ALIEN ACCOUNTS
John Sladek
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
CONTENTS
Scenes from the Country of the Blind
The aliens here are human. This book contains no giant flying snails or telepathic octopods, no Ganymedean cat-women dressed in silver, no aggressive dugong chiefs roaming the galaxy in their pulsar-powered yoyo ships. The aliens here are human aliens. Most of them work in ordinary offices, and they do not commute to work from Proxima Centauri, either. Yet these here humans are aliens.
Office life attracts them, perhaps because of its futility. At least they’ve inhabited offices in fiction since Dickens’s day. Since the Circumlocution Office we’ve had the petty officials of Kafka, the double-thinkers of Orwell, the pathetic cogs of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, and that super-clerk of Herman Melville’s, Bartleby the Scrivener. In The Grey Ones, J. B. Priestley outlined an entire alien conspiracy: Having no souls, They cannot possibly be bored. Thus they must always rise to the top in business and governments, where they can set about killing the souls of others.
Notice that none of these authors can separate the monsters from the victims in office life, for aliens are both. The sociologists who speak of ‘alienation’ manage to alienate themselves through official jargon like this:
… a set of arrangements for producing and rearing children the viability of which is not predicated on the consistent presence in the household of an adult male acting in the role of husband or father …
(meaning ‘families where Dad isn’t home much’). A person who thinks like this may not exactly breathe methane, but there is a giant flying snailiness here.
Here are the human aliens.
‘Whoever is in charge of operations should be designated with real authority to be used in case of an emergency.’
A.P. Sloan
My Life with General Motors
PART ONE: CLERKS ALL!
Section I: The Lutte Agency
Division A: Mr. Gelford
Henry found that, when he had filled out the orange card listing his education, work experience and hobbies, he was permitted to pass beyond the railing next to the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist was a fat, pretty girl whose bare feet would be soft and pink. Being bored in the evenings, especially Sunday evenings, she would draw on black silk stockings and fuck someone in front of a movie camera. Once a famous American executive, watching her in a movie, had had an unusual experience.
Henry moved down the light green hail to a barn-like room where each stall was equipped with a desk and a living soul. The black wooden floor was wavy. Little incandescent bulbs, strung on wires, pumped light into the room, but dark corners drained it away too fast. Henry sat down in the second rank of folding chairs, along with a blind man and a Negro who would someday be a well-known boxer. The blind man’s dog looked at Henry, seeing him.
Henry remembered visiting the dentist with just such an orange card in his hand. He was thinking of some way of explaining this to the blind man or the Negro, when far down the barn a tall man stood up and beckoned.
‘Henry,’ he called. Henry and the blind man stood up together.
‘Did he say Amory?’ asked the blind man.
‘No, Henry.’
‘Eh? Henry?’
‘Henry.’
‘Henry!’ called the tall man again, beckoning over the waves. Henry walked towards him, past the desks of Mr. Blair and Mr. Clemens and Mrs. Dudevant and Mr. Beyle and Miss Knye.
Division B: Mr. Nind
Mr. Gelford asked Henry to call him Al. With a special pen, Al initialled the orange card in several places, maintaining the attitude of a dentist marking caries. His eyes, small and dark – like human nipples, they were surrounded with tiny white bumps – looked searchingly at Henry’s hair or teeth.
‘Henry C. Henry, eh? What does the C. stand for?’ Henry looked at him in silence until Al turned his nipples to a mimeographed list. ‘Nothing here, I’m afraid, for someone with almost no experience. I’ll turn you over to Mr. Nind.’
Don kept a telephone receiver well in front of his mouth as he spoke, because the inside of his lip had developed a terrible cold sore he wished to hide. It was, as he already suspected, syphilis.
‘I have a really challenging job in a small, friendly engineering company,’ he said. ‘No experience necessary, and there is no limit to how far you can work your way up. What do you say, fella?’
Henry leaned forward and laid a hand on Nind’s desk calendar. ‘Fine, Don,’ he said softly.
Section II: An Interview
In an almost bare room evenly coated with dust, Mr. Masterson toyed with a slide rule, a clipboard, a retractable ballpoint pen and a thin book, Steam Tables, by Keynes and Keyes. Henry sat motionless before him. Out of the window he could see a soup line, and in the distance a building was being demolished. A man in uniform walked up the soup line, pulled a man out of it and began hitting him in the face. Perhaps later the victim would go to a movie theatre, buy a ticket, enter the Gents and comb his hair.
‘Are you a good, steady worker?’ asked Masterson.
‘Yes.’
Fingers like white slugs curled around the slide rule. Undoubtedly Masterson was puffy and white all over, like a drowned corpse. His unpleasant glasses were hinged in the centre like motorcycle goggles, and folded hard against the colourless bubbles of his eyes. Mr. Masterson contained a great quantity of liquid.
‘Do you work good?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘If you work good, we’ll do good by you.’ Henry was never to forget this sentence, for he wrote it on a sheet of paper and taped it in the drawer of his desk, where it became a kind of motto.
‘You start at fifty.’ The corner of Mr. Masterson’s mouth lifted in a kind of smile, revealing a rotten tooth.
Section III: The Arrangement
The Masterson Engineering Company occupied the third and fourth floors of the building. Henry was to work on the third floor. An old man, whose tie was fastened with a paper clip, whose sleeves were rolled high above his parched elbows, led Henry downstairs into a room full of clerks at oak desks. There were in the room perhaps a dozen, perhaps a hundred men of various sizes and ages.
Gesticulating wildly with his skinny arms, the old man began in a high, clear voice to explain Henry’s duties:
See this here form
This here is the system sheet.
You’ve got to mark it down every time
An assignment bill comes in
You’ve got to mark it down every time
An assignment bill goes out
And put the tally number here off the spec
Or else the item identification.
See this here list
This here is the transfer list,
Where you put the part number here
From the compiled list of numerical transfers
Where you put the description number here
From the B column of the changeover schedule
And mark it down.
We have always initialled our work
We always will.
Be sure you initial the backlist
When you add a serial number
Be sure you initial the adjustment form
When you check this here.
Fill out the job number;
Fill out the item identification index
(Blue and yellow copies),
Make a note on the margin of the drawing
Or on the margin of the transfer book
If the alphabetical register is stamped
And initialled by the proper authority.
‘You’ll catch on …’ Winking, the old man gave his sketches of arms a final flourish and went away. Henry fingered various piles of clean forms tentatively, murmuring fragments of the old clerk’s song; he picked up a coloured pencil and laid it down again. It seems that being a clerk is not all fun!
Henry consulted with himself and decided to learn by observing and imitating the other clerks around him. There were eight clerks around him in the following arrangement:
Clark Markey
Willard Bask
Karl Henkersmahl
Robert Kegel
Henry C. Henry
Rodney Klumpf
Harold Kelmscott
Edward Warner
Edwin Futch
Henry was never to learn the names of any of the sixteen or forty clerks outside this circle of desks, but soon he ‘caught on’, or moved into the general work rhythm. He accepted from Rod or Ed Warner a batch of forms, removed paper clips from some, marked a few of them with numbers and initials, erased the numbers or initials from others, sorted them by his own arrangement, clipped them together, and gave them to either Bob or Willard.
Willard was born and raised in the Southern part of the United States, while Bob’s younger sister was sure to become salutatorian of her high school class. Meanwhile Bob or Willard was undoing part or all of Henry’s work, then passing the stuff on to Clark or Harold or Karl, who in turn undid part or all of his (Bob’s or Willard’s) work, then passed the stuff on to Rod or Ed W. or callow Eddie Futch; each man along the chain approaching the work as if no one had gone before and no one would come after. Numbers would be erased, altered, changed back to their original values. Forms might be sorted by names, then dates, then colour, then in numerical order, alphabetical order and alphanumerical order. Often enough, work came back to Henry from two to three times. This was indeed a vicious circle!
Section IV: The Happy Ending
Happily, sooner or later every form ended up with Karl, the stapler, who might put a staple in it and send it out of the department for good. Work flow was thus:
Thus a kind of progress was achieved, without, however, sacrificing routine. The happy days blended into one another like molten glass.
Section V: The Departures
No one ever saw Mr. Masterson on the third floor. He seemed to send all his orders through the old clerk, who descended every morning with a memorandum to be tacked to the bulletin board.
The speaker of the intercom, fixed in the ceiling, made crackling noises that might have been the voice of Masterson. The shape of a name emerged from the static. A clerk at once rose, squared his shoulders and climbed the stairs. He did not come back.
The room was filled with the anxious murmur of the clerks, discussing his departure. The same thing had happened a dozen times or more, it was said. They never came back.
The discussion stamped everyone. Some clerks stood leaning against their desks, arms akimbo. Some tapped pencils on their blotters, made spitting motions, or leaned back. Others pretended to move their jaws sideways, while still more others sharpened pencils and drank water from paper ‘cups’. Bob Kegel continued to read numbers from a list to Rod Klumpf, who punched the buttons of a small adding machine. Karl picked at his stapler with a preoccupied air. Big Ed Warner, an older man known for his leaky heart and halitosis, was swivelled around to talk to Eddie Futch. Had the bomb (or a Hiroshima-size atomic bomb) gone off at this moment, at 5,000 feet above Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the shadow of Ed would no doubt have protected the acne-riddled face of Eddie from the direct effects of the blast, or is this just wishful thinking?
Ed told the young man that the departed clerk was dead, and that nothing, no power on earth could bring him back.
‘Is that any way to talk? Jesus! Is that any way …’
Eddie ran off to the lavatory to pinch pimples from his hot, raw cheeks. Big Ed considered the word ‘laughter’.
Section VI: Kegel and Klumpf
Bob Kegel and Rod Klumpf were alike. Often Henry tried to envision some mirror arrangement that would allow him to see, in place of the back of Bob’s head in front of him, the back of Rod’s head behind him. Clearly the virtual image would be the same.
They were tall, slim and polite, with round heads, round shoulders and long, narrow feet. They wore fashionable clothes and reasonable smiles and neat cowlicks, and they read the same consumer magazine, which prompted them to buy many of the same articles: antifreeze, air conditioners, Ascots, attaché cases, beer mugs, berets, blazers, brandy snifters, cameras, carpeting, cars, cats, deodorants, door chimes, filter cigarettes, golf clubs, hats, L.P.s, luggage, movie cameras, movie projectors, shavers, silverware, slide projectors, tape recorders, typewriters, television sets, toothbrushes.
At first Henry supposed that he could tell them apart by Rod’s freckles and Bob’s half-rimmed glasses. But the sun soon brought out freckles on Bob also, and he proved to be quite vain in regard to his glasses, wearing them less and less. At the same time, Rod purchased and began to wear a similar pair of glasses, and since he kept out of the sun, his own freckles began to fade. Being of a size, the two friends loaned one another clothes. Occasionally, for a joke, they would exchange desks. Both spoke in the same modulated tones, and both moved with the grace of bowlers.
It was always Bob or Rod who got up a football pool, who sent out for coffee, who tacked up humorous signs, who started charity drives, who instituted fines for tardiness and swearing, who collected money for flowers whenever anyone fell ill, died or married. Tirelessly and good naturedly, these clean young men organized the life of the office. The others despised them.
Section VII: The Coffee Break
Division A: The idea of coffee break
Coffee break was an old tradition at the Masterson Engineering Company, instituted some years before by Mr. Masterson when he had read in a management magazine the following advertisement:
UP PRODUCTION WITH A COFFEE BREAK!
Get more out of your workers by giving them a short mid-afternoon rest, with coffee, the all-purpose stimulant. Coffee perks up flagging minds and bodies the way fuel injection pumps up the power of an engine. They will gladly pay for the coffee – while you reap the extra productivity!
His frequent memos on the subject claimed that coffee breaks cost him an enormous amount of money, but that he was determined his clerks should be happy at all costs.
Division B: Coffee break praxis
It was during coffee break that Henry began to learn the peculiar vocabulary of the clerk.
First he heard Clark Markey, the non-lawyer, say, ‘I certainly did finalize that item.’
A delighted smile invaded the solemn features of Karl Henkersmahl. ‘Finalized it, did you? You do not know the meaning of the word finalize. Did you expedite it or ameliorate it? Did you even estimate the final expenditures? Or did you merely correlate the old stabilization programs? Ha!’
Harold Kelmscott stirred his coffee with a peculiar new kind of pencil. Laughter hissing in his blue eyes, he said, ‘Quit it, Karl. We all know what a poor expediter you are yourself, and you’re a non-conservative estimator, unless I miss my guess.’
Karl nipped off his rimless glasses and polished them in aggravated silence. It was hard for him to acknowledge the presence of a superior will, but he did so with his best grace. His tiny, wide-set eyes, were on the move, looking for a smile he could challenge.
Karl often let his pride and quick temper draw him into an argument on any subject, especially on the subject of Germany, about which he possessed a number of interesting statistics. Claiming to know the exact reason Germany lost the Second World War, he usually won any arguments simply by shouting the same words over and over until his opponent gave up. The only man who ever won the war argument from Karl was Ed Warner, who maintained that Germany had won the war.
Division C: False teeth
Karl swallowed his coffee and said, ‘I estimate that the productionalized operational format will be updated by mid-March at the very earliest.’
Harold smiled. ‘But that’s hardly a conservative estimate, is it, Karl?’ The smile became an orange balloon, orgulous and threatening. Karl stared at its teeth in disbelief.
Modestly swirling his coffee and studying the rainbow in it, Harold said aloud that he had found two discrepancies today.
Two! A low murmur of approval went around the group. Indian, or ‘ideal’ summer descended on the city, and a new movie came to the Apollo. Hurricane Patty Sue was breaking up. The eyes of Eddie Futch glistened with frank hero-worship, which Harold accepted graciously. Even Bob and Rod paused in their counting of the proceeds of a turkey raffle to make the well-known gesture of ‘nice going’.
Karl alone refused to congratulate Harold. ‘I hope you itemized them both,’ he said testily, ‘before you followed a plan of procedure.’
‘Of course I itemized them. What did you think I’d do – standardize them?’ Harold quipped. The others laughed heartily, as much in glee at Karl’s discomfiture as in open admiration of the excellent bon mot, or good word, of his inquisitor.
It was hard not to like Harold Kelmscott, for he was a true clerk, descended from a line of clerks that could trace its name back to the twelfth century, to a Benedictine monk who broke his vow of celibacy. Harold once lectured to an orientation class of incoming clerks at a business college. He said:
Section VIII: A Priesthood
My esteemed fellow-clerks:
There have not been so many ways in this world in which a man might earn his daily bread, that the desiderata of clerkdom could invariably vie with more dramatic ways of ‘bringing home the bacon’ (slide shown of Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, 1953, or Head IV, 1949, or Painting, 1946), such as police detection work, mass hypnotism, name any sport.
What, then, is it about clerkdom, that draws so many millions of fine young persons of all levels to dedicate their lives, so to speak, to the world of paper and telephones; to join, if I may be permitted a small jest, the pen and pencil set? (Slide shown of comic figure climbing out of inkwell, copyright by Ub Iwerks. Boos and clatter of neolite soles on Armstrong cork floors. Guards take firmer grip on Smith & Wesson .38 calibre police special revolvers, glance inadvertently at tough Yale locks on all doors, but H.K. has it under control.)
What it is, we may very well ask, for it is an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question. Let us unask it, then, and move on to a history of paper. The first clerks, we know, lived in ancient cities where they wrote on stone, clay slabs, wax tablets. But very quickly, they moved into their true capacity as priests. (Mixed hissing, but a general feeling of well-being pervades the auditorium. Guards relax and even light up Camels and Luckies. Wearing a plain black business suit, Foreman and Clark with vest and extra pair of pants at home, Harold spreads his arms in benediction. He is plump and blond, but even so, serious as a nose. He is all-English, black round-rimmed glasses and an unruly lock of hair his trade mark.) Yes, priests, a shocking word but oh so true! You shall be priests in the tradition, handlers of the lamb, then the lambskin then paper. Your hands will caress no whiter flank than the margin of form 289-XB-1967M. Your rituals are many and important, and you will dedicate your life to preserving their routine, that endless cyclic round that drives the universe. Whether you work in the death, birth or marriage registration bureau, it is your work which moves civilisation in its great orbit. God bless you all! (From the front of the hall guards and firemen move in with firehoses, using Townely-Ward 1½” nozzles and Townely-Ward pumpers to empty the hall and flush it out for the next lecture.)
Section IX: Jax TV Lounge
Division A: Rod
Henry stood at the bar and began a conversation with Rod or Bob. Around them, clerks murmured a kind of plainsong cadence of complaint, and Henry was pleasantly aware of being a clerk himself. He was one with the two clerks in the corner, arguing about the finalization of finalizations. He was one with the boisterous group of tic-tac-toe players in the corner. He was one with the three clerks at the other end of the bar, their arms about one another’s shoulders, who counted off by tens. Nearby another comrade was showing someone how to fold a dollar-bill ring. Henry’s hands itched for paper to feel. The bar, foreseeing this, had provided a tiny paper napkin with each drink, which his hands raped as he talked.
Peering into his glass, Bob (or Rod) said, ‘Rob gives me a pain in the ass. Today he wanted to hand me a tally index, quadruplicate – and would you believe it? – the stupid bastard had the blue copy on top!’
‘No kidding?’
‘No, really. Even little Eddie Futch knows the white copy goes on top, for Christ’s sake.’
Henry could not help but think of Masterson’s childhood:
MEMO: My childhood. It has come to the attention of this office that the company personnel in general do not know the details of how I was born and raised. I intend to ameliorate this circumstance.
I was conceived because the contraceptive device my mother was wearing at the moment was not properly fitted. It consisted of a small metal button, to which was attached a long wire coil spring. The end of the coil was to be introduced into the cervix and thence into the womb, and screwed up tight until the button sealed the opening of the cervix. Either due to a malfunction of the device itself or an unwillingness on the part of Mom to undergo the discomfort of a really tight seal, an accidental conception occurred.
I learned of all this only on my twenty-first birthday, from a pretty cousin with whom I dallied, in an after-Sunday-dinner way, in a haymow. My mother I hardly remember, except as a ghostly figure standing silent by the electric kitchen range, almost an aura thrown off by the back burners. She liked to stir things. To my knowledge, she never spoke.
I soon was able to go to college, where, thanks to the leadership of Athelstan Spilhaus, I was persuaded to make my goal the sanctification of mechanical engineering, the elevation of thermodynamics to a sacrament. My studies were interrupted by the birth of a younger sister, or half-sister, whom my impoverished parents could not support. The rest is history.
– Masterson
Bob (or Rod) went on, ‘Well, to make a long story short, I expedited them, though I had a damned good notion to let them go the way they were. Old Rob is beginning to make too many little discrepancies, if you ask me. Only last week, I caught him updating a form, just because it was in short supply!’
‘I can’t believe it!’ cried Henry. clapping his hands to his ears.
‘True, though. And he had the itemization slip attached to the bill, and I couldn’t find the authorization for that anywhere!’
‘Exactly.’ Henry sensed his meaning. Down the bar, the trio counted:
‘One hundred forty!’
‘One hundred fifty!’
‘One hundred sixty!’
