The rest is history, and I'm not going over that again. If you want to read about the history of the past thirty years, you will find plenty of material. Most of it deals with the reconstruction which followed the invasion of the Andromedans. Mankind put up a good resistance, but not for long. The whole world capitulated inside thirty days, and no one ever was able to agree to use the atomic weapons which were the only possible defense. The efficient undermining of the governments of both Britain and the USA made them helpless in a few days. The good men were destroyed; those who were under control took charge and did as they were told. Russia, so buried in suspicion and mistrust was unable to cooperate with the West, even in the face of such a threat – and it had its own problems of men who had been "wired for sound", to use Dodds' expressive phrase.
With these three powers, together with the rest of Europe out of action, the rest of the world was defeated before it realized what had happened. There was gallant, last ditch resistance, but it did not last long. After the total destruction of key centers such as London, Bonn, Paris and New York, the heart went out of people. Pockets of guerilla warfare endured until the end came, but they made no impact on global events.
We were up against, during all that bitter time, beings whose life attitude was entirely different from ours. They were not moved by any shade of compassion or "human feeling". They were emotionless, cold and, by our standards, brutal. Even during our most bloody wars, we had at least paid lip-service to the idea of humanity. The Red Cross, the Geneva Convention had meant something, even to the Japanese and Germans. But to the Andromedans such concepts were meaningless. To them, we were no more important than insects had been to us. Insects eat your crops? Spray them with poison! They invade your home? Trample on them! They breed too fast? Feed them drugs to make them sterile. The attitude of the Andromedans was as simple and straight forward as that.
Maybe things would have been different, but for one Andromedan. They might have tried to come to terms with us, to have found a way of living alongside us which would have been of tremendous long-term advantage to mankind. If we had been able to learn their technology, for instance, it would have saved us many weary centuries of struggle. But, in the fierce internal struggle that occurred in the advance space-craft, between the Lady and Gulda, Gulda won! Gulda, the only Andromedan left with an emotional life based on sexual desire, defeated the Lady by sheer passion and intensity.
In half an hour the deed was done. Gulda, revengeful and resentful, sent the Lady to the Torture Room, and there, not immediately, not quickly as would have been seemly; but slowly, over a period of several days, Gulda watched the Lady die, screaming in agony as she herself had done.
After that, things proceeded smoothly for the Andromedans. All through that year the advance party watched from their craft as mankind, led by the small cadre of men and women who had been put under control, deliberately destroyed their systems of government which had held their affairs in precarious balance. At the end of ten months, the whole world had fallen into chaos and anarchy. Countless millions had starved to death. Hunger and disease stalked the Earth like pale ghosts. No one was safe. No place was secure.
Then the main fleet arrived, and because she had a firm grip on affairs and more knowledge of the management of Earth than anyone else, Gulda became Supreme Leader of the Andromedans. With half a million of them landed and rapidly taking possession of the land, ultimate victory seemed certain. Mankind, with all its long traditions of love and hate, self-sacrifice and cruelty, nobility and meanness, goodness and evil, seemed doomed to complete destruction…
Months before the arrival of the main invasion, Gulda had to face and resolve a great problem. Although her groups could bring ruin to the Earth, as it had done, they were too few to take possession of it. And even half a million invaders would not be able to occupy the Earth in a satisfactory manner. Millions of new creatures would be required. The population of Andromedans must be multiplied over a decade – and then the multiplication must be stopped because creatures with a possible life-span of one thousand years or more could not be allowed to multiply indefinitely. This must be a "once for all time" breeding.
Over a thousand years ago the policy had been decided. By then enough was known about the genetics of the human race to prove that it had certain characteristics desirable in Andromedans living in this new environment. So, the new creatures would be a careful cross-breed, with human fathers and Andromedan mothers. Over the millennia, the male sex had been almost totally eliminated among the Andromedans, only enough males being maintained to ensure continuity of the race. No more than a thousand were kept at stud, as donors in artificial insemination. Sex, in its emotional aspects, did not enter into the matter. Such emotions as "love" and "passion" had been bred out of the race as being time-wasting and illogical.
