The Infinite Moment

Consider Her Ways

There was nothing but myself.

I hung in a timeless, spaceless, forceless void that was neither light, nor dark. I had entity, but no form; awareness, but no senses; mind, but no memory. I wondered, is this this nothingness my soul? And it seemed that I had wondered that always, and should go on wondering it for ever But, somehow, timelessness ceased. I became aware that there was a force: that I was being moved, and that spacelessness had, therefore, ceased, too. There was nothing to show that I moved; I knew simply that I was being drawn. I felt happy because I knew there was something or someone to whom I wanted to be drawn. I had no other wish than to turn like a compass needle, and then fall through the void…

But I was disappointed. No smooth, swift fall followed. Instead, other forces fastened on me. I was pulled this way, and then that. I did not know how I knew it; there was no outside reference, no fixed point, no direction, even; yet I could feel that I was tugged hither and thither, as though against the resistance of some inner gyroscope. It was as if one force were in command of me for a time, only to weaken and lose me to a new force. Then I would seem to slide towards an unknown point, until I was arrested, and diverted upon another course. I wafted this way and that, with the sense of awareness continually growing firmer; and I wondered whether rival forces were fighting for me, good and evil, perhaps, or life and death…

The sense of pulling back and forth became more definite until I was almost jerked from one course to another. Then abruptly, the feeling of struggle finished. I had a sense of travelling faster and faster still, plunging like a wandering meteorite that had been trapped at last…

“All right,” said a voice, “Resuscitation was a little retarded, for some reason. Better make a note of that on her card. What’s the number? Oh, only her fourth time. Yes, certainly make a note. It’s all right. Here she comes!”

It was a woman’s voice speaking, with a slightly unfamiliar accent. The surface I was lying on shook under me. I opened my eyes, saw the ceiling moving along above me, and let them close. Presently, another voice, again with an unfamiliar intonation, spoke to me: “Drink this,” she said.

A hand lifted my head, and a cup was pressed against my lips. After I had drunk the stuff I lay back with my eyes closed again. I dozed for a little while, and came out of it feeling stronger. For some minutes I lay looking up at the ceiling and wondering vaguely where I was. I could not recall any ceiling that was painted just this pinkish shade of cream. Then, suddenly, while I was still gazing up at the ceiling, I was shocked, just as if something had hit my mind a sharp blow. I was frighteningly aware that it was not just the pinkish ceiling that was unfamiliar—everything was unfamiliar. Where there should have been memories there wall just a great gap. I had no idea who I was, or where I was; I could recall nothing of how or why I came to be here… in a rush of panic I tried to sit up, but a hand pressed me back, and presently held the cup to my lips again.

“You’re quite all right. Just relax,” the same voice told me, reassuringly.

I wanted to ask questions, but somehow I felt immensely weary, and everything was too much trouble. The first rush of panic subsided, leaving me lethargic. I wondered what had happened to me had I been in an accident, perhaps? Was this the kind of thing that happened when one was badly shocked? I did not know, and now for the moment I did not care: I was being looked after. I felt so drowsy that the questions could wait.

I suppose I dozed, and it may have been for a few minutes, or for an hour. I know only that when I opened my eyes again I felt calmer more puzzled than alarmed and I lay for a time without moving. I had recovered enough grasp now to console myself with the thought that if there had been an accident, at least there was no pain.

Presently I gained a little more energy, and, with it, curiosity to know where I was. I rolled my head on the pillow to see more of the surroundings.

A few feet away I saw a contrivance on wheels, something between a bed and a trolley. On it, asleep with her mouth open was the most enormous woman I had ever seen. I stared, wondering whether it was some kind of cage over her to take the weight of the covers that gave her the mountainous look, but the movement of her breathing soon showed me that it was not. Then I looked beyond her and saw two more trolleys, both supporting equally enormous women.

I studied the nearest one more closely, and discovered to my surprise that she was quite young not more than twenty-two, or twenty-three, I guessed. Her face was a little plump, perhaps, but by no means overfat; indeed, with her fresh, healthy young colouring and her short cropped gold curls, she was quite pretty. I fell to wondering what curious disorder of the glands could cause such a degree of anomaly at her age.

Ten minutes or so passed, and there was a sound of brisk, businesslike footsteps approaching. A voice enquired: “How are you feeling now?”

I rolled my head to the other side, an found myself looking into a face almost level with my own. For a moment I thought its owner must be a child, then I saw that the features under the white cap were certainly not less than thirty years old. Without waiting for a reply she reached under the bedclothes and took my pulse. Its rate appeared to satisfy her, for she nodded confidently.

“You’ll be all right now, Mother,” she told me.

I stared at her, blankly.

“The car’s only just outside the door there. Do you think you can walk it?” she went on.

Bemusedly, I asked: “What car?”

“Why, to take you home, of course,” she said, with professional patience. “Come along now.” And she pulled away the bedclothes.

I started to move, and looked down. What I saw there held me fixed. I lifted my arm. It was like nothing so much as a plump, white bolster with a ridiculous little hand attached at the end. I stared at it in horror. Then I heard a far off scream as I fainted.

When I opened my eyes again there was a woman a normal-sized woman in a white overall with a stethoscope round her neck, frowning at me in perplexity. The white-capped woman I had taken for a child stood beside her, reaching only a little above her elbow.

“I don’t know, Doctor,” she was saying. “She just suddenly screamed, and fainted.”

“What is it? What’s happened to me? I know I’

‘m not like this—I’m not, I’m not,” I said, and I could hear my own voice wailing the words.

The doctor went on looking puzzled.

“What does she mean?” she asked.

“I’ve no idea, Doctor,” said the small one. “It was quite sudden, as if she’

‘d had some kind of shock but I don’t know why.”

“Well, she’s been passed and signed off, and, anyway, she can’t stay here. We need the room,” and the doctor. “I’d better give her a sedative.”

“But what’s happened? Who am I? There’s something terribly wrong. I know I’m not like this. Pplease ttell me!” I implored her, and then somehow lost myself in a stammer and a muddle.

The doctor’s manner became soothing. She laid a hand gently on my shoulder.

“That’s all right, Mother. There’s nothing to worry about. Just take things quietly. We’ll soon have you back home.”

Another white-capped assistant, no taller than the first, hurried up with a syringe, and handed it to the doctor.

“No!” I protested. “I want to know where I am. Who am I? Who are you? What’s happened to me?” I tried to slap the syringe out of her hand, but both the small assistants flung themselves on my arm, and held on to it while she pressed in the needle.

It was a sedative, all right. It did not put me out, but it detached me. An odd feeling: I seemed to be floating a few feet outside myself and considering me with an unnatural calmness. I was able, or felt that I was able, to evaluate matters with intelligent clarity.

Evidently I was suffering from amnesia. A shock of some kind had caused me to “lose my memory,” as it is often put. Obviously it was only a very small part of my memory that had gone just the personal part, who I was, what I was, where I lived all the mechanism for day to day getting along seemed to be intact: I’d not forgotten how to talk, or how to think, and I seemed to have quite a well stored mind to think with.

On the other hand there was a nagging conviction that everything about me was somehow wrong. I knew, somehow, that I’d never before seen the place I was in; I knew, too, that there was something queer about the presence of the two small nurses; above all, I knew, with absolute certainty, that this massive form lying here was not mine. I could not recall what face I ought to see in a mirror, not even whether it would be dark or fair, or old or young, but there was no shadow of doubt in my mind that whatever it was like, it had never topped such a shape as I had now.

And there were the other enormous young women, too. Obviously, it could not be a matter of glandular disorder in all of us, or there’d not be this talk of sending me “home,” wherever that might be…

I was still arguing the situation with myself in, thanks no doubt to the sedative, a most reasonable-seeming manner, though without making any progress at all, when the ceiling above my head began to move again, and I realised I was being wheeled along. Doors opened at the end of the room, and the trolley tilted a little beneath me as we went down a gentle ramp beyond.

At the foot of the ramp, an ambulance-like car, with a pink coachwork polished until it gleamed, was waiting with the rear doors open. I observed interestedly that I was playing a part in a routine procedure. A team of eight diminutive attendants carried out the task of transferring me from the trolley to a sprung couch in the ambulance as if it were a kind of drill. Two of them lingered after the rest to tuck in my coverings and place another pillow behind my head. Then they got out, closing the doors behind them, and in a minute or two we started off.

It was at this point and possibly the sedative helped in this, too that I began to have an increasing sense of balance and a feeling that I was perceiving the situation.

Probably there had been an accident, as I had suspected, but obviously my error, and the chief cause of my alarm, proceeded from my assumption what I was a stage further on than I actually was. I had assumed that after an interval I had recovered consciousness in these baffling circumstances, whereas the true state of affairs must clearly be that I had not recovered consciousness. I must be still in a suspended state, very likely with concussion, and this was a dream, or hallucination. Presently, I should wake up in conditions that would at least be sensible, if not necessarily familiar.

I wondered now that this consoling and stabilising thought had not occurred to me before, and decided that it was the alarming sense of detailed reality that had thrown me into panic. It had been astonishingly stupid of me to be taken in to the extent of imagining that I really was a kind of Gulliver among rather oversize Lilliputians. It was quite characteristic of most dreams, too, that I should lack a clear knowledge of my identity, so we did not need to be surprised at that. The thing to do was to take an intelligent interest in all I observed: the whole thing must be chocklul of symbolic content which it would be most interesting to work out later.

The discovery quite altered my attitude and I looked about me with a new attention. It struck me as odd right away that there was so much circumstantial detail, and all of it in focus there was none of that sense of foreground in sharp relief against a muzzy, or even nonexistent, background that one usually meets in a dream. Everything was presented with a most convincing, three-dimensional solidity. My own sensations, too, seemed perfectly valid. The injection, in particular, had been quite acutely authentic. The illusion of reality fascinated me into taking mental notes with some care.

The interior of the van, or ambulance, or whatever it was, was finished in the same shell-pink as the outside, except for the roof, which was powder-blue with a scatter of small silver stars. Against the front partition were mounted several cupboards, with plated handles. My couch, or stretcher, lay along the left side: on the other were two fixed seats, rather small, and upholstered in a semi-glazed material to match the colour of the rest. Two long windows on each side left little solid wall. Each of them was provided with curtains of a fine net, gathered back now in pink braid loops, and had a roller blind furled above it. Simply by turning my head on the pillow I was able to observe the passing scenery though somewhat jerkily, for either the springing of the vehicle scarcely matched its appointments, or the road surface was bad: whichever the cause, I was glad my own couch was independently and quite comfortably sprung.

The external view did not offer a great deal of variety save in its hues. Our way was lined by buildings standing back behind some twenty yards of tidy lawn. Each block was three storeys high, about fifty yards long, and had a tiled roof of somewhat low pitch, suggesting a vaguely Italian influence. Structurally the blocks appeared identical, but each was differently coloured, with contrasting window frames and doors, and carefully considered, uniform curtains. I could see no one behind the windows, indeed there appeared to be no one about at all except here and there a woman in overalls mowing a lawn, or tending one of the inset flowerbeds.

Further back from the road, perhaps two hundred yards away, stood larger, taller, more utilitarian-looking blocks, some of them with high, factory-type chimneys. I thought they might actually be factories of some kind, but at the distance, and because I had no more than fugitive views of them between the foreground blocks, I could not be sure.

The road itself seldom ran straight for more than a hundred yards at a stretch, and its windings made one wonder whether the builders had not been more concerned to follow a contour line than a direction. There was little other traffic, and what there was consisted of lorries, large or small, mostly large. They were painted in one primary colour or other, with only a five gold combination of letters and figures on their sides for further identification. In design they might have been any lorries anywhere.

We continued this uneventful progress at a modest pace for some twenty minutes, until we came to a stretch where the road was under repair. The car slowed, and the workers moved to one side, out of our way. As we crawled forward over the broken surface I was able to get a good look at them. They were all women or girls dressed in denim-like trousers, sleeveless singlets, and working boots. All had their hair cut quite short, and a few wore hats. They were tall and broad-shouldered, bronzed and healthy-looking. The biceps of their arms were like a man’s, and the hafts of their picks and shovels rested in the hard, strong hands of manual toilers.

They watched with concern as the car edged its way on to the rough patch, but when it drew level with them they transferred their attention, and jostled and craned to look inside at me.

