The Stork Factor Read online

  sold openly describing sexual acts, natural and perverted, in minute detail. Sexual freedom, Wundt said, contributed to a slow breakdown in the family unit, long a standard of Western civilization, one of the adhesive factors. Wundt wrote: Freedom, without the education necessary to use freedom intelligently, can be destructive. To inject a personal note, the freedom to enjoy sex with a partner of one's choice is a necessary part of being civilized, of being human. Yet this freedom was handed to a nation with Puritan upbringing, a nation that had been weaned on the teaching that all sex is dirty, or even criminal. The nation eagerly seized this freedom, without

  the understanding of it, and, while enjoying it, lacerated itself with guilt. In the orgy of freedom in the late twentieth century, all barriers were lowered. The nation used the freedoms to be traitorous in the name of free speech, to be perverted in the name of sexual freedom, to be poisoned by drugs in the name of personal freedom. The old values faded and were

  replaced by new non-values of doubtful worth. Styles of attire in the 1980's were indicative of the new thought. Women were bare to the waist. Men wore bottomless suits. The original function of attire was forgotten. Originally, the human race began to wear clothing, at least in the opinion of this writer, as protection and for comfort. A mature woman with large mammary glands needs some sort of support for comfort and for protection. The male reproductive glands are sensitive and easily