By the time the main invasion arrived, Gulda wanted to have a semen-bank ready so that the breeding of cross-breeds could be put in hand immediately. Inside a century there would be a new race of Earth-born Andromedans, hundreds of millions of them. And from this nucleus of new creatures would arise other armies of invasion which could reach out into space to find and prepare other planets for occupation. Andromeda did not intend to be caught again with a planet that might die around them!
Gulda thought that she was dutifully carrying out established policy, but of course her decisions were clouded by the sexual passions that tore at her. That was why she had opposed the Lady. That was why, in the final issue, the Lady had had to be destroyed. Now Gulda was in supreme power, and she could and would have her own way. Her sexual obsession centered on just one man, out of all the teeming millions on Earth, for a very good reason that she could never understand. She was in love with Gerry Glasner! Gulda did not know love when she experienced it. To her, this obsession which haunted her every waking hour, and many of her sleeping ones, was something unaccountable. She had to have this man in her power. She bad to see him suffer, in order to soothe her own suffering. And she realized that there was now a special relationship between Gerry and the American girl, Sonia Evans. She did not recognize it as "love" because to her there was no such thing. She did not even have a word for it! But she did recognize Sonia Evans as some kind of impediment to her own desires, and as such she must be overcome.
To Gulda this obsessional emotion that over-powered her and clouded her judgment was not related to giving, but to taking; not to submission but to domination; not to yielding, but to aggression. She understood nothing of the mutuality of love, only the personality of desire.
Gerry Glasner did not get far. He was not even sure that he wanted to go far, and if it came down to bedrock, where was there to go? Something terrible was going to happen to his world, and he felt he wanted to be there to do what he could to help. His immediate inclination was to go to see Sonia. He took a cab to the hospital, listening with half his mind to the talk of the cab driver commenting on the news that had just broken, of the new military government. The man was understandably bewildered, but Gerry did not want to discuss the topic. He enquired at reception of Sonia and was sent up to the private room she was occupying. She was conscious now, obviously in pain, but clearheaded.
Gerry told her what he knew, and she listened gravely.
"What are you going to do, Gerry?" she asked.
"I don't know… I'm more worried about you."
"About me?"
"Yes. For one thing, you're such a long way from home. For another, you're marked. I think the Andromedans have very long memories."
"You believe they'll bother about me?" She smiled. "I'm not all that important, Gerry. They'll have a lot more to think about."
"I'm not sure, Sonia. That woman who impersonated you was someone to be reckoned with."
As they talked, neither of them took any special note of the two white-coated young men who came quietly into the room.
"Do you want me to leave?" asked Gerry.
"No, don't disturb yourself, Sergeant Glasner," said one of them.
As he struggled against the cloth pressed over his nose and mouth, and smelled the pungent odor of ether, Gerry knew he had been right to fear Gulda!
The ambulance bumped over the grass beside the road leading over Wimbledon Common. On the main road, the traffic of the evening rush-hour was crawling along, delayed as always by the bottle-neck of Wimbledon High Street. If anyone noticed the ambulance, certainly no one was interested. But suddenly, out of a clear sky, the great bulk of the Andromedan space craft materialized, hovering a couple of feet above the grass. A driver braked suddenly, shaken out of his day dream of home and food, and the evening air was rent by the crash of bumpers and the tinkle of broken glass as a hundred cars piled up slowly and inexorably.
A square door opened in the craft and steps were let down. Two white-coated figures leaped from the ambulance and opened the back doors. They drew out a stretcher and carried it quickly to the foot of the steps. Weird figures in black plastic suits, their faces covered by hoods, came hurrying down the steps to take the stretcher while the white-coated men ran back to the ambulance for a second one. It was all over inside three minutes. The last of the black-clad figures disappeared through the door. The steps retracted and the door closed silently. The two men in white coats stood by the ambulance. When it reached its target, there was a blinding flash and ambulance and men just disappeared – evaporated. One moment they were there; a second later, they were not! The grass in a circle of about forty feet in diameter was burned black. That was all.