They smiled widely, showing strong white teeth in their browned faces. All of them raised their right hands, making some sign to me, still smiling. Their goodwill was so evident that I smiled back. They walked along, keeping pace with the crawling car, looking at me expectantly while their smiles faded into puzzlement. They were saying something but I could not hear the words. Some of them insistently repeated the sign. Their disappointed look made it clear that I was expected to respond with more than a smile. The only way that occurred to me was to raise my own right hand in imitation of their gesture. It was at least a qualified success; their faces brightened though a rather puzzled look remained. Then the car lurched on to the made up road again, and their still somewhat troubled faces slid back as we speeded up to our former sedate pace. More dream symbols, of course but certainly not one of the stock symbols from the book. What on earth, I wondered, could a party of friendly Amazons, equipped with navvying implements instead of bows, stand for in my subconscious? Something frustrated, I imagined. A suppressed desire to dominate? I did not seem to be getting much farther along that line when we passed the last of the variegated but nevertheless monotonous blocks, and ran into open country.

The flowerbeds had shown me already that it was spring, and now I was able to look on healthy pastures, and neat arable fields already touched with green; there was a haze like green smoke along the trim hedges, and some of the trees in the tidily placed spinneys were in young leaf. The sun was shining with a bright benignity upon the most precise countryside I had ever seen; only the cattle dotted about the fields introduced a slight disorder into the careful dispositions. The farmhouses themselves were part of the pattern; hollow squares of neat buildings with an acre or so of vegetable garden on one side, an orchard on another, and a rickyard on a third. There was a suggestion of a doll’s landscape about it Grandma Moses, but tidied up and rationalised. I could see no random cottages, casually sited sheds, or unplanned outgrowths from the farm buildings. And what, I asked myself, should we conclude from this rather pathological exhibition of tidiness? That I was a more uncertain person than I had supposed, one who was subconsciously yearning for simplicity and security? Well, well An open lorry which must have been travelling ahead of us turned off down a lane bordered by beautifully laid hedges, towards one of the farms. There were half a dozen young women in it, holding implements of some kind; Amazons, again. One of them, looking back, drew the attention of the rest to us. They raised their hands in the same sign that the others had made, and then waved cheerfully. I waved back.

Rather bewildering, I thought: Amazons for domination and this landscape, for passive security: the two did not seem to tie up very well.

We trundled on, at our unambitious pace of twenty miles an hour or so, for what I guessed to be three quarters of an hour, with the prospect changing very little. The country undulated gently and appeared to continue like that to the foot of a line of low, blue hills many miles away. The tidy farmhouses went by with almost the regularity of milestones, though with something like twice the frequency. Occasionally there were working parties in the fields; more rarely, one saw individuals busy about the farm, and others hoeing with tractors, but they were all too far off for me to make out any details. Presently, however, came a change.

Off to the left the road, stretching back at right angles to it for more than a mile, appeared a row of trees. At first I thought it just a wood, but then I noted that the trunks were evenly spaced, and the trees themselves topped and pruned until they gave more the impression of a high fence.

The end of it came to within twenty feet of the road, where it turned, and we ran along beside it for almost half a mile until the car slowed, turned to the left and stopped in front of a pair of tall gates. There were a couple of toots on the horn.

The gates were ornamental, and possibly of wrought iron under their pink paint. The archway that they barred was stucco-covered, and painted the same colour.

Why, I enquired of myself, this prevalence of pink, which I regard as a namby-pamby colour, anyway? Flesh-colour? Symbolic of an ardency for the flesh which I had insufficiently gratified? I scarcely thought so. Not pink. Surely a burning red… I don’t think I know anyone who can be really ardent in a pink way…

While we waited, a feeling that there was something wrong with the gatehouse grew upon me. The structure was a single-storey building, standing against the left, inner side of the archway, and coloured to match it. The woodwork was pale blue, and there were white net curtains at the windows. The door opened, and a middle-aged woman in a white blouse and trouser suit came out. She was bareheaded, with a few grey locks in her short, dark hair. Seeing me, she raised her hand in the same sign the Amazons had used, though perfunctorily, and walked over to open the gates. It was only as she pushed them back to admit us that I suddenly saw how small she was certainly not over four feet tall. And that explained what was wrong with the gatehouse: it was built entirely to her scale..

I went on staring at her and her little house as we passed. Well, what about that? Mythology is rich in gnomes and “little people,” and they are fairly pervasive of dreams, too, so somebody, I am sure, must have decided that they are a standard symbol of something, but for the moment I did not recall what it was. Would it be repressed philoprogenitiveness, or was that too unsubtle? I stowed that away, too, for later contemplation and brought my attention back to the surroundings.

We were on our way, unhurriedly, along something more like a drive than a road, with surroundings that suggested a compromise between a public garden and a municipal housing estate. There were wide lawns of an unblemished velvet green, set here and there with flowerbeds, delicate groups of silver birch, and occasional, larger, single trees. Among them stood pink, three. storey blocks, dotted about, seemingly to no particular plan.

A couple of the Amazon types in singlets and trousers of a faded rustred were engaged in planting out a bed close beside the drive, and we had to pause while they dragged their handcart full of tulips on to the grass to let us pass. They gave me the unusual salute and amiable grin as we went by.

A moment later I had a feeling that something had gone wrong with my sight, for as we passed one block we came in sight of another. It was white instead of pink, but otherwise exactly similar to the rest except that it was scaled down by at least one third…

I blinked at it and stared hard, but it continued to seem just the same size.

A little further on, a grotesquely huge woman in pink draperies was walking slowly and heavily across a lawn.

She was accompanied by three of the small, white-suited women looking, in contrast, like children, or very animated dolls: one was involuntarily reminded of tugs fussing round a liner.

I began to feel swamped: the proliferation and combination of symbols was getting well out of my class.

The car forked to the right, and presently we drew up before a flight of steps leading to one of the pink buildings a normal-sized building, but still not free from oddity, for the steps were divided by a central balustrade; those to the left of it were normal, those to the right, smaller and more numerous.

Three toots on the horn announced our arrival. In about ten seconds half a dozen small women appeared in the doorway and came running down the right hand side of the steps. A door slammed as the driver got out and went to meet them. When she came into my range of view I saw that she was one of the little ones, too, but not in white as the rest were; she wore a shining pink suit like a livery that exactly matched the car.

They had a word together before they came round to open the door behind me, then a voice said brightly: “Welcome, Mother Orchis. Welcome home.”

The couch, or stretcher, slid back on runners, and between them they lowered it to the ground. One young woman whose blouse was badged with a pink St Andrew’s cross on the left breast leaned over me. She enquired considerately: “Do you think you can walk, Mother?”

It did not seem the moment to enquire into the form of address. I was obviously the only possible target for the question.

“Walk?” I repeated. “Of course I can walk.” And I sat up, with about eight hands assisting me.

“Of course” had been an overstatement. I realised that by the time I had been heaved to my feet. Even with all the help that was going on around me it was an exertion which brought on heavy breathing. I looked down at the monstrous form that billowed under my pink draperies, with a sickly revulsion and a feeling that whatever this particular mass of symbolism disguised, it was likely to prove a distasteful revelation later on. I tried a step. “Walk” was scarcely the word for my progress. It felt like, and must have looked like, a slow series of forward surges. The women, at little more than my elbow height, fluttered about me like a flock of anxious hens. Once started, I was determined to go on, and I progressed with a kind of wave motion, first across a few yards of gravel, and then, with ponderous deliberation, up the left hand side of the steps.

There was a perceptible sense of relief and triumph all around as I reached the summit. We paused there a few moments for me to regain my breath, then we moved on into the building. A corridor led straight ahead, with three or four closed doors on each side, at the end it branched right and left. We took the left arm, and, at the end of it, I came face to face, for the first time since the hallucination had set in, with a mirror.

It took every volt of my resolution not to panic again at what I saw in it. The first few seconds of my stare were spent in fighting down a leaping hysteria.

In front of me stood an outrageous travesty: an elephantine female form, looking the more huge for its pink swathings. Mercifully, they covered everything but the head and hands, but these exposures were themselves another kind of shock, for the hands, though soft and dimpled and looking utterly out of proportion, were not uncomely, and the head and face were those of a girl.

She was pretty, too. She could not have been more than twenty-one, if that. Her curling fair hair was touched with auburn lights, and cut in a kind of bob. The complexion of her face was pink and cream, her mouth was gentle, and red without any artifice. She looked back at me, and at the little women anxiously clustering round me, from a pair of blue-green eyes beneath lightly arched brows. And this delicate face, this little Fragonard, was set upon that monstrous body: no less outrageously might a blossom of freesia sprout from a turnip.

When I moved my lips, hers moved; when I bent my arms, hers bent; and yet, once I got the better of that threatening panic, she ceased to be a reflection. She was nothing like me, so she must be a stranger whom I was observing, though in a most bewildering way. My panic and revulsion gave way to sadness, an aching pity for her. I could weep for the shame of it. I did. I watched the tears brim on her lower lids; mistily, I saw them overflow.

One of the little women beside me caught hold of my hand.

“Mother Orchis, dear, what’s the matter?” she asked, full of concern.

I could not tell her: I had no clear idea myself. The image in the mirror shook her head, with tears running down her cheeks. Small hands patted me here and there; small, soothing voices encouraged me onward. The next door was opened for me and I was led into the room beyond, and concerned fussing.

We entered a place that struck me as a cross between a boudoir and a ward. The boudoir impression was sustained by a great deal of pink in the carpet, coverlets, cushions, lampshades, and filmy window curtains; the ward motif, by an array of six divans, or couches, one of which was unoccupied.

It was a large enough room for three couches, separated by a chest, chair and table for each, to be arranged on either side without an effect of crowding, and the open space in the middle was still big enough to contain several expansive easy chairs and a central table bearing an intricate flower arrangement. A not displeasing scent faintly pervaded the place, and from somewhere came the subdued sound of a string quartet in a sentimental mood. Five of the bed couches were already mountainously occupied. Two of my attendant party detached themselves and hurried ahead to turn back the pink satin cover on the sixth.

Faces from all the five other beds were turned towards me. Three of them smiling in welcome, the other two less committal.

“Hallo, Orchis,” one of them greeted me in a friendly tone. Then, with a touch of concern she added: “What’s the matter, dear? Did you have a bad time?”

I looked at her. She had a kindly, plumply pretty face, framed by light-brown hair as she lay back against a cushion. The face looked about twenty-three or twenty-four years old. The rest of her was a huge mound of pink satin. I couldn’t make any reply, but I did my best to return her smile as we passed.

Our convoy hove to by the empty bed. After some preparation and positioning I was helped into it by all hands, and a cushion was arranged behind my head.

The exertion of my journey from the car had been consderable, and I was thankful to relax. While two of the little women pulled up the coverlet and arranged it over me, another produced a handkerchief and dabbed gently at my cheeks. She encouraged me: “There you are, dear. Safely home again now. You’ll be quite all right when you’ve rested a bit. Just try to sleep for a little.”

“What’s the matter with her?” enquired a forthright voice from one of the other beds. “Did she make a mess of it?”

The little woman with the handkerchief she was the one who wore the St Andrew’s cross and appeared to be in charge of the operation turned her head sharply.

“There’s no need for that tone, Mother Hazel. Of course Mother Orchis had four beautiful babies didn’t you, dear?” she added to me. “She’s just a bit tired after the journey, that’s all.”

“H’mph,” said the girl addressed, in an unaccommodating tone, but she made no further comment.

A degree of fussing continued. Presently the small woman handed me a glass of something that looked like water, but had unsuspected strength. I spluttered a little at the first taste, but quickly felt the better for it. After a little more tidying and ordering, my retinue departed leaving me propped against my cushion, with the eyes of the five other monstrous women dwelling upon me speculatively.

An awkward silence was broken by the girl who had greeted me as I came in.

“Where did they send you for your holiday, Orchis?”

“Holiday?” I asked blankly.

She and the rest stared at me in astonishment.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I told them.

They went on staring, stupidly, stolidly.

“It can’t have been much of a holiday,” observed one, obviously puzzled. “I’ll not forget my last one. They sent me to the sea, and gave me a little car so that I could get about everywhere. Everybody was lovely to us, and there were only six Mothers there, including me. Did you go by the sea, or in the mountains?”

They were determined to be inquisitive, and one would have to make some answer sooner or later. I chose what seemed the simplest way out for the moment.

“I can’t remember,” I said. “I can’t remember a thing. I seem to have lost my memory altogether.”

That was not very sympathetically received, either.

“Oh,” said the one who had been addressed as Hazel, with a degree of satisfaction. “I thought there was something. And I suppose you can’t even remember for certain whether your babies were Grade One this time, Orchis?”