They laughed and pounded on the bar, then drew themselves up to count again.
‘Yes,’ Rod (or Bob) went on in thick accents, ‘if you ask me, old Rob is about to get the axe. Too many discrepancies, if you see what I mean. One of these days they’ll be calling him on the intercom …’
‘Do you mean it?’ Henry inadvertently genuflected.
‘Off the record, you understand, but the trouble with old Rob is – he drinks.’
‘No!’ said Henry, not disputing it. He bought a round, then Bob (or Rod) tried to interest him in tickets for a turkey raffle.
‘But it’s only March.’
‘We’ve already raffled off a ham for Easter. Clark won it, and gave it away to Karl. Then we sold everyone cards for Mother’s and Father’s Days, flags for Veterans’ Day, baby trees for Arbor Day, fireworks for the Fourth and St. Christopher medals for the Labor Day weekend. Thanksgiving is the only thing we had left,’ explained Bob (or Rod). ‘I mean, it’s a little early for Christmas trees.’
‘What about treats for Hallowe’en?’ suggested a stranger.
‘Sure, that’s it, teach kids to beg. That’s the American way, all right. If kids worked for their pennies the way I had to – Gee, it’s nearly seven! I’ve got to get to class. Sorry I can’t buy you a round, Henry.’ He drank up and lounged quickly towards the door.
Rod (or Bob), less because of the ski-ing instructor with whom he had had a brief flirtation than because of his current interest in Arctic literature, had a well-shaped neck, tapering inward slightly under his small ears, and forming a niche in front, into which was set an Adam’s apple.
‘Wait! What is it you study?’ Henry cried, and the answer blew back in a block of November wind:
‘IBMs.’
Division B: Bob
Bob (or Rod) moved down the bar to talk to Henry as soon as Rod (or Bob) had left. Henry was able at once to confirm that he drank, as the IBM scholar alleged, for he now had a drink in his hand, and sipped at it.
‘Was that Dob I saw leaving?’ he said. ‘Intelligent kid, Dob is.’
‘Yes, he tells me he’s studying IBMs.’
IBM, unknown to either of the speakers, represents not only International Business Machines, but Yebem, the seventieth angel quinary of the Zodiac. This angel over the seventieth quinary of the Zodiac. This angel is usually depicted plucking a quill from the wing of its neighbour, 69 or Raah (who hangs head downward like a bat), with which to make, this legend has it, the first ‘pen’.
Like wax, the other’s face took a smile. ‘The real money isn’t in IBMs, it’s in ICBMs. I study ICBMs.’ After a moment he added, ‘Yes, I’m no intellectual like Dob, but I can tell you right now he’s getting too smart for his own good. For instance, he thinks the white copy of the tally index quadruplicate form goes on top, in the finalized format. Just for the record, I think old Dob’s going to be finalized himself one of these days.’
‘For the record?’
‘The confidential record, of course. Dob makes too many discrepancies, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean, all right,’ said Henry, showing some of his teeth. ‘He drinks?’
‘Golly, yes. In fact, I saw him drinking here, just a few minutes ago.’
There was nothing either of them could add to this, so they turned to watch the television. As the picture slowly brightened, it became even more painfully clear that the monkeys were not free-standing on the ponies’ backs, but strapped on. A hidden orchestra played ‘Perpetual Motion’. After trying to interest Henry in the first pick of a lot of Norway pines Bob (or Rod) went off to school.
Section X: Ed and Eddie
The unpleasant marsupiality of Ed Warner’s eyes was worsened when he smiled. Little sharp shrew-teeth glittered at the ends of big dead-pale gums, and one knew his tongue would also be black.
‘There isn’t any boss,’ he murmured to Eddie Futch. There was no need to say more. The panic ripples spread, leaving little Eddie bobbing on the surface of his own consciousness, a writer might presume. He who follows the conceit far enough might even glimpse something like slime boiling in the depths … ‘But I seen him. He hired me.’
‘You saw someone who said he was the boss. Or did he even say that?’
Little Eddie looked around for help, his eyes full of tears. ‘But there just has to be a boss,’ his shrillness insisted. ‘If there’s no boss, how can there be a company?’
The shrew-teeth bared in a grin.
‘Leave the lad alone, Ed,’ Harold bade. ‘You’ll have him making discrepancies.’
‘This whole company is a discrepancy, Harry. I’m trying to say something, now, listen. Unrectifiable –’
‘That’ll do!’ Harold leapt to his feet, a sword of ignorance glimmering in his fine eyes. Cackling, Big Ed moved behind his own desk to gulp heart pills.
This was his defence. Everyone was terrified of Ed’s tender heart, as much as of his black breath. If he were pressed too hard in an argument, he would simply clutch his chest and slump to the floor, remaining there until the argument was forgotten.
Henry envied him the trick. If only it were possible to imitate it without soiling his shirt.
Section XI: Dirt
Yes, Henry cried out to cleanliness. He bathed morning and evening, and wore clothes scientifically cleaned and packaged in polythene bags. His shirts were first disinfected and boiled at home, then scrubbed to new whiteness by Chinese slaves. He carried about with him toothpaste, carbolic soap, orange sticks, a safety razor, styptic pencil and Kleenex, while the drawer of his desk was crammed with bandaids, new shirts and underwear, depilatory and cotton swabs.
No, cleanliness answered. His was the dirtiest shirt in the office, and the tartar caked up permanently on his teeth. Strange rashes came and went on his coarse-pored, grainy skin, while his fingernails remained in mourning. It was as if another person were determined to keep him foul.
MEMO: The history of the Masterson Engineering Company.
The Masterson Engineering Company was started in 1927 by my father. My mother. He began with one draughtsman and a broken T-square, and plenty of guts and sand. In 1931, the company went broke, but by 1950, he was back in business. I took over that year, under his directorship, and soon killed or replaced him. The original name was retained, though the company moved downtown. Wife and child. I am now Mr.
– Masterson
One day Henry tried a daring experiment. After spreading some newspapers on the floor, he clutched his chest and slumped down carefully on them.
No one paid the least attention, even when he groaned and writhed a few times. After several minutes, Henry got up and went back to work, his neck hot against the grey collar of his shirt.
Section XII: Clark
Clark Markey, the non-lawyer, was unpopular because of his political beliefs, though no one was afraid of him.
‘I’m no lawyer,’ he would say, ‘but it seems to me that twenty-five minutes for lunch is below the legal minimum.’ He asked each of the others if they would back him in complaining to the Labor Board.
Willard Bask: ‘Don’t want to rock the boat.’
Eddie Futch: ‘Guess it would be all right.’
Karl Henkersmahl: ‘Should think we have no right to complain about anything.’
Henry C. Henry: No comment.
Robert Kegel: ‘I think we need a bowling team.’
Harold Kelmscott: ‘Let us give up lunch of the flesh.’
Rodney Klumpf: ‘Let’s organize a bowling team.’
Clark Markey: ‘Will go along with the others.’
Ed Warner: ‘Abolish lunch. Abolish the company …’
Section XIII: Clark and Karl and Eddie
Clark was viscerally interested in everyone’s problems of justice. When Eddie Futch played loud music on his radio, Clark assured him he was well within his rights. But when Karl complained of the noise, Clark hastened to tell him that he, too, had a legitimate claim.
‘I’ve got a claim, all right. I’m going to smash that goddamned radio,’ Karl said quietly. ‘Then I’m going to smash its owner. Ha!’
‘Oh, no, you mustn’t do that; your right to smash ends where Eddie’s radio begins. But you do have a right to insist that he turn it down if it bothers you.’
Karl began to shout, his head swelling up out of a thick, Michelin-man neck. ‘Turn that fucking radio off, before I come over there and smash it!’
Blinking rapidly, little Eddie switched off the music. Clark’s eyes filled with tears of compassion. He rushed to comfort the boy. ‘Nevertheless, you have a right to listen.’
‘I don’t want to listen,’ Eddie lied. Red flooded the acne-scarred face: a Martian map. ‘If I did want to listen, I’d listen, all right, no matter what anyone said.’
‘That’s right! You selfish pig!’ Karl screamed. ‘You care nothing for the nerves of others. You aren’t doing precision work, as I am. All you do is shuffle papers around. But I’m a precision stapler. I have to get the staple in exactly the same place each time; I can’t bend it over or ruin it, because then I’d have to start all over again. But what do you care? What do any of you care?’
MEMO: Automation
There will be no automation at the Masterson Engineering Company.
– Masterson
Section XIV: Clark and Karl
Clark rushed over to placate the hysterical Henkersmahl and offer him a halvah bar.
‘What is this supposed to be?’
‘Halvah. A kind of candy. Just try it.’
Karl bit into it gingerly and chewed, watching Clark to one side. ‘It tastes good. Jewish product, is it?’ He finished the bar in two bearish gulps and began turning his fingers over, sucking crumbs from them. ‘It tastes damned good.’
Clark began to smile, relieved that he had been able to help Karl so easily. Then the Henkersmahl’s red jewels of eyes closed with suspicion.
‘Damned clever, you Jews. Now I suppose you’re going to overcharge me for that candy bar, eh?’
Clark became aware of a problem in communications research. ‘No, Karl, that was a gift,’ he said.
‘Ha ha, a gift. Very cute little tricks. A gift, eh? A gift? Very cute tricks indeed. A gift with Hebrew strings attached, eh? You’ve fooled me this time, but I’ll remember this. I never get fooled twice, and I always remember anyone who cheats me, Clark.’ Karl pulled a dollar from his billfold and threw it on Clark’s desk.
‘Yes, that’s the difference between your kind and mine. I may be fooled by your subtleties, but not for long. I pay my debts sportingly, yes, even gladly, when I’m caught in one of your snares. But your kind never pays up, do they? All right, I don’t mind being cheated out of mere money. Go on, take it.’
As he said this last, Karl snatched back the dollar and put it away again. From that day on, he would never lose an opportunity to tell people of how Clark tried to charge him a whole dollar for a candy bar, which Karl always referred to as a ‘Bar Mitzvah, or one of those crazy names. It might even have been Jewish dope. I felt funny afterwards …’
Section XV: The Second World War
The real reason Karl disliked Clark was that Jews had undoubtedly cost Germany the Second World War. There could be no other explanation. Germany had what everyone acknowledged the world’s finest fighting men. They had the best planes, the best guns, everything. But the army had so dissipated its efforts by hauling around mewling Jews and killing them that its efficiency had suffered, he told Ed. Karl would never forgive the Jews for that.
‘It’s the real reason Germany lost. Not the second front, but that Jewish fifth column. Not the American bombers, but the sabotage in Germany’s bosom.’
‘I know just what you mean,’ Willard Bask agreed. ‘I spent eighteen months in Stuttgart, and believe you and me, there ain’t a finer kind of folks anywhere than the Germans. We had some godawful fights in them honkytonks, sure, but I respect a man who fights for what’s coming to him. Know what I mean? I mean I respect a man who stands up on his hind legs and comes at you with a broke bottle like a white man, and don’t go messing around with Big Knives or razors and stuff.’
Ed Warner scratched a mole. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Didn’t Germany win the war?’
Not listening, Karl went on. ‘German logistics were all snarled. Instead of troop trains and supply trains, they had carloads of Jews lolling about the countryside. Getting a free ride, while the world’s finest fighting men had to walk.’
‘Know just what you mean,’ Willard said, nodding fiercely. ‘One night this big German and me started out cuttin’ each other up with busted bottles, and before the night was over, we was old pals, swapping stories about women. Next night, it was just the other way round …
‘But Germany won the war, Karl. Look at Germany today. One of the top industrial nations in the world. Two continents are overrun every year with German tourists. They have one of the biggest, best-equipped armies in Europe. How can you say they lost?’
Karl cocked his head and frowned, realising something had gone wrong. He had to make Ed understand the truth. Smiling, he began his explanation once again. The light reflected off the octagonal shapes of his lenses, blanking out the eyes.
Section XVI: Cesspools
When Harold Kelmscott looked at Clark Markey, what did he see?
He saw the ancestor of Clark Markey performing ritual sacrifice of Christian children. He saw the ancestor of Clark Markey breeding money from money: usury: a sin. He saw the ancestor of Clark Markey cursing Christ as He bore His cross, and telling Him to go faster up Calvary. He saw Christ turn to look at that ancestor, saying, ‘I go, but thou shalt wait till my return.’ He saw the ancestor of Clark Markey buying and selling Christian kings.
What were the five sources of the hatred Harold bore the Jew before him?
Old half-remembered stories from childhood; his parents’ anti-Semitism; popular slogans recalled unconsciously; the intense dislike of Karl for Clark, as reflected in his glasses; bitterness because Clark had not offered Harold a candy bar.
From what two-fold reason springs this last bitterness?
From Harold’s abstention from candy during Lent: first, he would naturally have taken pleasure in refusing a temptation of Satan; secondly, he would have enjoyed refusing the candy on religious grounds, implying that Clark was cruelly intolerant to offer it, and thus wounding him.
When Clark’s name was called over the intercom, he went meekly and quietly upstairs. As soon as he was gone, Harold drew and fired a histrionic sigh. ‘Good riddance, good riddance,’ he clucked. ‘I never could stand Jews, not even when they were my best friends. Do you know why?’
‘Because they cheat you?’ Karl prompted, hoping for an anecdote.
‘No, because, during the Middle Ages, the Jews used to slit open the throats of Christian babies and throw them into cesspools.’
Henry thought about the cesspools. He was becoming compulsively clean in habit if not in fact, and only barely restrained himself from wiping off door knobs and answering the phone with a Kleenex.
‘Cesspools, eh?’ Karl looked disappointed. ‘Well, you’ve got to expect it. Anyone mean enough to charge a dollar for a candy bar would stoop to just about anything.’
‘Anything. Their name comes from Judas, you know – their secret leader (you recall he killed Christ).’
‘That’s right. For money, wasn’t it?’ As he spoke, Karl stared hard at the back of Willard Bask’s neck.
MEMO: Power
We are fighting for, and we expect to win, a return of power to the hands of the white, Anglo-Saxon, God-fearing, Protestant, not overly-intellectualized citizens of American descent, especially in our Southern states, men of integrity who have kept the old values.
– Masterson
Section XVII: Old Values
Willard Bask was about six feet tall, slender, with a fine square-featured face that showed only a trace of weakness around the jaw. His clear eyes were the blue-grey of distance, and the necessary impression of fanaticism they produced was softened by his serious grin. Willard spent his summers on the beach, and used lamps to keep his tan dark all winter. Against it, his teeth seemed even and almost sound. His sculptured hair glistened like the whorls of thumb prints in grease. Like the grin, the nose of Willard twisted slightly to one side; he seemed always about to share a private joke with some invisible audience to his right.
Willard opinioned that it might not be all the fault of the Jews, things were all screwed up in the papers and they slanted things. He was sure things could be fixed up again, if the Southern coloured stopped listening to agitators and tended their knitting.
‘Let folks be, that’s what I always say,’ he said often.
MEMO: Dwelling patterns of the Allendar and Bask families: Patrilocal or matrilocal? At first the kinship arrangements of the Allendar and Bask families may seem complex and even arbitrary, but a closer inspection reveals many basic formations common to Southern United States tribes. At the heart of this scheme we find, of course, the familiar automobile, usually an older Ford or Mercury equipped with phallic aerials(s), with mammary steering knob (see formation of the form ‘guffer’s knob’ in Frazer, ‘Courtship in the Merc’) and certainly with twin anal ‘tailpipes’. The greater mobility provided by these vehicles has not led, as expected, to a breakup of the old matrilocal dwelling patterns, but only extended the range of such patterns from village to county, up to 150 miles.
The seven children of Faron Bask and Maypearl Allendar Bask are a case in point: Selma and Wilma settled in the same village with their spouses, while Travis, Truman, Orman, Willard and J.B. moved on to a city at too great a distance to maintain easy contact. Willard’s wife, Nelline Parker, bore him four children between her 13th and 17th years. They were then divorced and he moved back into the county of his birth at his mother’s death. He left home again, the following year abandoning Etta Leich, his second wife, shortly before her miscarriage. His younger brother, J.B., followed an exactly similar pattern, while Wilma and Selma followed its opposite, e.g., leaving the village at the death of their mother. Travis died, and Orman and Truman had not yet married. The Merc belonging to Travis had fender skirts; but when Truman inherited it, these were removed and a sunshade added. The pattern is self-evident.
– Masterson
Section XVIII: Patterns
‘It’s them communists, if you’ll excuse the expression,’ he said earnestly. ‘They come down and stir up the coloured. I can’t blame the poor coloured. They see all this white pussy around, agitatin’, telling them they’re as good … Well, you can see what that’ll lead to, but what can I do? Live and let live, that’s my middle name. But you’ve got to admit the coloured and white used to get along just fine, just fine, without no outside interference. Well, I’m not going to complain. I know God didn’t intend coloured and white to mix any more than a washer woman means to mix up coloured and white clothes – it’s the white ones get ruint. But who am I to make trouble?’
He glanced around accusingly. A bitter, nagging note came into his voice. ‘I’m not complaining. To each their own, that’s my motto. I think birds of a feather ought to flock together. Why, when I used to pump gas …’
Section XIX: Going out of style
‘The Southern coloured are just different, and if I sat around here explaining till Doomsday, you wouldn’t understand what I meant unless you lived down there. I mean different. Like they don’t know the value of a dollar. Soon as they get a nickel in their jeans, they just got to spend it, like it was burning a hole in their pocket.’
Lazily, he unstraddled a chair to fish a five-dollar bill out of his watch pocket with two fingers. Willard was buying coffee for everyone. The deliveryman set down the box of lukewarm covered containers and reached for his change, but Willard waved it away. Before he could taste his own coffee, however, his name was called on the intercom.
Section XX: Gone, but not forgot
‘Did you ever notice how Willard just throws money away?’ asked Karl when he had left. ‘Anyone who does that must have a bit tucked away. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that his background is – Biblical, if you get my meaning.’
‘I had the same thought,’ said Harold. He took a reflective sip of the coffee Willard had bought him – black, for it was Advent – and asked, ‘What sort of name is Willard, anyway? Surely not a Christian name.’
Ed Warner finished his own coffee and started on Willard’s untouched cup. ‘Well, he’s gone now. No use talking about the dead,’ he said firmly.
‘He’s not –!’
Section XXI: Irregularities
‘He’s not!’ Karl screamed, his Michelin-tyre head inflating dangerously.
Harold’s long celluloid teeth clicked on his paper cup. ‘Of course not. He’s been fired, I’m sure.’ He looked warningly at Ed. ‘Caught, I suppose, with his hand in the till.’
‘What till?’ Ed’s yellow cheeks turned the colour of pleasure.
‘HE’S NOT DEAD!’
‘Prove it.’
Karl seemed about to collapse, but Harold shook his head. ‘You should know better than that, Ed. It’s up to you to prove that what’s-his-name is dead.’
For answer, Ed clutched his chest and crumpled to the floor.
Section XXII: Fake
Karl crowed. ‘He’s faking! Knows he lost!’