  susceptible to injury, therefore, clothing was devised as protection. Yet, in the last two decades of the century, commonsense was discarded in the rush to freedom. And yet, during this very orgy of freedom, there was a hard core of unreconstructed fanatics, throwbacks to the old Puritanical values, who resisted. While the majority of the country rushed to new extremes, this hard core of fanatics banded together under the skirts of the organized church and began to fight. A President of the First Republic, Richard M. Nixon, dubbed this segment of society the Silent Majority. Perhaps, when he first coined this phrase, in 1969, he was right. Those who objected to the excesses of the more lunatic segments of society may have been more numerous, but, in the fantastic time of prosperity, they ignored the warning signals and allowed the rush to dubious freedoms to continue. Then, when resistance began to become organized under the United Church, it was too late to rectify the defects by peaceful means. The Church, itself, had undergone drastic changes, the largest single unit, the Roman Catholic Church, had disintegrated under the forces and disputes centered around birth control and celibacy. The Protestant churches had been weakened by the Tax Act of 1985, an extreme measure made necessary by the success of the rich churches in business and land speculation. The new-freedom advocates, having elected their own members to the national legislature, pointed out the power of the tax-free churches in the financial world. It was estimated that 85 percent of the real property in the nation was church owned. The Tax Act of 1985 was drastic, punitive, and final. Taxes ate into the Church holdings with an incredible swiftness and, since the common man had abandoned the Church, there was no way of stopping it. However, the loss of financial power galvanized the fanatics into union. Mr. Nixon's Silent Majority, no longer in the majority but possessed of vast financial and industrial power, organized the Christian Party and began a slow, futile effort to recapture the country by political means. Having failed by peaceful means to effect change, the Christian Party tried, at the turn of the century, to overthrow the administration of the long-haired, drug-taking President, Peaches Tickles, a former guitar-playing pop singer, by force. The insurrection was put down in an extremely bloody manner by administration shock troops who were allegedly high on the newest of so-called mind-expanding drugs, XES. The Christian Party was forced to go underground. Since members of the medical community were instrumental in Christian Party politics, and since many professional people died in the massacre of 2000, one of the most dramatic effects of the national schism began to make itself felt soon afterward. The medical system, already overburdened by the population explosion, weakened by the lack of young people willing to sacrifice the good times to be had under XES for the years of study required to become a medical practitioner, began to break down rapidly. Disease and death became endemic. Then the Influx, following the great Communist War and the destruction of vast land areas of the Old World, made medical care for the masses an impossible dream from the past. With the nation in chaos, the Christian Party found it possible to develop vast redoubts in hidden areas. Scientific progress, seemingly halted in the surface world, continued in the underground caverns. The alliance of fanatics and professional men functioned and developed, extending its tendrils into the chaotic conditions of the country. Revolution was assured. There was only the question of timing. And it appeared that external affairs, namely the development of a nuclear capacity in the Republic of South America, coupled with a new Nazism with expansionist leanings by the South Americans, would force the revolution prematurely. It was at this crucial stage that Colonel Ed Baxley made his great technological breakthrough, the invention of the fire gun. Threatened by the ultimate weapon, the decadent First Republic surrendered immediately. The Republic of South American was brought to heel by the threat of instant and total destruction. The revolution was completed. Seemingly, then, all was right with the world. The sensible people were back in power. It was time to right the wrongs. The life expectancy of the average man had dropped, in a decade, by twenty years. Swift and decisive measures were needed. Professional members of the Christian Party urged a crash attack on disease and the serious problem of environmental pollution. The fanatics, in the majority, were more interested in consolidating their hold on the country and in perpetuating themselves in power. A new schism developed. And suddenly the professional men found themselves to be virtual prisoners of the majority. We stood by helplessly as freedom, wounded by its own excesses, was erased. Censorship not only removed objectionable material from the arts, it stifled art entirely. The labor movement, guilty of vast excesses in the past, creator of inflation, disruptive of national wealth in excessive strikes, a virtual proletarian dictatorship within a dictatorship, was exterminated in a vast, bloody purge which saw the industrial capacity of the nation crippled, then revived to produce status objects, such as the ground car, with the installation of automated machines. Mighty Labor was reduced to a pitiable collection of workers who became known, in the new slang, as Techs. The government, in possession of all technology, industry, and wealth, doled out a minimum living to a vast segment of the society, creating the nonproductive Fares. Minor governmental workers, of which there were millions, became know as Lays and, when retired after twenty years of service, as Tireds. Meanwhile, in an effort to reduce the teeming population, the Christian Party withheld medical aid from the masses, giving them nothing more than a placebo called Newasper and, as punishment, therapy, a catch-all, a diabolical retread from early, experimental treatment of mental illnesses known as shock treatments, a terror named shakeshock. The effects of severe crowding in the environment have been studied by professional men since the middle of the last century and there is sufficient material on record without our going into the details here. However, it is well known that severe overcrowding at first stimulated sexual activity. The growing population of the past century and breakdown of the old morality seems to support this. Further, the leveling off of the population at approximately one billion seems also to make more believable the old theory that overcrowding also tends, after a suitable period, to inhibit breeding and keep the population level static. Thus, with the leveling off, there was created, with encouragement by the ruling Christians, a new Puritanism. Once again, sex became a dirty word. The formation of a new underground was inevitable. Professional men who objected to government policies began to seek ways and means of changing the intolerable situation before a vast and bloody upheaval from the lower classes destroyed civilization as we had known it. The history of the success or failure of this new attempt to restore a sensible new freedom is yet to be written… Luke
read and reread and forgot to be shocked by the references to dirty things like sex and breeding. He asked Caster about things which were difficult for him to understand. «I'm no authority on history,» she said. «I just know that things are not good outside. I know that my mother died when she was twenty-nine years old with the lung sickness. I'm forty-two years old and all my brothers and sisters are dead. Dr Wundt and the others want to change this. I'll walk on fire to help them.» «But they don't believe in God.» «And you do,» she said. «Of course,» Luke said, shocked that she'd even question it. «Then why don't you get about his work?» Caster asked. «Huh?» «You said you were given a gift, a gift of healing. Why don't you go out and use it?» «Well,» Luke said, «I mean—they—» «They what? All they want you to do is go out and see if you still have the gift.» «They want someone to go with me,» Luke said. «And they don't have faith. I mean, you've gotta have faith. It's like that. If you don't have faith…» «They want to see what you do. They want to understand how you can do what you did with that Fare in Old Town. I think their having faith has nothing to do with it, Luke. I think you've lost faith.» «No!» He protested the idea with a loud voice. «Then let's go out and heal,» she said. Luke's face turned red, for he had once had the thought of asking them to let Caster go with him and now she was saying, «Let's—» «I'm Lay, too,» she said. «I know what you're thinking.» «Huh?» «Oh, I'm not one of those who can read thoughts, not really, but I just know what you're thinking. If we went together it would be me and you, a man and a woman, alone in the city:» She smiled. «Well, don't worry, boy. I've got the same hangups you have. I was born in a city, too. I got the treatment. I was going to be married when I came down with the lung

  sickness and I was just fifteen. I feel the same way you feel, Luke. I don't like it, but that's the way I am. No man has ever touched me and it doesn't

  look as if one of you ever will, not the way I feel. So your virtue would be safe with me.» Luke was unable to speak. He turned away. It wasn't the act he was

  afraid of. It was the continuous smutty talk of these people. Alone with one of them in a city? He'd die if she said something similar to what she'd been saying where people could hear. «And I also know that you don't talk about things like that,» Caster said. He looked at her quickly. Maybe she could read his thoughts. «I pray every night,» she said simply. «Huh?» «I shouldn't. My prayers have never been answered. I've never had a sign from heaven like you, but I pray. I pray because I think there has to be something. Something better than this.» He was silent. He thought about the big Fare who had come to his defense, who had fought the Techs to allow him to preach without heckling. He thought about the way the big man was breathing, all jerky and gaspy, how the blood and ooze covered his lower body. He thought about how he felt, seeing the sign from God. And Caster prayed. She