“Don’t be stupid, Hazel,” one of the others told her. “Of course they were Grade One. If they’d not been, Orchis wouldn’t be back here now she’d have been rerated as a Class Two Mother, and sent to Whitewich.” In a more kindly tone she asked me: “When did it happen, Orchis?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember anything before this morning at the hospital. It’s all gone entirely.”

“Hospital!” repeated Hazel, scornfully.

“She must mean the Centre,” said the other. “But do you mean to say you can’t even remember us, Orchis?”

“No,” I admitted, shaking my head. “I’m sorry, but everything before I came round in the Hosp ... in the Centre, is all blank.”

“That’s queer,” Hazel said, in an unsympathetic tone. “Do they know?”

One of the others took my part.

“Of course they’re bound to know. I expect they don’t think that remembering or not has anything to do with having Grade One babies. And why should it, anyway? But look, Orchis”

“Why not let her rest for a bit,” another cut in. “I don’t suppose she’s feeling too good after the Centre, and the journey, and getting in here. I never do myself. Don’t take any notice of them, Orchis, dear. You just go to sleep for a bit. You’ll probably find it’s all quite all right when you wake up.”

I accepted her suggestion gratefully. The whole thing was far too bewildering to cope with at the moment; moreover, I did feel exhausted. I thanked her for her advice, and lay back on my pillow. In so far as the closing of one’s eyes can be made ostentatious, I made it so. What was more surprising was that, if one can be said to sleep within an hallucination or a dream, I slept…

In the moment of waking, before opening my eyes, I had a flash of hope that I should find the illusion had spent itself. Unfortunately, it had not. A hand was shaking my shoulder gently, and the first thing that I saw was the face of the little women’s leader, close to mine.

In the way of nurses she said: “There, Mother Orchis, dear. You’ll be feeling a lot better after that nice sleep, won’t you?”

Beyond her, two more of the small women were carrying a short-legged bed tray towards me. They set it down so that it bridged me, and was convenient to reach. I stared at the load on it. It was, with no exception, the most enormous and nourishing meal I had ever seen put before one person. The first sight of it revolted me but then I became aware of a schism within, for it did not revolt the physical form that I occupied: that, in fact, had a watering mouth, and was eager to begin. An inner part of me marvelled in a kind of semi-detachment while the rest consumed two or three fish, a whole chicken, some slices of meat, a pile of vegetables, fruit hidden under mounds of stiff cream, and more than a quart of milk, without any sense of surfeit. Occasional glances showed me that the other “Mothers” were dealing just as thoroughly with the contents of their similar trays.

I caught one or two curious looks from them, but they were too seriously occupied to take up their inquisition again at the moment. I wondered how to fend them off later, and it occurred to me that if only I had a book or a magazine I might be able to bury myself effectively, if not very politely, in it.

When the attendants returned I asked the badged one if she could let me have something to read. The effect of such a simple request was astonishing: the two who were removing my tray all but dropped it. The one beside me gaped for an amazed moment before she collected her wits. She looked at me, first with suspicion, and then with concern.

“Not feeling quite yourself yet, dear?” she suggested.

“But I am,” I protested. “I’m quite all right now.”

The look of concern persisted, however.

“If I were you I’d try to sleep again,” she advised.

“But I don’t want to. I’d just like to read quietly,” I objected.

She patted my shoulder, a little uncertainly.

“I’m afraid you’ve had an exhausting time, Mother. Never mind, I’m sure it’ll pass quite soon.”

I felt impatient. “What’s wrong with wanting to read?” I demanded.

She smiled a smug, professional nurse smile.

“There, there, dear. Just you try to rest a little more. Why, bless me, what on earth would a Mother want with knowing how to read?”

With that she tidied my coverlet, and bustled away, leaving me to the wide-eyed stares of my five companions. Hazel gave a kind of contemptuous snigger; otherwise there was no audible comment for several minutes.

I had reached a stage where the persistence of the hallucination was beginning to wear away my detachment. I could feel that under a little more pressure I should be losing my confidence and starting to doubt its unreality. I did not at all care for its calm continuity. Inconsequent exaggerations and jumps, foolish perceptives, indeed any of the usual dream characteristics would have been reassuring, but, instead, it continued to present obvious nonsense, with an alarming air of conviction and consequence. Effects, for instance, were unmistakably following causes. I began to have an uncomfortable feeling that were one to dig deep enough one might begin to find logical causes for the absurdities, too. The integration was far too good for mental comfort even the fact that I had enjoyed my meal as if I were fully awake, and was consciously feeling the better for it, encouraged the disturbing quality of reality.

“Read!” Hazel said suddenly, with a scornful laugh. “And write, too, I suppose?”

“Well, why not?” I retorted.

They all gazed at me more attentively than ever, and then exchanged meaning glances among themselves. Two of them smiled at one another. I demanded irritably: What on earth’s wrong with that? Am I supposed not to be able to read or write, or something?”

One said kindly, soothingly: “Orchis, dear. Don’t you think it would be better if you were to ask to see the doctor? Just for a check up?”

“No,” I told her flatly. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just trying to understand. I simply ask for a book, and you all look at me as if I were mad. Why?”

After an awkward pause the same one said humouringly, and almost in the words of the little attendant: “Orchis, dear, do try to pull yourself together. What sort of good would reading and writing be to a Mother. How could they help her to have better babies?”

“There are other things in life besides having babies,” I said, shortly.

If they had been surprised before, they were thunderstruck now. Even Hazel seemed bereft of suitable comment. Their idiotic astonishment exasperated me and made me suddenly sick of the whole nonsensical business. Temporarily, I did forget to be the detached observer of a dream.

“Damn it,” I broke out. “What is all this rubbish? Orchis! Mother Orchis! for God’s sake! Where am I? Is this some kind of lunatic asylum?”

I stared at them, angrily, loathing the sight of them, wondering if they were all in some spiteful complicity against me. Somehow I was quite convinced in my own mind that whoever, or whatever I was, I was not a mother. I said so, forcibly, and then, to my annoyance, burst into tears.

For lack of anything else to use, I. dabbed at my eyes with my sleeve. When I could see clearly again I found that four of them were looking at me with kindly concern. Hazel, however, was not.

“I said there was something queer about her,” she told the others, triumphantly. “She’s mad, that’s what it is.”

The one who had been most kindly disposed before, tried again: “But, Orchis, of course you are a Mother. You’re a Class One Mother with three births registered. Twelve fine Grade One babies, dear. You can’t have forgotten that!”

For some reason I wept again. I had a feeling that something was trying to break through the blankness in my mind; but I did not know what it was, only that it made me feel intensely miserable.

“Oh, this is cruel, cruel! Why can’t I stop it? Why won’t it go away and leave me?” I pleaded. “There’s a horrible cruel mockery here but I don’t understand it. What’s wrong with me? I’m not obsessional! I’m not! oh, can’t somebody help me…?”

I kept my eyes tight shut for a time, willing with all my mind that the whole hallucination should fade and disappear.

But it did not. When I looked again they were still there, their silly, pretty faces gaping stupidly at me across the revolting mounds of pink satin.

“I’m going to get out of this,” I said.

It was a tremendous effort to raise myself to a sitting position. I was aware of the rest watching me, wide-eyed, while I made it. I struggled to get my feet round and over the side of the bed, but they were all tangled in the satin coverlet and I could not reach to free them. It was the true, desperate frustration of a dream. I heard my voice pleading: “Help me! Oh, Donald, darling, please help me…”

And suddenly, as if the word “Donald” had released a spring, something seemed to click in my head. The shutter in my mind opened, not entirely, but enough to let me know who I was. I understood, suddenly, where the cruelty had lain.

I looked at the others again. They were still staring half bewildered, half alarmed. I gave up the attempt to move, and lay back on my pillow again.

“You can’t fool me any more,” I told them. “I know who I am now.”

“But, Mother Orchis” one began.

“Stop that,” I snapped at her. I seemed to have swung suddenly out of selfpity into a kind of masochistic callousness. “I am not a mother,” I said harshly. “I am just a woman who, for a short time, had a husband, and who hoped but only hoped that she would have babies by him.”

A pause followed that; a rather odd pause, where there should have been at least a murmur. What I had said did not seem to have registered. The faces showed no understanding; they were as uncomprehending as dolls.

Presently, the most friendly one seemed to feel an obligation to break up the silence. With a little vertical crease between her brows: “What,” she enquired tentatively, “what is a husband?”

I looked hard from one face to another. There was no trace of guile in any of them; nothing but puzzled speculation such as one sometimes sees in a child’s eyes. I felt close to hysteria for a moment; then I took a grip of myself. Very well, then, since the hallucination would not leave me alone, I would play it at its own game, and see what came of that. I began to explain with a kind of deadpan, simple word seriousness: “A husband is a man whom a woman takes...”

Evidently, from their expressions I was not very enlightening. However, they let me go on for three or four sentences without interruption. Then, when I paused for breath, the kindly one chipped in with a point which she evidently felt needed clearing up: “But what,” she asked, in evident perplexity, “what is a man?”

A cool silence hung over the room after my exposition. I had an impression I had been sent to Coventry, or semi-Coventry, by them, but I did not bother to test it. I was too much occupied. trying to force the door of my memory further open, and finding that beyond a certain point it would not budge.

I knew now that I was Jane. I had been Jane Summers, and had become Jane Waterleigh when I had married Donald.

I was had been twenty-four when we were married: just twenty-five when Donald was killed, six months later. And there it stopped. It seemed like yesterday, but I couldn’t tell Before that, everything was perfectly clear. My parents and friends, my home, my school, my training, my job, as Dr Summers, at the Wraychester Hospital. I could remember my first sight of Donald when they brought him in one evening with a broken leg and all that followed I could remember now the face that I ought to see in a looking-glass and it was certainly nothing like that I had seen in the corridor outside it should be more oval, with a complexion looking faintly suntanned; with a smaller, neater mouth; surrounded by chestnut hair that curled naturally; with brown eyes rather wide apart and perhaps a little grave as a rule.

I knew, too, how the rest of me should look slender, long legged, with small, firm breasts, a nice body, but one that I had simply taken for granted until Donald gave me pride in it by loving it I looked down at the repulsive mound of pink satin, and shuddered. A sense of outrage came welling up. I longed for Donald to comfort and pet me and love me and tell me it would be all right; that I wasn’t as I was seeing myself at all, and that it really was a dream. At the same time I was stricken with horror at the thought that he should ever see me gross and obese like this. And then I remembered that Donald would never see me again at all never any more and I was wretched and miserable, and the tears trickled down my cheeks again.

The five others just went on looking at me, wide-eyed and wondering. Half an hour passed, still in silence, then the door opened to admit a whole troop of the little women, all in white suits. I saw Hazel look at me, and then at the leader. She seemed about to speak, and then to change her mind. The little women split up, two to a couch. Standing one on each other, they stripped away the coverlet, rolled up their sleeves, and set to work at massage.

At first it was not unpleasant, and quite soothing. One lay back and relaxed. Presently, however, I liked it less: soon I found it offensive.

“Stop that!” I told the one on the right, sharply.

She paused, smiled at me amiably, though a trifle uncertainly, and then continued.

“I said stop it,” I told her, pushing her away.

Her eyes met mine. They were troubled and hurt, although a professional smile still curved her mouth.

“I mean it,” I added, curtly.

She continued to hesitate, and glanced across at her partner on the further side of the bed.

“You, too,” I told the other. “That’ll do.”

She did not even pause in her rhythm. The one on the right plucked a decision and returned. She restarted just what I had stopped. I reached out and pushed her, harder this time. There must have been a lot more muscle in that bolster of an arm than one would have supposed. The shove carried her half across the room, and she tripped and fell.

All movement in the room suddenly ceased. Everybody stared, first at her, and then at me. The pause was brief. They all set to work again. I pushed away the girl on the left, too, though more gently. The other one picked herself up. She was crying and she looked frightened, but she set her jaw doggedly and started to come back.

“You keep away from me, you little horrors,” I told them threateningly.

That checked them. They stood off, and looked miserably at one another. The one with the badge of seniority fussed up.

“What’s the trouble, Mother Orchis?” she enquired.

I told her. She looked puzzled.

“But that’s quite right,” she expostulated.

“Not for me. I don’t like it, and I won’t have it,” I replied.

She stood awkwardly, at a loss.

Hazel’s voice came from the other side of the room: “Orchis is off her head. She’s been telling us the most disgusting things. She’s quite mad.”