[bb-133 illustration 11.png]
The drivers whose cars had been damaged did not stop to exchange the names of insurance companies, names and addresses or bad language. With one accord they put their cars in gear and drove off as fast as they could. When they looked back, the huge craft had… disappeared. There was nothing to be seen but a circle of blackened grass, smoking faintly in the cool evening air… When they arrived home, the momentous news on TV absorbed their attention. None of them connected the formation of a new military government with that strange episode on Wimbledon Common…
Gerry Glasner had lost all count of time, but he knew he had been imprisoned for a long period. It was not easy to remember, but he believed he had been fed about twenty-five times, and assuming three meals a day, that was over a week since he had been abducted from the hospital and delivered into the hands of the Andromedans. In all the time, he had seen only a solitary hooded guard, who had not spoken to him, nor even seemed to understand his questions. He was in a grey-walled room with a sliding door and a grill high up near the ceiling from which came a light draft of warm fresh air. The walls and floor were lightly padded, which made sense because a couple of times the craft he was in had lurched suddenly and he had banged into the wall as he paced up and down, up and down.
There was a narrow couch in the room and a comfortable arm-chair, and nothing more. Everything, walls, floor, and furniture, were covered with material which seemed identical with that used to make the chastity belts he had seen. If it were, an eighth of an inch of that would make a better prison than three feet of solid stone! In an alcove, fitted with a sliding door held by a spring but with no catch, were necessary toilet facilities, strange in their design but recognizable and efficient.
It was the everlasting silence that came close to driving Gerry crazy! Except when the guard brought his meals, be heard nothing, apart from a soft whine that never changed note, and was presumably due to machinery operating somewhere. He had whistled at first, even sung to try to raise his spirits; but the sound bad been taint and dead in the padded room, so that at last he bad given that up too. He worried about Sonia.
During the first day, he had found interest in his clothes. He was wearing a close-fitting suit made of some black plastic which stretched so that the suit fitted like a second skin. It fitted simply, with no fastenings of any kind. Open down the front, it had an overlap seam. He pressed this seam with his fingers, and it closed – and stayed closed. To open it, he pulled the overlapped seam apart, and it opened. He could open and reseal it indefinitely, because the plastic, which certainly did not feel sticky, had this capacity to adhere to itself.
Under the suit he was wearing a garment that he thought of as a chastity belt. It was not like those others which had provided the first clue to the Andromedans. In fact, while it would certainly prevent him from having intercourse, assuming there had been a woman present and willing… the belt did not make any attempt to prevent masturbation. And several times, perhaps because of boredom, maybe too on account of the fear that gnawed at his mind, and anxiety about Sonia, he had brought himself to orgasm. There was a narrow belt around his waist, pulled tight. It had no fastening, but was made of the same stuff as all the other belts he had seen. Presumably it had been put on wet and then dried. Nothing he did could shift it. In front, the belt widened and came down to cover his belly. It passed between his legs and, narrowing, up between his buttocks to attach to the back of the waist belt, all in one piece.
In his anus was a long tube, about an inch in diameter. Over his penis and scrotum was a sheath of the plastic, metallic substance, which fitted perfectly. He could feel that, from the end of the penis-sheath, a rigid tube entered his penis at the tip, but he could not tell how long the tube was. In consequence, his penis was always rigid, even when it was not actually erect. The suit he could remove; the belt he could not. Every day the guard brought him a clean suit and waited while he removed the soiled one, to take it away. That was the only excitement in twenty-four hours. He would take a shower before putting on the clean suit, which felt clammy to his skin until it warmed up. After that it was not uncomfortable.
Sometimes Gerry wondered vaguely what was happening in the world he used to know, but it was becoming increasingly remote and unreal to him.
The monotony was broken when two guards came into the room. He made no resistance when they put a collar tight around his neck and strapped his wrists to it, one at each side of his neck. And when one of them took him by the arm, he moved toward the door without a word. There was no point in talking. He would not get an answer!
