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the same kind of dormant fear as had been instigated by the visual memory of the man. The whole subject was wrapped in a sinister cocoon of unfathomable mystery.

"I'd never realized," she said, "that men were so real. What I mean is that men have always been to me—to most women—a kind of legend, a fairy tale, or stories of ghosts and goblins."

"After five thousand years you could hardly expect more."

"Then why did men disappear so suddenly from the world?"

The Mistress sat down again at her desk, drumming her fingers lightly upon its shining surface. "It wasn't sudden. It was a slow process. The truth is they were no longer necessary. Evolution had ceased in the human species. Sexual variation was no longer necessary. So nature introduced an economy and eliminated the male sex."

"But how?"

"By adjusting the ratio of births so that more and more females were born. Eventually there were no male births whatever. And at the same time parthenogenesis developed into a natural function of the female sex."

"I suppose it's logical," Aubretia conceded. "After all, if women can have children without the—the intervention of a male, then there seems to be no point in having two sexes."

"Exactly. And the beauty of it is this. The female ovum contains twenty-four chromosomes. By parthenogensis, whether natural or induced, the ovum splits into a normal cell of forty-eight chromosomes: a female cell. It is absolutely impossible to produce a healthy male cell of forty-seven chromosomes by parthenogenesis. Obviously, then, woman is the end product of nature. Man was merely an interim stage incapable of perpetuation other than by heterosexual means. You see, the male gametes were divided into two parts: those with twenty-three chromosomes and those with twenty-four, formed by subdivision of the forty-seven chromosomes in his body cells."