The little woman turned to regard her, and then looked inquiringly at one of the others. When the girl confirmed with a nod and an expression of distaste she turned back to me, giving me a searching inspection.

“You two go and report,” she told my discomfited masseuses.

They were both crying now, and they went wretchedly down the room together. The one in charge gave me another long thoughtful look, and then followed them.

A few minutes later all the rest had packed up and gone.

The six of us were alone again. It was Hazel who broke the ensuing silence.

“That was a bitchy piece of work. The poor little devils were only doing their job,” she observed.

“If that’s their job, I don’t like it,” I told her.

“So you just get them a beating, poor things. But I suppose that’s the lost memory again. You wouldn’t remember that a Servitor who upsets a Mother is beaten would you?” she added sarcastically.

“Beaten?” I repeated, uneasily.

“Yes, beaten,” she mimicked. “But you don’t care what becomes of them, do you? I don’t know what’s happened to you while you were away, but whatever it was it seems to have produced a thoroughly nasty result. I never did care for you, Orchis, though the others thought I was wrong. Well, now we all know.”

None of the rest offered any comment. The feeling that they shared her opinion was strong, but luckily I was spared confirmation by the opening of the door.

The senior attendant reentered with half a dozen small myrmidons, but this time the group was dominated by a handsome woman of about thirty. Her appearance gave me immense relief. She was neither little, nor Amazonian, nor was she huge. Her present company made her look a little overtall, perhaps, but I judged her at about five-footten; a normal, pleasant-featured young woman with brown hair, cut somewhat short, and a pleated black skirt showing beneath a white overall. The senior attendant was almost trotting to keep up with her longer steps, and was saying something about delusions and “only back from the Centre today, Doctor.”

The woman stopped beside my couch while the smaller women huddled together, looking at me with some misgiving. She thrust a thermometer into my mouth and held my wrist. Satisfied on both these counts, she enquired: “Headache? Any other aches or pains?”

“No,” I told her.

She regarded me carefully. I looked back at her.

“What?” she began.

“She’s mad,” Hazel put in from the other side of the room. “She says she’s lost her memory and doesn’t know us.”

“She’s been talking about horrid, disgusting things,” added one of the others.

“She’s got delusions. She thinks she can read and write,” Hazel supplemented.

The doctor smiled at that.

“Do you?” she asked me.

“I don’t see why not but it should be easy enough to prove,” I replied, brusquely.

She looked startled, a little taken aback, then she recovered her tolerant half-smile.

“All right,” she said, humouring me.

She pulled a small notepad out of her pocket and offered it to me, with a pencil. The pencil felt a little odd in my hand; the fingers did not fall into place readily on it, nevertheless I wrote: “I’m only too well aware that I have delusions and that you are part of them.”

Hazel tittered as I handed the pad back.

The doctor’s jaw did not actually drop, but her smile came right off. She looked at me very hard indeed. The rest of the room, seeing her expression, went quiet, as though I had performed some startling feat of magic. The doctor turned towards Hazel.

“What sort of things has she been telling you?” she enquired.

Hazel hesitated, then she blurted out: “Horrible things. She’s been talking about two human sexes just as if we were like the animals. It was disgusting!”

The doctor considered a moment, then she told the senior attendant: “Better get her along to the sickbay. I’ll examine her there.”

As she walked off there was a rush of little women to fetch a low trolley from the corner to the side of my couch. A dozen hands assisted me on to it, and then wheeled me briskly away.

“Now,” said the doctor grimly, “let’s get down to it. Who told you all this stuff about two human sexes? I want her name.”

We were alone in a small room with a gold-dotted pink wallpaper. The attendants, after transferring me from the trolley to a couch again, had taken themselves off. The doctor was sitting with a pad on her knee and a pencil at the ready. Her manner was that of an unbluffable inquisitor.

I was not feeling tactful. I told her not to be a fool.

She looked staggered, flushed with anger for a moment, and then took a hold on herself. She went on: “After you left the Clinic you had your holiday, of course. Now, where did they send you?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “All I can tell you is what I told the others that this hallucination or delusion, or whatever it is, started in that hospital place you call the Centre.”

With resolute patience she said: “Look here, Orchis. You were perfectly normal when you left here six weeks ago. You went to the Clinic and had your babies in the ordinary way. But between then and now somebody has been filling your head with all this rubbish and teaching you to read and write, as well. Now you are going to tell me who that somebody was. I warn you you won’t get away with this loss of memory nonsense with me. If you are able to remember this nauseating stuff you told the others, then you’re able to remember where you got it from.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake talk sense,” I told her. She flushed again.

“I can find out from the Clinic where they sent you, and I can find out from the Rest Home who were your chief associates while you were there, but I don’t want to waste time following up all your contacts, so I’m asking you to save trouble by telling me now. You might just as well. We don’t want to have to make you talk,” she concluded, ominously.

I shook my head.

“You’re on the wrong track. As far as I am concerned this whole hallucination, including my connection with this Orchis, began somehow at the Centre how it happened I can’t tell you, and what happened to her before that just isn’t there to be remembered.”

She frowned, obviously disturbed.

“What hallucination?” she enquired, carefully.

“Why, this fantastic setup and you, too.” I waved my hand to include it all. “This revolting great body, all those little women, everything. Obviously it is all some projection of the subconscious and the state of my subconscious is worrying me, for it’s certainly no wish fulfilment.”

She went on staring at me, more worried now.

“Who on earth has been telling you about the subconscious and wish fulfilments?” she asked, uncertainly.

“I don’t see why, even in an hallucination, I am expected to be an illiterate moron,” I replied.

“But a Mother doesn’t know anything about such things. She doesn’t need to.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve told you, as I’ve told those poor grotesques in the other room, that I am not a Mother. What I am is just an unfortunate M. B. who is having some kind of nightmare.”

“M. B.?” she enquired, vaguely.

“Bachelor of Medicine. I practise medicine,” I told her.

She went on looking at me curiously. Her eyes wandered over my mountainous form, uncertainly.

“You are claiming to be a doctor?” she said, in an odd voice.

“Coloquially, yes,” I agreed.

There was indignation mixed with bewilderment as she protested: “But this is sheer nonsense! You were brought up and developed to a Mother. You are a Mother. Just look at you!”

“Yes,” I said, bitterly. “Just look at me!”

There was a pause.

“It seems to me,” I suggested at last, “that, hallucination or not, we shan’t get much further simply by going on accusing one another of talking nonsense. Suppose you explain to me what this place is, and who you think I am. It might jog my memory.”

She countered that. “Suppose,” she said, “that first you tell me what you can remember. It would give me more idea of what is puzzling you.”

“Very well,” I agreed, and launched upon a potted history of myself as far as I could recollect it up to the time, that is to say, when Donald’s aircraft crashed.

It was foolish for me to fall for that one. Of course, she had no intention of telling me anything. When she had listened to all I had to say, she went away, leaving me impotently furious.

I waited until the place quietened down. The music had been switched off. An attendant had looked in to enquire, with an air of polishing off the day’s duties, whether there was anything I wanted, and presently there was nothing to be heard. I let a margin of half an hour elapse, and then struggled to get up taking it by very easy stages this time. The greatest part of the effort was to get to my feet from a sitting position, but I managed it at the cost of heavy breathing. Presently I crossed to the door, and found it unfastened. I held it a little open, listening. There was no sound of movement in the corridor, so I pulled it wide open, and set out to discover what I could about the place. All the doors of the rooms were shut. Putting my ear close to them I could hear regular, heavy breathing behind some, but there were no other sounds in the stillness. I kept on, turning several corners, until I recognised the front door ahead of me. I tried the latch, and found that it was neither barred nor bolted. I paused again, listening for some moments, and then pulled it open and stepped outside.

The parklike garden stretched out before me, sharp-shadowed in the moonlight. Through the trees to the right was a glint of water, to the left was a house similar to the one behind me, with not a light showing in any of its windows.

I wondered what to do next. Trapped in this huge carcase, all but helpless in it, there was very little I could do, but I decided to go on and at least find out what I could while I had the chance. I went forward to the edge of the steps that I had earlier climbed from the ambulance, and started down them cautiously, holding on to the balustrade.

“Mother,” said a sharp, incisive voice behind me. “What are you doing?”

I turned and saw one of the little women, her white suit gleaming in the moonlight. She was alone. I made no reply, but took another step down. I could have wept at the outrage of the heavy, ungainly body, and the caution it imposed on me.

“Come back. Come back at once,” she told me.

I took no notice. She came pattering down after me and laid hold of my draperies.

“Mother,” she said again. “You must come back. You’ll catch cold out here.”

I started to take another step, and she pulled at the draperies to hold me back. I leant forward against the pull. There was a sharp tearing sound as the material gave. I swung round, and lost my balance. The last thing I saw was the rest of the flight of steps coming up to meet me…

As I opened my eyes a voice said: “That’s better, but it was very naughty of you, Mother Orchis. And lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. Such a silly thing to do. I’m ashamed of you, really, I am.”

My head was aching, and I was exasperated to find that the whole stupid business was still going on: altogether, I was in no mood for reproachful drip. I told her to go to hell. Her small face goggled at me for a moment, and then became icily prim. She applied a piece of lint and plaster to the left side of my forehead, in silence, and then departed, stiffly.

Reluctantly, I had to admit to myself that she was perfectly right. What on earth had I been expecting to do what on earth could I do, encumbered by this horrible mass of flesh? A great surge of loathing for it and a feeling of helpless frustration brought me to the verge of tears again. I longed for my own nice, slim body that pleased me and did what I asked of it. I remembered how Donald had once pointed to a young tree swaying in the wind, and introduced it to me as my twin sister. And only a day or two ago…

Then, suddenly, I made a discovery which brought me struggling to sit up. The blank part of my mind had filled up. I could remember everything… The effort made my head throb, so I relaxed and lay back once more, recalling it all, right up to the point where the needle was withdrawn and someone swabbed my arm But what had happened after that? Dreams and hallucinations I had expected… but not the sharp-focused, detailed sense of reality… not this state which was like a nightmare made solid..

What, what in heaven’s name, had they done to me…?

I must have fallen asleep again, for when I opened my eyes there was daylight outside, and a covey of little women had arrived to attend to my toilet.

They spread their sheets dextrously and rolled me this way and that with expert technique as they cleaned me up. I suffered their industry patiently, feeling the fresher for it, and glad to discover that the headache had all but gone.

When we were almost at the end of our ablutions there came a peremptory knock, and without invitation two figures, dressed in black uniforms with silver buttons, entered. They were the Amazon type, tall, broad, well setup and handsome. The little women dropped everything and 33 fled with squeaks of dismay into the far corner of the room where they cowered in a huddle.

The two gave me the familiar salute. With an odd mixture of decision and deference one of them enquired: “You are Orchis, Mother Orchis?”

“That’s what they’re calling me,” I admitted.

The girl hesitated, then, in a tone rather more pleading than ordering, she said: “I have orders for your arrest, Mother. You will please come with us.”

An excited, incredulous twittering broke out among the little women in the corner. The uniformed girl quelled them with a look.

“Get the Mother dressed and make her ready,” she commanded.

The little women came out of their corner hesitantly, directing nervous, propitiatory smiles towards the pair. The second one told them briskly, though not altogether unkindly: “Come along now. Jump to it.”

They jumped.

I was almost swathed in my pink draperies again when the doctor strode in. She frowned at the two in uniform.

“What’s all this? What are you doing here?” she demanded.

The leader of the two explained.

“Arrest!” exclaimed the doctor. “Arrest a Mother! I never heard of such nonsense. What’s the charge?”

The uniformed girl said, a little sheepishly: “She is accused of Reactionism.”

The doctor simply stared at her.

“A Reactionist Mother! What’ll you people think of next? Go on, get out, both of you.”

The young woman protested: “We have our orders, Doctor.”

“Rubbish. There’s no authority. Have you ever heard of a Mother being arrested?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Well, you aren’t going to make a precedent now. Go on., The uniformed girl hesitated unhappily, then an idea occurred to her.

“If you would let me have a signed refusal to surrender the Mother…?” she suggested helpfully.

When the two had departed, quite satisfied with their piece of paper, the doctor looked at the little women gloomily.

“You can’t help tattling, you servitors, can you? Anything you happen to hear goes through the lot of you like a fire in a cornfield, and makes trouble all round. Well, if I hear any more of this I shall know where it comes from.” She turned to me. “And you, Mother Orchis, will in future please restrict yourself to yesandno in the hearing of these nattering little pests. I’ll see you again shortly. We want to ask you some questions,” she added, and went out, leaving a subdued, industrious silence behind her.

