After the examination, when Gorste was preparing to go, the doctor said: “About Drewin’s wife. What happened to her after her husband killed himself?”
Gorste hesitated a moment, buttoning his overcoat with precision movements of his delicate fingers. He moved to wards the door, not looking at the doctor.
“I married her,” he said, then made his exit.
After he had placed the remains of the Rhesus monkey in the laboratory refrigerator, Gorste removed his white overall and went into the washroom to freshen up for his journey home. Slade was in there, and Ingram. From the broad grin on Slade’s face and the jolly tone of Ingram’s voice, Gorste deduced that Ingram was reciting one of his improper jokes.
“And there in the bedroom was a hammock,” Ingram was saving, “and he said what’s the big idea and she said I thought you liked doing things the hard way.”
Slades guffaw reverberated hollowly from the tiled walls of the washroom. The point had been made and the joke was over and Slade was performing the complex lung-voice ritual known as laughter, and Ingram’s long thin face was reaming with radiant smugness. Gorste turned on the taps and washed his hands carefully, anxious to remove the odour of formaldehyde from his fingers. From the comer of his eye he saw Ingram approaching.
“Congratulations,” came Ingram’s smooth voice. “I understand the world’s going to be a much brighter place any time at all, thanks to you, Gorste.”
“Mm?” Gorste murmured, tinning his head slightly.
“This new contraceptive you’ve developed.”
Gorste grimaced mentally. “I wish you wouldn’t refer to my work in that way, Ingram. My job is biochemical research, and the commercial applications are none of my business.”
“But it’s my business,” said Ingram pleasantly. Gorste recalled that the other man was a member of the sales promotion staff of the company. He had been a representative, out on the road, and his appointment to a staff job in the sales office was a fairly recent event. He eyed Ingram with a certain veiled hostility: he looked every inch the salesman: smooth, suave, affable, talkative, and never at a loss for a good story or anecdote.
“You’re too sensitive,” Ingram went on. “The manufacture and distribution of contraceptives is one of the major industries of our society. You’d be surprised if you realized the ramifications. Birth control is related to population level, and that in turn affects the economics of modern life.” Gorste grunted non-committally, wishing Ingram were several light-years away.
“Do you realize,” Ingram persisted, “that what you are doing now might alter the whole structure of society as we know it. This estro thing you’ve developed…”
“estrogen derivative.”
“That’s what I said. Do you realize, Gorste, that…
“I realize it’s twenty-five past six,” Gorste said shortly, “and that I should have been halfway home by now.”
Ingram chuckled synthetically. “Of course. I forgot you were a married man. I’ll take it up with you some other time.”
Gorste turned to go, but Ingram’s voice came provocatively over his shoulder. “Did you hear about the man who liked doing things the hard way? Used to cut the grass with a pair of nail scissors and when he got married insisted on picking up the confetti off the carpet with a pin…
“I’m sorry,” said Gorste, glancing at his wrist watch. “I really do have to go.”
When Gorste had left, Slade said to Ingram: “You ought to be more careful, Ingram. Never talk about sterility or contraceptives to Gorste.”
Ingram’s eyes registered genuine surprise. “But that’s his job.”
“I know, but there’s something else that alters the picture. You see, Ingram, Gorste is sterile.”
For an instant Ingram’s narrow face was solemn and uncomprehending, then abruptly he burst into laughter. He nudged Slade in the ribs. “That’s rich! Gosh, I must remember that! The inventor of mass sterility is sterile!”
He kept on laughing in his artificial manner until Slade be came embarrassed. He excused himself and left the room.
VII
Home was a house, Gorste was thinking, but not an empty house. There must be furniture and possessions and some of the possessions had to be trivial, like an empty tooth paste tube or an ash tray garnished with cigarette stubs — symbols of human occupation. And there had to be a clock, a reliable clock, for the routine of any home was largely actuated by the time of day. And for a married man there had to be a wife.
From where he was sitting in his home Gorste could see both the clock and his wife; both were attractive in a superficial way. The clock, for instance, was a rectangle in chrome and white, with green triangles in place of figures, and the hands were slender and black, with a pale strip of luminous matter painted on them (that would be a compound containing radioactive thorium, he recalls with a faint sense of irony). The wife was smooth and rounded and auburn-haired, not less than thirty and looking her age, but with a poised, almost deliberate, air of maturity. Her eyes were brown and a little narrow, but her face was pleasant enough and her lips were invitingly bowed. She dressed well. The dark crimson dress she wore made her look vaguely movie-like to Gorste’s eyes, like a portion of a still from a Technicolour film. But perhaps that’s because she was a still, a motionless image in a kind of deep freeze, with static eyes fixed on the tiny moving shapes of the television screen.
Occasionally Gorste glanced perfunctorily at the television set. A panel game of some kind, one of the many. Four experts guessed some unimportant triviality to the accompaniment of enthusiastic applause from an unseen studio audience. Disseminated to the nation by the miracle of radio transmission, it was fascinating if you felt in the mood, but Gorste didn’t feel in the mood.
The radioactive hand of the clock advanced round the dial with the slowness of eternity, and had been doing so for the past two hours. During that time the only sound in the room had been the synthetic voice of the television receiver. Not quite accurate: there had been an occasion when Gorste volunteered to make coffee and Anne nodded briefly, and the coffee was made and consumed with a murmured thanks. Robots Incorporated, Gorste thought, but in twenty minutes television would be finished and the human mind would reassert its control over the human brain, and the hypnotic seizure of human consciousness by electronic shadows would cease for another day. Life would return to normal at bedtime.
Life and night and bed had become synonymous, and the business of human relationships became compressed into the twilight fringe between the end of television and the beginning of sleep. Meanwhile Gorste looked at Anne and at the clock, and he counted off the minutes to the end of this modern electronic narcotic.
Looking at Anne was by no means a penance. There was a time when it had been a distinct pleasure, before the death of Drewin, before the slow concretion of routine marriage relationships, before life had become complicated by matters of fertility and sterility. It was still a pleasure, but with reservations. She was attractive enough within her own terms of reference, and her body still held the eternal promise of her sex, unconditionally. But a body wasn’t everything; sometimes a brain was an asset, and sometimes, to a scientist with an academic turn of mind, the occasional sluggish turning of intelligence could be a flashing jewel in the gloom of psychic non-communication.
Or am I being smug? Gorste asked himself. Am I judging Anne too harshly, by standards far removed from the level of normal life? Am I expecting too much from a stolen woman? Or, getting down to fundamentals, are we really incompatible, and did I make the supreme mistake in taking her as my wife? What in the long run is the basic attraction? A matter of biological chemistry, of hormones and discreet physiology, or a matter of psychological compulsion, of mother fixation or image transference? Why do I love her, or more simply, do I love her? And, in framing such a question, am I not confessing that I do not love her?