After that incident I was careful with the male principle. When the
audience left each night I turned it on very slightly--only enough to
be sure that the women would do their best to get back to see me
again.
But before I go any further in this account of my adventures, Your
Excellency, let me tell you about the women here. The greatest
difference between the Americans and ourselves is in the women. They
are extraordinary. Some of them are beautiful beyond belief. My
researches completely confirm your much-criticized hypotheses
concerning our own women. If our enemies who object so strongly to
Your Excellency's statements could be here for only one hour they
would become your devoted supporters. American women are the proof
that your theories are correct. Your famous attempt to explain some of
the incongruous and apparently ridiculous passages in our ancient
manuscripts by assuming the existence of a now-vanished female
principle is irrefutably demonstrated by these women, Your Excellency.
Here, the female principle exists, and as you predicted, most of the
women are therefore entirely different from ours. The term used in
this language is "femininity." It is a devastatingly attractive
thing--but almost impossible to explain. I will make an attempt.
Senseless, reasonless, even foolish motions of the body and the hands,
the expressions of the eyes and the mouth, the way the head is moved
and tilted are a part of it. So are unusual tones of the voice and
special ways in which things are said. Laughter, a whisper, the
direction of the glance, the fingers' pressure--these, too, are parts
of it.
There are infinitely various types of adornment which hang on the
body, fabrics in delicate or brilliant colors which cling and flow,
gleaming stones at throat and wrists. The faces are enchantingly
painted, the hair shining and arranged in numerous wonderful designs.
There is an aura of the scent of flowers and fruits.
I tell you, Excellency, everything about this femininity assails the
senses. It is so potent that once having experienced it the mere
recollection causes the pulses to pound and throb. My hand trembles as
I write these words to you. I am confused and disturbed and wild with
a longing I never knew at home. I wish to meet Your Excellency's high
standards in preparing this report, and yet I am unable to be
scientific. The logic of the laboratory cannot be employed.
As soon as I could I began to hunt desperately for the secret of the
female principle. I analyzed the soil, the food, the water, and the
air by our own most refined methods. I found nothing to help us. I
went to the risky extreme of killing two of their women. One possessed
an unusual amount of this femininity. The other, who seemed to have
very little of it, was essentially like one of our own women. _There
was not the slightest chemical difference in their bodies._ Dead, they
were precisely the same. But alive, Your Excellency, they were
overwhelmingly dissimilar.
I was able to kill the unfeminine one scientifically without emotion
or regret. But, although it was clearly my duty, I could hardly bring
myself to kill the other one. I had known her for several days. Her
femininity almost prevented my continuing with the experiment. She
told me that she loved me.
I don't know if I have the skill to explain to you what this "love"
is. Briefly, it means that the woman was in a mental state--a
receptive mental state, Excellency, infinitely more violent than the
peak our women reach after intensive application of the male
principle. Your Excellency, _she was that way all of the time_.
* * * * *
This brings me to another extraordinary difference between them and
us. The men here lack the male principle. They obviously don't need it
because of the existence of the female principle in the women. If the
men had it, as we have, I leave it to Your Excellency's vivid
imagination as to what would be happening here.
In general the men are enough like us to be called humanoids in our
sense of the word. They have about the same intelligence quotient that
we have, and are physically almost identical except for our induced
modifications. As Your Excellency predicted they do not have these
since they have not yet discovered the methods of inducing them. As a
result, while they have the same muscular potential as we do, they are
far weaker, and their life span is not more than 70 or 80 years by
their calendar.
They do not have heat sensors, so they stumble around in the dark and
trip over things like children. They squander more energy on electric
lights than on anything else in the economy. Also, their hearing and
eyesight cannot be compared to ours. I am always hearing and seeing
things without their suspecting it. A low conversation across the room
is perfectly audible to me. Much of my best information comes this
way. Naturally, since they completely lack heat generators, they
cannot set things on fire.
To get back to the account of my activities, Excellency; my biggest
mistake was in killing the two women for the femininity research. This
got me into terrible trouble. They feel strongly about killing women
here. Now that I appreciate their women, I can see why.
The local police were not hard to handle, but they have a central
police system called the F.B.I. It is comparable to Your Excellency's
organization in techniques and training, and in some ways even
superior to it. When the F.B.I. started investigating me, things got
serious immediately.
One day my heat sensor detected a man standing outside my front door.
He was a huge bulky man. I sensed a mass under his left arm pit. My
heat sensor analyzed it. It reflected heat like iron, but there seemed
to be some small pieces of lead there too.
The man was polite and apologetic when I opened the door. He tipped
his hat. He said that he had come to the wrong apartment. Then he
asked, "How did you know I was standing outside the door?"
Without thinking, I uttered the first thing that came into my head. "I
saw your shadow."
His eyes widened only slightly. He had good control of himself. "How
could you see a shadow through a wooden door?" he asked softly.
I was exasperated at my mistake but I smiled the way people here do
when they are at a disadvantage. "I do not explain my tricks," I told
him. "I earn my living by performing them at the theatre."