She returned just as the tray which had held by gargantuan breakfast was being removed, and not alone. The four women who accompanied her, and looked as normal as herself, were followed by a number of little women lugging in chairs which they arranged beside my couch When they had departed, the five women, all in white overalls, sat down and regarded me as if I were an exhibit. One appeared to be much the same age as the first doctor, two nearer fifty, and one sixty, or more.

“Now, Mother Orchis,” said the doctor, with an air of opening the proceedings, “it is quite clear that something highly unusual has taken place. Naturally we are interested to understand just what and, if possible why. You don’t need to worry about those police this morning it was quite improper of them to come here at all. This is simply an enquiry, a scientific enquiry to establish what has happened.”

“You can’t want to understand more than I do,” I replied. I looked at them, at the room about me, and finally at my massive prone form. “I am aware that all this must be an hallucination, but what is troubling me most is that I have always supposed that any hallucination must be deficient in at least one dimension must lack reality to some of the senses. But this does not. I have all my senses, and can use them. Nothing is insubstantial: I am trapped in flesh that is very palpably too, too solid. The only striking deficiency, so far as I can see, is reason, even symbolic reason.”

The four women stared at me in astonishment. The doctor gave them a sort of now-perhaps-you’ll-believe-me glance, and then turned to me again.

“We’ll start with a few questions,” she said.

“Before you begin,” I put in, “I have something to add to what I told you last night. It has come back to me.”

“Perhaps the knock when you fell,” she suggested, looking at my piece of plaster. “What were you trying to do?”

I ignored that. “I think I’d better tell you the missing part it might help a bit, anyway.”

“Very well,” she agreed. “You told me you were... er... married, and that your... er... husband was killed soon afterwards.” She glanced at the others; their blankness of expression was somehow studious. “It was the part after that that was missing.” she added.

“Yes,” I said. “He was a test pilot,” I explained to them. “It happened six months after we were married only one month before his contract was due to expire.

“After that, an aunt took me away for some weeks. I don’t suppose I’ll ever remember that part very well. I wasn’t noticing anything very much.

“But then I remember waking up one morning and suddenly seeing things differently, and telling myself that I couldn’t go on like that. I knew I must have some work, something that would keep me busy.

“Dr. Hellyer, who is in charge of the Wraychester Hospital where I was working before I was married, told me he would be glad to have me with them again. So I went back, and worked very hard, so that I did not have much time to think. That would be about eight months ago, now.

“Then one day Dr Hellyer spoke about a drug that a friend of his had succeeded in synthesising. I don’t think he was really asking for volunteers, but I offered to try it out. From what he said it sounded as if the drug might have some quite important properties. It struck me as a chance to do something useful. Sooner or later, someone would try it, and as I didn’t have any ties and didn’t care very much what happened, anyway, I thought I might as well be the one to try it.”

The spokesman doctor interrupted to ask: “What was this drug?”

“It’s called chuinjuatin,” I told her. “Do you know it?”

She shook her head. One of the others put in: “I’ve heard the name. What is it?”

“It’s a narcotic,” I told her. “The original form is in the leaves of a tree that grows chiefly in the south of Venezuela. The tribe of Indians who live there discovered it somehow, like others did quinine and mescalin. And in much the same way they use it for orgies. Some of them sit and chew the leaves they have to chew about six ounces of them—and gradually they go into a zombie-like, trance state. It lasts three or four days during which they are quite helpless and incapable of doing the simplest thing for themselves, so that other members of the tribe are appointed to look after them as if they were children, and to guard them.

“It’s necessary to guard them because the Indian belief is that chuinjuatin liberates the spirit from the body, setting it free to wander anywhere in space and time, and the guardian’s most important job is to see that no other wandering spirit shall slip into the body while the true owner is away. When the subjects recover they claim to have had wonderful mystical experiences. There seem to be no physical ill effects, and no craving results from it. The mystical experiences, though, are said to be intense, and clearly remembered.

“Dr Hellyer’s friend had tested his synthesised chum juatin on a number of laboratory animals and worked out the dosage, and tolerances, and that kind of thing, but what he could not tell of course, was what validity, if any, the reports of the mystical experiences had. Presumably they were the product of the drug’s influence on the nervous system but whether that effect produced a sensation of pleasure, ecstasy, awe, fear, horror, or any of a dozen more, it was impossible to tell without a human guiena pig. So that was what I volunteered for.”

I stopped. I looked at their serious, puzzled faces, and at the billow of pink satin in front of me.

“In fact,” I added, “it appears to have produced a combination of the absurd, the incomprehensible, and the grotesque.”

They were earnest women, these, not be sidetracked. They were there to disprove an anomaly if they could.

“I see,” said the spokeswoman with an air of preserving reasonableness, rather than meaning anything. She glanced down at a paper on which she had made a note from time to time.

“Now, can you give us the time and date at which this experiment took place?”

I could, and did, and after that the questions went on and on and on…

The least satisfactory part of it from my point of view was that even though my answers caused them to grow more uncertain of themselves as we went on, they did at least get them; whereas when I put a question it was usually evaded, or answered perfunctorily, as an unimportant digression.

They went on steadily, and only broke off when my next meal arrived. Then they went away, leaving me thankfully in peace but little the wiser. I half expected them to return, but when they did not I fell into a doze from which I was awakened by the incursion of a cluster of the little women, once more. They brought a trolley with them, and in a short time were wheeling me out of the building on it but not by the way I had arrived. This time we went down a ramp where another, or the same, pink ambulance waited at the bottom. When they had me safely loaded aboard, three of them climbed in, too, to keep me company. They were chattering as they did so, and they kept it up inconsequently, and mostly incomprehensibly, for the whole hour and a half of the journey that ensued.

The countryside differed little from that I had already seen. Once we were outside the gates there were the same tidy fields and standardised farms. The occasional built-up areas were not extensive and consisted of the same types of blocks close by, and we ran on the same, not very good, road surfaces. There were groups of the Amazon types, and, more rarely, individuals, to be seen at work in the fields; the sparse traffic was lorries, large or small, and occasional buses, but with never a private car to be seen. My illusion, I reflected, was remarkably consistent in its details. Not a single group of Amazons, for instance, failed to raise its right hands in friendly, respectful greeting to the pink car.

Once, w crossed a cutting. Looking down from the bridge I thought at first that we were over the dried bed of a canal, but then I noticed a post leaning at a crazy angle among the grass and weeds: most of its attachments had fallen off, but there were enough left to identify it as a railway signal.

We passed through one concentration of identical blocks which was in size, though in no other way, quite a town, and then, two or three miles further on, ran through an ornamental gateway into a kind of park.

In one way it was not unlike the estate we had left, for everything was meticulously tended; the lawns like velvet, the flowerbeds vivid with spring blossoms, but it differed essentially in that the buildings were not blocks. They were houses, quite small for the most part, and varied in style, often no larger than roomy cottages. The place had a subduing effect on my small companions; for the first time they left off chattering, and gazed about them with obvious awe.

The driver stopped once to enquire the way of an overailed Amazon who was striding along with a hod on her shoulder. She directed us, and gave me a cheerful, respectful grin through the window, and presently we drew up again in front of a neat little two-story Regencystyle house.

This time there was no trolley. The little women, assisted by the driver, fussed over helping me out, and then half-supported me into the house, in a kind of buttressing formation.

Inside, I was maneuvred with some difficulty through a door on the left, and found myself in a beautiful room, elegantly decorated and furnished in the period style of the house. A white-haired woman in a purple silk dress was sitting in a wing chair beside a wood fire. Both her face and her hands told of considerable age, but she looked at me from keen, lively eyes.

“Welcome, my dear,” she said, in a voice which had no trace of the quaver I half expected.

Her glance went to a chair. Then she looked at me again, and thought better of it.

“I expect you’d be more comfortable on the couch,” she suggested.

I regarded the couch a genuine Georgian piece, I thought doubtfully.

“Will it stand it?” I wondered.

“Oh, I think so,” she said, but not too certainly.

The retinue deposited me there carefully, and stood by with anxious expressions. When it was clear that though it creaked, it was probably going to hold, the old lady shooed them away, and rang a little silver bell. A diminutive figure, a perfect parlourmaid three-footten in height, entered.

“The brown sherry, please, Mildred,” instructed the old lady. “You’ll take sherry, my dear?” she added to me.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” I said faintly. After a pause I added: “You will excuse me, Mrs... er... Miss?”

“Oh, I should have introduced myself. My name is Laura not Miss, or Mrs, just Laura. You, I know, are Orchis, Mother Orchis.”

“So they tell me.” I owned, distastefully.

We studied one another. For the first time since the hallucination had set in I saw sympathy, even pity, in someone else’s eyes. I looked round the room again, noticing the perfection of details.

“This is—I’m not mad, am I?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly, but before she could reply the miniature parlourmaid returned, bearing a cutglass decanter and glasses on a silver tray. As she poured out a glass for each of us I saw the old lady glance from her to me and back again, as though comparing us. There was a curious uninterpretable expression on her face. I made an effort.

“Shouldn’t it be Madeira?” I suggested.

She looked surprised, and then smiled, and nodded appreciatively.

“I think you have accomplished the purpose of this visit in one sentence,” she said.

The parlourmaid left, and we raised our glasses. The old lady sipped at hers and then placed it on an occasional table beside her.

“Nevertheless,” she went on, “we had better go into it a little more. Did they tell you why they have sent you to me, my dear?”

“No,” I shook my head.

“It is because I am a historian,” she informed me. “Access to history is a privilege. It is not granted to many of us nowadays and then somewhat reluctantly. Fortunately, a feeling that no branches of knowledge should be allowed” to perish entirely still exists though some of them are pursued at the cost of a certain political suspicion.” She smiled deprecatingly, and then went on. “So when confirmation is required it is necessary to appeal to a specialist. Did they give you any report on their diagnosis?”

I shook my head again.

“I thought not. So like the profession, isn’t it? Well, I’ll tell you what they told me on the telephone from the Mothers” Home, and we shall have a better idea of what we are about. I was informed that you have been interviewed by several doctors whom you have interested, puzzled and I suspect, distressed very much, poor things. None of them has more than a minimum smattering of history, you see. Well, briefly, two of them are of the opinion that you are suffering from delusions of a schizophrenic nature: and three are inclined to think you are a genuine case of transferred personality. It is an extremely rare condition. There are not more than three reliably documented cases, and one that is more debatable, they tell me; but of those confirmed two are associated with the drug chuinjuatin, and the third with a drug of very similar properties.

“Now, the majority of three found your answers coherent for the most part, and felt that they were authentically circumstantial. That is to say that nothing you told them conflicted directly with what they know, but, since they know so little outside their professional field, they found a great deal of the rest both hard to believe and impossible to check. Therefore, I, with my better means of checking, have been asked for my opinion.”

She paused, and looked me thoughtfully over.

“I rather think,” she added, “that this is going to be one of the most curiously interesting things that has happened to me in my quite long life. Your glass is empty, my dear.”

“Transferred personality,” I repeated wonderingly, as I held out my glass. Now, if that were possible.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about the possibility. Those three cases I mentioned are fully authenticated.”

“It might be that almost,” I admitted. “At least, in some ways it might be but not in others. There is this nightmare quality. You seem perfectly normal to me, but look at me, myself and at your little maid! There’s certainly an element of delusion. I seem to be here, like this, and talking to you but it can’t really be so, so where am I?”

“I can understand, better than most, I think, how unreal this must seem to you. In fact, I have spent so much of my time in books that it sometimes seems unreal to meas if I did not quite belong anywhere. Now, tell me my dear, when were you born?”

I told her. She thought for a moment.

“H’m,” she said. “George the Sixth—but you’d not remember the second big war?”

“No,” I agreed.

“But—you might remember the coronation of the next Monarch? Whose was that?”

“Elizabeth—Elizabeth the Second. My mother took me to see the procession,” I told her.

“Do you remember anything about it?”

“Not a lot really, except that it rained, nearly all day,” I admitted.

We went on like that for a little while, then she smiled, reassuringly.

“Well, I don’t think we need any more to establish our point. I’ve heard about that coronation before at second hand. It must have been a wonderful scene in the abbey.” She mused a moment, and gave a little sigh. You’ve been very patient with me, my dear. It is only fair that you should have your turn but I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for some shocks.”