The old man’s lips turned blue. ‘He’s dying!’ Eddie snatched up the phone and dialled an emergency number. The number was printed in red ink on a card stuck to one corner of the bulletin board. Any user of the telephone confronted the bulletin board and read its notices without realizing it.
‘Join a bowling team now!’ ‘THIMK’, ‘THINK’, ‘We don’t make much money but then we don’t have ulcers, either.’ ‘Give generously to Univac.’ ‘Join and contribute now: AMERICANS FOR PRIVATE ENTERPRISE.’ ‘We are asking for flowers for Willard Bask, departed this afternoon. Please sign name and write amount clearly.’ ‘Good books for starving Asia.’
‘Forget it,’ said Karl, pressing down the phone cradle. ‘Do you want to get us all in trouble with the authorities? I told you, he’s faking. He’s not really turning blue.’
Eddie flushed, and his chin, raw with fresh pustules, began to tremble. Shoving Karl aside, he began to dial again. At that moment, the intercom sputtered:
‘Edwin EEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! Futch.’
He dropped the receiver and threw both hands to his face.
‘Go on, kid,’ said Karl gently. ‘If it will make you feel any better, I’ll call the hospital for Ed. All right? Now go on.’ He spanked Eddie lightly, starting him towards the door that led to the stairs. With a zombie stride, the youth marched out.
Karl replaced the telephone receiver and lit a cigarette.
‘Ed’s just faking,’ he announced. ‘Let’s get back to work and just ignore him.’
Harold licked his lips and glanced towards the door. ‘Too bad about young Eddie. though. So young – to go like that.’
‘Yes, death is a natural thing,’ Karl said, blowing a smoke ring. ‘We must learn to accept it and live with it. There must be nothing frightening or shameful about dying – it is as natural as pee-pee and poop.’
‘Yes, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, as the saying goes.’
The figure on the floor coughed, one sudden explosive noise, then lay still. Using his dirty grey handkerchief, Henry picked up the phone and dialled an emergency number.
Section XXIII: Real
‘All right, Ed, keep it up, right to the last minute,’ Karl yelled down the hall to the covered basket the ambulance men were removing. ‘Keep on faking! You’re only fooling yourself!’
His voice was shrill with fury. It excited the professional interest of the intern, who had stayed behind to fill out the death certificate.
‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment?’ he invited. ‘I know it’s hard to believe in the death of someone close.’ He pressed Karl into a chair and asked Henry his name.
‘Karl Henkersmahl. He’s a stapler.’
‘1 see. Oh, Mr. Henkersmahl? Karl? Would you mind putting a few staples in this form for me? It’s the death certificate of Mr. Warner.’
Karl moved slowly and reluctantly, but with a great deal of ceremony (Feierlichkeit) and precision beautiful to behold. He placed one staple neatly in each corner of the form.
‘Say, he really is dead, isn’t he?’ he murmured then, scratching his head. ‘I thought he was just faking.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ said the intern, with a mysterious smile. Though he wore a white uniform, he was a black man.
Section XXIX: The End of All Clerks
One by one, they were all called. Henry thought of quitting first. He even went so far as to interview with another firm, one specializing in famous information. But that night he dreamed that he was brushing his teeth when the toothbrush began ramming wooden splinters up his gums. It was a warning, perhaps.
In the spring, Bob and Rod left, smiling, asking that no flowers be sent after them, that they be cremated by a reliable firm recommended by a leading consumer magazine, and that their ashes be mingled.
At midsummer, Harold left, crossing himself and making signs to ward off the evil eye.
‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ Karl assured him with a serene smile. ‘It’s as natural as wee-wee and grunt.’
But when Karl’s own name was called he behaved in a strange, unnatural manner. The sound made him jerk erect, spoiling a staple. He carefully replaced it, tidied his desk, and with a private, one-sided smile lifted from the bottom drawer a heavy object encased in leather. This he carried into the lavatory and shut the door. A shot rang out. Before Henry, who was the only one left, could try the door, his own name was called on the intercom.
PART TWO: MASTERSON
Section I: The Figure at the Head of the Stairs
Masterson, or a bulging, obnoxious, enigmatic person like Masterson, stood at the head of the stairs. Henry saw he would have to squeeze past him to gain the fourth floor. The eyes in their lenses were quiet and horrible as glass, watching him ascend. In his hand, Henry carried the sheet of paper with his motto: ‘If you work good, we’ll do good by you.’ It was folded in neat thirds, and he held it up before him, like a shielding dental chart.
Who was this Masterson if this were indeed he? Was he truly the author of all memos, or a figurehead? Had he killed the real Masterson and assumed his place? The figure above, beetling over Henry, seemed almost like a great cancer that had once totally absorbed a man; now its vague memory of his lineaments served it to spew forth an idea of death upon the rest of the world.
As Henry moved closer, however, the cancer cleared its throat and stepped back to let him pass. As it did so, he saw the light had been wrong. This was the face of a fat, weary, self-pitying man, nothing more.
Section II: The Fourth Floor
Masterson explained to Henry that he was closing the third floor department and moving all clerks into the draughting room on this, the fourth, floor.
The old clerk with skin like parchment appeared once more and led Henry into a large room he’d never known existed, where a dozen draughtsmen hunched low over their boards. As he passed them, he saw that each man was working on an entirely different project.
The first draughtsman was drawing large circles and small circles, and dividing them into quadrants. Mandalas, wheels, gunsights? Henry wanted to ask him what he drew, but he seemed preoccupied.
The second was drawing a long, continuous curve on a roll of paper. He might have explained that this represented infinity, but Henry did not pause to hear.
The third drew a histogram showing apparently the sales or consumption of oxen and earthen jars. It seemed too self-evident to enquire about, but was it?
The fourth copied, from the cover of a book of matches, the picture of a girl, labelled DRAW ME, but he was copying it upside down and reversed. Intrigued, Henry asked him why, but the draughtsman was, alas, stone deaf.
The fifth copied stylized arrowheads, from a pattern book. Henry was too frightened to ask him what his intention was.
The sixth was beginning a schematic diagram called MOODY’S LATEST SERMONS. He asked Henry to get out of his light.
The seventh had outlined a set of regular polygons, and was now beginning to black them in. ‘If you like them,’ he said to Henry, ‘you might pay. Otherwise please move on and give another a chance to see them.’
The eighth drew a bird’s wing, ‘Detail 43B.’ Henry was struck speechless by the beauty of it.
The ninth drew a ‘valve in cross-section’. ‘It means,’ he explained, ‘that “My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity.”’ Henry did not understand.
The tenth made, or had made, a map of possibly the human brain. But he was not at his drawing board, and Henry was able neither to decipher it alone or await his return.
The eleventh covered his drawing so that Henry could not see it. It was very likely either a blank sheet or a smeary example of the kind of erotic thing he had been dismissed from another job for sketching:
Two breastlike hills are covered with little figures, archers, shooting crossbows at the sky, or rather at certain objects in the sky. These are dozens of large, vicious-looking sickle shapes, apparently descending to attack the archers or breasts. In the background is a walled city, possibly Nurnberg. It is filth like this that makes me, as a father, wish I could administer the death penalty instead of this five-year sentence.
(from notes of District Judge Ruking.)
The twelfth and last draughtsman seemed only to be doing meaningless doodles. This man later left the Masterson Engineering Company and took a job elsewhere lettering placards. He committed suicide in his room by plunging a French knife (bought for the occasion) into his heart. Impaled on the blade near the hilt the police found a large placard serving as a suicide note. It read:
ACCIDENT
Section III: Lips whiter than teeth
Past them, at the front corner of the room, were familiar faces in a group. Eddie Futch was eating chocolate noisily. Bob and Rod were tacking up signs saying ACCURASY and SUPPORT IBM. Willard Bask was discussing slavery with Clark Markey. Harold Kelmscott, cowled in an old grey sweater, had turned his back on the others. Only Ed Warner looked up to greet Henry.
‘About time,’ he said. ‘We thought you’d died down there.’
Henry was reminded of the possibly violent death of Karl, which he had forgotten, though it had happened only a few minutes before. Should he report it? he wondered, and if so, to whom? Mr. Masterson was inaccessible in his office. The placard on the door, hand-lettered by the last draughtsman, read ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’
Karl himself had been against making unnecessary trouble by reporting Ed’s death. If Karl was dead, then, the sensible thing to do would be to say nothing. Henry had a great respect for the wishes of the dead.
He began to convince himself that the ‘shot’ was a truck backfiring in the street, and the ‘gun’ nothing but an electric shaver or electric toothbrush. Karl had always, when alive, enjoyed electrical cleanliness. And to what end? thought Henry C. Henry.
He had begun to rejoice in his own teeth, covered as they were with a thick, resinous deposit like the gum on old furniture. As he remarked to Willard, who was interested in anything like old furniture, ‘What if I went around brushing my teeth twice a day all my life, then got them knocked out of my head by some punk in some alley?’
‘Hot damn!’ said Willard. ‘I know just what you mean. Very same thing happened to me once, in ‘Frisco. I sure was peeved, I’ll tell the world. Makes a fella want to go back home and open an antique store. Fill it with good old solid traditional things. Whew! Fella’d give his left nut for a chance like that.’
Willard wanted to get into a discussion of the draughting tables and the draughtsmen, some of whom were, or seemed to be, Negroes.
Ed Warner kept asking everyone if they knew why he was declared officially dead. No one knew or wanted to know, least of all Karl, when he showed up freshly shaved some days later. Though for some reason he and Ed were not speaking, Karl said loudly for Ed’s benefit: ‘If he was declared officially dead, he wouldn’t be here, and that’s that. They don’t make mistakes like that, right, Clark?’
‘That’s right.’ The little non-lawyer had grown a foot taller and vaguely hairy. ‘They have no right to hire a dead man all over again, when there are so many living unemployed.’
Masterson was not being a pine cone about it. He hired men of all races and nationalities as draughtsmen, because they could be virtually enslaved, and he especially liked to hire Negroes and South American immigrants.
‘They all carry big, mean-lookin’ knives,’ Willard insisted.
‘I can’t believe that,’ said Clark. ‘They wouldn’t be allowed to carry knives longer than three inches. It’s illegal. Besides, I’ve never seen one of them with such a knife.’
‘You better pray you never do see one,’ Willard said. ‘They only get them out to use them. I know what I’m talkin’ about, now. I could tell you about one street fight I had in Leningrad. Whewee! Them big bucks come at me with knives like …’
To defend himself, Willard began to carry a switchblade.
Section IV: Disappearances
‘No one is so busy as he who has nothing to do,’ read the sign Bob (or Rod) was tacking to the wall. Rod (or Bob) looked on in smiling anguish, the better to see him with; later he took up a hammer and amended the sign to read ‘he who has something to do’. Easter was approaching, and the two pals were selling Valentines – to everyone but Art, the old clerk with his aureole of dust-coloured hair. No one ever tried to sell anything to Art.
The chthonic draughtsmen kept to their stalls and did not mingle with the clerks. It was as if they feared infection, or that fraternizing with their superiors would cost them their jobs. For some reason the draughtsmen did not last long anyhow. They were fired, one at a time, and their tables broken up and burnt, until the day would come when … but that day was far in the future when Art revealed a true side to his face, unlimbering himself of the waste baskets of the past.
MEMO: My childhood.
I developed acrophobia, or fear of high places, as soon as I walked. When I was nearly two, my father one day decided to cure me of my irrational fear by making me climb up a tall (12 to 14 foot) stepladder to the top, and there sit until I stopped screaming.
– Masterson
Section V: Art Speaks
Art was in charge of firing, which consisted of simply filling out a pink slip and putting it into a pay envelope. Henry envied Art this power, the power of dealing effectively with papers. Alone of all the clerks, Art could see the real consequences of his work. He was an old, trusted employee who had been with the firm since its inception.
In fact, as he confided at lunch one day, he was its inceptor, and Masterson’s father.
‘Does he know you are alive?’ asked Henry, incredulous that this harmless, friendly, frail, thin, likeable old man had created both an empire and its frightening emperor.
‘Yes.’ Art took a small bite of his hamburger and mangled it in the wrinkled depths of his mouth contentedly. With a fine jasper hand he flicked greasy crumbs from his tie. ‘Yes, I built the whole shebang, and I nursed it all through the Great Depression, too. It was hard going, let me tell you, but on the other hand, I had all that cheap labour in long supply. Ten cents an hour, in the good old days, would buy you an unemployed architect. And I could hit them if I liked, without some damned nosy Labor Board coming around asking questions.’
He shook his wattles wistfully. ‘Yes, sir, ten cents an hour. And they were loyal, mind you. I had men staying on ten, fifteen years. It was the war ruined all that. I have always been against war, and if you talk at me until you are blue in the face, I’ll not change my opinion. War destroys stability. Nowadays, the young men only work for you a year or so, then they run off to get drafted, with not a care for the future of the firm.’
Section VI: Masterson on Tour
Shortly after lunch was the time when Mr. Masterson made his afternoon tour. He paced the aisle, holding his fat, hairless hands carefully away from his sides, fingers together and slightly cupped, thumbs braced, as though he were gripping the wheels of a wheelchair. In the watery glass panels on his face, two pale creatures darted back and forth.
Masterson’s finger suddenly stabbed the table of one draughtsman with a sound like a thrown knife. He screamed. ‘Arrowheads! I said no arrowheads! Take them out! I distinctly said no arrowheads! When I come back here in an hour, I don’t want to see a single arrowhead! No arrowheads! Can’t you understand plain English?’
The man did not understand a word he was saying, but he realized erasures were in order, and nodded. He bent lower over his board, and the electric eraser trembled in his hand.
Masterson passed on to the next man. ‘What’s that number?’ Stab. ‘It looks like a three, for Christ’s sake.’
‘It is a three, sir.’
‘Well, it don’t look enough like a three, then. Take it out and do it over.’
Smiling, the man obeyed. Masterson’s doughy features began to glow. ‘Take out all your numbers and do them over. Make them all look like threes.’
He came at last to a deaf-mute, Hrothgar.
‘What do you call this? A centreline? And this? If these are centrelines, let’s make them look like centrelines, huh?’
Hrothgar looked hurt, but moved to obey.
‘And I told you before I wanted more space in there and there. Why don’t you listen when I’m talking to you?’
‘Nggyah-ngg!’ protested the victim.
‘Don’t you talk back to me that way!’
Section VII: Questions
From the office came the sound of a knife being thrown with great force and apparent hate. Perhaps it was as Ed said, that arbitrary power corrupts arbitrarily.
Masterson screamed at the draughtsmen continually, but never at the clerks. He never asked the clerks what it was they were doing because he didn’t know what they were doing. It did not suit him to ask a question unless he already knew the answer. Nothing infuriated him more than discovering that someone else knew the answer, too.
‘How fast does light travel?’ he asked Henry casually one day. Henry did not know.
‘I know, naturally. In our measurement system, 186,000 miles per second,’ said Karl.
‘Who asked you?’ said Masterson’s right eye.
Somewhere inside Karl another eye was closed forever by a foot squashing it; it spewed forth a grapey eye-seed.
The unpleasant marsupiality of Karl’s eyes was worsened when he smiled. Little sharp shrew-teeth glittered at the ends of big dead-pale gums, and one knew his tongue would also be black. He looked like someone Henry had met before, somewhere, and Karl had changed. He was a spoiled bear, a bear gone finicky – yet how had he got those teeth?
Section VIII: More Questions
Masterson slapped Harold on the shoulder and asked if he could borrow ten till payday. ‘I’m a little short, heh heh.’ Assuming the boss was joking, Harold began to chuckle.
‘No, I’m serious. Had a big weekend with a doll in Boston. I’m flat broke. You know how it is. I could always pay myself my own salary early, but I hate to screw up the book-keeping, see?’ Reluctantly Harold saw. He loaned the ten.
‘You’ll never see that again,4' whispered Big Ed, his face a complete blank. Harold pretended to be unaware of the old man’s existence.
Henry noticed how blank Ed was actually becoming, as if someone were slowly erasing him. He was not just blurry, like Clark (who was growing a great mouth-devouring beard), but less definitely there at all.
On the following payday when Art passed around the pay envelopes, Harold did not get his ten. He tried to catch the flickering eye of Masterson when he stalked through the room, but the boss pretended to be unaware of Harold’s existence.
‘In the good old days,’ Art said to Henry, ‘I never had to take crap from anybody. Good feeling, being your own boss.
‘Why, I used to walk down that aisle and I never even looked at what was on their boards. I just stared real hard at the back of each draughtsman’s neck, stared until he thought he was going to get hit. If he flinched, my rule was, I got to hit him twenty times on the arm. Hee hee, they nearly always flinched.’
The two men sat in the warm diner speaking to one another through pale yellow clouds of steam from the french fryer: mists of the distant present. On the previous day, window cleaners had appeared at the office and wiped away the winter’s grime. An hour after they had left, a dirty rain began.
‘I notice everyone smokes around the office,’ Art said. ‘Not in my day. I never let anyone smoke, and I’d walk around the office all day puffing fifty-cent cigars and blowing the smoke at them. Drove ‘em crazy, especially when I’d dump hot ashes on their drawings. Yes, sir, I ran a tight office in those days.
‘If anyone ever sneaked off to the can for a smoke, I’d lock him in there for the rest of the day, then fire him. “Enjoy your smoke,” I’d say as I turned the key. “You got all day, bright boy.”
‘Whee, one time a new kid ran in there for a smoke at about nine in the morning. I locked him in till six. Hee hee, the rest of them didn’t like that, I can tell you, working all day without a biff.
‘Well, came six o’clock and I opened to let him out, and what do you think that young bastard had done? Hanged himself! Yep, he had that old chain right around his neck and he was stone cold, and the toilet running gallons and gallons. You should have seen my water bill that month.’
His eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘Yes, sir, that’s the only time anyone ever put anything over on old Art. Hee hee.’ He hugged his new coat around him gleefully, while some of his coffee dribbled off the point of his chin.
Section IX: The Theological Virtues
Division A: Faith
It soon became apparent to all that Harold was going to get the shitty end of the stick.
‘Did you even ask him for the money?’ asked Ed.
‘Well – no. How can I? He’ll think I don’t trust him.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘Of course I do. Heck, he’s the boss. Our lives are in his keeping, so to speak. Our names are in his book. He gives us each payday our wages. How can we turn against him? The pen is mightier than the sword.’
‘But if you trust him, what have you got to gripe about?’
Harold, descended of a flawed monk, pondered this point of faith. ‘It isn’t the money, you understand. Heck, I don’t care if I never see that ten again.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s just that I trust him, and now he’s going to betray that trust. He’s going to welsh on me.’
‘Maybe he just forgot,’ Karl purred, showing his little nasty teeth.
‘Oh sure. He forgets, and I never see my money again. You can be sure he wouldn’t forget it if I owed him ten dollars.’
Clark made a diplomatic suggestion. ‘Look, just ask him if you can borrow ten from him. If he’s forgotten about the loan, it’ll remind him of it, and if he’s planned on welshing, he’ll be caught out ashamed. Besides, this way he’ll know you need the money right away.’
Division B: Hope
Harold accosted Mr. Masterson. ‘Sir, could I borrow ten from you till payday? Heh, heh, I’m a little short, at the moment.’
