“Hi, Tom, how are you?” She too had recovered.
“Semi-human. And you?”
“Was I awful in the car?”
“The world was awful. You put up with it very well.”
“At one point there I was ready to start biting things.”
“If you’ll look at the steering wheel, you see toothmarks.”
She laughed, and said, “On a similar topic, I just called the restaurant, and they only serve till ten o’clock.”
“On a Saturday night?”
“That’s what they said.”
“I am a stranger in a strange land. What time is it now?” My watch, as usual, was in the cab.
“Just after nine-thirty.”
“In other words, we ought to go do it.”
“If we want dinner.”
“I’ll call for you in fifteen minutes,” I said, and did, and we headed for the restaurant.
It’s always possible, in these sprawled-out motels, to travel from place to place inside them via endless anonymous narrow corridors, but if the weather’s at all acceptable one tends to go outside and circle the building to one’s destination. That’s what we did this time, going past our by-now very dusty and scruffy cab, and finding the sky a mad psychedelic array of color; purples, mauves, indigos, navy blues, violets, amethysts, garnets, vermilions, all were streaked and swathed and swept across that huge curved canvas as though God had never heard that less is more. All afternoon an incomprehensible feeling had been coming over me, while driving into that glaring golden sun, and now I understood: “We’re on a different planet.”
Katharine said, “Is that what it is? I knew there was something; I felt that time had stopped. Did you ever read Ray Bradbury?”
“Sure.” Then I frowned at her. “Girls don’t read science fiction.”
“There you go again,” she said.
We went on to the restaurant, where the headwaiter, though male, adapted readily to Katharine’s being host. He looked to be a college student with a part-time job, but he was bright and alert and efficient, and after he’d taken our drink orders and departed I said, “Looks as though you won’t save much on the tip tonight.”
“It has its compensations. I once wrote a science fiction story.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s true,” she said. “In college. Would you like to hear it?”
“Of course.”
She said, “It was about the Solar System going through a mysterious space cloud, and afterwards the atmosphere on Earth is changed. There’s this new element in it that the scientists don’t understand, but it reacts with women’s bodies so that if a woman wants to get pregnant all she has to do is eat honey. I called it ‘You’re My Honey.’ Now, the thing is, this makes it possible for women to have children without the assistance of men, but the children are all girls. Male children only result from the traditional method. So it’s up to women whether or not they want men in the world anymore, since men aren’t necessary for reproducing the human race but only for reproducing men.”
“Hmmmm,” I said.
“I was very militant then,” she said.
“So it was decided to do without men?”
“Just listen,” she said, as our drinks arrived. She waited till the waitress had served them, and distributed menus, and then she continued: “At first, the men don’t take it seriously, but then the statistics show a higher and higher percentage of female births, and around the world different governments set up commissions to see what’s going on. But of course the commissions are all men, except for a token woman here and there, like in the United States and Great Britain, so they have no idea what’s going on, and they don’t get anywhere. Then the men counterattack. The incidence of rape goes up, as men try to make women pregnant before they can make themselves pregnant. Some countries like Russia outlaw honey and try to wipe out the world’s population of bees, but bees are very hard to get rid of entirely, and very easy to breed surreptitiously, so there’s an ongoing black market in honey.”
“This is a hell of a story.”
She smiled at me, a bit smugly. “The boy I was going with at the time couldn’t stand it. He kept saying it showed I hated him personally.”
“Instead of men in general.”
“Well, that too,” she admitted. “But I think the way Danny described it, I was afraid of men in general, but I hated him in particular.”
“Was this the Tupperware fellow?”
“No, before him.”
“Go on with the story,” I said. “As a man, you might say I’m dying to find out how it ends.”
But the waitress was beside us, and Katharine said, “I think we ought to order.”
The waitress, looking apologetic, said, “I don’t want to rush you, but the kitchen’s about to close.”
“Half the human race hangs in the balance,” I said, “and she’s worried about the kitchen. All right, all right.” And I did a quick scan of the menu.
Restaurant menus, away from the major cities, don’t vary that much. There’s six or seven things you recognize, time after time, and you just order one of them, because you know they know how to make it and they know you know what it should taste like. So we placed our dinner orders without too much difficulty, and then I took a quick swallow of my gin and tonic and said, “On with the story. At this point, the male population is killing bees and raping women, while the female population is smuggling honey and having daughters.”
Laughing, she said, “Well, of course, not everybody reacts the same way. There are loving married couples who go on as before, and there are men who try to come to an understanding of the situation, and there are women who try to work out what best to do. And a leader of the moderate women, from the group that believes each individual should follow her own conscience, is elected President of the United States. Naturally.”
“Naturally?”
“Well, there are more women than men, and the disparity is growing every day. As for it being a moderate woman, American voters always tend toward the center. When it becomes clear that women have the final control in the solution of the problem, the men in both major parties put women candidates up for President, and of course one of them wins.”
“Okay,” I said.
“With the American government leading the way,” she continued, “power around the globe gradually shifts from the men to the women. Women take over industry, commerce, everything, and always using the same ultimate threat: ‘If men make us angry, there won’t be any more men.’ ”
“I rate this story very high for suspense,” I said.
“Well, finally there’s a mass meeting. A global meeting, with the American Congress and the UN and the British Parliament and the Japanese Diet and all the other legislatures — and by now they’re all almost completely women — all connected together by TV. And there’s a great debate about the future of mankind. Because by now a lot of women want to ban male births completely, with jail sentences for the mother and — if they can find him — the father. In seventy or eighty years, if they have their way, there won’t be any more men at all, anywhere, and there never will be a man again because it takes a man to make a male child.”
She sipped at her drink, then went on: “And the debate ends with a speech from the American president, who first talks about all the trouble that men have been to women down the ages, oppressing women, enslaving women, making women the villains in all their religions and superstitions. And then all the trouble men have been to one another and to all the other creatures on this planet. And then she says, ‘The reason they’ve been so much trouble to everybody is because they always had to decide. Whether it was hunting a mammoth for food for the family or competing for a better job so they could move the kids to the suburbs, it has almost always been the man who had the responsibility, and too much responsibility makes anybody nervous and erratic. Now we have the responsibility, and those who say we should do away with men are themselves being nervous and erratic. We have one great advantage, in that we can profit by their mistakes. We can be calm. We have the power, and we can’t possibly lose it. So we can stop looking at men out of bitterness and grievance, and we can see they have some good qualities as well. They’re very good at building things. Some of them are fairly useful at fixing things. They have an eagerness for life which has helped them deal with too much responsibility, and which in repose can be rather lovable. They are capable of being excellent companions, and to be practical there is no acceptable substitute in bed. The best man is not, as some have suggested, a dead man, but a retired man, all responsibility finished. A putterer, a permanent boy. It will take men a while to adapt themselves to this new role, but women adapted themselves to subservience for thousands of years and men, too, will find it possible to adjust. So long as there are women, there must go on being men, to be our companions, our helpmates, our better halves, our assistants and auxiliaries. In a word, our wives!’ ”