“I think I must be inured after my last thirty-six hours or what has appeared to be thirty-six hours,” I told her.

“I doubt it,” she said, looking at me seriously.

“Tell me,” I asked her. “Please explain it all if you can.”

“Your glass, my dear. Then I’ll get the crux of it over.”

She poured for each of us, then she asked: “What strikes you as the oddest feature of your experience, so far?”

I considered. “There’s so much”

Might it not be that you have not seen a single man?” she suggested.

I thought back. I remembered the wondering tone of one of the Mothers asking: “What is a man?”

“That’s certainly one of them,” I agreed. Where are they?”

She shook her head, watching me steadily.

“There aren’t any, my dear. Not any more. None at all”

I simply went on staring at her. Her expression was perfectly serious and sympathetic. There was no trace of guile there, or deception, while I struggled with the idea. At last I managed: “But, but that’s impossible! There must be some somewhere… You couldn’t mean, how? I mean…” My expostulation trailed off in confusion.

She shook her head.

“I know it must seem impossible to you, Jane, may I call you Jane? But it is so. I am an old woman now, nearly eighty, and in all my long life I have never seen a man save in old pictures and photographs. Drink your sherry, my dear. It will do you good.” She paused. “I’m afraid this upsets you.”

I obeyed, too bewildered for further comment at the moment, protesting inwardly, yet not altogether disbelieving, for certainly I had not seen one man, nor sign of any. She went on quietly, giving me time to collect my wits: “I can understand a little how you must feel. I haven’t had to learn all my history entirely from books, you see. When I was a girl, sixteen or seventeen, I used to listen to my grandmother. She was as old then as I am now, but her memory was still very good. I was able almost to see the places she talked about but they were part of such a different world that it was difficult for me to understand how she felt. When she spoke about the young man she had been engaged to, tears would roll down her cheeks, even then not just for him, of course, but for the whole world that she had known as a girl. I was sorry for her, although I could not really understand how she felt. How should I? But now that I am old, too, and have read so much, I am perhaps a little nearer to understanding her feelings, I think.” She looked at me curiously. And you, my dear. Perhaps you, too, were engaged to be married?”

“I was married for a little time,” I told her.

She contemplated that for some seconds, then: “It must be a very strange experience to be owned,” she remarked, reflectively.

“Owned?” I exclaimed, in astonishment.

“Ruled by a husband,” she explained, sympathetically.

I stared at her.

“But it, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all,” I protested. “It was” But there I broke off, with tears too close. To sheer her away I asked: “But what happened? What on earth happened to the men?”

“They all died,” she told me. “They fell sick. Nobody could do anything for them, so they died. In little more than a year they were all gone all but a very few.”

“But surely, surely everything would collapse?”

“Oh, yes. Very largely it did. It was very bad. There was a dreadful lot of starvation. The industrial parts were the worst hit, of course. In the more backward countries and in rural areas women were able to turn to the land and till it to keep themselves and their children alive, but almost all the large organisations broke down entirely. Transport ceased very soon: petrol ran out, and no coal was being mined. It was quite a dreadful state of affairs because although there were a great many women, and they had outnumbered the men, in fact, they had only really been important as consumers and spenders of money. So when the crisis came it turned out that scarcely any of them knew how to do any of the important things because they had nearly all been owned by men, and had to lead their lives as pets and parasites.”

I started to protest, but her frail hand waved me aside.

“It wasn’t their fault, not entirely,” she explained. “They were caught up in a process, and everything conspired against their escape. It was a long process, going right back to the eleventh century, in Southern France. The Romantic conception started there as an elegant and amusing fashion for the leisured classes. Gradually, as time went on, it permeated through most levels of society, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that its commercial possibilities were intelligently perceived, and not until the twentieth that it was really exploited.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century women were starting to have their chance to lead useful, creative, interesting lives. But that did not suit commerce: it needed them much more as mass consumers than as producers except on the most routine levels. So Romance was adopted and developed as a weapon against their further progress and to promote consumption, and it was used intensively.

“Women must never for a moment be allowed to forget their sex, and compete as equals. Everything had to have a “feminine angle” which must be different from the masculine angle, and be dinned in without ceasing. It would have been unpopular for manufacturers actually to issue an order “back to the kitchen,” but there were other ways. A profession without a difference, called “housewife,” could be invented. The kitchen could be glorified and made more expensive; it could be made to seem desirable, and it could be shown that the way to realise this heart’s desire was through marriage. So the presses turned out, by the hundred thousand a week, journals which concentrated the attention of women ceaselessly and relentlessly upon selling themselves to some man in order that they might achieve some small, uneconomic unit of a home upon which money could be spent.

“Whole trades adopted the romantic approach and the glamour was spread thicker and thicker in the articles, the writeups, and most of all in the advertisements. Romance found a place in everything that women might buy from underclothes to motorcycles, from “health” foods to kitchen stoves, from deodorants to foreign travel, until soon they were too bemused to be amused any more.

“The air was filled with frustrated moanings. Women maundered in front of microscopes yearning only to “surrender,” and “give themselves,” to adore and to be adored. The cinema most of all maintained the propaganda, persuading the main and important part of their audience, which was female, that nothing in life was worth achieving but dewy-eyed passivity in the strong arms of Romance. The pressure became such that the majority of young women spent all their leisure time dreaming of Romance, and the means of securing it. They were brought to a state of honesty believing that to be owned by some man and set down in a little brick box to buy all the things that the manufacturers wanted them to buy would be the highest form of bliss that life could offer.”

“But” I began to protest again. The old lady was now well launched, however, and swept on without a check.

“All this could not help distorting society, of course. The divorce rate went up. Real life simply could not come near to providing the degree of romantic glamour which was being represented as every girl’s proper inheritance. There was probably, in the aggregate, more disappointment, disillusion, and dissatisfaction among women than there had ever been before. Yet, with this ridiculous and ornamented ideal grained in by unceasing propaganda, what could a conscientious idealist do but take steps to break up the short-weight marriage she had made, and seek elsewhere for the ideal which was hers, she understood, by right?

“It was a wretched state of affairs brought about by deliberately promoted dissatisfaction; a kind of rat-race with, somewhere safely out of reach, the glamorised romantic ideal always luring. Perhaps an exceptional few almost attained it, but, for all except those very few, it was a cruel, tantalising sham on which they spent themselves, and of course their money, in vain.”

This time I did get in my protest.

“But it wasn’t like that. Some of what you say may be true, but that’s all the superficial part. It didn’t feel a bit like the way you put it. I was in it. I know.”

She shook her head reprovingly.

“There is such a thing as being too close to make a proper evaluation. At a distance we are able to see more clearly. We can perceive it for what it was a gross and heartless exploitation of the weaker-willed majority. Some women of education and resolution were able to withstand it, of course, but at a cost. There must always be a painful price for resisting majority pressure even they could not always, altogether escape the feeling that they might be wrong, and that the rat-racers were having the better time of it.

“You see, the great hopes for the emancipation of women with which the century had started had been outflanked. Purchasing power had passed into the hands of the ill-educated and highly suggestible. The desire for Romance is essentially a selfish wish, and when it is encouraged to dominate every other it breaks down all corporate loyalties. The individual woman thus separated from, and yet at the same time thrust into competition with, all other women was almost defenceless; she became the prey of organised suggestion. When it was represented to her that the lack of certain goods or amenities would be fatal to Romance she became alarmed and, thus, eminently exploitable. She could only believe what she was told, and spent a great deal of time worrying about whether she was doing all the right things to encourage Romance. Thus, she became, in a new, a subtler way, more exploited, more dependent, and less creative than she had ever been before.”

“Well,” I said, “this is the most curiously unrecognisable account of my world that I have ever heard it’s like something copied, but with all the proportions wrong. And as for “less creative”, well, perhaps families were smaller, but women still went on having babies. The population was still increasing.”

The old lady’s eyes dwelt on me a moment.

“You are undoubtedly a thought child of your time, in some ways,” she observed. “What makes you think there is anything creative about having babies? Would you call a plant pot creative because seeds grow in it? It is a mechanical operation and, like most mechanical operations, is most easily performed by the least intelligent. Now, bringing up a child, educating, helping her to become a person, that is creative. But unfortunately, in the time we are speaking of, women had, in the main, been successfully conditioned into bringing up their daughters to be unintelligent consumers, like themselves.”

“But,” I said helplessly, “I know the time. It’s my time. This is all distorted.”

“The perspective of history must be truer,” she told me again, unimpressed, and went on: “But if what happened had to happen, then it chose a fortunate time to happen. A hundred years earlier, even fifty years earlier, it would very likely have meant extinction. Fifty years later might easily have been too late it might have come upon a world in which all women had profitably restricted to domesticity and consumership. Luckily, however, in the middle of the century some women were still entering the professions, and by far the greatest number of professional women was to be found in medicine which is to say that they were only really numerous in, and skilled in, the very profession which immediately became of vital importance if we were to survive at all.

“I have no medical knowledge, so I cannot give you any details of the steps they took. All I can tell you is that there was intensive research on lines which will probably be more obvious 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. They 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. 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 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 a 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 clear. They told you, on all levels, from the works of Freud to that of the most nugatory magazines for women, that it was sex, civilised 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 all 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 time in history to be an exploited class. Without male rulers to confuse and divert them they began to perceive that all true power resides in the female principle. The male had served only one brief and useful purpose; for the rest of his life he was a painful and costly parasite.

“As they became aware of power, the doctors grasped it. In twenty years they were in full control. With them were the few women engineers, architects, lawyers, administrators, some teachers, and so on, but it was the doctors who held the keys of life and death. The future was in their hands and, as things began gradually to revive, they, together with the other professions, remained the dominant class and became known as the Doctorate. It assumed authority; it made the laws; it enforced them.

“There was opposition, of course. Neither the memory of the old days, nor the effect of twenty years of lawlessness, could be wiped out at once, but the doctors had the whip-hand any woman who wanted a child had to come to them, and they saw to it that she was satisfactorily settled in a community. The roving gangs dwindled away, and gradually order was restored.

“Later on, they faced better organised opposition. There was a party which contended that the disease which had struck down the men had run its course, and the balance could, and should, be restored they were known as Reactionists, and they became an embarrassment.

“Most of the Council of the Doctorate still had clear memories of a system which used every weakness of women, and had been no more than a more civilised culmination of their exploitation through the ages. They remembered how they themselves had only grudgingly been allowed to qualify for their careers. They were now in command: they felt no obligation to surrender their power and authority, and eventually, no doubt, their freedom to a creature whom they had proved to be biologically, and in all other ways, expendable. They refused unanimously to take a step that would lead to corporate suicide, and the Reactionists were proscribed as a subversive criminal organisation.

“That, however, was just a palliative. It quickly became clear that they were attacking a symptom and neglecting the cause. The Council was driven to realise that it had an unbalanced society at its hands a society that was capable of continuity, but was in structure, you might say, little more than the residue of a vanished form. It could not continue in that truncated shape, and as long as it tried to disaffection would increase. Therefore, if power was to become stable, a new form suitable to the circumstances must be found.

“In deciding the shape it should take, the natural tendencies of the little educated and uneducated woman were carefully considered such qualities as her feeling for hierarchical principles and her disposition to respect artificial distinctions. You will no doubt recollect that in your own time any fool of a woman whose husband was ennobled or honoured at once acquired increased respect and envy from other women though she remained the same fool; and also, that any gathering or society of unoccupied women would soon become obsessionally enmeshed in the creation and preservation of social distinctions. Allied to this is the high value they usually place upon a feeling of security. Important, too, is the capacity for devoted self-safrifice, and slavery to conscience within the canons of any local convention. We are naturally very biddable creatures. Most of us are happiest when we are being orthodox, however odd our customs may appear to an outsider; the difficulty in handling us lies chiefly in establishing the required standards of orthodoxy.

“Obviously, the broad outline of a system which was going to stand any chance of success, would have to provide scope for these and other characteristic traits. It must be a scheme where the interplay of forces would preserve equilibrium and respect for authority. The details of such an organisation, however, were less easy to determine.

“An extensive study of social forms and orders was undertaken but for several years every plan put forward was rejected as in some way unsuitable. The architecture of that finally chosen was said, though I do not know with how much truth, to have been inspired by the Bible a book at that time still unprohibited, and the source of much unrest, I am told that it ran something like: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways.”

“The Council appears to have felt that this advice, suitably modified, could be expected to lead to a state of affairs which would provide most of the requisite characteristics.