They took him through endless grey corridors and up in an elevator, and at last one of the guards pressed a button outside a door. A green light went out and the door opened. They pushed him, not roughly, into a large room. He stood, dazed, trying to recognize his surroundings. In front of him, sitting in a large armchair, almost like a throne, was the tall, dark-haired woman who had impersonated Sonia. It was Gulda. Behind her, dressed as he was, and with her hands similarly immobilized, stood Sonia herself!
Gerry started forward, to be immediately restrained by the guards.
"Sonia!" he cried. "Are you all right?"
The girl looked pale, but seemed to have recovered from the whipping she had endured. But there was something wrong with her. She did not smile, nor give any sign of pleasure at seeing Gerry. She stared at him coldly, as though he were a stranger.
"Sonia! What have they done to you?" She did not show any response.
He glared at Gulda. "What have you done to her? Why is she like that?"
Gulda smiled. It was not a nice smile. "The woman has been put under control," she said. "She no longer has a personality. She is an automaton."
Gerry struggled against the guards, in vain.
"You bitch!" he shouted. "I'll kill you!"
Gulda spoke rapidly to the guards. One of them took something from her belt, knelt down and strapped Gerry's ankles tightly together. Then the guards withdrew, leaving the trio together.
"You are highly honored," said Gulda.
"Honored? What the hell do you mean, honored?"
"You are to become the father of a new race of beings," she said, seriously. "From you we are going to breed a new race of Andromedans who will be better suited to survive on this planet."
Gerry stood stupidly, not understanding.
"You're going to breed… from me?"
"Yes. You are going to be our first human donor. From you, over the next ten solar years or so, we shall breed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of half-human, half-Andromedan people. You will be the donor – and the woman will draw the semen from you!"
Gerry stood silent for a minute or so, trying to gather his wits. To be faced with this, after about ten days in solitary confinement was hard to handle.
"You can't do this to us!" he shouted at last.
"I can. I shall. It is my will," said Gulda, grandly. And suddenly Gerry knew that she could, and would. But he made one more effort. If he had to grovel, for Sonia's sake more than his own, then he would grovel. If he had to humiliate himself, he would do it, for the woman he loved.
"Please," he begged, his voice shaking and broken. "Please don't do this to us… We love one another."
"Love? I've heard of it from Earth people. It means nothing to me." Contemptuously Gulda turned to Sonia. "What are your feelings in the matter?" she asked.
When Sonia spoke, it was like listening to the third-hand reproduction of a very bad tap recording. Every word was deliberate and slow.
"I have no feelings," she said. "I do what I am told to do." Her eyes were dull, lack-luster.
"Do you love this man?"
"He means nothing to me."
"You see? There is no love between you – whatever that may mean!"
"You lie! You have taken away her senses, controlled her mind. That's not the real Sonia speaking!"
"She looks real enough to me!" Gulda's lips were twisted with sarcasm. "Enough of this nonsense. I have had you both brought here so that I may see whether she is competent and whether you are as capable as I seem to remember from another occasion!" Deliberately Gulda crossed one knee over the other, and Gerry saw, with a kind of horror, the high spike heels of her shiny black boots, swinging up and down hypnotically before his eyes.
"I see you remember," said Gulda softly.
"Do you love them, Gerry?"
"No!" he cried. "No!" There was a note of despair in his voice as he looked at Sonia.
"Don't bother with that one," said Gulda. "She thinks no thoughts that are not fed to her. You can forget her – until it is time for her to do her job. Come, kneel down here. You know you want to."
Despite himself, hating himself for it, ashamed to act in that way in front of the woman he loved, Gerry had to obey. Something stronger than his own will forced him to fall heavily on his knees on the padded floor, and to lean slightly forward to plant a kiss on the toe of the glistening boot.
Gulda sat back, a triumphant smile on her face. It was easy to manipulate these creatures, who were so much at the disposal of their senses. She did not think further to consider how much she too was enmeshed. Lack of self-criticism apparently is not a monopoly of human beings!
She moved her foot slightly, and Gerry's lips followed until at last he could move no more because he was in danger of falling forward. Gulda sat forward and unstrapped his hands.