The bulging figure turned slowly with the dignity of a wagon train, and faced him. For over a minute, Masterson subjected Harold to an intense stare of scorn and disbelief. Then he sighed and pulled out his billfold. Harold sighed, too.
‘I wish you’d learn to live within your means, Kelmscott. I’m not a loan company. Now I’m going to loan you this, but it’s the last time, understand?’ The hinged glasses beetled over him.
‘But I do live within my means, sir,’ Harold stammered. ‘It’s not me who has weekends in Boston with a girl.’
The pale eyes did not register anything. Masterson sighed again, heaving his big, flabby shoulders. ‘I’m not interested in nasty details of your personal life, Kelmscott. If you can’t live on what I pay you, maybe you’d better look elsewhere for a job.’ With a snort of disgust, he peeled a ten from his thick bundle of large bills and slapped it on Harold’s desk. Then he stalked off to his office to throw, presumably, knives.
Division C: Charity
Every time an object hit the wall, Willard jumped. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned. ‘I just know he’s got some big, mean-lookin’ knives in there.’
From time to time, Willard got out his own knife and tested the action. It was never fast enough to suit him.
At lunch, Henry asked Art about the pink slips. Did he ever warn anyone they were about to be fired?
The old man stopped masticating. ‘Sir, watch your tongue. The job of firing is a sacred trust. My son, Mr. Masterson, has entrusted me with the care of and disbursement of those pink slips, and of the persons they represent. Do you think I could let him down? My own son?’
Drawing himself up, Art for the moment resembled a famous general, and his thin chest seemed even to fill out the folds of his new coat.
‘Besides,’ he added with a wheeze. ‘I like to watch a man’s face when he opens his envelope. Boy, he sees those streets, those employment offices, even soup lines, hee hee hee …’ His laughter turned to a fit of dry coughing.
Section X: A High Office
That afternoon, Mr. Masterson called Henry into his office. None of the clerks but Art had ever been there before, and Art had forgotten what it was like. Rod and Bob looked envious of Henry, but Karl smirkingly assumed he was being given the axe.
‘If you want my opinion,’ he said, ‘I think you’re going to be quietly axed to leave. Ha!’
Willard drew him aside and said, ‘Play it cool, boy. If he pulls a knife, just you give me a holler.’
Henry pushed open the door with the placard and entered a plain, drab room. On one wall was a peculiar dart board, and on the floor beneath it a huge pile of darts with plastic fins. Near the opposite wall was a long desk behind which was visible the upper half of Mr. Masterson. In his hands was a dart with green plastic fins. Nothing else in the room was describable.
The boss half-rose, turned and hurled the dart; it hit a spot near the baseboard with a sound like a thrown knife, hung for an instant, then fell to the heap.
‘So it goes,’ sighed Masterson, or maybe, ‘How would you like a raise?’
‘Fine, sir.’
‘Here’s the set-up. We may have a new contract or two. Already we have a new contact or two. It’s the big chance. All the candy companies on the coast are changing over to dynamometers. They’ll need a lot of records and stuff switched over, too, and that’s where we come in. If we can handle the changeover for one company, we can do good. Then all the other companies will want us to do good for them, too. Get it? Then later on, when the armed forces change from telephones to radios, we’ll be set, see?
‘But we’ll need some extra help, and I’ll need your help. You could be my right hand, and it’ll mean a lot of extra money for the company, o.k.?’
Section XI: The Mysterious Motto
Henry remembered his motto, the words spoken to him by the boss the day he’d hired him. As they had occurred to him. Henry had added interpretations, until now the sheet was covered; but which had the boss actually said?
If you work good, we’ll do good by you.
If few work good, we’ll do good by you.
If you were good, we’ll do good by you.
If few were good, we’ll do good by you.
If you work good weal, do good by you.
If few work good weal, do good by you.
If you were good weal, do good by you.
If few were good weal, do good by you.
In addition to these, there were the 24 combinations possible by replacing ‘good by you’ by ‘good buy you’, ‘goodbye, you’, and finally ‘good bayou’. Though it was unlikely that he said ‘If few were good weal, do good bayou,’ that possibility could not be overlooked, Henry thought as he shook hands and prepared to leave.
‘One thing, though,’ said Masterson, counting that thing on his forefinger. ‘Of course you’ll make a lot of dough eventually, after our contacts become contracts, but you’ll have to take a little pay cut for now, o.k.?’
They shook hands once more, and Henry started to leave. The boss held up two fingers. ‘Secondly, now that you’re a boss, you’ll have to do a little informing on your pals. Remember, a boss has no real pals, and the great are always lonely.
‘So I want you to tell me who hates me and who likes me. Let me know everything they say about me, understand?’ He brought out another dart and threw it at the strange dart board.
‘When the time comes –’ the dart stuck weakly in the edge of the board and drooped. ‘You’ll get your reward.’ The dart fell quietly to the floor.
‘Especially I want to know what my father says about me. You eat with him, don’t you?’
‘How did you know?’
Masterson wagged his fat forefinger. ‘I have my spies, I have my spies,’ he said archly. ‘But tell me, does he talk about me a lot?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you lie to me! I know he talks about me all the time. All right, get out of here, then, and forget about that swell job.’
Henry waited for a pink slip, but it never came. Indeed, he seemed to receive the promotion after all, for he took a pay cut.
Section XII: A Hazard of New Fortunes
All that week they worked on the bid. Masterson never left the aisle, but stamped, screamed, pounded on tables, and chewed to pieces dozens of dart-fins. He directed his father to hand out pink slips to anyone who got in his way, or to anyone who sneaked around behind him.
MEMO: Is there life on other planets?
This question is of the utmost importance to all of us, whether or not we are actually located in the aerospace industries, for it is a restatement of another, all-inclusive question: Are we alone in the universe? And if not, who else is there? These questions pose problems as yet unanswered; we can only wonder and hope and pray. But whether or not we ever find life on other planets, I feel confident that each and every one of us will want to give this question our full and careful consideration.
– Masterson
The first real crisis was paper. Masterson decided that ordinary tracing vellum was too expensive, and substituted newsprint. This rough, absorbent stuff made spiderwebs of ink lines and spiders of lettering. Masterson began to scream at the draughtsmen, sometimes with eloquence, sometimes wordlessly.
‘Why can’t you make neat, black lines and letters?’ he demanded, and held up a newspaper. Pointing to a story about Hurricane Patty Sue, he said: ‘Take a look at this. They don’t have any trouble making neat lines and letters. Just look at this neat work.’
They tried again, again complaining of the paper, until Masterson, with a martyred smile, said, ‘All right, all right. I’ll get you some fancy, expensive paper. But then –’
He left, and returned an hour later with what appeared to be a roll of wide, slick toilet paper. Along one border ran the tiny green words: ‘Deutsches Bundesbahn’.
In Austria, a fat Mercedes-Benz rolled on fat tyres into a filling station. The attendant saluted and began to fill the tank, while from behind the wheel a fat man rolled out, hitched up his belt and moved towards the toilet like a file of elephants going to the river. The sunlight gleamed on him, on his damp hair and his white shirt of miracle fibres. In one pocket of it was a leather liner containing a matching ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil and a steel scale, marked off both in centimetres and inches. In the other pocket was a package of Roth Handel cigarettes and a roll of hard candy liqueurs. The man stood a moment in the sun, gazing at four brown cows in the field nearby; in this town lived the engineer who designed the ovens at Dachau; the traveller thought of all this and then went in to shit. He, too, was an engineer. Once he had written to an American magazine, asking for the names of engineering firms, of the particular type which included the Masterson Engineering Company. Due to an oversight, however, the engineer did not receive that name.
The draughtsmen tried again and again, but still their work did not satisfy Masterson. Finally, the eyes swelling behind his huge lenses, he screamed, ‘Stop! I want you to stop. Erase everything. I want you to erase everything.’
For an hour, the only sound was the hum of electric erasers. One or two people erased holes in the fragile paper; they were given pink slips at once. Finally Masterson collected the twenty blank sheets, touched them up with an artgum eraser, wrapped them carefully and sent them out.
‘We’ve got the contract sewed up,’ he joyfully confided to the clerks. ‘No one else could turn out work as neat as that, ever. Not one single mistake!’
Yet the next day, even while Rod and Bob were collecting money to buy flowers for the departed package, it came back. His thick hands fumbled at the bale of tattered tissue; Masterson read the accompanying letter aloud, and sobs hung quivering from his voice like drops of water from a tap.
‘Dear Sirs:
Re yours of the thirteenth inst., we have no specific need for railroad station toilet tissue at present.
Thank you for keeping us in mind.’
Section XIII: All’s Well in the End
Masterson removed his glasses and began cleaning them on a scrap of the tissue. He turned his back modestly so that no one could glimpse his naked eyes. As he settled the frames once more on his cheeks, he cleared his throat with an oddly familiar sound. Henry leaned over and asked Ed, ‘Will you tell me why you were declared officially dead?’
Ed pretended not to hear, and gazed steadily at the boss, who moved now on ponderous tiptoes to Art’s desk. ‘Give yourself a pink slip,’ he sighed, and ran away to his office. The little old man nodded eagerly and began filling out a pink slip at once.
The next day was payday, and all watched Art closely as he passed out the envelopes. Smirking as usual, he sat down to open his own. The money he’d sealed into it and the pink slip he’d signed slid out together, and Art’s face seemed to fold in thirds, like a business letter.
Clark Markey, always the barometer of another’s mood, began to weep for him. Art himself merely sat there, staring at the slip lying flat on his desk.
‘Noo,’ he said in a small voice. ‘They can’t do this to me. Not to old Art.’ He said it like a speech of condolence.
‘It isn’t fair,’ said Clark with feeling. ‘They can’t make a man fire himself.’
Art walked slowly to the office, pounded on the placard, waited. The sound of darts within ceased.
‘Let me in,’ he cried. ‘You’ve got to talk to me, Mr. Masterson.’
‘Go away, Dad,’ said a muffled voice. Art trudged to the coat rack, slipped on his old, worn coat, and left.
A moment or two later, the dart game resumed.
PART THREE: THE DISMANTLING
MEMO: My childhood.
My father was a large cheque drawn on First National City Bank, and my mother was very tired.
– Masterson
Section I: Improvements
Things were looking up. Business seemed much improved, for everyone took enormous pay cuts. Karl was promoted to Art’s old job. In addition to precision stapling, he now made out pink slips and took charge of office supplies. He began to detect and eliminate sources of waste.
Bob and Rod were promoted to informers. They blamed Masterson’s father for everything, so their pay was not cut.
Clark Markey had begun to study law. Too many questions of justice now tormented him. How could a dead man be rehired? How could a man be forced to fire himself? At lunch hour he sat hunched over a large volume of labour laws, dropping crumbs (larger than whole words of the fine print) from his cream cheese sandwich. He was not a lawyer, and many of the long paragraphs were unintelligible to him. He began to suspect that in these lay the very answers he was seeking.
Masterson began looking fresh and fit. His death-colour skin took on a pink tinge, as if he daily gorged on blood. He bulged less, and began to walk around the office on new ripple-soled shoes, smacking his fist in his palm and saying, ‘Now that the dead wood is cleared away, we can really move.’ He made a progress chart.
Karl moved to eliminate the shocking waste of forms around the office. ‘Look,’ he explained to the group. ‘We always have old, used forms around. Why don’t we just eradicate the ink from them and re-use them?’
Section II: A Fast
After Christmas, Harold Kelmscott began a fast. It was, he said, in protest of his not being repaid the ten dollars the boss had borrowed; it was a form of sitting in dharna. Karl, who handled the pay envelopes, knew better. Masterson had garnisheed all of Harold’s wages against the twenty he claimed Harold owed him.
‘You can have your pay,’ Karl explained, ‘when the boss gets his twenty back.’
‘Twenty! But I only borrowed ten, and that he had already borrowed from me.’
‘If he borrowed it from you, how come you had to borrow it back? Come on, Harold, don’t be a welsher. You’re too nice a guy. Pay him his twenty, will you?’
‘How can I, as long as I’m not getting paid myself? This is worse than debtor’s prison, isn’t it, Clark?’ Harold looked to the non-lawyer for sympathy.
‘What? Who knows? I’d have to check with English Civil Law,’ said Clark testily, not looking up from his perusal of the New York Code.
Karl wagged his close-cropped head. ‘Harold, you’re a case, the worst I’ve ever seen. You know very well the boss isn’t trying to cheat you. In fact, I begged him – I begged him to fire you and haul you into court. God knows you deserve it.
‘But no, he said he wouldn’t even stop the money out of your wages. He said if you didn’t want to pay him, that was between you and your conscience. “I’m worried about Harold,” he said to me. “I think I’ll just garnishee his wages until he pays me back.”
‘You see, he knows you’ve got this shack-job in Boston, and he figures it ain’t doing your character any good. But by the time you get squared away on your debt, she’ll have forgotten all about you. Not only that, but you’ll get all your pay at once, a real pile.’
‘I’m starving,’ Harold announced humbly. ‘To death.’
Karl continued counting paper clips. ‘You’re a real case,’ he muttered.
Section III: Further Progress
Having devised a method for rebending and re-using old paper clips, Karl saw a further short cut. Rather than eradicate the ink from old forms, he encouraged the others to use disappearing ink in the first place.
Willard kept his knife in his hand at all times, now, and feared everyone who moved suddenly or talked loudly. He took up whittling, to give himself an excuse for holding a knife. One day Masterson, jogging by, asked him if he could make a table, since he was so clever with his hands.
One week later, Willard presented him with a perfect matchbox-size Louis Quinze table, painted and gilded. Lifting it from his calloused palm, Willard set it carefully in the centre of the boss’s desk.
‘Idiot!’ Masterson screamed, and brought his fist down on it. ‘I meant a real table. A table of our progress.’
‘Wait,’ said Karl. ‘If he can do this, Willard here can make big tables for all the clerks. Then we could sell off all the desks.’
Masterson had taken down and discarded the dart board, and now his walls were covered with charts. He and Karl planned many new charts and tables, and Harold executed them.
There was a chart of business volume compared to paper-clip expenditure, one of volume of work versus man-hours, one of level of water in the water cooler versus work output and one of Mr. Masterson’s weight versus the strength of his grip. They were inversely proportional, so that, had his weight been zero, his grip would have been a thousand pounds.
Three times a day he lifted weights in his office, rising on the toes and exploding breath through clenched teeth. At lunch hour, he ran three laps around the block, showered and gulped quantities of natural foods. Most mornings he came in with skinned knuckles and stories of brawls that frightened Willard. Masterson was no longer a shapeless bulgy man of indeterminate age, but a handsome, powerful man of about twenty-five.
‘He’s getting in shape to die,’ Ed ‘opined.’
Masterson had Harold post charts of his progress. There were graphs of his biceps and triceps, and a phrenological chart of his head. The boss began to talk about what great shape the company was in, squeezing grip developers as he talked.
‘As soon as we trim off a little fat here and there, as soon as we fire the draughtsmen, we’ll be in great shape.’ He fired the draughtsmen next day, en masse, owing them three weeks’ wages, and Henry complained to Clark about it.
Clark was getting jowly and near-sighted from cream cheese and law, and his temper was noticeably shorter. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Caveat emptor. Why come to me with your problems? All I want is to be left alone with Law.’
Henry scooped up some dirty, tattered forms from the floor and began filling them out, in invisible ink. For several weeks, no work had left the office. Messengers who called to pick up work were sent out to get more natural foods for Mr. Masterson. Karl sent them on errands for invisible carbon paper, or to sell the desks that were slowly being replaced by Willard’s tables.
Great bales of papers piled up, collecting dust. They grew greasy and black from handling, and Henry grew greasy and black from handling them. He washed and brushed his teeth often, but one cannot hold in the heart what is not bred in the bone: he stank.
Bob and Rod organised a clean-up campaign. They collected all the dirty forms in the office and laundered them. Karl was so pleased with their efforts that he even permitted them to sew patches on worn-out forms, though common practice did not permit this. Even so, after the windows came out, they could not keep up with the dirt.
No one but Henry and Ed and Eddie were working full-time on clerical duties. Clark was reading law fulltime now, and Masterson had come to approve this. ‘You never can tell when you’ll need a good mouthpiece,’ he said, and began calling Clark ‘the mouthpiece’. The mouthpiece never spoke to anyone.
Harold was making charts of the company and of Mr. Masterson full time. They overflowed the walls of his office and began to cover the corridor.
There was a chart showing the chain of command and another showing the flow of work. There was a chart showing weight of forms handled per clerk per day; a chart showing all the muscles of Mr. Masterson’s body (with the Latin labels lettered by Harold in half-uncials); a chart of company work-output vs. world population, and a fishing map of Northern Minnesota, which Mr. Masterson planned to visit some day. There was a graph showing the monthly number of accidents, fatal, and accidents, non-fatal, per clerk.
Karl’s job included researching the data for all of these. He counted paper clips, measured the level of water in the cooler, taped Mr. Masterson’s biceps, weighed forms, and estimated the world population. His estimates, Harold chuckled, were not conservative enough.
But Masterson pointed out how efficient Karl was. Who else would have realized the wasteful duplication in using both pink and blue copies of the same form? Karl had purchased a new single form printed on litmus paper, which was either blue or pink, depending on the weather. Ed seemed to grow a beard, which had the appearance of frightening Masterson. Clark wore rimless glasses..
The janitor service was cut off because the rent had not been paid. Karl had estimated the company could survive one year without it, saving several thousand dollars.
On the stage of a nearby theatre, two girls, one dressed as a man, were singing a song about making little gifts. One of the girls was sincere, but it was never clear which. Bob and Rod explained to the boss his father had sabotaged the janitor service.
‘He sees what a good thing the company is getting to be,’ one of them said. ‘He wants to muscle in on you.’
‘Well, I’m ready for him,’ said Masterson. ‘Let him try something.’ Grinning, he flexed his forearm and watched the sinew lumps move in it as characters move about on a stage. Rod and Bob, or as they preferred being called, Dob and Rob, began doing janitor work around the office. They refused service to anyone who would not contribute to their list of charities: CORE, CARE, KKK, CCC, the Better Business Bureau, AAA and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Only Harold did not give.
They cornered him one day. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you care that millions of Asians are starving while you sit here well-fed and complacent?’ Harold did not deign to reply, or perhaps had not the strength. His skeletal face showed odd emotions, but he did not look up from his chart. Steadying a hunger-quaking hand, he went on with his beautiful, flowing uncials.
Living on the scraps of other clerks’ lunches, and on the crumbs of cream cheese in Clark’s law books, Harold was under a hundred pounds. He gulped water from the cooler, until Karl stopped him, saying that it ruined the line on the water-consumption estimates.
Once Harold fainted, and Mr. Masterson revived him with a little natural soya meal. Harold gulped it down until Karl, alarmed at the way the expensive stuff was disappearing, grabbed the canister away. ‘Easy does it, now,’ he said. ‘Not good to take too much at once.’
Willard made tables to replace all desks, but more tables were required. The volume of business, as Karl explained it, was steadily increasing. Consulting a table of Willard’s table-making progress, he was not satisfied. ‘Why don’t you make tables out of the doors? It might be faster.’