“A four class system was chosen as the basis, and strong differentiations were gradually introduced. These, now that they have become well established, greatly help to ensure stability there is scope for ambition within one’s class but none for passing from one class to another. Thus, we have the Doctorate, the educated ruling-class, fifty per cent of whom are actually of the medical profession. The Mothers, whose title is self-explanatory. The Servitors, who are numerous and, for psychological reasons, small. The Workers, who are physically and muscularly strong, to do the heavier work. All the three lower classes respect the authority of the Doctorate. Both the employed classes revere the Mothers. The Servitors consider themselves more favoured in their tasks than the Workers; and the Workers tend to regard the puniness of the Servitors with a semi-affectionate contempt.

“So you see a balance has been struck, and though it works somewhat crudely as yet, no doubt it will improve. It seems likely, for instance, that it would be advantageous to introduce subdivisions into the Servitor class before long, and the police are thought by some to be put at a disadvantage by having no more than a little education to distinguish them from the ordinary Worker…”

She went on explaining with increasing detail while the enormity of the whole process gradually grew upon me.

“Ants!” I broke in suddenly. “The ant-nest! You’ve taken that for your model?”

She looked surprised, either at my tone, or the fact that what she was saying had taken so long to register.

“And why not?” she asked. “Surely it is one of the most enduring social patterns that nature has evolved though of course some adaptation”

“You’re—are you telling me that only the Mothers have children?” I demanded.

“Oh, members of the Doctorate do, too, when they wish,” she assured me.

“But, but...”

“The Council decides the ratios,” she went on to explain. “The doctors at the clinic examine the babies and allocate them suitably to the different classes. After that, of course, it is just a matter of seeing to their specialised feeding, glandular control, and proper training.”

“But,” I objected wildly. “What’s it for? Where’s the sense in it? What’s the good of being alive, like that?”

“Well, what is the sense in being alive? You tell me,” she suggested.

“But we’re meant to love and be loved, to have babies we love by people we love.”

“There’s your conditioning again; glorifying and romanticising primitive animalism. Surely you consider that we are superior to the animals?”

“Of course I do, but...”

“Love, you say, but what can you know of the love there can be between mother and daughter when there are no men to introduce jealousy? Do you know of any purer sentiment than the love of a girl for her little sisters?”

“But you don’t understand,” I protested again. “How should you understand a love that colours the whole world? How it centres in your heart and reaches out from there to pervade your whole being, how it can affect everything you are, everything you touch, everything you hear… It can hurt dreadfully, I know, oh I know, but it can run like sunlight in your veins… It can make you a garden out of a slum; brocade out of rags; music out of a speaking voice. It can show you a whole universe in someone else’s eyes. Oh, you don’t understand… you don’t know… you can’t… Oh, Donald, darling, how can I show her what she’s never even guessed at… There was an uncertain pause, but presently she said: “Naturally, in your form of society it was necessary for you to be given such a conditioned reaction, but you can scarcely expect us to surrender our freedom, to connive at our own resubjection, by calling our oppressors into existence again.”

“Oh, you won’t understand. It was only the more stupid men and women who were continually at war with one another. Lots of us were complementary. We were pairs who formed units.”

She smiled. “My dear, either you are surprisingly ill-informed on your own period, or else the stupidity you speak of was astonishingly dominant. Neither as myself, nor as a historian, can I consider that we should be justified in resurrecting such a state of affairs. A primitive stage of our development has now given way to a civilised era. Woman, who is the vessel of life, had the misfortune to find man necessary for a time, but now she does no longer. Are you suggesting that such a useless and dangerous encumbrance ought to be preserved, out of sheer sentimentality? I will admit that we have lost some minor conveniences you will have noticed, I expect, that we are less inventive mechanically, and tend to copy the patterns we have inherited; but that troubles us very little; our interests lie not in the inorganic, but in the organic and the sentient. Perhaps men could show us how to travel twice as fast, or how to fly to the moon, or how to kill more people more quickly; but it does not seem to us that such kinds of knowledge would be good payment for re-enslaving ourselves. No, our kind of world suits us better all of us except a few Reactionists. You have seen our Servitors. They are a little timid in manner, perhaps, but are they oppressed, or sad? Don’t they chatter among themselves as brightly and perkily as sparrows? And the Workers, those you called the Amazons, don’t they look strong, healthy, and cheerful?”

“But you’re robbing them all robbing them of their birthright.”

“You mustn’t give me cant, my dear. Did not your social system conspire to rob a woman of her “birthright” unless she married? You not only let her know it, but you socially rubbed it in: here, our Servitors and Workers do not know it, and they are not worried by a sense of inadequacy. Motherhood is the function of the Mothers, and understood as such.”

I shook my head. “Nevertheless, they are being robbed. A woman has a right to love”

For once she was a little impatient as she cut me short.

“You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about, my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamorised by Romance. You were never openly bought and sold, like livestock; you never had to sell yourself to the first corner in order to live; you did not happen to be one of the women who through the centuries have screamed in agony and suffered and died under invaders in a sacked city, nor were you ever flung into a pit of fire to be saved from them; you were never compelled to suttee upon your dead husband’s pyre; you did not have to spend your whole life imprisoned in a harem; you were never part of the cargo of a slaveship; you never retained your own life at the pleasure of your lord and master…

“That is the other side the age-long side. There is going to be no more of such things. They are finished at last. Dare you suggest that we should call them back, to suffer them all again?”

“But most of these things had already gone,” I protested. “The world was getting better.”

“Was it? ” she said. “I wonder if the women of Berlin thought so when it fell? Was it, indeed? Or was it on the edge of a new barbarism?”

“But if you can only get rid of evil by throwing out the good, too, what is there left?”

“There is a great deal. Man was only a means to an end. We needed him in order to have babies. The rest of his vitality accounted for all the misery in the world. We are a great deal better off without him.”

“So you really consider that you’ve improved on nature?” I suggested.

“Tcha!” she said, impatient with my tone. “Civilisation is improvement on nature. Would you want to live in a cave, and have most of your babies die in infancy?”

“There are some things, some fundamental things” I began, but she checked me, holding up her hand for silence.

Outside, the long shadows had crept across the lawns. In the evening quiet I could hear a choir of women’s voices singing, a little distance away. We listened for some minutes until the song was finished.

“Beautiful!” said the old lady. “Could angels themselves sing more sweetly! They sound happy enough, don’t they? Our own lovely children, two of my granddaughters are there among them. They are happy, and they’ve reason to be happy: they’re not growing up into a world where they must gamble on the goodwill of some man to keep them; they’ll never need to be servile before a lord and master; they’ll never stand in danger of rape and butchery, either. Listen to them!”

Another song had started and came lilting lightly to us out of the dusk.

“Why are you crying?” the old lady asked me as it ended.

“I know it’s stupid. I don’t really believe any of this is what it seems to be so I suppose I’m crying for all you would have lost if it were true,” I told her. “There should be lovers out there under the trees; they should be listening hand in hand to that song while they watch the moon rise. But there are no lovers now, there won’t be any more… ” I looked back at her.

“Did you ever read the lines: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air?” Can’t you feel the forlornness of this world you’ve made? Do you really not understand?” I asked.

“I know you’ve only seen a little of us, and do you not begin to understand what it can be like when women are no longer forced to fight one another for the favours of men?” she countered.

We talked on while the dusk gave way to darkness and the lights of other houses started to twinkle through the trees. Her reading had been wide. It had given her even an affection for some periods of the past, but her approval of her own era was unshaken. She felt no aridity in it. Always it was my “conditioning” which prevented me from seeing that the golden age of woman had begun at last.

“You cling to too many myths,” she told me. “You speak of a full life, and your instance is some unfortunate woman hugging her chains in a suburban villa. Full life, fiddlesticks! But it was convenient for the traders that she could be made to think so. A truly full life would be an exceedingly short one, in any form of society.”

And soon…

At length, the little parlourmaid reappeared to say that my attendants were ready to leave when it should be convenient. But there was one thing I very much wanted to know before I left. I put the question to the old lady.

“Please tell me. How did it, how could it happen?”

“Simply by accident, my dear, though it was the kind of accident that was entirely the product of its time. A piece of research which showed unexpected, secondary results, that’s all.”

“But how?”

“Rather curiously, almost irrelevantly, you might say. Did you ever hear of a man called Perrigan?”

“Perrigan?” I repeated. “I don’t think so, it’s an uncommon name.”

“It became very commonly known indeed,” she assured me. “Doctor Perrigan was a biologist, and his concern was the extermination of rats, particularly the brown rat, which used to do a great deal of expensive damage.

“His approach to the problem was to find a disease which would attack them fatally. In order to produce it he took as his basis a virus infection often fatal to rabbits or, rather, a group of virus infections that were highly selective, and also unstable since they were highly liable to mutation. Indeed, there was so much variation in the strains that when infection of rabbits in Australia was tried, it was only at the sixth attempt that it was successful; all the earlier strains died out as the rabbits developed immunity. It was tried in other places, too, though with indifferent success until a still more effective strain was started in France, and ran though the rabbit population of Europe.

“Well, taking some of these viruses as a basis, Perrigan induced new mutations by irradiation and succeeded in producing a variant that would attack rats. That was not enough, however, and he continued his work until he had a strain that had enough of its ancestral selectivity to attack only the brown rat, and with great virulence.”

“In that way he settled the question of a longstanding pest, for there are no brown rats now. But something went amiss. It is still an open question whether the successful virus mutated again, or whether one of his earlier experimental viruses was accidentally liberated by escaped “carrier” rats, but that’s academic. The important thing is that somehow a strain capable of attacking human beings got loose, and that it was already widely disseminated before it was traced also, that once it was free, it spread with devastating speed; too fast for any effective steps to be taken to check it.

“The majority of women were found to be immune; and of the ten per cent or so whom it attacked over eighty per cent recovered. Among men, however, there was almost no immunity, and the few recoveries were only partial. A few men were preserved by the most elaborate precautions, but they could not be kept confined for ever, and in the end the virus, which had a remarkable capacity for dormancy, got them, too.”

Inevitably several questions of professional interest occurred to me, but for an answer she shook her head.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there. Possibly the medical people will be willing to explain,” she said, but her expression was doubtful.

I maneuvred myself into a sitting position on the side of the couch.

“I see,” I said. “Just an accident, yes, I suppose one could scarcely think of it happening any other way.”

“Unless,” she remarked, “unless one were to look upon it as divine intervention.”

“Isn’t that a little impious?”

“I was thinking of the Death of the Firstborn,” she said, reflectively.

There did not seem to be an immediate answer to that. Instead, I asked: “Can you honestly tell me that you never have the feeling that you are living in a dreary kind of nightmare?”

“Never,” she said. “There was a nightmare, but it’s over now. Listen!”

The voices of the choir, reinforced now by an orchestra, reached us distantly out of the darkened garden. No, they were not dreary: they even sounded almost exultant, but then, poor things, how were they to understand…?

My attendants arrived and helped me to my feet. I thanked the old lady for her patience with me and her kindness. But she shook her head.

“My dear, it is I who am indebted to you. In a short time I have learnt more about the conditioning of women in a mixed society than all my books were able to tell me in the rest of my long life. I hope, my dear, that the doctors will find some way of enabling you to forget it, and live happily here with us.”

At the door I paused and turned, still helpfully shored up by my attendants.

“Laura,” I said, using her name for the first time. “So many of your arguments are right yet, over all, you’re, oh, so wrong. Did you never read of lovers? Did you never, as a girl, sigh for a Romeo who would say: “It is the east, and Laura is the sun!”?”

“I think not. Though I have read the play. A pretty, idealised tale. I wonder how much heartbreak it has given to how many would be Juliets? But I would set a question against yours, my dear Jane. Did you ever see Goya’s cycle of pictures called “The Horrors of War”?”

The pink car did not return me to the “Home.” Our destination turned out to be a more austere and hospital-like building where I was fussed into bed in a room alone. In the morning, after my massive breakfast, three new doctors visited me. Their manner was more social than professional, and we chatted amiably for half an hour. They had evidently been fully informed on my conversation with the old lady, and they were not averse to answering my questions. Indeed, they found some amusement in many of them, though I found none, for there was nothing consolingly vague in what they told me it all sounded too disturbingly practicable, once the technique had been worked out. At the end of that time, however, their mood changed. One of them, with an air of getting down to business, said: “You will understand that you present us with a problem. Your fellow Mothers, of course, are scarcely susceptible to Reactio–ist disaffection, though you have in quite a short time managed to disgust and bewilder them considerably, but on others less stable your influence might be more serious. It is not just a matter of what you may say; your difference from the rest is implicit in your whole attitude. You cannot help that, and, frankly, we do not see how you, as a woman of education, could possibly adapt yourself to the placid, unthinking acceptance that is expected of a Mother. You would quickly feel frustrated beyond endurance. Furthermore, it is clear that the conditioning you have had under your system prevents you from feeling any goodwill towards ours.”