[bb-133 illustration 12.png]
"Hold my foot," she said, "stroke it." For one mad moment Gerry thought that with a swift movement he could upset Gulda on to the floor, cast her down, capture her – but he realized as quickly that this would be fruitless. He could not hope to keep her subjugated, with maybe a thousand other Andromedans to help her. And in the struggle it was almost certain that Sonia would be killed – and what was the use of that? For the moment, he could abandon himself to this crazy obsession – and he wanted to, with an intensity the greater because for so many years he had kept it repressed, pressed harshly down in his unconscious. It had taken Gulda with her superior ability to understand him, to uncover his desire and to enslave him by it.
Groaning in an access of abasement and self-hatred, Gerry took the glossy boot in both hands and began to smother it with kisses. Inside the plastic sheath, his penis was hard and throbbing. Sonia, the poor, lost girl, the charming companion, the dear companion, was forgotten in her misery.
Tentatively he put out his tongue and began to lick the surface of the shoe, and as he did so, Gulda turned it contemptuously so that the sole was presented to him. He licked that too, and kissed it; and as he did so, slowly, inexorably the heel moved up toward his mouth. At last, he took the sharp spike into his mouth and began to suck it. Unable to stand the pressure any longer, he moved one hand to the sheath covering his penis, but as he touched it, Gulda moved her heel sharply so that it grazed the inside of his mouth, and he could taste blood on his tongue.
"You shall not do that!" she hissed. "Hold my boot!" Dumbly, like an ox led to the slaughter, Gerry obeyed his mistress, although the desire that mounted in him was almost insupportable.
At last Gulda withdrew her foot, taking the heel from his mouth.
"Lie down on your back," she said, "with your head toward me!" He obeyed, and once more as the point of the heel hovered over his lips, he opened his mouth and took it in. Once more it was withdrawn and again pressed in, each time a little more than before.
Gulda spoke sharply to Sonia. "Fasten his hands!" And, like a machine, Sonia came forward and knelt to her task. Gerry hardly noticed her as she took each hand and strapped it tight to the collar, until at last he was helpless again. AU he was conscious of was that sharp, long heel pressing ever deeper into his mouth, sliding up and down against his tongue.
"Carry out your instructions!" ordered Gulda.
Sonia got up from her knees and walked stiffly across the room. She came back and knelt beside Gerry again. Taking his sheathed penis in her hand, she plugged a narrow-bore plastic tube into the end of the sheath, fitting it into the tube that ran along inside the penis. To the end of the tube was attached a small plastic bottle.
Then she put one hand between his thighs and grasped his balls. With the other hand she held his penis, and began to masturbate him, gently and delicately at first, adding to the sensation he was already experiencing. Gerry was hardly aware of her; only of the sensation she was bringing him.
At that moment she was not the girl he loved; nothing more than an instrument of pleasure, an extension of Gulda's personality. He began to writhe as he lay, and opened his mouth wider to breathe more easily. Gulda slowly got to her feet, balancing on the left foot with the right poised over Gerry's mouth, and the heel deep inside. She pressed down hard, so that he gagged, but, could not move. She stood like that, pinning him to the floor with the spike of her heel, and with the sole pressing down on his nose, restricting his breathing.
Another sharp command, and Sonia obediently speeded up the movements of her hands and then, as she brought Gerry to orgasm and he ejaculated, the silence of the room was broken by a weird, high-pitched scream from Gulda. She withdrew her heel from Gerry's mouth and stood firm on the floor, leaning forward over him to hold on to the arms of her chair, her body stiff. Then, slowly she relaxed and began to breathe normally as she regained control of her senses.
"So much thought and effort!" she thought. "And all for that one instant of time. It's not worth it! Why was I born like this? Why can't I be like the others, free of this terrible need?"
She sat down again, her breast heaving, but slowly bringing her mind into line with reality. Gerry lay supine, panting, unwilling to move. In him, too there was a strong feeling of self-hatred and disgust. Once more he had let this creature triumph over him. Worse still, as she did so he had totally forgotten Sonia.
