He tried to run, tried to get away. He heard Lois' voice, high and shrill. Figures closed in around him. He fought, desperately. He put a few temporarily out of the way with the neurogun, but there were always more. Men, men everywhere. Hundreds of men where there should be no men at all. Well-groomed, strong, bronzed, ever-smiling men. It gave him intense pleasure to crack off a few of the smiles. To hurl the gun, smash with his fists. Then the men were swarming all over him, the clean faces, the smiling fragrant men, and he went down under the weight of men. He tried to move. A blow fell hard and his head smashed against the rocks. He tried to rise up, and other blows beat him down and he was glad about the darkness, not because it relieved the pain, but because it curtained off the faces of men. * * * * * After a time it was as though he was being carried through a dim half-consciousness, able to think, too tired to move or open his eyes. He remembered how the men of Earth had rationalized a long time, making a joke out of it. Laughing when they hadn't wanted to laugh, but to hate. It had never been humorous. It had been a war between the sexes, and the women had finally won, destroying the men psychologically, the race physically. Somehow they had managed to go on with a culture of their own. The war between the sexes had never really been a joke. It had been deadly serious, right from the beginning of the militant feminist movements, long before the last big war. There had always been basic psychological and physiological differences. But woman had refused to admit this, and had tried to be the "equal" if not the better of men. For so long woman had made it strictly competitive, and in her subconscious mind she had regarded men as wonderful creatures, capable of practically anything, and that woman could do nothing better than to emulate them in every possible way. There was no such thing as a woman's role unless it had been the same as a man's. That had gone on a long time. And it hadn't been a joke at all. How ironic it was, there at the last! All of man's work through the ages had been aimed at the stars. And the women had assumed the final phase of conquest! For a long time women had been revolting against the masculine symbols, the levers, pistons, bombs, torpedoes and hammers, all manifestations of man's whole activity of overt, aggressive power. The big H-bombs of the last great war had seemed to be man's final symbol, destructive. And after that, the spaceships, puncturing space, roaring outward, the ultimate masculine symbol of which men had dreamed for so long, and which women had envied. And then only the women could stand the acceleration. It was a physiological fact. Nothing could change it. Nothing but what they had done to Bowren.