Page:World Without Men (HT osu.32435053364535).pdf/163

Sometimes she fell to speculating about the future of the child, her child, in the incubator. What role could a male fulfill in a monosexual society that had adapted itself to its own peculiar mode of existence and survival for longer than anyone could remember? Was there any point or purpose in allowing the child to survive? And supposing there were more male children, supposing the child, on attaining maturity, would be able to reproduce its own sex in defiance of the natural inhibition that had operated for so many centuries: What then? Could society turn the clock back and resume heterosexual living? Could women tolerate reversion to the primitive in matters of human propagation? Induced parthenogenesis was neater, cleaner and so precise. Devoid of emotional contamination, and pure in that it was a function on the level of abstract duty, it was impregnation by the unseen and the unfelt. Radiation was surely the ultimate in reproductive technique, and no modern woman could contemplate without horror any kind of crude physical fertilization by a creature that had been obsolete for thousands of years. It was unimaginable.

And yet there was something appealing about the child in the incubator, something that occasionally caught the heart, like an injection of adrenalin, and produced an indescribable writhing of the fundamental emotions. And Cordelia was conscious of a very special feeling of proprietorship, for it was she who had performed the original micro-cytological operation that had injected the breath of life into the pink and wrinkled midget inside the glass case. The child was hers, as surely as if she personally had given birth to it in a State fertility center.

As the child grew and reached the stage of imminent independence, she experienced something akin to pride, and presently, to love.

On the day they removed the male child from the incuba-