The only one not apparently involved was the American girl. Gravely she unplugged the tube from the end of the penis-sheath, waited for the white fluid to run down into the plastic bottle, removed the tube from the neck of the bottle and sealed it. She gathered up everything and got rid of the tube into a slot, presumably intended for garbage. She stood, holding the bottle.
"That will go into deep-freeze," said Gulda. "From that we shall breed maybe five-hundred Andromedan half-breeds. You will become the father of a new race!"
Gerry did not speak. He just lay there, looking up at Sonia who stood beside Gulda motionless, uninvolved, aloof.
The guards came soon after and took him back to his prison. They removed the strap from his ankles, replacing it by a hobble that enabled him to shuffle along with short steps. But they left his hands strapped to the collar. In future two of them always came together with his food and his daily clean suit. They loosed his hands for as long as it took him to eat, or to bathe and change, and then they strapped his hands tight to his neck again.
And three times in twenty-four hours, Sonia came to him. She entered the room alone, although Gerry knew there was a guard outside the door, within call. Always she carried a small box, from which she removed a length of plastic tube attached to the neck of a small bottle. Without a word or a sign of recognition she would attach the tube to his penis-sheath and then proceed to masturbate him, coldly, emotionlessly but very efficiently. Then, having collected the semen she would depart, leaving him alone again for another eight hours.
At first, inevitably, Gerry had enjoyed her ministrations; had looked forward to it eagerly. But as he began to see how automatically she did her work, how her mind was controlled so that she was a mere instrument of Gulda's policy, the pleasure diminished, until at last he came to hate the very idea of her coming to him. Yet he was at the same time obsessed by the knowledge that her arrival was inevitable; that there was nothing he could do to resist her; that he, too was being used by Gulda as an instrument. And sometimes Gulda would come too, and occasionally she would bring her whip! She was careful not to overdo the whipping. Obviously she had gained some experience from Sonia's condition when she was delivered from the craft, showing the undesirability of whipping these Earth people too severely. Gerry never knew when to expect her, nor even when Sonia was likely to arrive because, confined to that cell of a room he had no idea how time was passing.
Sometimes he would panic, imagining that he had been forgotten, that no one would ever come again. Another time, it seemed that the door had no sooner shut on Sonia than it opened again.
One day Gulda said, "We already have enough semen from you to breed fifty thousand new creatures." She was taunting him, but after she had gone he did a quick sum. Assuming her first estimate of five-hundred lives from the first batch of semen, it meant that Sonia must have visited him three times a day for about a month! And still it continued.
At last, close to nervous collapse, and very daring, Gerry asked if it would be possible for him to have a radio. When he explained that he wanted to know what was happening in the world, Gulda, much to his surprise raised no objection. A small, powerful receiver was brought and plugged in with a timer, so that four or five times a day he was able to listen to news bulletins. And such news it was; news of revolution, of starving, hunger-crazed people behaving like animals, fighting for scraps, tearing one another to pieces for food. News of great nations fragmented, with every town and village a separate entity, ruled locally, hanging or shooting strangers who tried to pass that way. News of central governments striving to bring some sense back into affairs, to control anarchy, to prevent the whole fabric of civilization falling into destruction. News of executions, of armored troops forcing their way along roads through and over the bodies of panic-stricken civilians; of those same troops weeping unashamedly by the road side, deserting to wander back to where they had come from in the hope of finding a wife, a child, a parent still living.
And news of disease, rampant, uncontrollable. The saboteurs appointed by the Andromedans had been only too well chosen. It had been wrongly assumed that they would have concentrated on heads of governments, on the armies and air forces; but they had gone much further than that. We Earth people did not appreciate the thoroughness with which their preparations had been made; the patient work their explorers had done over several thousands of years before the invasion was mounted. They knew enough to put under control relatively unimportant people. Those, who had charge of water-works and sewage installations; generating plants and railroad systems. All the vital operations of civilized life that everyone overlooked as having "always been there". Suddenly, almost overnight, they were there no longer.
