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Ethical Suicide Parlor
A nothinghead was a person who refused to take his ethical birth-control pills three times a day. The penalty for that was $10,000 and ten years in jail.
the population of Earth was 17 billion human beings. That was far too many mammals that big for a planet that small. The people were virtually packed together like drupelets.
World Government was making a two-pronged attack on overpopulation.
One pronging was the encouragement of ethical suicide, which consisted of going to the nearest Suicide Parlor and asking a Hostess to kill you painlessly while you lay on a Barcalounger. The other pronging was compulsory ethical birth control.
The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex. Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.
Nancy was a virgin. All Hostesses were virgins. They also had to hold advanced degrees in psychology and nursing. They also had to be plump and rosy, and at least six feet tall.
America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.
All Hostesses were experts at judo and karate.
The Howard Johnson’s had an orange roof and the Suicide Parlor had a purple roof, but they were both the Government. Practically everything was the Government.
The average citizen moped around home and watched television, which was the Government.
The Foxy Grandpa was something of a rarity, since he was marked by old age, was bald, was shaky, had spots on his hands. Most people looked twenty-two, thanks to anti-aging shots they took twice a year.
"He didn’t have the slightest idea his pills would be taken by human beings someday," said the Foxy Grandpa. "His dream was to introduce morality into the monkey house at the Grand Rapids Zoo.
"We saw a monkey playing with his private parts!"
J. Edgar Nation was so upset he Went straight home and he started developing a pill that would make monkeys in the springtime fit things for a Christian family to see."
"Soak yourself in Jergen’s Lotion. Here comes the one-man population explosion."
And thanks to pills I did not sin.
Virgin hostess, death’s recruiter,
The people who understood science said people had to quit reproducing so much, and the people who understood morals said society would collapse if people used sex for nothing but pleasure."
It was calibrated in billions of people on Earth, from zero to twenty.
Very close to the bottom was a black arrow that showed what the scientists thought the population ought to be.
"Tell me—" he said, "when I die, how much will that thermometer go down? A foot?"
"You know what the answer is, don’t you?" he said, and he faced her. The senility had vanished from his voice and eyes. "One inch on that thing equals 83,333 people. You knew that, didn’t you?"
"That—that might be true," said Nancy, "but that isn’t the right way to look at it, in my opinion."
"I’ll tell you something else that’s true: I’m Billy the Poet, and you’re a very good-looking woman."
With one hand, he drew a snub-nosed revolver from his belt. With the other, he peeled off his bald dome and wrinkled forehead, which proved to be rubber. Now he looked twenty-two.
The machinery that processed and served the food there was silent. But, so people wouldn’t feel too lonesome when eating there, the designers had provided sound effects for the kitchen. It was these Nancy heard—a tape recording of the clashing of silverware and the laughter of Negroes and Puerto Ricans.
"What in hell is a girl with hips like yours doing selling death?"
"A woman’s not a woman till the pills wear off."
were statues representing the fourteen Kennedys who had been Presidents of the United States or the World.
The President of the World at the time of Nancy’s abduction, incidentally, was an ex-Suicide Hostess named "Ma" Kennedy.
These perverted women were sisters from the Ethical Suicide Service. This upset her so much that she asked loudly and bitterly, "How can you violate your oaths like this?"
She speculated silently as to what on Earth could make Suicide Hostesses turn against every concept of human decency. Nothingheadedness alone couldn’t begin to explain it. They had to be drugged besides.
persuaded herself that the women had taken the worst one of all.
The women, and probably the men, too, had been drinking gin.
"How does it feel to be a virgin at sixty-three?"
"Pointless,"
Mosquitoes and bees were extinct. So were birds. But Nancy dreamed that millions of insects were swarming about her from the waist down. They didn’t sting. They fanned her. Nancy was a nothinghead.
dressed in a white nightgown.
Champagne was as illegal as heroin.
"What if my idea of happiness doesn’t coincide with yours?" "And what do you think my idea of happiness is?"
He deflowered her with a clinical skill she found ghastly. When it was all over, he didn’t seem cocky or proud. On the contrary, he was terribly depressed, and he said to Nancy, "Believe me, if there’d been any other way—"
"Then why don’t they kill you instead of helping you?" "Because they understand." And then he added mildly, "They’re grateful."
"I am not grateful." "You will be." "And what could possibly bring about that miracle?" "Time," said Billy.
"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.
The nothinghead movement is growing by leaps and bounds."
"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.