  believed. And things were bad outside. If he could help. If he could make it easy for the people. If he could help bring them ease from their illnesses and make life better… «They don't have the right, do they, the Brothers, to live while we die?» «No,» she said. «They don't.» «Then I'll go,» Luke said. «I'll tell them,» Caster said. When she left, Luke fell to his knees, hands clasped. «Help me,» he prayed. «Please help me.» There was no light in the sky, only a lightening in his heart as if a weight had been lifted. CHAPTER NINE Truly, she thought, those who were responsible would suffer. It was a living hell. The massive ship of the line was a prison. Time was, for the first time within her immediate memory, a thing to be endured. Back on the Trangized planets, entire solar circuits meant little. In the small, enclosed, Trangless ship, a standard rotation period was eternity. Being alone was a new and unsettling experience. The navigation and handling of the ship was automatic, of course, directed by the huge computer back on A-l. Shipboard computers regulated the life of the ship. She was merely a passenger. Moreover, she was a prisoner. The shipboard computers were tyrannical. Machines directed her every movement, controlled her every moment. Machines indicated when it was time to take nourishment, time to sleep. Machines forced her into an indoctrination room where her mind was invaded, stimulated, shuffled around. Knowledge she had once been fed was reactivated from the memory storage banks of her brain, useless knowledge which had been force-fed her when she was a child, so long, long ago. It was there, but it was beyond her reach under normal conditions, for her pleasure-filled life on A-l had not been concerned with such things. It was traumatic to be jerked out of a sweet mixture of Trang and the joys of endless coition into a world of machines and complicated areas of knowledge. It is the function of the beings aboard a ship of the line to be capable of backing up any mechanical system. And, thus, she was crammed with terribly dry data regarding arms systems, navigation systems, the life system, power systems, emergency systems. It pleased her to find that the armament of the ship was sufficient to destroy a planetary grouping. She entertained bloody, joyful thoughts of finding the disturbing elements in Section G-1034876 and of blasting them into cosmic dust with one flyby. It pleased her to think of the sub-beings on Planet 3, Star R-875948 watching the nighttime skies to see planet after planet nova and spread death toward them, broiling them slowly before the actual effects of the guns reached them. One of the most frustrating aspects of the entire miserable situation was the remoteness of the suspected planet. It was far out from galactic center, an outpost planet near the thinning edge of the galaxy, remote, small, insignificant. Getting there was a series of lightning-fast jumps which ate vast distances. Incredible distances were covered in each jump into sub-space, but there were interminable waiting periods between jumps while the shipboard computers located a suitable power source from among the near stars, focused onto it, hummed in motionless energy as the power banks were recharged for yet another jump. It was the recharging periods which were deadly. The indoctrination helped, after the shock of having areas of the mind stimulated wore off. The indoctrination, after the first few sessions, became somewhat of a release from the sheer boredom of shipboard loneliness. There was even a sort of pride in finding that one's memory banks were so completely stocked with a vast technology. And there was a sense of childish pride in being reminded of the history of the race. Once she had been taught all of it and it had been pushed aside into unused areas of the brain during the eons of Trang-life. Once, when she was a child, she'd been indoctrinated in the

  history of a people who started, ageless eternities ago, to people an empire which encompassed most of the galaxy. Having completed the necessary technical re-education, she passed the time with historical sessions and knew, with a sense of renewed wonder, the achievements of the race. Reliving it almost as if she participated, she saw the formation of the empire, the spreading out from A-l to near star systems, then on and on, the race proliferating as if it had been given a mandate to people the entire island universe. She saw the early starships flash into sub-space, some never to resurface. She saw the trials of the early colonists in primitive surroundings. She met the greats of the race. All were preserved in the banks of the great knowledge banks, almost alive in her mind. Outside, during the recharging periods of floating, seemingly motionless in space, she saw the great suns and the whorls of gaseous nebula and the great dark clouds and the distance, the sheer distance, involved in her trip. Far ahead of the ship, using sub-space as an instant medium of conduction, the small sensor near R-875948 acted as a beacon. Ancient records, exhumed by the central computer on A-1, proved the coordinates for each jump, and yet it was time-consuming. There was boredom, in spite of the interest in the historical archives. There was, after all, a physical limit to the time she could stay under the preceptors in the indoctrination room. For the remaining time, she was forced to endure long, Trangless periods of dissatisfaction. And alone! For the most desired female in the original system to be alone was the most unforgivable thing of all. There were times when her entire being cried out for male companionship, for the closeness, the joy of it. And for that, she determined, the sub-beings on th
at miserable, stinking planet would pay, and pay, and pay. At last the shipboard computer joined onto the weak, distant rays of the star R-875948 and the power banks hummed to gather strength for the last jump. It was then that she was summoned—summoned! Her!—to the indoctrination room. She went sullenly. She had just completed a thorough self-survey making minute adjustment to a gland, revitalizing dying cells, changing her hair color, just to pass the time, to a more glowing red. She felt wonderful, of course. She'd never felt any other way.