In the days following Gerry's disappearance from the world, vast quantities of powerful explosives had been issued to the secret agents of the Andromedans. Mankind did not know what had hit it until it turned on a faucet to find it dry, until sewage backed up the pipes into the houses, until food rotted in refrigerators and children died of hypothermia in freezing homes. As oilfields and port installations went up in smoke and dust, transport ground to a halt, so that famine began to stalk Earth, not at first because there was no food, but because there was no way of distributing it.
By the time the Andromedans fleet was discernible to the few space-radar stations that still managed to keep some kind of watch, there was not a country, not a city, not a village in the world whose life was not on a day-to-day emergency basis, with the living hardly able to cope with the daily task of burying the dead…
And then, as you know, they landed. The largest fleet, of about one-hundred-and-fifty ships landed in the Texas Panhandle, where the population was so sparse that it was easily wiped out in a few hours. They were joined by some three-hundred freighters, and within hours of landing the Andromedans were busy at work, establishing themselves on a temporary basis, equipped with everything they required, independent if necessary for months or even years of Earth. Another fleet, rather smaller, landed in the Central Plains of France, and cleared an area of two-hundred square miles of some of the most densely populated and highly industrialized land in the world of every living thing. A small fleet landed in England, in the south east corner, in the county of Kent. Others, even smaller landed in India, China, European Russia, Australia and elsewhere.
The Earth people, distraught, panic-stricken, starving and hopeless learned slowly of these invasions. Often they knew nothing about them until they saw the vast machines lumbering toward their town, destroying everything in their path. They could not believe their eyes. They died incredulous.
And all through this time, exactly on the eighth hour of every day, Sonia Evans was admitted to Gerry's cell to draw from his loins the vital fluid that should establish a new race of Andromedans on Earth.
It was almost exactly a year from the first time when Sonia came into the room in a hurry, her eyes bright and alert.
Gerry did not open his eyes. He was resigned, apathetic. He could not bear even to look at this girl any more. She came, did what she had to do and left, with never a word or a sign of recognition. Outside, everything he valued had gone up in smoke. It did not matter. Nothing mattered any more. Life was a game played by fools for the amusement of some Gods or others with time on their hands and nothing more interesting to do. If it amused them to kick the ant-hill to bits – what of it!
But Gerry awoke at the sound of Sonia's voice, bright, alert, excited.
"Gerry! Gerry! Wake up! Something's happened?"
He sat up with an effort. Lack of exercise had left him stiff and weak.
"What do you mean? What's happened?"
"I don't know. But about an hour ago I suddenly had this feeling. Oh, Gerry, I'm me again!" She fell over Gerry, almost smothering him, and began to cry.
"Unstrap my hands, Sonia, for Pete's sake!" She roused herself to release him. He bent forward and took the hobble off his legs. Then he put his arms around Sonia and held her. "Where's the guard?" he asked.
"There isn't one! Gerry, there isn't anyone! I can't find them. And they've stopped whatever they were doing to me! Look at me!"
Gerry did. Once more Sonia was the sweet companion with whom he had entered into danger for a cause greater than either of them. Her eyes were soft and tender; her cheeks stained with tears. He held her tight, trying to come to grips with the situation.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Yes. About an hour ago I was sitting – I have spent most of my time just sitting, Gerry. I was waiting for the signal to… to come… when suddenly, just like that, something seemed to clear in my mind. I got up, opened the door and crept out. Gerry, I've been almost all over the ship – and they've all gone! There's no one about that I can find. The only place I know where I haven't been is Gulda's office, and the door's locked."
"We'll have to get out of here, fast!" said Gerry, but he did not move. It was so long since he had been called upon to make any decision for himself that he was inhibited. "They may come back."
At last they got up and stumbled along corridor and down stairways until at last, by accident they came to the door of Gulda's office.
Gerry stood silent for a moment, listening. He thought he could hear moaning. He tapped on the door, tried the buzzer, but got no response.
Sonia said, "I was here once when the power was cut off for a few minutes. One of the guards opened a little door up there and took out some kind of key."
Gerry found the tiny closet, took out the metal rod and inserted it into a hole in the door, which slid wide open. The light seemed dimmer than usual, but a the two crept into the room, they could see a recumbent form lying on the couch and hear a kind of sobbing moan. They went nearer and saw that it was Gulda. She turned at a sound and stared at them, her eyes wild. She made no effort to sit up.
