The guidance specialist droned on. "Our society could not endure for a single day without the skills of men and women who have been trained to perform just one task well." His great golden head on the illuminated tele-screen stood out with a startling clarity, holding his audience spellbound.
"Specialization in every human activity has kept disaster from overtaking us, as it has overtaken so many of the powerful world civilizations of the past," he went on eloquently. "We have created a social structure that should endure for five thousand years. It has already stood firm for four centuries. But now that structure is being undermined by a very great evil.
"It is being undermined by the strongest and most rebellious of human impulses: the blind, uncontrollable urge of men and women everywhere to make love, to mate and reproduce themselves. If that primitive aberration is not stamped out, if stern measures are not taken at once, our society will collapse."
ONE
Teleman couldn't remember when he had first experienced the strange torment. The restlessness, the almost frightening desire to behave like some mad criminal, would come upon him at the most unexpected moments.
He'd find himself turning his head and staring wildly at the women who passed him on the travel strip. He'd watch them while they went striding on ahead of him toward the mating and child-rearing centers, never taking his eyes from them until they were swallowed up in the golden glow from the distant buildings.
It was incredible, and completely unlawful. It made no sense at all. He was an engineer and a construction worker, not a sex-privileged man. Theoretically all physical desire had been eliminated from his biogenetic heritage for four generations.
In the year 2061 only one man in fifty was supposed to feel the stirring. He had read about it in books, of course. But the scientific descriptions had never stirred him before, and neither had the sight of the passing women, swaying their hips in voluptuous abandonment as they went about their appointed tasks.
The very word "seductive" had been to him an intellectual concept solely. Emotionally it had awakened no response in him, no real understanding of how a man could be drawn from his work by enticements of the flesh that were as coldly meaningless as a row of numerals set down at random on a blank sheet of paper.