The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) by John Sladek

elevated almost to sacraments.
    Tears came to Susie’s eyes. It all seemed so unfair. She was seventeen years old and still a virgin, and now it was too late. She wanted more than anything to give up pointless, silly virtue now, near the end of All, but it was somehow too small a sacrifice (then, too, there was always the outside chance that the world would
not
end—and then how in the world would she explain things to Madge?). Susie hated the old End-of-the-world suddenly and furiously. She wanted to just scratch its eyes out !
    ‘Why—why I think we ought to go out and protest !’ she declared, standing up. The others looked at her, not catching her meaning. ‘They have no right to do this to us ! They have no right to take away the world like this, the selfish pigs !’
    There was a sudden high-pitched explosive laugh from one youth. ‘What do you think we ought to do about it?’ he mocked. ‘Write our congressmen?’
    ‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘But I don’t think we’ll solve anything by just sitting around here moping, for Pete’s sake ! We ought to
    go out and—and protest ! We ought to march on this Alt—this wherever it is and tell them what we think of them, in no uncertain terms !’ She stamped her little boot. ‘Or are we going to let them take
everything
away?’
    The room was in an uproar. Some people were egging her on, while others were thinking over her words. Susie’s scorn was magnificent. In vain did someone try to point out that protest against the inevitable is useless.
    ‘Well of course it’s useless,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not as dumb as all that ! But it certainly isn’t any use just sitting around here just—steaming, is it?’
    ‘I think she has something,’ said Ron, grinning. ‘Why the hell not go down there and protest? It’s only ten hours’ drive.’
    ‘Protest what?’ asked Kevin. ‘The end of the world?’
    ‘Sure, why not?’ Ron said. ‘Like in
Attack of the Fungamen
, everyone protested the dangerous experiments, right? Like in
Goz
, they demonstrate against the army’s impotence, remember? And in
The Day the Earth Caught Cold
—’
    ‘All right, all right, but what are we protesting?’ Kevin asked. ‘If I may be so stupid.’
    ‘How about the sealing off of an American city by the CIA, and the violations of freedom of speech involved? Come on, we’ll make some signs, and we’ll get some people who have cars in on this.’
    Kevin gave in. ‘We’ll let your girl run the show,’ he suggested. ‘It was her idea. But I never thought I’d spend my last hours making signs.’
    ‘Or getting arrested,’ Ron added. ‘The friends won’t like this at all.’
    ‘If I see any fuzz,’ said the poet, ‘I’m going to suddenly have a business deal in Tangier. I’ll only go so far for a joke.’
    It may have been a joke to him and to most of those present (behaving in conscious or unconscious parody of old movies—‘Gee gang,’ someone said, ‘how are we going to raise money for uniforms for the team?’ ‘I have it ! We’ll put on an end of the world !’), but to Susie, it meant becoming for a moment a kind of Joan of Arc. As they left the coffee house, she was at the fore, her white boots lifting high, higher, leading the parade.
    Certainly Madge never worried less about the vincibility of her daughter’s innocence than now, having just heard her insist on the word ‘seater’, and seeing her blush as she pronounced it.
    How innocent Susie was, and how wise she herself had been at that age.
    Madge was now only dimly aware of the dying roar of Ron’s Harley, only vaguely cognizant of her own hand, caressing the buttons on the velvet bar in Susie’s vanity kit. Madge was seeing herself of eighteen years ago, going out to the Webster Beach Club with a handsome young insurance salesman.
    How like the youthful Suggs was one of Susie’s friends, Jim Porteus, she thought. Odd that Susie never noticed it in him. He was such a nice boy—so