‘Or make coffins,’ whispered Ed.
Willard converted all the doors into tables. When still more were needed, he unputtied window-panes and began using them for table-tops. The windows were grimy, and nearly everyone appreciated the increase in light.
Clark’s sight was failing. Eddie Futch now read Law to him. Clark’s sedentary life had made him gouty, and he began to walk about with a stick. From time to time, he would take a turn about the room, flicking with his stick at the dead forms that lay everywhere like leaves, like history. He would mutter legal phrases to himself through gritted teeth.
It was spring again, and a chill, dirty wind whipped through the office, whirling drawings and forms in a constant flux. To keep some of them in place, Henry borrowed weights from Mr. Masterson’s office.
The boss was rarely there these days. He worked out at a gym most of the week, and only bounced in occasionally to assure them that the company was recouping its losses at a truly fantastic rate. The litter of dirty forms was now ankle deep.
MEMO: Dreams
I dreamed of finding pieces of hate.
I dreamed an obscure dream: part of it was talking with a psychiatrist who looked something like Hemingway and something like Jung, and showing him my written-down dreams. It seems that I had never remembered the important parts. I forget the rest.
I dreamed of loving the princess of the glass house, Geopatra, full of mirrors and swimming pools.
– Masterson
No one talked, except Eddie Futch, droning periods of Law. Whenever the youngster stumbled, Clark caned him across the back, screaming epithets. Once the non-lawyer grew so excited that he had to take a turn around the room, limping and muttering, ‘… ergo sum … ignoratio elenchi … petitio principii … non compos mentis … mons veneris …’
‘Ed’ nudged Henry, pointed to the ponderous figure and laughed. ‘They’re fattening him up for the kill,’ he said.
‘Who is?’ Henry’s ass felt a chill.
‘Who knows? Maybe no one. Maybe “they” is just a figure of speech … but then maybe, you know, maybe we’re just figures of speech, eh?’
MEMO: Park conditions today
Thick pink balloons were drifting over the park from some unknown source. They reminded the boy and the girl of giant drops of rosy sperm. Flowers seemed to be exploding at their feet as the boy took out his gold-filled ballpoint pen and wrote, in an unpretentious, sturdy, masculine hand, a love poem.
The poem spoke of fire-trucks and other excitements, of televisable passions, of a love nest made of food, wherein they settle:
No car honks madly;
The mayor gives the death penalty for honking tonight;
And cars have nightingales in place of horns.
The girl placed a drop of perfume on the pulse of her throat, and began to curve the soft inner part of her arm about the boy’s writing hand. Inside every pink balloon was a hundred-dollar bill. A passing policeman thrust his nightstick at the polka-dot sky and laughed out of pure joy. The flowers made a noise like distant target practice. The boy leaped and the girl laughed. The policeman’s gun belt shook with laughter, while overhead the opalescences bumped one another silently.
– Masterson
‘You want to know why I was declared officially dead?’ Ed asked. Henry shook his head and pointed to a sign affixed to his table: ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’
‘I was declared officially dead because Karl put four staples in my death certificate.’ The water was cut off. Henry seized Ed by the throat and tried to strangle him, as one might strangle an empty faucet, not to choke it off, but to make it flow again.
‘Art’s cut off the water, now,’ Rob and Dob reported to Art’s son.
‘Oh, trying to starve us out, is he?’ His heavy handsome jaw took a stern set. ‘We’ll just see about that.’
Harold showed him his latest, indeed his last effort, a chart of the basic natural foods and their constituents, arranged in a segmented circle. Heavy with gold-and-red illumination, the chart was called: ‘THE WHEEL OF LIFE’.
‘Very nice indeed, Harold,’ said the boss, reaching for it. A ripple of muscle was visible through his specially-tailored suit. ‘But you seem to be losing weight. Why is that? Dieting to improve the strength of your grip? I tried that, and it worked wonders.’
‘By the way, I hate to ask you for it, Harold, but when are you going to pay me that twenty you owe me? I really need it – got a big week-end in Boston coming up. You know what I mean.’ He winked, and winked again at Clark.
‘Well, now, mouthpiece, say something legal,’ boomed the boss. A voice croaked from the tangled depths of Clark’s beard. Holding his cane to the sky, he said, ‘Mens sana in –’ he belched painfully, ‘– in corpore sano.’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Masterson, not hearing him. His powerful calves waded through the knee-deep debris effortlessly and carried him to his office.
MEMO: On Communication
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
– Jqw534w9h
From the office came the clink and chunk of weights, and breath hissing through clenched teeth. Suddenly, as he lettered the words ‘The Form Divine’, Harold collapsed. Henry reached him first and held up his head. Harold cast a rueful look on his unfinished work, murmured, ‘I go … I go to the Death Registration Office,’ and died.
‘Now where,’ said Karl, ‘did I put that fatal accidents chart?’
There came a deep reverberation, not Masterson. He came bounding from his office in sweatpants, his chest gleaming with perspiration. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. ‘Is someone else lifting weights around here? He’s fucking up my timing.’
The crew made its way down the stairs after him, to see the other weightlifter. Eddie led Clark down last, a step at a time. Naturally Ed and Harold remained behind.
The offices all the way down were empty. When they reached the sidewalk, the clerks found a derrick smashing at their building with a steel ball.
Masterson walked over to have a word with the foreman, who held up the destruction for the moment.
‘We’re tearing it down.’
‘Why?’
‘Abandoned.’
‘… some mistake, or …’
‘But nobody works there.’
Masterson said something else as the foreman gave a signal and the derrick engine roared. The tall tower turned awkwardly, like a hand puppet, setting the ball into motion.
The man shook his pink helmet. ‘I don’t know nothing about no father,’ he shouted. ‘All I know is, we got work to do.’ He signalled the derrick operator, who swung the moving ball far back, then towards the wall.
Mr. Masterson ran headlong towards it, springing with the grace of a dancer on his ripple soles. For a moment, it looked as if the steel ball would bounce harmlessly off his great chest.
Ernest thought it would be fun to let his computer call up Frank’s computer on the telephone.
‘Good to hear yours, too! But hey, do you know what a.m. it is out here?’
Al is seen glancing at his watch. Thanks to a vibrating quartz crystal in it, the watch keeps very, very accurate time. He looks from its Swiss face to the American face of Dot, his wife, out in the back yard eating a piece of fruit that has been picked the day before yesterday in the Orient. Will miracles – or anything – ever cease? The digital clock reports a new minute.
‘I met you,’ Al said into a portable tape recorder no larger than a packet of cigarettes, ‘a year, three days, seven hours and forty-three minutes ago, through that computer dating service. You had brushed your teeth electrically, using stannous fluoride toothpaste to prevent decay. I had just had dacron veins put in.
‘Times change. You now have someone else’s liver and kidney: I have ridden on an atomic submarine.’
On the atomic ship, Al will notice an interesting article about LSD, a drug commonly supposed to cause visions and insights. He would reproduce this article by xerography, a fast electrostatic process making use of powdered ink.
Al called Bertha, his ex-wife, on the hall video phone.
‘I just took a stay-awake pill,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so sleepy ever since the sauna I took, on the airbus from –’
‘What’s new?’
‘I’m pregnant again, due to the fertility drug I’m taking. Ah, and I have a new non-stick milk saucepan. See?’ On the screen she cuts open a tetrahedral carton of milk which was sealed for almost a year, then pours some into a special pan. The pan has previously been coated with a compound to prevent sticking and burning. So Bertha, wife of Ernest, was pregnant!
She and Al soon fell into their old argument about riot control. She favoured tanks with aluminium armour, while Al defended the judicious use of Mace, a gas which irritates the mucous membranes.
‘What’s new with you and Dot?’ she asks.
‘Oh, I’ve been sterilized. Dot has this detached retina, but luckily they can now weld it back on with lasers.’
They spoke of Dot’s trip to the Orient on a ballistic, supersonic plane. There Dot makes the acquaintance of an amateur biologist named Frank, who’s all keyed up about the isolation of the gene. His real business is the manufacture of cosmetics for men, in factories he claimed were 97% automated.
LIFE AFTER DEATH – AL WONDERS.
Ernest took a tranquillizer before he called Dot on the teletypewriter. They were lovers, not to Al’s knowledge. This was a conveniently private mode of communication, not often used by spirit mediums, though.
As they ‘spoke’, Ernest drank coffee that had been percolated, frozen, vacuum dried and packed in jars. A spoonful of this substance to a cup of boiling water, while Dot watched the five-inch screen of her portable television set: there is a baseball game in far-off Texas, played on nylon grass beneath a geodesic dome, and she is part of it. When they have said the private things lovers must, Dot took a sleeping pill and slept.
Clement, or Clem, was Al’s son by a previous marriage. Next day he fuelled his car at a coin gas station, dry-cleaned his clothes in a similar manner, and fell foul of a peculiar police arrangement: At one end of a bridge police read the licence numbers of all passing cars into their radios. The computer at headquarters checks these for old violations.
Clem lived avoiding the army in a module apartment house, which has been made up at a factory in complete, decorated rooms, then bolted together at the building site. When he gets home he tries to call Bertha, his former stepmother, by means of a telephone message relayed through a communications satellite many thousands of miles, but she is at the hospital, having her third child.
Bertha’s first child was now a bright little five-year-old, using an unusual teaching machine to learn to type and spell at the same time. This machine would give an instruction, then lock all but the necessary keys. If only life could be like that, Al thought, with no chance to err! In a programmed novel, the reader determines the ending.
Her second child was very intelligent, possibly because Bertha wore a suit pressurized with oxygen during the brain-growing months of pregnancy. Her present delivery is difficult. The child has worked down too far for a Caesarean yet not far enough for forceps. What is the obstetrician to do?
He used a new suction device to grip the child’s head and draw him from the womb. Soon it cried, and before long, Bertha knew, it would be joining its siblings in immunity to polio, once a dread crippler and killer of children. She only hoped it would grow up to be a president like the one she now watches on colour TV, announcing the landing of men on the moon (this president had not yet been assassinated). O Frank, Frank! Where are you?
Frank had given up smoking, drinking and excessive eating since his heart-lung transplant. Yet here he is, enjoying a cigar, a martini, and what looks like boeuf Stroganoff! What can possibly be the explanation of this?
It was a photograph of Frank made many years before, to demonstrate a process that made colour prints, right in the camera, seconds after the photo was snapped. Dot became a secretary. As she rode the helicopter to the Pan Am building, she typed on her personal portable plastic typewriter. The ride compared favourably with her former trip on the 125 mph train from Tokyo to Osaka, where she met Frank. Unforgettable Japan! She revisited in memory that factory where thousands of workers began the day with the company song, followed by ‘Zen jerks’ to limber up mind and body for the assembly of portable record players.
Such as the one Clem now listened to as he avoided the draft. He did not want to die in Vietnam, but stay here, taking LSD. He saw God, was God, felt God, left God.
Frank was at this moment crossing the English Channel on a hovercraft. He liked unusual means of motion. In Paris he had stood upon a moving sidewalk. In London, he meant to ride on one of the famous ‘driverless’ Underground trains. Back in the US, he tries sitting on the beetle-like back of his robot lawnmower, as it moves its random pattern. Travel was his vice. Like Ernest’s drinking.
Ernest had thank God been cured of his drinking by aversion therapy. One by one, all the pleasant stimulus-response mechanisms linking him with alcohol were broken down. In real time, Al ponders life after death.
He had engaged a firm to freeze him soon after death and thus maintain him until such time as science should come across a way of reversing whatever killed him. Ernest would live longer than otherwise on account of his ‘pacemaker’, an electronic device to regulate the heartbeat of Ernest. In a programmed novel, he might or might not have this pacemaker; it all depends on the reader.
Al dialled Ernest’s number in another city. ‘Dialled’ is not strictly accurate, for the clumsy dial on Al’s phone had been replaced by pushbuttons and musical tones. They get into a heated discussion of missile defence systems. Ernest certainly presents his case fairly, but Al wouldn’t listen to reason. Dot counted her contraceptive pills, 20 of which must be taken each month. She also changed her paper panties. Clem receives a picture of Frank by almost magical means!
Bertha puts the picture into a machine and places the receiver of her phone upon it. Far way, Clem copies this motion, then finds the picture in his duplicate machine. Eagerly he gazes on the familiar lineaments of his real father.
Dot notices how much plastic there is around. Her plastic necklace, her boss’s plastic tie, Al’s plastic credit cards, which he claimed were displacing money in the realtime world – could there be any connection with that island where they issued bright plastic coins? Dot saw what she must do, later. Now –
She maintains that the ‘golfball’ typewriter, a highspeed machine using interchangeable spherical type fonts, is a pain in the ass. The reader, Al, may choose …
Bertha took a new antibiotic tablet, while Ernest explained again the difference between ‘Quasars’ and ‘Quarks’.
‘“Quarks” are mathematical entities proposed to explain certain behaviour in subatomic particles. “Quasars” are quasi-stellar radio sources which have often puzzled astronomers.’ Clem tore Frank’s picture into thirty-two pieces. Why can’t the others share time, the whatyoucallems, the computer makers, the peoples? On a radio small as a pocket watch, Clem heard the news.
They had invented a polymer of water which, if uncontrolled, could turn all the water of the world into plastic.
Dot and Frank are in bed when Al
No, Dot is at home. Al dies of heart failure in his office, slumping across the digital calendar. ‘A black and white picture!’ muttered Clem, as his heart begins to beat. ‘What do they take me for?’ Dot and Ernest are in the vibrating bed. Clem hears of a plan to widen the Panama Canal with atomic blasts. Dot and Ernest are vibrating when Al walks in with the electric carving knife in his hand. This carving knife could run as now on batteries. Alternatively, it could use house power, ultimately derived from a distant atomic pile.
SCENES FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
Outside the window of the Faculty Lounge, between the great slabs of blind concrete that house University departments, there is a small square of empty green lawn. On the architect’s immaculate drawings, this is called ‘the Quad’, but no one here has ever called it anything, or made any use of it, either. Once ‘Corky’ Corcoran – but that comes later.
I was looking out of this window while Beddoes talked on andon. Out and down, from my privileged perspective, I could see the architect’s intention, an arrangement of little trees. I thought of that limerick, naturally, but it didn’t seem appropriate: It wasn’t the Quad, I wasn’t God, and all the little trees looked dead. Anyway, Beddoes was sure to quote it himself, sooner or later.
No, I thought – I suppose what I thought was: How stupid to plant those trees down there, where they can’t get any light. Even birds are afraid to descend to them, in the shadow of the Philosophy Department, or the Psychology Department, or whatever it is. I’d been here two years, and still couldn’t find my way about …
The rat’s pink nose turned the final corner, came up against a food pellet and stopped. Dr Smith took a reading from the electric timer.
‘Eight point two nine seconds,’ he announced. ‘Check this, will you, Latham?’
I read the figures and entered them on my clipboard. ‘It’s very good,’ I said. ‘Better than we’d hoped.’
‘Yes, even Beddoes will have trouble explaining this away. Though no doubt he’ll try. All yours, Gorky.’
Corcoran leaned over the maze, politely waiting for the rat to finish devouring its prize. Then he picked it up and stroked its belly with his thumbs. He crooned over it. ‘Clever lad. Clever little lad. Wait till Beddoes hears about you, eh?’The animal clung to his red beard.
Smith grinned. ‘That’s exactly why I insisted we take every possible precaution against mistakes. We must have strict records, with everything trebly-checked. Because, if we find it hard to believe, how do you suppose it’ll hit the rigid behaviouristic mind of Dr Beddoes?’
Taking the hint, Corcoran turned the rat over and read out its identification number. Smith and I both looked to be sure, then wrote it down, while he returned the animal to the bank of cages across the room.
‘Don’t forget Ariadne,’ said Smith.
I opened the black cage suspended above the maze and took her out: the large female rat who acted as our experimental ‘transmitter’. Though by now we all knew Ariadne by sight, we now read and recorded her number.
The entire fussy operation bored me. It was meant to be a test for ESP in animals. Dr Smith had planned it, Corcoran had designed the equipment, so of course they had reason to be excited: It was going well. Since our Paranormal Experience Research Group was, as always, short of staff, I acted as observer. The principle was interesting enough, bur the laborious details meant nothing – except that I was cutting back on my real work, the Library of Paranormal Experiences. Real work, cataloguing letters from the real world, outside the Country of the Blind.
Still, our experiment might pry open a few eyelids. It worked like this: A rat coming to our maze ‘cold’ would take, on average, fourteen seconds or more to negotiate its blind alleys and find the bait. On a second trial it would be quicker, and so on. After twenty trials or so, the time could be got dawn to two seconds flat.
Pure behaviourism, thus far. But Smith had given it a twist:
Ariadne was a rat which had run the maze many times. It hardly ever took her more than two seconds. We put her into a cage suspended a few inches above the maze while other rats did the running.
The cage was painted matte black with a double wire-gauze bottom, and the white maze was brightly illuminated with flood-lamps. This made it possible for Ariadne to watch what happened below without being visible. She could see the food pellet and the way through to it, and she was hungry enough to really want to try. We hoped she would communicate a bit of her urgency and purpose to any rat trying to thread the maze.
The idea was to put through twenty rats who had never seen the maze before, giving them one run each. For ten of them, Ariadne would be upstairs, sending down telepathic directions to speed them through –we hoped. The other ten were our control group; she was not in the cage for them.
To isolate possible ESP, we had to eliminate every other difference between the test rats and the controls. They were not to sense the presence or absence of Ariadne by any normal means. This meant not only the black cage of invisibility but other devices developed by the ingenious Corcoran to hide her sound, her scent, even her body-heat from those below.
So far the control rats were behaving as expected, running the maze in about fourteen seconds. But the test rats, clever little lads and lasses, were doing it in eight seconds. To which Smith said, ‘Statistically significant’, and Corcoran said, ‘Flabbergasting!’
I simply shrugged. Why waste time trying to prove the existence of ESP to other scientists, when the evidence was all about us? Why not instead try finding out more about ESP, more about all psychic phenomena?
So I was bored, while Smith and Corcoran were excited – and increasingly on edge. As we prepared to lock up for the night, Corcoran started worrying.
‘When I was filling the water dishes, I noticed a draught,’ he said. ‘I hope there’s no temperature difference between the cages.’
Smith raised an eyebrow. ‘You worry too much, Gorky. If it really matters, put a draught-excluder on the door.’
‘I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s just that – and another thing. Did you know there’s a wall mirror behind the bank of cages? What did they design this lab for? Budgies?’
‘I’d like to lock up and go.’ I said. Smith said the same thing, by taking out a pocket calculator and stabbing at its buttons. We stood about with our coats on for some time. Even when Corcoran finally joined us, he was muttering about needing a strip of felt for the door.
‘What you need is a drink,’ I said.
What Corcoran really needed, I now can see, was to let go his death-grip on the material world. He worked too closely with things, making and mending, and along the way he lost contact with people. For example he spent far too much time ruling out mazes on white cardboard and cutting them out with razor blades. That led to one of his more unpleasant confrontations with Beddoes.
