Free The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) by John Sladek Page B

and the only clue to her years being the lines in her face. Susie fervently wished that she herself, at thirty-five, would look as good.
    Madge went on, ‘I guess I shouldn’t try to tell you how to run your life, after I’ve made such a mess of my own. Every time I think of that bastard—how he’s enjoying himself over there with his harem girls—not even a postcard, in over three months ! Well, I saw the lawyer today, and I’m suing him for a divorce. If he can live it up, so can I ! Sauce for the goose ! While the cat’s away !’
    Madge seemed to have been drinking. She lurched to the
    mirror and examined her eyes, pulling the loose flesh beneath them this way and that. She scarcely seemed to notice that Susie had drawn on her white felt boots, kissed her goodbye and said, ‘That’s the spirit, Mommy ! Kick him in the—the seater ! ’Bye.’
    Near the campus of the University of California, at Santa Filomena, one street featured four well-patronized coffee houses, but none so popular as The Blue Tit. To avoid difficulties with university officials the owner of the coffee house, Kevin Mackintosh, had painted a bluebird on the café’s sign. As on all weekend nights, a crowd had crammed itself into The Blue Tit to listen to folk music and poetry, but tonight, it was a sullen, heavy-spirited crowd. Many of them had arrived, as had Susie and Ron, on motorcycles in the drizzle, and the room was filled with steam and sour smell of wet wool.
    On a raised dais at the rear of the narrow room, a poet was reading aloud from a sheet of paper held close to his face. As he turned to catch the light, Susie recognized Kevin Mackintosh.
    ‘
Timepoem
number fourteen,’ he read.
    ‘Johnson in Omaha: loud ticks from the inner clock.
There always has to be a victim
In cool and secret stride
No motives other than patriotism
and pure disgust.
Back to business, without boots.
Look here for an explosive spirit.’
     
    ‘Golly !’ Susie exclaimed. ‘Explosives reminds me, I ought to be studying for that Organic Chem test Monday.’
    ‘Ssh,’ said Ron. ‘There isn’t going to be any day after tomorrow.’
    ‘I don’t know the Geneva naming system or anything.’
    Ron smiled. Kevin Mackintosh looked at her, incredulous. ‘The Geneva naming system is done,’ he said. ‘So is the Geneva convention. So is Geneva.’
    ‘It’s the end of the world,’ Ron explained.
    ‘That’s right,’ said someone else. ‘The crack of doom has been sounded.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ asked Susie, smiling a little. ‘I don’t get it.’
    ‘It’s the end of the whole works, baby,’ Ron said. ‘Like they
    tell us on the radio. Didn’t you hear the news?’
    ‘This is our end-of-the-world party,’ announced Kevin Mackintosh, ‘Bring your own.’
    Someone snickered, but the poet was not smiling.
    ‘Will someone please tell me what this is all about?’ Susie asked. She thought and thought, but was unable to recall just what she had seen on the six o’clock news.
    ‘That thing in Altoona, Nevada,’ Ron explained, ‘is either a Russian missile, Something Horrible from outer space, or one of our own screaming nightmares. If it is a Russian missile, we retaliate. Then they retaliate. Et cetera, the end.
    ‘If it is a thing from outer space, why does the government keep it so quiet? Because it is something pretty horrible, like a thing that digested the whole town, or atomic monsters, shooting X-rays all over. Something we can’t stop, that’ll take over.
    ‘If it is some weapon of our own out of control, what would it be? Some bomb? Not likely, or other countries would be raising hell. More likely a nasty disease—say universal contagious cancer.’
    Everyone in the room had grown silent. It was as if they huddled together in the gloom actually waiting for a quick blinding light to illumine and transfigure them for one final instant. The most important actions and words were pointless; the most trivial were full of meaning,