I took that straight; simply as a judgment without bias. Moreover, I could not dispute it. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in pink, scented, soft-musicked illiteracy, interrupted, one gathered, only by the production of quadruplet daughters at regular intervals, would certainly have me violently unhinged in a very short time.

“And so what?” I asked. “Can you reduce this great carcass to normal shape and size?”

She shook her head. “I imagine not, though I don’t know that it, has ever been attempted. But even if it were possible, you would be just as much of a misfit in the Doctorate and far more of a liability as a Reactionist influence.”

I could understand that, too.

“What, then?” I enquired.

She hesitated, then she said gently: “The only practicable proposal we can make is that you should agree to a hypnotic treatment which will remove your memory.”

As the meaning of that came home to me I had to fight off a rush of panic. After all, I told myself, they were being reasonable with me. I must do my best to respond sensibly. Nevertheless, some minutes must have passed before I answered, unsteadily: “You are asking me to commit suicide. My mind is my memories: they are me. If I lose them I shall die, just as surely as if you were to kill my this body.”

They did not dispute that. How could they?

There is just one thing that makes my life worth living knowing that you moved me, my sweet, sweet Donald. It is only in my memory that you live now. If you ever leave there you will die again and for ever.

“No!” I told them. “No! No!”

At intervals during the day small servitors staggered in under the weight of my meals. Between their visits I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company.

“Frankly,” one of the doctors had put it to me, not unsympathetically, “we can see no alternative. For years after it happened the annual figures of mental breakdowns were our greatest worry, even though the women then could keep themselves fully occupied with the tremendous amount of work that had to be done, so many of them could not adjust. And we can’t even offer you work.”

I knew that it was a fair warning she was giving me and I knew that, unless the hallucination which seemed to grow more real all the time could soon be induced to dissolve, I was trapped.

During the long day and the following night I tried my hardest to get back to the objectivity I had managed earlier, but I failed. The whole dialectic was too strong for me now; my senses too consciously aware of my surroundings; the air of consequence and coherence too convincingly persistent.

When they had let me have twenty-four hours to think it over, the same trio visited me again.

“I think,” I told them, “that I understand better now. What you are offering me is painless oblivion, in place of a breakdown followed by oblivion and you see no other choice.”

“We don’t,” admitted the spokeswoman, and the other two nodded. “But, of course, for the hypnosis we shall need your cooperation.”

“I realise that,” I told her, “and I also see now that in the circumstances it would be obstinately futile to withhold it. So, yes, I’m willing to give it, but on one condition.”

They looked at me questioningly.

“It is this,” I explained, “that you will try one other course first. I want you to give me an injection of chum juatin. I want it in precisely the same strength as I had it before. I can tell you the dose.”

“You see, whether this is an intense hallucination, or whether it is some kind of projection which makes it seem very similar, it must have something to do with that a rug. I’m sure it must nothing remotely like this has ever happened to me before. So, I thought that if I could repeat the condition or, would you say, believe myself to be repeating the condition? there may be just a chance… I don’t know. It may be simply silly… but even if nothing comes of it, it can’t make things worse in any way now, can it? So, will you let me try it… The three of them considered for some moments.

“I can see no reason why not…” said one.

The spokeswoman nodded.

“I shouldn’t think there’ll be any difficulty with authorization in the circumstances,” she agreed. “If you want to try, it’s fair to let you, but I’d not count on it too much…”

In the afternoon half a dozen small servitors arrived, bustling round, making me and the room ready, with anxious industry. Presently there came on more, scarcely tall enough to see over the trolley of bottles, trays and phials which she pushed to my bedside.

The three doctors entered together. One of the little servitors began rolling up my sleeve. The doctor who had done most of the talking looked at me, kindly, but seriously.

“This is a sheer gamble, you know that?” she said.

“I know. But it’s my only chance. I’m willing to take it.”

She nodded, picked up the syringe, and charged it while the little servitor swabbed my monstrous arm. She approached the bedside, and hesitated.

“Go on,” I told her. “What is there for me here, anyway?”

She nodded, and pressed in the needle…

Now, I have written the foregoing for a purpose. I shall deposit it with my bank, where it will remain unread unless it should be needed.

I have spoken of it to no one. The report on the effect of chuinjuatinthe one that I made to Dr. Hellyer where I described my sensation as simply one of floating in space was false. The foregoing was my true experience.

I concealed it because after I came round, when I found that I was back in my own body in my normal world, the experience haunted me as vividly as if it had been actuality. The details were too sharp, too vivid, for me to get them out of my mind. It overhung me all the time, like a threat. It would not leave me alone…

I did not dare to tell Dr Hellyer how it worried me, he would have put me under treatment. If my other friends did not take it seriously enough to recommend treatment, too, then they would have laughed over it, and amused themselves at my expense interpreting the symbolism. So I kept it to myself.

As I went over parts of it again and again in detail, I grew angry with myself for not asking the old lady for more facts, things like dates, and details that could be be verified. If, for instance, the thing should, by her account, have started two or three years ago, then the whole sense of threat would fall to pieces: it would all be discredited. But it had not occurred to me to ask that crucial question… And then, as I went on thinking about it, I remembered that there was one, just one, piece of information that I could check, and I made enquiries. I wish now that I had not, but I felt forced to So I have discovered that: There is a Dr Perrigan, he is a biologist, he does work with rabbits and rats He is quite well known in his field. He has published papers on pest-control in a number of journals. It is no secret that he is evolving new strains of myxomatosis intended to attack rats; indeed, he has already developed a group of them and calls them mucosimorbus, though he has not yet succeeded in making them either stable or selective enough for general use.

But I had never heard of this man or his work until his name was mentioned by the old lady in my “hallucination”…

I have given a great deal of thought to this whole matter. What sort of experience is it that I have recorded above? If it should be a kind of prevision of an inevitable, predestined future, then nothing anyone could do would change it. But that does not seem to me to make sense: it is what has happened, and is happening now, that determines the future. Therefore, there must be a great number of possible futures, each a possible consequence of what is being done now. It seems to me that under chuinjuatin I saw one of those futures It was, I think, a warning of what may happen unless it is prevented.

The whole idea is so repulsive, so misconceived, it amounts to such a monstrous aberration of the normal course, that failure to heed the warning would be neglect of duty to one’s kind.

I shall, therefore, on my own responsibility and without taking any other person into my confidence, do my best to ensure that such a state as I have described cannot come about.

Should it happen that any other person is unjustly accused of doing, or of assisting me to do, what I intend to do, this document must stand in his defence. That is why I have written it.

It is my own unaided decision that Dr Perrigan must not be permitted to continue his work.

(Signed) JANE WATERLEIGH.

The solicitor stared at the signature for some moments; then he nodded.

“And so,” he said, “she then took her car and drove over to Perrigan’s with this tragic result.

“From the little I do know of her, I’d say that she probably did her best to persuade him to give up his work, though she can scarcely have expected any success with that. It is difficult to imagine a man who would be willing to give up the work of years on account of what must sound to him like a sort of gipsy’s warning. So, clearly, she went there prepared to fall back on direct action, if necessary. It looks as if the police are quite right when they suppose her to have shot him deliberately; but not so right when they suppose that she burnt the place down to hide evidence of the crime. The statement makes it pretty obvious that her main intention in doing that was to wipe out Perrigan’s work.”

He shook his head. “Poor girl! There’s a clear conviction of duty in her last page or two: the sort of simplified clarity that drives martyrs on, regardless of consequences. She has never denied that she did it. What she wouldn’t tell the police is why she did it.”

He paused again, before he added: “Anyway, thank goodness for this document. It ought at least to save her life. I should be very surprised indeed if a plea of insanity could fail, backed up by this.” He tapped the pile of manuscript with his finger. “It’s a lucky thing she put off her intention of taking it to her bank.”

Dr Hellyer’s face was lined and worried.

“I blame myself most bitterly for the whole thing,” he said. “I ought never to have let her try the damned drug in the first place, but I thought she was over the shock of her husband’s death. She was trying to keep her time fully occupied, and she was anxious to volunteer. You’ve met her enough to know how purposeful she can be. She saw it as a chance to contribute something to medical knowledge, which it was, of course. But I ought to have been more careful, and I ought to have seen afterwards that there was something wrong. The real responsibility for this thing runs right back to me.”

“H’m,” said the solicitor. “Putting that forward as a main line of defence isn’t going to do you a lot of good professionally, you know, Hellyer.”

“Possibly not. I can look after that when we come to it. The point is that I hold a responsibility for her as a member of my staff, if for no other reason It can’t be denied that if I had refused her offer to take part in the experiment, this would not have happened. Therefore it seems to me that we ought to be able to argue a state of temporary insanity; that the balance of her mind was disturbed by the effects of the drug which I administered. And if we can get that as a verdict it will result in detention at a mental hospital for observation and treatment, perhaps quite a short spell of treatment.”

“I can’t say. We can certainly put it up to counsel and see what he thinks of it.”

“It’s valid, too,” Hellyer persisted. “People like Jane don’t do murder if they are in their right minds, not unless they’re really in a corner, then they do it more cleverly. Certainly they don’t murder perfect strangers. Clearly, the drug caused an hallucination sufficiently vivid to confuse her to a point where she was unable to make a proper distinction between the actual and the hypothetical. She got into a state where she believed the mirage was real, and acted accordingly.”

“Yes. Yes. I suppose one might put it that way,” agreed the solicitor. He looked down again at the pile of paper before him. The whole account is, of course, unreasonable,” he said, “and yet it is pervaded throughout with such an air of reasonableness. I wonder…” He paused pensively, and went on: “This expendability of the male, Hellyer. She doesn’t seem to find it so much incredible, as undesirable. That seems odd in itself to a layman who takes the natural order for granted, but would you, as a medical scientist, say it was, well, not impossible, in theory?”

Dr Hellyer frowned.

“That’s very much the kind of question one wants more notice of. It would be very rash to proclaim it impossible.

Considering it purely as an abstract problem, I can see two or three lines of approach… Of course, if an utterly improbable situation were to arise calling for intensive research, research, that is, on the sort of scale they tackled the atom, well, who can tell…?” He shrugged.

The solicitor nodded again.

“That’s just what I was getting at,” he observed. “Basically it is only just such a little way off the beam; quite near enough to possibility to be faintly disturbing. Mind you, as far as the defence is concerned, her air of thorough conviction, taken in conjunction with the near-plausibility of the thing will probably help. But, for my part, it is just that nearness that is enough to make me a trifle uneasy.”

The doctor looked at him rather sharply.

“Oh, come! Really now! A hardboiled solicitor, too! Don’t tell me you’re going in for fantasy-building. Anyway, if you are, you’ll have to conjure up another one. If Jane, poor girl, has settled one thing, it is that there’s no future in this particular fantasy. Perrigan’s finished with, and all his work’s gone up in smoke and fire.”

“H’m,” said the solicitor, again. “All the same, it would be more satisfactory if we knew of some way other than this”—he tapped the pile of papers—“some other way in which she is likely to have acquired some knowledge of Perrigan and his work. There is, as far as one knows, no other way in which he can have come into her orbit at all—unless, perhaps, she takes an interest in veterinary subjects?”

“She doesn’t. I’m sure of that,” Hellyer told him, shaking his head.

“Well, that, then, remains one slightly disturbing aspect. And there is another. You’ll think it foolish of me, I’m sure and no doubt time will prove you right to do so but I have to admit I’d be feeling just a bit easier in my mind if Jane had been just a bit more thorough in her enquiries before she went into action.”

“Meaning?” asked Dr Hellyer, looking puzzled.

“Only that she does not seem to have found out that there is a son. But there is, you see. He appears to have taken quite a close interest in his father’s work, and is determined that it shan’t be wasted. In fact he has already announced that he will do his best to carry it on with the very few specimens that were saved from the fire…

“Laudably filial, no doubt. All the same it does disturb me a little to find that he, also, happens to be a D. Sc., a biochemist; and that, very naturally, his name, too, is Perrigan… “