He told Beddoes: ‘I’ve made this little model of the Great Pyramid in cardboard. Did you know that if you use a razor blade each day, but keep it under the model pyramid at night, it never loses its edge?’
Anyone with sense would never have put it that way to Beddoes, a creature who swam in a private sea of scepticism. Beddoes only said, ‘Indeed?’ but Corcoran couldn’t leave it there.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘What do you say to that?’
‘It sounds like good news for the manufacturers of cardboard model pyramids, bad news for manufacturers of razor blades. How do you account for it?’
Corcoran leapt at the chance. ‘Well, we know that metal edges are made of crystals. If they wear down, maybe they can be re-grown. We also know that crystals can be grown, given the proper magnetic fields –’
‘Cardboard being a great magnetizer?’ Beddoes said. ‘I see. Well, when I see a properly-conducted test that establishes this “truth”, I’ll. look into it. Meanwhile I might remind you of one razor which has not needed re-sharpening since the year 1350: Ockham’s Razor. That is the principle that one must not look for complex answers until one has failed to find any simple ones.’
I was to remember that conversation again.
Dr Harry Beddoes could easily have committed murder and escaped punishment, if only because he could not be picked out of an identity parade: He had no face. One might remember his heavy figure, his rumpled grey suit, eyes of some sort peering out through thick glasses, but nothing more. No – there’s no other word for it – no soul.
He could be found each evening at six o’clock, blending in to one corner of the Faculty Lounge. With his back to the great window, an ocean of pale green carpet stretching away before him, and an overflowing ashtray at his elbow, he was ready to hold court.
The Lounge was like the lounge in any airport: formica tables, chrome chairs and lines of perspective that leave no place for the eye to rest. Instead the eye would hunt and hunt, as though looking for one’s lost relative, but finally alighting only on a blemish in the corner.
We inevitably found ourselves drinking with Beddoes and suffering his little jibes. Smith said it was good for us, having as a kind of devil’s advocate a determined sceptic like Beddoes, who was always willing to test our theories, even to destruction.
That evening we talked of Arthur Koestler’s latest book on strange coincidences.
Dr Smith said, ‘Mind you, I’m not entirely convinced that all these cases are meaningful. But you’ll have to admit, some are most intriguing. Take the example of the man who flings himself in front of a London Underground train. It hits him but does not run over him. Because, at the same instant, some passenger has pulled the emergency handle. The train stops just in time.’
Beddoes’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. ‘If only Koestler knew where to stop,’ he said.
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
Beddoes sighed. ‘Meaning that the story is a rumour, whose only source Koestler seems to have found is a hospital doctor. The doctor wasn’t himself at the accident. If we can’t get at the facts in a story, why stop at repeating it?’
I said, ‘I don’t follow. What else could he do?’
‘One might make it into an even more meaningful story. Say the passenger was a twin brother of the man who threw himself in front of the train. Or say that, the night before, the passenger had a premonition of disaster. He dreamed –’
‘Very amusing,’ Smith said. ‘You feel, then, that it’s a case of “Don’t confuse me with the facts”?’
Beddoes lit a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor. ‘I suppose facts can be confusing, if we’re speaking of coincidence. After all, is anything irrelevant? The most trivial events suddenly make “sense”, do they not? One man looks into the mirror while shaving and says, “Today I’ll grow a moustache.” A thousand miles away, a second man decides to shave off his moustache, at the same instant. Is it all part of the master plan? A law of conservation?’
I started to speak, but he went on:
‘Or suppose that I own a beagle, and Corcoran here owns an eagle, and you, Smith, are a bee-keeper. Is the universe trying to spell out significance into our meeting here?’
I thought of an odd coincidence: That Corcoran had mentioned a mirror a few minutes before, while Beddoes now chose mirrors and animals for his illustrations. Mirror and animal cage …
‘All things are possible,’ I said.
‘But not of equal importance, Latham. If they were, we might profitably spend our time looking for messages in every bowl of alphabet soup.’ He tapped his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray; flakes of ash floated to the carpet.
Tidy little mind, messy little man. Beddoes the sower of ashes.
The test series finished and, to my disappointment, Smith suggested waiting a week and then trying to replicate our excellent results. Corcoran busied himself at the drawing board, laying out new maze plans. Smith went back to his book, New Horizons in Psi: I went back to my cataloguing.
Our Library of Paranormal Experiences consisted of some two thousand letters to be read, filed and, where practical, followed up. I was preparing cross-indices and also trying to keep up with the dozen or so new letters which arrived each week.
Some of them were obviously of no use to us. Now and again we received a demented-sounding letter, often unintelligible and always pathetic: ‘I am the Holy Ghost my enemys wil soon learn to there distres that my rays of power cannot be gainsaid no cannot be gainsaid …’ These went into a dead file.
Of course there were also a few practical jokes. One man described a supposed telepathic link with his twin brother. The story ran to several pages, becoming more and more incredible, and ending: ‘… and when they hanged him, I was the one who died!’ Ho ho and hum. Fortunately such letters were usually easy to spot from their feebly punning signatures: Vi. B. Rations, E. Espee, Uri Dipple et al. found their letters filed in my wastebasket. I was tempted to keep the joke letters and analyse them, to try finding out what makes people sneer at psychic phenomena. But I knew the answer already; it was as plain in the scrawl of poor Miss Rations as in the quips of Dr Beddoes. It was the fear of freedom.
The great majority of our letters, however, came from sane, sincere, reasonably intelligent people. Typically such a person has had some puzzling, even inexplicable experience: a true dream, a premonition, or meeting a friend by chance in a foreign city. He knows the contents of a telegram before opening it. He finds himself thinking of someone he hasn’t seen for years, and they ring him on the telephone. Ghostly visitations, déjà vu experiences … rarely easy to confirm, but all of it providing a background of evidence that something is going on.
One letter, however, told a story both uncanny and evidential. I read it through twice, then ran down the hall and hammered on the door of Dr Smith’s little office.
‘Oh it’s you, is it? What’s up?’
‘Read this,’ I said. ‘Our experiment is nothing compared to this!’
He looked at me and laughed. ‘You should see your face! You look as though you’d just had a psychic experience yourself, Latham.’
‘I almost feel I’ve had one, reading this. A letter from a Mr Durkell. He’s seen a village vanish – a complete Tudor town, with smoking chimneys, just fade out of sight!’
‘Really?’
‘I know it sounds insane, but there’s a second witness. What’s more, it seems to be connected with the disappearance of a third person. Wait till Beddoes tries blunting Ockham’s Razor on this!’
While Smith read the letter through, I watched him: Dr Efraim Smith, a gaunt, ascetic-looking man of sixty-odd, with a mop of white hair and black, staring eyes. In Hollywood, he could have been cast in the role of an Old Testament prophet.
His appearance, combined with the fact that he preferred writing his books by hand, seated at an old roll-top desk, made him a kind of local eccentric –it was that kind of locality. He had already attracted a few half-joking rumours:
Was he a vegetarian? Was it true that he slept only four hours per night?
In reality there was nothing fanatical or eccentric about him. He was a hard-headed practical research chemist, author of a well-known textbook on polymers. Ten years earlier, his brother had died. Dr Smith had consulted mediums, meeting with the usual mixture of disappointing vagueness and uncanny truth. He’d decided to turn his scientific scrutiny upon the entire field of psychic research – in his spare time. Passing interests have a way of becoming vocations, however: he now headed our Paranormal Experience Research Group. He handed the letter back. ‘Chilling detail,’ he said. ‘Will you be following it up?’
‘Of course. If even half of it can be corroborated, it’s just what we need. Imagine: A village that doesn’t exist, except –’
‘Except on Tuesdays!’ He shook his head. ‘Obviously not an hallucination, and too detailed for a mirage.’
‘Perhaps there’s a sort of, well, rupture in the space-time fabric. Could he be looking at a village that exists in some other time or place? Or even some other universe running parallel to ours?’
‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘After all, our concept of the space-time framework is very hazy indeed. There are a lot of unanswered questions, aren’t there? Black holes, for example. Some scientists suspect they are just such “ruptures” as you describe. If so, it may go some way towards explaining many really puzzling phenomena: a-causal events, such as Koestler’s coincidences, begin to make sense if we can discard the notion that causes come before effects in time. Of course it might also explain ESP. Why do we find “Two minds with but a single thought?” Simply this: Minds are not fettered to local time and place.’
We talked for some time. The general theory sounded difficult, but I felt I could grasp it intuitively: Mind is not my mind or your mind or Smith’s mind, but a kind of energy ocean in which we, all thinking beings, are immersed.
‘I’d better start checking out the facts in this letter,’ I said, taking my leave. ‘By the way, until I’ve proved it, not a word to Beddoes?’
We hadn’t meant to tell Beddoes much about our animal experiment, either, until the second series was completed. But one day, while we were only half-finished with the series, Beddoes’s smugness broke through even Smith’s usual reserves of calm.
The conversation began innocently enough, when Corcoran mentioned Uri Geller.
‘Uri Geller?’ Beddoes asked. ‘Ah, you mean the Israeli paratrooper.’
Corcoran asked if that was supposed to be a joke.
‘Not at all. I understand he was a paratrooper. Amazing. Don’t see how he did it.’
Smith showed his teeth in a smile. ‘Very funny. The implication being that you do see how he managed, during one television performance, to make stopped watches start ticking all over Britain.’
‘I have an idea, yes. According to a New Zealand study, if you play about with any stopped watch, chances are it will start ticking. In fact, you have about a forty percent chance that it will keep going for a few days. No, it’s the parachute jumps that really astound me.’
Corcoran winked at me. ‘Perhaps Dr Beddoes has psychic insights into how Uri does what he does with spoons. Perhaps we ought to study Dr Beddoes?’
Beddoes tried imitating Uri Geller’s voice. ‘You want me for a subject? Me? But I tell you, I don’t know from where I get zis power. From God, maybe. Or my agent.’
No one but Beddoes laughed. I said, ‘Why don’t you tell us, once, what you do believe in? If anything.’
‘Thought-communication,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a distinct possibility. Of course it’s tricky. One makes the right facial expressions, speech sounds and gestures, but it doesn’t always get across.’
Smith said, ‘Get your laughs while you can, Beddoes.’ And he told him about our first series of experiments.
‘Ariadne?’ Beddoes asked. ‘Oh, I see. Leading them through the maze. Very good.’
Smith grimaced. ‘I think you’ll have to concede that our results look good, as well. I’ve done a bit of statistical work on them, and I believe that we can rule out chance. The odds are over four hundred thousand to one against the notion that this happened by accident.’
Beddoes sowed more ash on the carpet. ‘I agree. Chance doesn’t come into it.’
Corcoran looked angry. ‘Spell that out for me, will you?’
‘Gladly. If I hear of a rat that ought to take fourteen seconds to run a maze, but who does it in bnly eight seconds, I immediately suppose that the rat has some experience of the maze. Has that possibility been ruled out?’
‘Completely,’ said Smith.
Corcoran stood up, knocking over his drink. ‘You two can sit here listening to veiled accusations of fraud if you like,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough. Let me out of here.’
Fraud? I thought at the time that Corcoran was merely over-reacting to Beddoes’s stupid question. Later I learned that poor ‘Gorky’ was going mad.
We finished the second series, again with success. Corcoran was oddly silent, depressed. He spent much of his time at the drawing board, laying out plans for many more mazes – far more than we could ever use. He might work furiously for days, then suddenly fling down his pen and slam out the door, saying something about a walk. He’d be gone for hours.
Neither Smith I could account for it.
‘I think Beddoes has depressed him,’ I said. ‘Belittling our work. Corcoran worked hard on this.’
Smith looked up from his calculations. ‘Eh? No, I don’t think that’s the answer. My guess is, it’s the experiment itself that’s got to him. You see, he worked so hard, hoped so deeply – and then it all worked out right. It’s like being a long-term prisoner, and finally having the cell door bang open. The fear of freedom. Let’s hope he’s over it soon.’
But he seemed to grow worse. There was said to have been an incident in the canteen, when Corcoran caught sight of his own face reflected in a spoon and began to scream. I happened to see him on one of his long walks –going round and round the same building.
I remained convinced that Beddoes was at the bottom of it, somehow. I gradually began to see that it I could once crush Beddoes, crack through his hard shell with a harder piece of evidence, Corcoran might begin to see him for what he was. It might help.
Beddoes could not be drawn to comment upon our experiment. The only answer seemed to be to show him the Durkell letter. A story that strange and compelling could not be ignored. I now reread it: Mr Durkell had seen an article about our group in a Sunday paper. He was sales manager of an electronics firm, and had recently moved to Blenford New Town, whence he daily commuted to work in Casterwich, some ten miles away.
Mornings I usually take the secondary road, to avoid traffic. One Tuesday I left Blenford as usual, but driving slowly. It was a fine day, I had plenty of time, and the colours of the autumn leaves were too lovely to miss. Then I had the vision.
It wasn’t a vision then, only a surprise. On my right, through a small copse, I glimpsed a village. I knew there shouldn’t be any village there, so I kept my eye on the spot. After the copse came a large hill, and after that, no village! Nothing but empty fields, as always.
I kept watching for it. A week later – Tuesday again – I was bringing my wife along with me (she had shopping to do in Casterwich), when I saw it again. I hit the brakes, backed up and we both took a better look. There was no mistake about it. We could see bits of several half-timbered houses and a smoking chimney. My wife flipped open the road map and found what she thought must be the place, with the strange name of Mons. ‘Mons? In England?’ I said. ‘Let me see that.’ But she’d already put the map away again. We didn’t look again until we got to Casterwich. Would you believe it, neither one of us could find it! I know my wife is no great mapreader, but we searched the entire area (lower left-hand corner of the map) and found nothing remotely like the name Mons.
I couldn’t stop wondering about it. Finally I went to the Blenford police. They said they’d never heard of a village called Mons in Britain, and that there was no village on that spot, and never had been. I think they thought I was drunk or drugged or crazy!
I investigated a bit on my own. I learned that the place was a pasture belonging to a farmer named Letworthy. I called in to see him. Not only couldn’t he help me, he was extremely suspicious. Finally he came out with it: His wife had disappeared! He’d gone to market –on a Tuesday! – and returned to find her gone. When I asked him if he had any explanation, he muttered something about her being carried off by a glacier!
At this point it was all too much for me; I decided I never should know the truth. A vanishing village, a vanishing woman, glaciers and the map business – I just gave up. Shortly after, we moved to Casterwich, so I more or less tried to forget about it. But now and then I still wonder. Especially on Tuesdays!
Yours sincerely,
‘F. H. Durkell’
‘Is that your evidence?’ Beddoes asked, handing the letter back. ‘And if so, evidence of what?’
I found it hard to put into words. ‘Evidence that – that the Durkells have seen something that ought not to be seen, by your laws of science. It’s an event that transcends normal explanation. I believe that the Durkells are psychic sensitives, or else that this place is, at times, a psychically sensitive place. There’s just no other explanation.’
‘There are a great many other possible explanations,’ he said. ‘Not all correct, of course. Still I believe that it’s possible to settle the matter very quickly – if you really want it settled. Shall I look into it?’
‘Done,’ I said. ‘How much time do you want?’
‘That depends,’ he said. ‘How much digging have you done already?’
I told him I had written to Durkell, to the Blenford police, and to the local paper. Mrs Durkell had confirmed her husband’s story, and the police remembered his enquiry. The Blenford Gazette knew of Mrs Letworthy’s disappearance, but they were taking the police’s version of it, that she had simply run away with another man.
‘And not a floe of psychic ice?’ Beddoes asked. ‘Curious. But very useful. I think I could clear this up in – shall we say, two hours?’
‘Or not at all,’ I retorted.
‘Why not? All things are as you say, possible. But don’t expect miracles, if you take my meaning.’
I saw Corcoran outside, walking round and round the same building.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Looking for something?’ He laughed. ‘Yes. The way out.’
I started to leave him but he caught my arm. ‘Wait a minute, Latham. I want to tell you something. I have a confession to make.’
We walked into the deserted ‘Quad’, sat down on the grass. Corcoran looked at the little half-dead tree and quoted it: the limerick I’d always expected to hear from Beddoes:
‘There once was a man who said, God
Must think it exceedingly odd,
Continues to be
To find that this tree
When there’s no one about in the quad.’
‘Is that the confession?’ I said drily. ‘Because I’ve heard it.’
‘Ah, what haven’t we all heard? and seen? Especially seen. In the mirror. Thoughts while shaving. With Ockham’s Razor? No, that cuts both ways. I’d better begin again.’
‘You’d better,’ I said. ‘And try to make more sense.’
‘Take care of the sense and the sounds take care of themselves,’ he quoted. ‘What’s that from? Through the Looking-Glass?’
‘I think so. But what –’
‘But there’s more to that title, isn’t there: And what Alice Found there. The truth?’
‘And what is the truth you want to tell me?’ I suddenly thought I knew: Corcoran was going to confess that he’d somehow rigged our experiment to make it work. ‘And what might it have to do with mirrors and trees in the quad?’
‘Mirrors? You’ll see about that. Trees in the quad? The point is, out of sight, out of mind; out of mind, out of existence. What happens when no one’s about is Nobody’s business, right? All right, here’s my little story. Through the looking glass and what Corky found there. Do you remember when I was looking for a bit of felt for the door?’
After a moment, I did. ‘You were worried about the draught in the lab.’
‘And I kept on worrying. One evening during the second series, I was in the lab with Smith and I thought of it again. I remembered a door in the hallway that might be a janitor’s cupboard or something, and I thought there might be a bit of rag in there. So I excused myself and went to look.
‘It wasn’t a cupboard at all. It’s an observation room. The psychology department must have been using it for experiments before we took it over. You know that wall mirror behind the bank of cages: That’s it. Oneway glass. Darkly I was given a vision into the lab. There was Smith messing about the maze.’ He rubbed his face with both hands and said,
‘God forgive me for looking!’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He was running a rat through the maze. The same rat, two or three runs. Training it to build up speed. I kept watching and I saw which cage he returned it to. Next day we took that rat and tested it. Naturally the rat ran the maze in eight seconds. Not psychic vibes at all – just Smith’s bloody fraud.’
I didn’t believe it and I said so.
‘Who cares what you believe? Say I’m mad, call me a liar – I still had to tell you. I had to confess, you see? I’m the one who’s buggered it all up. I peeked – and there wasn’t any bloody tree at all! There’s nothing, do you understand? No bloody tree!’
He leapt up and seized the little tree, trying to uproot it. After a moment of struggling, he gave up.
‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘Suppose Smith did cheat a little, so what? It’s not the end of the world. We know he’s got a long and distinguished record as a scientist, and he didn’t get that by fraud. He probably just boosted the statistics a bit, to underline our case. There’s plenty of other evidence of ESP, after all.’
‘Yes, and now I wonder how good it is. How many more Smiths are there? No, we’re caught in the maze, for good and all. What is there to believe in? The evidence of some Smith somewhere?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘The evidence inside. We know there’s more than this. We know the world is bigger and deeper than it looks on the surface.’
‘Do we indeed? And how about Dr Efraim Smith – does he know it? Because if he does, Why did he think he had to cheat?’
