be evil. Or illegal. And both. Even the position for making love in these religious faiths was limited to one, and that, not the one with the widest human preference, either. Mere “modesty” had become something other than the occasional shyness people often feel: it was mandatory and involved hiding the body save for face and hands. Communist nations were more puritanical than the Puritans.
All that, swept away!
And, Glenn found, after he had willfully adjusted to the pain involved in repressing his (never allowable) desire to be faithful to Leandra, that the modern attitudes here were not always and entirely productive of the impersonality, the autonomism, of the absence of feeling he’d first thought was universal.
And he’d tasted the strange exhilaration of accidentally encountering girls and women who had attracted him sexually and who, when they felt the same way, had arranged for privacy, often, right away and in such places as were meant for those pleasures, a thousand little off-street chambers with their varied Class ratings and “engaged” or “unoccupied” signs. These “love-nooks,” or some other handy place, provided Glenn and this or that stranger a place for passionate sexual acts—which, once or twice—were enjoyed without exchanging names till afterward.
He was sure that, in some ways, this license for lovemaking was beneficial. One such factor was plain; nobody was what had been called “up-tight” in old L.A. Not, at least, in all the ways that, it appeared now, were always basically sexual and owing to fear, frustration, taboos, and the rest, those crushing, perverted sex stigmas, church-designed, and power-granting to the church, or to the civil authorities. But this advantage, to the great degree Glenn could discern, was still not freedom, not completely, not this brand of sexual openness and the approval of any and all sexual self-expressions with any mate consenting who qualified.
These cultural liberties were allowed simply because they produced a specific docility in the vast, privileged majority. But something was lost in all their sexual relations, not because they were sterile, unless certified and treated to be other, but for a subtler reason. The birth control feature was all right. Man’s—woman’s—hunger to make love had never related to begetting. People had done it for thousands of years, in some places, unaware that sexual relations caused pregnancy. The negative factor was illusive but there, always, even on the “fertile holidays,” one of which Glenn had already attended. What was lost, he thought, was the power of personal choosing—which, though enormous, still, was yet limite
d by Class standings and genetic ratings.
What was perhaps lost for him and as surely, he believed, as for Leandra, was the chance to have only one partner, if one wished that. But among A Class and some B’s and of them, all who were Alphas, let alone, Alpha-pluses, it was not thinkable to be monogamous, and was such a criminal act even to try that one was erased for the effort.
“So I felt,” Glenn finally said to Leandra, “the way a whore must have felt—at least to a degree. An expensive call girl, say; one, not emotionally ruined or sexually shattered. A girl who enjoyed lovemaking to the limit, and in most ways, with all sorts of males (or, many sorts), who had incessant sexual relations but not often—or, at least, not frequently enough—with the male (or males) she preferred. Gigolos are in that boat,” Glenn added.
“So I am pimping for you?” She laughed merrily at the archaic word. “Is that it? But didn’t girls with panderers often love them only?”
“Sure.”
“So—come to bed! And next afternoon, I have a truly elegant, delicious and very passionate trick for you, darling! Name of Estrabanna. Shut your eyes and pretend it’s me—same measurements as mine, same multicolored hair at this length—and she’ll wear my perfume. Okay?”
“Okay. But I think, maybe, I ought to solicit a few guys for you. After all, I’m not around you enough—”
“What an idea! Didn’t you ever realize—?”
He halted and lifted his head in “their” bed. “I didn’t. But I suppose I should have. After all, we’re—”
Her hand blocked more words. The bugs weren’t cut off, this night, and he had nearly caused their deaths. Because, as she’d realized in time and he’d seen, a second later, he’d been about to mention that they had some reason for what had up to then been regarded as a ‘normalizing’ of Glenn.
Sexual pleasures unbounded did not make up for their extreme pleasure, and, too, often, though it mattered little, the extreme pain of marriage and fidelity, or, maybe, if people could not honestly be faithful through married years, that discretion that then kept the extramarital bliss unknown to a spouse.