"I am ill," she said, her voice cracked. "I am ill. My skin burns; my head is bursting… Help me…"
Gerry looked at her coldly. "I guess she's dying," he said.
Sonia clung to him. "What is it?" she whispered, although there was no one to over-hear.
Gerry laughed, a short, harsh laugh shorn of humor. "Bacteria!" he said.
"Bacteria?"
"Yes, mankind, that proud creature of creation has been saved at the eleventh hour by the smallest and most despised things on Earth. She's got influenza, or something very like it! And I'll bet that's what has happened to the others." He began to move away toward the door.
"We can't leave her alone to die," said Sonia, softly.
"Why not? We don't owe her anything!"
"She looks so, lost, so bewildered… poor thing…"
So the two of them sat in Gulda's room for almost two hours, while she died. Sonia found water and did what she could to ease the proud and powerful Andromedans last minutes. But she did not understand, nor show any appreciation until, toward the end she stopped moaning for a moment and, with a great effort, said, "I wish I knew what this love was…" A few minutes later Gulda sighed deeply and stopped breathing.
The recovery is something we all know about from personal experience. It was several years before any really concerted effort was possible, but then we began to rebuild our world. It isn't a "brave new world", as old-time humanists like Wells envisaged. In many ways it is no better than the old one; in some ways it is not nearly as good. But there is hope in one direction, because we are no longer tensed, waiting to leap at one another's throats. There's the over-riding fear now of another invasion from Outer Space. We are not by any means sure that the Andromedan invasion was the whole force, or merely a skirmish in strength. We watch, and we wait… and we don't dare start fighting one another. So, some good came out of it all in the end.
As for our two young friends, well they got out of the deserted space ship which lay, an empty hulk near the edge of Ashdown Forest, not far from the village of Sevenoaks in Kent. And they made their way by slow stages to London, traveling two-hundred miles on foot to make a thirty mile journey, trying to avoid the worst centers of turmoil. And, at last, in an underground shelter deep under Highgate Hill they came face to face once more with Chief Inspector Dodds. He looked twenty years older than when Gerry had seen him last, tired and white-faced, but every inch alive, vibrant, full of energy. He welcomed them both and put them to work.
About two years later, a chemist working on all that the Andromedans had abandoned, trying, with the physicists, mathematicians and others to rescue what could be rescued from the highly advanced technology of the Andromedans, discovered, quite by accident, a way of removing those metallic chastity belts. He was using a very weak acid, and spilt some on a table-top covered with the material. As he watched, the metallic plastic split and curled up. Gerry was not the only one to be glad of the discovery. Sonia also was among the thousands of people who were restored to the possibility of a normal sex-life.
Sonia and Gerry were much together during those days. In fact, purely for convenience, in view of the universal shortages of food, fuel and other essentials, they lived together in two small rooms. But they bad no sexual relationship. Their mutual affection was strong, but love seemed to have died somewhere in the belly of that great space ship. They both had a hard fight against shame and self-disgust, even though both were innocent parties.
But one evening after work, with a simple and not very adequate meal inside them, they huddled in front of a tiny wood-fired stove which they allowed themselves for a couple of hours each night in the depth of winter, in the darkness except for the glow of the front of the stove, Sonia put her hand in Gerry's and whispered, "We didn't get far with founding a new race of Andromedans, Gerry. Do you think we could do better with a new race of men?"
Gerry gripped that tiny hand hard in his own. For a fleeting moment he felt a spasm of regret for all that might have been; for the joy of youth and irresponsibility; for careless rapture and the days of wine and roses; for innocence and virginity gone forever. Then he drew himself together. Life had to be lived. It was hard and real; there was so much to do, so few people to do it. The penis that began to throb at his loins was no longer that of a youth, overeager, callow, inexperienced. This was the organ of a man that began to demand its just dues!
He sighed. "The fire's beginning to go out," he said at last, rising to his feet. "Come to bed, darling. Someone's got to keep the flames burning…"