At six o’clock I faced Beddoes alone in the Faculty Lounge. Corcoran had gone to his room. Smith was being interviewed on local television.
I began abruptly. ‘Have you found the village of Mons?’
‘Mons? Oh, the map village. Yes, I think so. But it has little to do with what the Durkells saw.’ Beddoes lit a cigarette. ‘Except psychologically.’
‘Hallucinations?’ I stared at him until his gaze shifted.
‘I think not,’ he said. ‘The answer I’ve got may not be the right answer, but it seems to account for everything. It depends upon a close reading of the letter. “My wife is no great map-reader,” for example. We must also remember that Mrs Durkell must have been rather nervous. Her husband, without warning on a deserted country road, had just “hit the brakes”. Then he shows her a village which, he says, does not exist. She fumbles for a map and finds the name Mons. Later they cannot find it. I suggest that the ink of their printed map did not alter in the meantime.’
‘Because it’s “impossible”?’ I asked. He handed me a scrap of paper. I saw it was the corner of a road map, with one word circled heavily: MONS.
‘Not the lower left-hand corner,’ he explained. ‘The upper right. Notice that all the other place-names but Mons are upside-down. The village is SNOW, and it’s in a different part of the county.’
I handed it back. ‘Snow. Very suggestive of glaciers. I suppose you’ll find some map-trick to explain the disappearance of Mrs Letworthy?’
He smiled, if one can call it that. ‘No, I think a calendar-trick, this time. Doesn’t this Tuesday business strike you as odd?’
‘Of course it does.’
‘Odd, I mean, in the sense that Tuesday is market day? When Mr Letworthy would likely be absent from his farm?’
I made no answer, so he carried on:
‘Let us assume the police version is correct. Mrs Letworthy did not “disappear”, but simply ran away with another man. That means she must have been seeing the man earlier, and she might well have chosen to do so on Tuesdays. Let us make an even wilder assumption: That the man’s profession forced him to drive a distinctive vehicle that must not be seen parked near the Letworthy farmhouse.’
‘Or he might be the man in the moon,’ I said.
‘Quite. Forget him for the moment, then, and look at the letter: “Mornings I usually take the secondary road”, says Mr Durkell. That suggests that there is a primary road which he takes of an evening –hurrying home from work.’
‘Agreed, but so what?’
‘It gives us two views of Blenford New Town, where he lives,’ Beddoes said. ‘One at his back in the morning, and a possibly quite different view that he faces each evening.’
‘Oh, it’s Blenford that he sees through the trees,’ I said with some sarcasm. ‘Looking to his right, he sees a town that is really behind him. It must all be done with mirrors.’
‘I was just about to suggest that,’ he said. ‘The mystery village is not likely an hallucination, and far too clear for a mirage. We are left with one natural explanation: A mirror or something like a mirror is placed behind that little grove of trees every Tuesday.’
I had to laugh aloud. Pathetically, Beddoes kept clutching at the wispiest straws of ‘natural’ phenomena, to avoid facing the obvious truth.
In the opposite corner of the Faculty Lounge, a few people had gathered round the TV set. I could hear Smith’s voice booming across to us, but I could not make out his words.
Beddoes continued the farce: ‘Naturally I wondered what kind of large mirror might be portable enough to fit the bill. I sent reply-paid telegrams to Mr Letworthy, to the local police and to the local weekly newspaper, asking if they knew the profession of the man supposed to have eloped with Mrs Letworthy. They confirmed what I suspected. The man drove a large van …’
The television was making too much noise, and anyway, I found Beddoes’s hypothesis boring. In a sense, Smith on television was giving him his answer, only Beddoes was too deaf and blind to notice. He droned on:
‘… large sheets of … attached to its sides. A kind of portable … definitely parked in that spot, behind the little copse. There. Does that possibility fit the facts?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I guess I missed the point.’
‘I said it was common knowledge: Mrs Letworthy’s boyfriend was a glazier.’
Smith’s voice suddenly became louder and clearer: ‘… as in the range of poetic or artistic experience, the mystic sees clearer and deeper, if only at times. Insight – the sudden sunburst of pure understanding. That’s what we’re concerned with here. Psychic phenomena are only a small part of it, you see.’
The interviewer asked if he would call himself a rationalist.
‘Well there are rationalists and rationalists, aren’t there? Take for example the rationalist answer to Russell’s Paradox: “In this village there is a barber who shaves all of the men who do not shave themselves. But does he shave himself?” You see how it goes: If he does, he doesn’t, and vice versa. There’s no rational answer, except to say: “There can be no such village.” But the true mystic, the man of vision, says: “Why not?” Why not indeed? You see, Man is a paradox in himself. He is apparently finite, yet he can easily conceive of vast infinities …’
I suppose it must have been just about that time that poor Corcoran was cutting his wrists with a razor blade.
We all share in the blame for Corcoran’s death. I, for sitting arguing futile theories with Beddoes, instead of staying with him. Smith – if what Corcoran told me was true – for his momentary loss of faith. Beddoes most of all, for hating all that is of a subtle and mysterious beauty, all that he cannot immediately reduce to a petty formula, all that he cannot slash with Ockham’s Razor. With his relentless scepticism, he almost certainly drove ‘Corky’ to the brink of insanity and to his death.
This being true, I have had no hesitation in dismissing Beddoes’s theory of the vanishing village as simply another of his destructive fantasies. Even without checking, I am sure it is utterly without foundation.
For different reasons, Corcoran’s statements about Smith’s ‘fraud’ must also be dismissed. To dootherwise would be to take the word of a hopelessly insane man against that of a reputable scientist with a brilliant record.
Our work carried on, though we now see much less of Beddoes. What would be the point? One cannot explain the incredibly beautiful colours of a sunset to a blind man.
Andor sat three rows back from the driver. Having jammed his small suitcase in the rack overhead, having seen his large suitcase stowed in the bowels of the bus, Andor began the pleasurable process of relaxing.
First he concentrated on the calves of his legs, letting their knots of muscle soften and grow numb. Then he folded his hands across his paunch, the left still gripping a magazine, however, in case the man next to him began talking. Andor let the muscles of his shoulders and neck relax now, ordering the tension in them to surrender.
He felt some of the nervous charge generated by the exciting activity at the great bus terminal drain out of him now, as the bus got into smooth, gearless motion. The acceleration sickened him, and as the bus rolled on through terminal tunnels, he turned his thoughts to the circumstances that had led to his trip.
Once again, on the television screen of his mind, Andor sat erect at his desk, operating a small calculator and marking numbers upon torms of pink, white, yellow, pale blue and pale green. At the desks just to his left and right, and immediately before and behind him, were men performing similar tasks. He knew their names, though now, away from the office, he could not recall their faces. One, he thought, had white hair. Andor supposed that on the floors immediately above him and below him were men performing similar tasks, though he had no proof of this. In thoughts, Andor’s office moved through the office seasons.
Fall. Aitkin, on his left, sold tickets on a football pool, the Army-Navy game. Andor bought one ticket, number 0 – 0.
Each day, when he opened his desk drawer, the ticket lay looking up at him with its blank spectacles. Long after the game was over, weary of its inspection, Andor threw the ticket into the wastebasket to the right of his desk.
Winter. Jurgens, in front of him, seemed to suffer from a severe sinus infection. Another man in another department was said to have suffered a heart attack from shovelling snow, but Andor was never able to check the truth of this story. Jurgens brought a new portable radio to work after the holiday. Playing it was not possible, however, for it interfered with the office’s normal recorded music, which played continuously.
Spring. Cleaning men came to clean all the office’s typewriters and calculators. There occurred conversations about baseball statistics in which Andor seldom participated, but which he never avoided.
Summer. Andor came eligible for two weeks’ vacation. After examining brochures and weighing various possibilities, he chose a distant resort near the sea, packed two suitcases, and departed from the great bus terminal.
The great bus terminal was as brightly lit as any office, though its ceiling was much higher. People moved in small flocks across the quiet, polished floor from ticket counters to platforms, from platforms to luggage counters, or from luggage counters to exits. Excitement pervaded their noisy murmur and quick, orderly movements. Andor purchased a ticket in the shape of along, folded strip made up of numerous coupons.
He looked at a television screen connected to a camera that elsewhere scanned a list of departures; thus he found the right platform for his bus. With minutes to spare, Andor gave his large suitcase to a platform attendant, who stored it in the bowels of a silvery bus with a number of other suitcases and a bicycle tyre. He closed the bowels and locked them with a silvery crank.
Andor allowed the driver to tear one coupon off his ticket, mounted the steps, and located an empty seat, three back from the driver. Andor sat next to the window of blue glass, after jamming his smaller suitcase in the overhead rack. Removing a folded magazine from his pocket, he began relaxing, as a white-haired man sat next to him. As he relaxed, Andor recalled all these actions with a kind of ‘pleasure’.
Now the bus emerged from the tunnel into blue light and crossed a bridge. The air conditioning hummed, concealed speakers played a medley of show tunes, blue girders and factories flitted by. This was not a familiar part of the city to Andor, but seeing it caused him no panic. It was obvious from the bus’s speed and from the driver’s sure motions that all was going according to plan.
Near the outskirts of the city the bus stopped for ten minutes at a glass-walled restaurant with a spire or steeple. Where the cross or rooster should be was a weathervane showing a nursery rhyme, Simple Simon. Inside were long rows of booths upholstered in pink and green leatherette. The waitress who brought Andor’s coffee was a thin redhead with bad nails and teeth. She wore a uniform of pink-and-green gingham. The coffee was too hot for him to drink before the bus departed.
There was a small rest room in the rear of the bus, marked ‘Toilet’. Andor walked back to it and washed his hands in the tiny sink. On the way to his seat, he noticed that a few servicemen were aboard the bus. Now he recalled seeing a great many servicemen in the great bus terminals, as well as several persons in religious habits.
Now he perceived that there were forty other people on the bus besides himself: two family groups consisting of man, pregnant woman, and small child, all speaking a foreign language; two elderly women and two young women in black religious habits; two young servicemen in tan uniforms and three others in white uniforms; six men of middle age carrying worn briefcases; three men of about twenty-eight carrying new attaché cases; a florid-faced drunken man of indeterminate age who addressed an occasional remark to the air in front of him; a cowboy and a thin woman who looked very like him, either his sister or his wife; one young man and two young women equipped with knapsacks and expensive casual clothes; two large women of middle age, who smelled bad; one young man in a college sweater; four very old men and three very old women, the latter wearing identical hats.
The bus moved past blue fields of plants Andor could not identify. He intended to read an article in the travel magazine in his lap about the resort to which he was going. He would read the article slowly, anticipating and savouring.
‘Are you going far?’ asked the man beside him. He had white hair and held an attaché case in his lap, upon which he now spread a copy of the same travel magazine Andor was holding. The copy was open to the article on Andor’s resort, as the stranger pointed out when Andor named the place he was going. Andor opened his own copy and began reading.
All the hotels at this resort maintained their own ballrooms for nightly dancing, but in addition there were public dances at the popular boardwalk pavilion and clambakes on the beach. Each hotel featured a heated pool, so that even in coldest weather – although the article assured him the weather was never really cold – one could immerse one’s body in warm blue liquid and glide silently about in the depths, safe from the gelid moon. What a joke, Andor thought (repressing the thought at once), if someone were to put jello in that blue pool!
The thought was shocking and foreign to him, like an object surgically inserted into his brain. He glanced down to make sure his tie was securely clipped to the front of his shirt.
There were beach facilities and equipment for many water sports, including sailing, skiing, surfing, water polo, rowing, and deep-sea fishing. There was an impressive list of restaurants, bars, and clubs. The vicinity boasted a number of places of scenic or historic merit. It occurred to him that the man beside him article at the same time, and a disturbing thought burst like caviar in Andor’s mind:
‘Every person who reads the same magazine is the same person.’
He was confused: had he actually thought this aloud, or had the man next to him spoken it? He stole a glance to see, but the stranger was just getting up to go to the rest room. Before he returned, the bus stopped at a large, elegant restaurant by the side of the interstate.
Andor found his appetite increased when he hurried through the hot, sunny, pink air of the outside to enter the blue-green coolness through a big glass door. As in the bus, concealed speakers played muted popular music constantly. Seating himself on a pink-and-green leatherette seat before a table of pale wood-grained plastic, Andor opened the giant menu.
Without much delay, he chose the house speciality, meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, creamed corn, bread and butter. The bread consisted of one slice of white, one of whole wheat, wrapped together in clear plastic; the butter was a foil-wrapped cube.
Andor ordered coffee with cream. The cream was in a tiny tetrahedron of thick paper coated with impermeable plastic; there were two paper envelopes of sugar which Andor ignored.
When he had finished his meal (and it went down remarkably fast, except for the coffee), Andor found himself still hungry, so he ordered a dish of strawberry ice cream.
After the waitress had taken away the waxy dinner plate, and before she had brought his dessert, he had time to examine the paper place mat before him. It depicted the United States, a network of pink lines (‘Interstates’) and green lines (‘Tollways’). They seemed veins and arteries, and he was even able to imagine tiny corpuscular cars nudging along them from coast to coast. The restaurant chain’s name arched across the top of the map, in giant green letters, followed by the words, ‘The Wonderful World of Food’. At various points on the map were tiny replicas of the chain’s familiar spire, each one marking the location of a single ‘Eating Palace’.
There was nothing else of interest on the mat but a large spot of gravy near one edge. For an instant he had the crazy notion of swiping up this spot with his finger and licking it down, but he at once realized how foolish this would look. Nevertheless the impulse remained strong until he received the dish of pink ice cream, and with it the pale green check.
As he paid the check, Andor bought a bag of the restaurant’s own brand of caramels and a consumer magazine. Back in the bus he dozed for perhaps an hour.
A light rain had begun streaking the blue windows diagonally when he awoke. Otherwise the landscape seemed unchanged. Large green-and-white signs marked exits and interchanges; shadows of overpasses flashed overhead; an occasional billboard announced some distant casino or hotel; a row of red signs advertised shaving cream:
Beards grow faster
In the grave
Take it with you –
The light rain stopped without his noticing. The man next to him was asleep, and now Andor could see, in the fading afternoon light, his creased forehead and sagging, slightly bristled jowls. Andor did not like to look at this face. He began to read interesting performance reports comparing three new cars; he ate caramels. The bus came through a tollgate and entered the driveway of another restaurant of the same chain.
‘There will be a thirty-minute stop here for dinner,’ the driver announced. ‘Please remember the number of your bus, 3350.’ He spoke through an electronic amplifier that broadcast his voice throughout the length of the bus.
‘This is where I get out,’ said the man next to Andor. ‘I’m here to check the books. So long.’ He climbed out of the bus and went into an unmarked door just to one side of the big glass entrance. Another bus drew up as Andor disembarked. Several middle-aged women in dark glasses stepped down from it and helped one another inside.
While Andor did not feel particularly hungry after having finished half his bag of caramels, he nevertheless ordered the house speciality, to avoid being hungry later. The speciality was pot roast and escalloped potatoes, with creamed corn. As soon as he had eaten it and drunk a soft drink, Andor felt slightly hungry, as if the process of eating had stimulated his appetite by some obscure chemical means. He quickly ordered a piece of pie from the glass case on the lunch-counter, pie of some unknown dark berry, and a glass of milk. There was barely time to bolt it down and get back to bus number 3350.
A younger, thinner driver was now in charge of the bus. He tore a coupon off each passenger’s ticket. Out the blue windows, the land and sky were dim purple. The man who checked books did not come back aboard.
When Andor put on the reading light to begin his newly bought detective novel, he saw something on the floor at his feet. It was the travel magazine, either his copy or the one belonging to the book-keeper. Andor picked it up and quickly reread the article on his destination.
In the amusement park there were thrilling rides – including the Octopus, the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster – colourful games of skill and chance, curios and souvenirs and a beer garden with an authentic German band. It was near the amusement park that the Aquatic Festival was held each summer – including the famous Aqua Follies – and Andor was glad he had planned to arrive at the resort in time for these colourful pageants previewed for him in the travel article. Here were golden girls riding water skis in formation, coloured lights turning their wakes to purple, crimson, old rose, and azure. Here were yacht races in the glaring sun, tilted sails turning to translucent, delicately fluted shells. Here were giant flowers formed, on the floodlit water, of naked girls swimming toe to toe in unison. Here were hydrofoil races and moonlight cruises, fancy diving and fireworks.
Finished with the magazine, Andor shoved it into the dark niche beneath the seat ahead. He would never look into this niche again, and in time, it would be cleaned by someone he would not see.
Nothing at all could now be seen out the windows, but for an occasional blue light that moved slowly past. Andor opened the detective novel and read it up to the point at which the detective was struck in the head by an unknown assailant. The bus driver switched off all interior lights, and Andor composed himself for sleep, sprawling diagonally across two seats. He continued to worry about the detective novel, which seemed to involve a case of mistaken identity.
Andor awoke once in the night, when the bus stopped for fifteen minutes at a restaurant with a glass front entrance and green-and-pink interior. Andor had a cup of coffee.
At eight o’clock, the bus pulled into another great bus terminal. There was a forty-five minute stop for breakfast. Passengers were requested to take all their belongings with them, for the journey would continue in a different vehicle. Andor took his two suitcases into the terminal and checked them in a steel locker with a secure lock.
There were over a dozen servicemen and two or three clergymen waiting for buses in the terminal. The clergymen strolled about or read breviaries. Most of the servicemen lounged on benches, trying to sleep, though some slouched up, reading hot-rod magazines. Andor entered the terminal restaurant, sat in a pink-and-pale-green leatherette seat before a table of wood-grained plastic, and opened the giant menu.
After a breakfast of pancakes and syrup, he retrieved his suitcases and shaved in the terminal men’s room. On the way out of the city, the new bus, number E-4799, passed a number of used-car lots, their plastic propellers spinning in the fresh morning breeze, or what Andor imagined to be a fresh morning breeze. Looking at them gave his heart a lift.
Before Andor opened his book to read, the bus was rolling along the turnpike, and through the concealed speakers came a sprightly morning song.
By mid-morning, things had changed. Andor left off reading the detective novel, finding he had read it before. He was sure it had once had a different title, or at least a different cover picture. Disgusted, he shoved the book into the pocket on the back of the seat ahead of him. In doing so he discovered a worn copy of a popular news picture magazine. It contained an interesting article on the very resort he was going to, as well as a feature on ancient Egypt, ‘Land of the Pharaohs’. By the time he had digested both of these, it was time for the lunch stop at a familiar spired restaurant.
‘Going far?’ asked the salesman who eased into the seat beside him later that afternoon. Andor named the resort he was bound for, and the stranger whistled. ‘Vacation?’
‘That’s right. Two fabulous weeks in the sun,’ said Andor.
‘Yes, I’ve been there five times myself. Great place. Lot of women on vacation, bored, you know. One thing leads to another: a dip in the pool, a drink in the hotel bar …’
They exchanged several pleasant words about the resort, and the salesman confirmed many things Andor had read in the travel and news magazines, and in a travel brochure: the place was expensive, but worth it.
The salesman took down his ample case and got off at the next city, where the bus once more changed drivers and another coupon was taken from Andor’s ticket. It seemed as if the number of coupons remaining had not diminished; the ticket looked as long as ever.
