• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"What about them?"

"You’ve done to them what you did to me?"

He didn’t look up from his book. "That’s right."

"Then why don’t they kill you instead of helping you?"

"Because they understand." And then he added mildly, "They’re grateful."

Nancy got out of bed, came to the table, gripped the edge of the table, leaned close to him. And she said to him tautly, "I am not grateful."

"You will be."

"And what could possibly bring about that miracle?"

"Time," said Billy.

Billy closed his book, stood up. Nancy was confused by his magnetism. Somehow he was very much in charge again.

"What you’ve been through, Nancy," he said, "is a typical wedding night for a strait-laced girl of a hundred years ago, when everybody was a nothinghead. The groom did without helpers, because the bride wasn’t customarily ready to kill him. Otherwise, the spirit of the occasion was much the same. These are the pajamas my great-great-grandfather wore on his wedding night in Niagara Falls.

"According to his diary, his bride cried all that night, and threw up twice. But, with the passage of time, she became a sexual enthusiast."

It was Nancy’s turn to reply by not replying. She understood the tale. It frightened her to understand so easily that, from gruesome beginnings, sexual enthusiasm could grow and grow.

"You’re a very typical nothinghead," said Billy. "If you dare to think about it now, you’ll realize that you’re angry because I’m such a bad lover, and a funny-looking shrimp besides. And what you can’t help dreaming about from now on is a really suitable mate for a Juno like yourself.

"You’ll find him, too—tall and strong and gentle. The nothinghead movement is growing by leaps and bounds."

"But—" said Nancy, and she stopped there. She looked out a porthole at the rising sun.

"But what?"

"The world is in the mess it is today because of the nothingheadedness of olden times. Don’t you see?" She was pleading weakly. "The world can’t afford sex anymore."

"Of course it can afford sex," said Billy. "All it can’t afford anymore is reproduction."

"Then why the laws?"

"They’re bad laws," said Billy. "If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth— those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.

"Why this is, I do not know. That is one of the many questions I wish somebody would ask the machines. I do know this: The triumph of that sort of disgust and terror is now complete. Almost every man and woman looks and feels like something the cat dragged in. The only sexual beauty that an ordinary human being can see today is in the woman who will kill him. Sex is death. There’s a short and nasty equation for you: ’Sex is death. Q. E. D.’

"So you see, Nancy," said Billy, "I have spent this night, and many others like it, attempting to restore a certain amount of innocent pleasure to the world, which is poorer in pleasure than it needs to be."

Nancy sat down quietly and bowed her head.

"I’ll tell you what my grandfather did on the dawn of his wedding night," said Billy.

"I don’t think I want to hear it."

"It isn’t violent. It’s—it’s meant to be tender."

"Maybe that’s why I don’t want to hear it."

"He read his bride a poem." Billy took the book from the table, opened it. "His diary tells which poem it was. While we aren’t bride and groom, and while we may not meet again for many years, I’d like to read this poem to you, to have you know I’ve loved you."

"Please—no. I couldn’t stand it."

"All right, I’ll leave the book here, with the place marked, in case you want to read it later. It’s the poem beginning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal