Read Online Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham - Free Book Online Page A

to you than they are to me.
    ‘A species, even our species, has great will to survive, and the doctors saw to it that the will had the means of expression. Through all the hunger, and the chaos, and the other privations, babies somehow continued to be born. That had to be. Reconstruction could wait: the priority was the new generation that would help in the reconstruction, and then inherit it. So babies were born: the girl babies lived, the boy babies died. That was distressing, and wasteful, too, and so, presently, only girl babies were born – again, the means by which that could be achieved will be easier for you to understand than for me.
    ‘It
is, they tell me, not nearly so remarkable as it would appear at first sight. The locust, it seems, will continue to produce female locusts without male, or any other kind of assistance, the aphis, too, is able to go on breeding alone and in seclusion, certainly for eight generations, perhaps more. So it would be a poor thing if we, with all our knowledge and powers of research to assist us, should find ourselves inferior to the locust and the aphis in this respect, would it not?’
    She paused, looking at me somewhat quizzically for my response. Perhaps she expected amazed – or possibly shocked – disbelief. If so, I disappointed her: technical achievements have ceased to arouse simple wonder since atomic physics showed how the barriers fall before the pressure of a good brains-team. One can take it that most things are possible: whether they are desirable, or worth doing, is a different matter – and one that seemed to me particularly pertinent to her question. I asked her:
    ‘And what is it that you have achieved?’
    ‘Survival,’ she said, simply.
    ‘Materially,’ I agreed, ‘I suppose you have. But when it has cost all the rest, when love, art, poetry, excitement, and physical joy have all been sacrificed to mere continued existence, what is left but a soulless waste? What reason is there any longer for survival?’
    ‘As to the reason, I don’t know – except that survival is a desire common to all species. I am quite sure that the
reason
for that desire was no clearer in the twentieth century than it is now. But, for the rest, why should you assume that they are gone? Did not Sappho write poetry? And your assumption that the possession of a soul depends upon a duality of sexes surprises me: it has so often been held that the two are in some sort of conflict, has it not?’
    ‘As an historian who must have studied men, women, and motives you should have taken my meaning better,’ I told her.
    She shook her head, with reproof. ‘You are so much the conditioned product of your age, my dear. They told you, on all levels,
from the works of Freud to that of the most nugatory magazines for women, that it was sex, civilized into romantic love, that made the world go round – and you believed them. But the world continues to go round for others, too – for the insects, the fish, the birds, the animals – and how much do you suppose they know of romantic love, even in brief mating seasons? They hoodwinked you, my dear. Between them they channelled your interests and ambitions along courses that were socially convenient, economically profitable, and almost harmless.’
    I shook my head.
    ‘I just don’t believe it. Oh, yes, you know something of my world – from the outside. But you don’t understand it, or feel it.’
    ‘That’s your conditioning, my dear,’ she told me, calmly.
    Her repeated assumption irritated me. I asked:
    ‘Suppose I were to believe what you say, what is it, then, that
does
make the world go round?’
    ‘That’s simple, my dear. It is the will to power. We have that as babies; we have it still in old age. It occurs in men and women alike. It is more fundamental, and more desirable, than sex; I tell you, you were misled – exploited, sublimated for economic convenience.
    ‘After the disease had struck, women ceased, for the first