Page:World Without Men (HT osu.32435053364535).pdf/49

yet you have worked for a government department. What do you know of the government? Not the officials and the administrators, but the real controlling authority which determines policy in all spheres of life. Have you ever met a true member of the government in this country, or in any other? Do you know who or what it is that governs our destinies? You look surprised, and you won't believe what I'm going to tell you, but it's true. . . .

"Don't look so anxious, Aubry. I'm not going to shock you or frighten you. All I'm going to do is tell you something you don't know, something no one knows, apart from the few members of my own circle, who are regarded as subversive. You see, we believe in truth for its own sake, just as Aquilegia did. We hold that perversion is evil, whatever the motive might be, and that the modern structure of society, based as it is on statistical birth and murder and on a homosexual morality, is wrong and corrupt throughout. And above all we object to the government of human beings by a . . ."

"By a what?" Aubretia asked.

Aquilegia (or her parthenogenetic double) remained silent for some time. Her eyes, though pale and pink, seemed to have acquired an intense burning quality that made Aubretia feel uncomfortable. Indeed, the whole trend of the near-monologue had been disquieting in the extreme, and she was not at all sure that her unkempt visitor might not be insane. Nevertheless, she was faintly aware of an undercurrent of response in her own subconscious mind, an inaudible harmonic that resonated occasionally when certain things were mentioned. The man, for instance. A fiction, obviously. Men were extinct, and it was fantastic in the extreme to allege that there was in existence a secret government laboratory containing the bodies of many men, dry and dessicated, on which experiments were being carried out to reverse the very course of nature itself. But somewhere deep within the darkness of her mind, a pallid phantom image floated hazily, the