Cheap Seats Press: Hillary Gausch Reporting
I caught up with Professor Benedict Ebes of the Hemispheric Alliance as he was leaving his hotel room. Professor Ebes was hurrying down the fire escape towards a car waiting in the alley below.
I had anticipated his move when the crowd in front of the hotel started getting ugly. But I had miscalculated the floor he was on so I was above him, racing to catch up, when I introduced myself. “Hillary Gausch,” I shouted. “Cheap Seats Press. Could I ask you a couple of questions?”
Startled he turned and looked up, his face edged with fear. When he saw that I was a young woman, apparently unarmed, he immediately resumed his descent. Even in heels I was gaining on him and by the time he dropped to the alley I was beside him. People at the edge of the crowd could see us and were starting to shout. I managed to get in through the car door before Ebes could close it.
“Are you surprised by the reaction to your ‘Delay Puberty’ proposal?” I asked
Ebes was watching the crowd through the rear window. Rocks and bottles were bouncing off our trunk. When the car finally began to move he sighed and turned to me. “Yes, frankly I am,” he said. “Our young students do well in worldwide rankings but, for whatever reason, they drop off steadily once puberty sets in.
“If we begin suppressing sex hormones at ten we’ll have them completely under control by fourteen. Puberty won’t happen until we want it to.”
The alleyway ahead was blocked by a truck unloading cases of beer and our driver went into reverse, looking for alternate route. As we came back into range of the crowd they started throwing stuff again. They had a bullhorn and someone was shouting insults. Our driver found another way out and Ebs returned his attention to me.
“Academic performance will increase generally and there’s an added bonus,” he said, impressively unperturbed. “Now we’re losing a lot of kids before they even get out of high school. Puberty is just more than they can handle. They become obsessed with it and go off the rails.”
I wasn’t sure. “Won’t the same happen to some of those under your plan when you turn the hormones back on” I asked.
“Yes,” said Ebes, “but they will be a little more mature then and they will have a basic preparation for coping with the real world. Today if you crash in high school you almost never get off the starting line, you’re pretty much stuck at the bottom for life. Well, except for actors and rock stars.”
We finally came out of the alley and back onto a main street. We were still in sight of the crowd and we were recognized. A shout went up and bottles and rocks flew again.
Nodding back toward the crowd I said with, I confess, a tiny bit of a smirk, “Apparently not all the kids you’re going to help are pleased.”
“Kids?” Ebes said disdainfully. “Those people! Those people are not prepubescent children …”
“Some of them are,” I said.
“Well, yes,” the professor admitted reluctantly. “And I understand their feelings. All they’ve heard all their lives is how very wonderful it will be to be teenagers.
“But most of the people in that mob are funded, paid. They are professionally angry and they come pre-loaded with outrage. The goal of the people employing them is to see that my plan is strangled in the cradle.”
That certainly got my interest. “So, who is funding that effort?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “There are theories.”
“But no idea who the mysterious ‘They’ are?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know who wants to throw the baby out with the bath water?”
He corrected me, “Strangle it in the crib.”
We finally got on a main street and faded into traffic. Ebes relaxed. The angry mob was far behind and he was safely on his way to the airport and getting out of town. He waxed philosophical. “But while we’re on the subject … “
I interrupted, “Of infanticide.”
“No, no, of course not. Just the subject of infants.” He settled back in his seat and turned his head to face me. “If we just left the sex hormones turned off until people were ready to have children, when their lives were stable and they’d found someone they wanted to raise children with, we could turn the hormones on for a few years so they could make babies. That’s the only time human beings actually need sex hormones.”
He paused again and then looked up the road. “I mean the rest of the time it’s really just hormones for the hell of it.”
That sunk in slowly and as it did I felt a peculiar queasiness, deep inside, settling in with it.
The End