Andor napped as he finished digesting his lunch of hamburger steak, french fries, and cole slaw. He got off the bus at dinnertime hungry enough to order creamed dried beef on toast, steamed potatoes, garden peas, and coffee. This time he debated whether or not to order dessert: he was hungry, but he was not getting enough exercise. At first he ordered apple pie à la mode, then changed it to plain apple pie. After paying the pale, green check, he returned to leave a coin on the wood-grained plastic table.
The next stop was after midnight at another restaurant of the same chain. Andor thought he glimpsed the book-keeper eating and reading a newspaper in another part of the large restaurant. It was only when the white-haired man looked up that Andor saw he was a cleric, and a complete stranger.
After dinner Andor walked around outside. The evening was chilly and damp. After ten minutes he began to feel uneasy. Five minutes later his uneasiness had grown to a mild panic. He was relieved when the other passengers came out of the restaurant and began boarding the bus, and he could join them. What would he have said to the book-keeper if it had been he indeed?
The drizzle lifted as Andor woke, moving his shoulders to ease their stiffness. Despite a night of indigestion and strange underwater dreams, he was content this morning. This was his favourite time of day, the purple hours just before dawn. The bus stopped for fuel at a kind of depot-restaurant out on the turnpike, far from civilization, where a dozen other buses nudged up to the concrete building like piglets at a sow. After dozing over a cup of coffee, Andor tried to board the wrong bus. Though it sat in the exact position he recalled it sitting in before, the driver was now tall and grey-haired rather than fat and red-haired. He asked Andor to see his ticket, then told him he was on the wrong bus.
‘This is number E-2842, and you came in on number E4799, over on the other side of the building. Better hurry up and see if you can still catch it.’
Andor saw his mistake at once. He had entered the restaurant by one door and left by another on the opposite side. He now ran back in through the glass doors, past the rows of empty pink-and-green leatherette booths, and out the proper door. The driver was just starting the engine as Andor bolted up the steps and back to his warm seat. Even though the danger was past, it took him several minutes to recover himself from panic.
That morning Andor divided between watching the billboards advertising tyres and distant casinos and reading the travel brochure describing his resort. At lunch he ate roast turkey and creamed potatoes, cranberry sauce and wax beans. Dessert was chocolate pudding.
His hotel, the brochure informed him, had a ballroom with dancing nightly, a cabaret, a restaurant, and a heated floodlit swimming pool. Even in coldest weather – although the weather was never really cold, the brochure assured him – he could slide into the warm blue liquid and glide silently about, safe from the gelid moon. It seemed to him almost as if he had been there already.
Andor noticed a series of power-line pylons set along parallel to the interstate highway. He began to count them, and fell asleep at one hundred and twenty-odd.
Dinner was a club sandwich, potato salad, and a glass of ginger ale, with tapioca for dessert. Andor bought a package of caramels and took them aboard with him. The driver removed another coupon from his ticket, which still seemed undiminished. Andor briefly considered counting the remaining coupons, to see if they were actually the same number as before, but it was too much work, and how was he supposed to account for it if they were? The whole idea was silly and profitless. Andor watched the sunset, aware of his own boredom.
Next morning was very warm indeed. The bus entered a great terminal where Andor bathed and changed clothes and ate bacon, eggs, hash browns, and coffee. In his coffee he poured cream from a tiny tetrahedronal container. He picked up a red plastic tomato and considered squeezing it over his hash browns, but decided against it. The coffee, he thought, tasted very like the coffee in that town – what was the name of it?
It seemed to Andor as if the name he was searching for were somehow the name of a town he had not yet reached.
The magazine he was reading was one he’d borrowed from a clergyman. It featured an article on spiritual fulfilment. In front of Andor two men in college sweaters were playing cards on top of a suitcase. Two nuns sat across from them, in front of a sleeping soldier. In front of them a businessman wrote steadily in his notebook. Behind the soldier a cowboy argued with his wife, while a family of swarthy foreigners looked on interestedly. Two clergymen of different denominations chatted genially across the aisle. Back of them sat more servicemen, and several vacationing pensioners.
Lunch was tuna casserole de luxe, diced carrots, and lettuce salad with french dressing. Dessert was custard pie. Andor imagined that he saw at the counter the salesman he’d talked to earlier, but dressed as a sailor. He seemed to see everyone twice, as on a merry-go-round. Motion was blending people and days together like soft ice cream.
Dinner at another restaurant with a spire. Andor felt a slight unpleasant sensation as he rode along afterwards. There were darkening blue fields wheeling past him, but Andor had no sensation of motion at all. It was as viewing a landscape painted on canvas, moving past on wooden rollers; it was cinematic illusion, badly done; it was a cheap mirror trick; it was, in short, motion that refused to become real. He felt the bus accelerate against the back of his head, and his ears heard the roar of engine in the back, but these too seemed piped-in sensations. Was there an engine behind him? As well insist there was a string orchestra playing show tunes somewhere in the compartment (he had ceased to think of it as a ‘bus’). The only reality in all this seemed to be the warmth spreading outward through him from his stomach, where enzymes, he supposed, were now attacking macaroni and cheese, butter beans, and malted milk. He dozed.
Things were no better in the morning, at least not at first. Counting back, Andor could not discover how long he had been travelling. Time was undone; days were become as alike as a row of ‘red’ signs against the flat, ‘green’ landscape:
Beards grow faster
In the grave …
He had to keep reminding himself that all was viewed through blue glass, that colours were not true. Whenever he stepped out of the bus, earth and sky took on an uncanny pink tinge.
A waffle and sausage; a morning paper from a strange city; counting his money and finding to his delight that he had more than he’d figured; these restored Andor’s good humour for the morning. He recovered himself sufficiently to hum along with the sprightly show tunes.
But after his lunch of Yankee pot roast and escalloped potatoes, Andor felt uneasy and depressed. The date on his paper was the thirtieth, and he determined to use it to find out his day of departure, by counting backwards. But not only could he not decide whether he had been four or five days en route, but it occurred to him he might have yesterday’s paper. He asked the soldier across the aisle for today’s date.
‘Wish I knew,’ the soldier apologized. ‘I got a calendar watch, but now and then I forget to set it right. Let’s see – Sunday was the twentieth or twenty-first, so Sunday again would of been the twenty-seventh or eighth. But I forget every time whether it’s May or June has thirty days, and so I get my watch off one day. It registers thirty-one days every month, see, unless I reset it.’
He might have asked someone else, but Andor suddenly gave up. Why was the date so important anyway? He would get there when he got there – to the resort whose name escaped him for the moment.
It was not as if he had not read, heard, or spoken it often enough. Rather, he knew it almost too well. It was become a piece of mental furniture so familiar as to be invisible in the background of his mind; he could not make his tongue trip over it. Indeed, he knew it so well, Andor could almost imagine having been to the resort already. Knowing how difficult it is to conjure up a forgotten name, he turned his thoughts to the more or less neutral topic of approaching dinner.
Dinner was basic fish sticks, french fries, baked beans, and lettuce salad with french dressing, followed by a banana split. Afterwards he walked out for a moment under the darkening sky, watching stars appear. But there was something vaguely terrifying about the first few points of light in that immense blackness …
He read a detective novel to the point where an unknown assailant struck the detective. The reading light went off.
Andor lay awake in the darkness, imagining the unread portion. It seemed not improbable that the detective was going to lose his memory from this blow on the head.
He awoke in utter darkness, among strangers, alone and afraid. But almost as if it had been awaiting his cue, the sky began to lighten. Soon he could make out the shapes of billboards and the grey tangles of an interchange.
Dozing again, he dreamt of the resort. Andor swan-dived into a pool of blue jello. Cutting through the viscid stuff, his body moved deeper and deeper into blue protecting darkness, until by some miracle reversal, he emerged at the centre of the sky, at the sun, and he flowed down like pale-green rain to the sun-flooded beach.
Bacon and eggs, coffee with cream from a tiny tetrahedron. Pale-green check from the pale waitress. He found he had read the detective novel before, or at least started it before. Washing his hands in the tiny sink at the rear of the compartment, he wondered if he would ever reach his goal.
It amused him to postulate two Andors, one moving from A to B, the other moving from B to A, each passing through the other – but perhaps neither arriving at his ever-receding goal. Perhaps he approached the end asymptotically, riding three seats behind the driver in perpetuity.
He counted his money, discovered there was more than he’d thought. The driver took another coupon from his never-diminishing ticket. Meat loaf and gravy, mashed potatoes, string beans, coffee. Apple pie à la mode.
Each night, he thought, when I’m asleep, I slip back one notch in time. If I travel all day, I may just make up that slippage. It’s some kind of treadmill.
Garden peas, Yankee pot roast, fried potatoes, and coffee with cream. Andor ignored the tiny paper envelopes of sugar. Tapioca. ‘Land of the Pharaohs’.
I’ll get out, he thought. They can’t keep me on the bus. But he found it more terrifying than ever, just imagining the solitude out there, stars and blackness and the frozen disc of the moon. Whenever he had to move from the bus to the restaurant, Andor hurried without looking up.
He had been to the resort already; that much seemed certain. He could recall it all so clearly: the night fireworks, by day the heated blue pool. He had picked up a woman there whose name he could not recall. A drink at the hotel bar, a dip in the pool, and so on. Later they had visited the fabulous amusement park and observed a yacht race in the dazzling sunlight.
Dinner: creamed dried beef on toast, steamed potatoes, spinach, coffee, bread and butter. Dessert: butterscotch pudding.
Hamburger steak, creamed corn, hash browns. He squeezed a red plastic tomato over the potatoes. I’ll stay out, he decided, but he was afraid. When the time came, he reboarded the proper bus.
It’s a treadmill in time, a suspension between present and past. If I try to stop anywhere, I’ll be swept backwards, backwards …
Always into a yesterday, always into a sealed-off, completed past, undying – because already dead?
A stranger eased into the seat beside him, holding an attaché case and a rolled-up magazine.
‘Going far?’ he asked.
Andor did not appear to hear him. The stranger seemed satisfied with Andor’s silence, for he settled himself and began to read. Andor continued to stare out the deep-blue window, as into the depths of a pool, until it grew so dark outside that there was nothing to see but the reflection of his own face.
REMARKS: (extra sheets may be attached)
You, the expediter who deals with this, may find it ironic that I use a form on which to make my complaint, and the wrong form at that. But then, is there a correct form for a problem of this type? Or is my case unique?
My case.
Briefly, I have discovered that all written records pertaining to me have disappeared. I can think of no reason for this, and feel it is an unnecessary discrepancy which should be cleared up at the earliest opportunity.
I blame no one. I could blame it all on the ‘bureaucracy’, but I have been too long on the other side of the counter. I know that bureaux are only groups of human clerks, like me. Like you.
I should say that I like forms. I like filling them out, printing clearly in ink only. I like stamping them, filing them, copying or checking them, even bringing in a fresh stack from the stockroom. But especially I like reading them. One of my favourite quotations is line 4 of Computation of Social Security Self-Employment Tax: ‘Net income (or loss) from excluded services or sources included on line 3'. Smile at my enthusiasm, but consider for a moment the precision and balance of that line. Income vs loss, excluded or included, services and sources. I’d like to shake the hand of the clerk who wrote that.
This form is also well set out, nicely planned, though possibly this Remarks section could be larger. I see I’m running out of space already, and my true remarks have not yet begun. Attaching extra sheets, then, let me begin:
At the beginning, I had a responsible job in a government documents office. Without becoming close friends with anyone in the office, I had managed to command some respect for my work and perhaps my person. No one seemed unduly envious when Mr Boyle told me I was being promoted in grade. The promotion involved a transfer to another department, in which I would be working with classified documents.
‘I should warn you,’ Mr Boyle said, ‘that you’ll need a SECRET clearance for this job. If you know any reason you won’t be able to get such a clearance, let me know now.’
Naturally I knew of no such impediment. Mr Boyle gave me forms for my clearance application, to be submitted in triplicate with a set of my fingerprints and a copy of my birth certificate.
I applied in person to the state records office for the latter. After a wait of twenty minutes, jerked out on the wall clock, the trim young woman behind the counter explained that my birth record was not on file here. She suggested I try the county records office.
Next day the county records office clerk suggested I try the hospital. The clerk at the hospital had neither any record of my birth nor any suggestion.
Such mistakes will happen. Clerks are human. I’m willing to tolerate a few mistakes, a lot of mistakes, any finire number of mistakes, choose one. I returned to the state office and explained my predicament. The clerk, a young woman with short hair, seemed to sympathize. She suggested I try obtaining copies of other documents attesting to my birth and present those to the clearance people. She seemed about to make another suggestion, but I saw by the jerking clock that I was already late for another appointment, to have my fingerprints taken. – I submitted the fingerprints with the triplicate clearance application, attaching a letter of explanation in lieu of my birth certificate. Then I set about tracing my birth.
Several routes were already closed: (a) My parents were dead, and everyone I could think of who might have known me as a child was either dead or untraceable.
(b) Tracing my school records was impossible, since the school had burned down.
(c) I telephoned county and state education departments, who refused to divulge any information whatsoever.
(d) I wrote to my old family doctor and dentist. The doctor’s niece replied that he had died two years ago, and that she had no idea what had happened to his old files. The dentist did not reply.
(e) I wrote asking for a copy of my baptismal certificate. The minister who replied (not the one who had baptized me) said that he was very sorry, but his predecessor’s files were in a chaotic state, and my certificate was not to be found. Perhaps out of habit, he urged me not to give up hope of his finding it eventually.
It was depressing, but still only an odd set of circumstances, up to this point. Then my application for a SECRET clearance was rejected, for two reasons: ‘Fingerprints not clear’ and ‘No birth certificate’. My letter of explanation was not returned with the other documents.
Mr Boyle called me into his office next day. He explained that the department hadn’t foreseen this new difficulty. Now, since I wasn’t cleared, he would have to give the promotion to someone else. I said I understood.
‘I don’t think you do,’ he said. ‘For one thing, when we created the position you were to fill, we also deleted your present position. Now there really is no room for you in our office. Naturally we can’t fire you, but – we think it would be better for everyone if you resigned.’
I agreed. For a moment I sat snapping a card between my front teeth – my rejected, blurry fingerprints – then I rose and shook hands with Mr Boyle. I hadn’t spent ten years in his office to become a liability to it now. I walked with slow dignity to the door, then turned to look at Mr Boyle.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and turned to drop some papers in the waste basket.
I spent the next few days wandering the streets, being ‘unemployed’. For one entire week I stationed myself on a particular street corner and made a note of the serial number of every bus that passed. For an afternoon I sought out weighing machines of the fortune-telling type. I wasted perhaps too much of my diminishing resources on this, and on taking my own picture and recording my own voice, but it was a comfort.
One day at the dinner hour, the plangent dinner hour, I wandered alone in an unfamiliar part of the city, thinking and no doubt talking to myself. The loss of two or even three documents could be a coincidence. But a dozen? Surely the odds against this were astronomical.
I found myself standing before a large building that was made of, or at least covered with, cast iron. Fireproof. Enduring. The sun must have been setting, for great flocks of noisy birds began to wheel and wheel in the changing light. A foreign ecstasy began to fill me, drawing me on like a glove. How could mere cards and papers matter, when I was here, alive, myself, and full of ease?
I must have fallen face down; when I awoke, it was night, and my mouth was full of drying blood. A policeman prodded me in the ribs, gently, with his stick. ‘You okay, fella?’ I sat up and nodded. ‘I seen right away you wasn’t just a drunk. What happened to you?’
‘I don’t know. Must have fainted.’
He asked if I’d been rolled. It was then I discovered that my billfold was missing.
A policeful day. When I got home at last, two FBI agents were waiting for me: Agent Barkley, and another whose name escapes me. I didn’t really realize how much of my official substance had eroded until our little, as they called it, chat. This took place in their small office – uncomfortably small, it seemed to me, for two large men and a taperecorder and myself. After taking a loyalty oath, I was permitted to tell my story.
‘You expect us to believe this?’ asked Agent Barkley. ‘That your high school burned down, and your doctor died, and you’ve lost your billfold with all your ID? And no one else has any records of you?’
‘There must be something,’ the other agent put in. ‘Your college transcript. Your dental chart. Old tax records.’
‘I’ve moved several times,’ I explained. ‘Certain papers have just disappeared in the shuffle. But surely the Internal Revenue Service has copies of my tax returns …’
The two agents looked at each other. Barkley asked about my college.
‘Cypress University,’ I said. ‘School of Business Administration.’ Again they exchanged looks.
‘Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ asked Barkley. He showed me an evening paper, headlining a violent disturbance at Cypress University. Transcript files had been ransacked and many destroyed.
The FBI men told me I could go home, but not to try going anywhere else. They promised to contact me shortly.
That night I lay awake theorizing. Three theories might account for what has happened: coincidence, a prank, and a conspiracy.
(1) Coincidence. The girl in the state birth records office accidentally put her cup of coffee on my certificate and spoiled it. Rather than tell her superior, she destroyed the copy. At the drivers’ licence bureau a man with a cut on his finger, a paper cut, goes awkwardly through the file with it, missing my form. I can see my draft board file accidentally stored under my first name; my social security form crumpled down in the back of the drawer; other files fallen down behind file cabinets; still others turned back to front; my insurance premium card is spindled by a stupid typist, so that it keeps fluttering through the computer, never to be retrieved.
A mouse nests in my baptismal certificate. The burnt school. The dead doctor. The trashed university files. My letters to my parents were bundled in the attic, and after their deaths, given to a neighbour who moved away, whose kids now play a game with them, ‘mailing’ them through the slot ofa cardboard grocery box, say. One letter to a friend was delivered to the wrong address, where an inquisitive person, having read it, burned the guilty evidence and mixed the ashes with the soil in her window box. Another letter was never mailed, but fell into the lining of a suit I gave away to the Salvation Army. Someday the derelict wearing it will die, and it will be found on him by someone feeling his clothes for thousand-dollar bills. Other letters will be stolen by postal clerks, mutilated by experimental cancelling machines, somehow destroyed as pornography or Communist propaganda, none of the above.
Someone is gluing overdraft notices to account records at the bank, he spills a drop of glue and welds my record forever to the one in front of it. A department store clerk only pretends to search for my charge account record – actually he’s sneaking a smoke in the toilet. Who can blame him, he’s young, plays with himself though believing it causes the pimples he also plays with. Say a file clerk at the Internal Revenue goes quietly crazy and – what file clerk has not had this dream? – selects one file and tears it up. Or his radium watch dial emits a stray gamma ray which obliterates the microfilm of me. Finally, my dentist, while examining my teeth card, feels suddenly tired. He closes the card in a telephone directory, puts his head down on his desk for a brief nap, and dies.
(2) Pranks. No one knows me well enough to take the trouble.
(3) Conspiracy. Who, again, would bother? Why not simply kill me, instead of breaking into hundreds of offices (or infiltrating them), searching through tons of files and never overlooking a duplicate? They could spend man-years
or expropriating my official self. Think of them, hiring hundreds of agents to infiltrate bureaux, present their qualifications, hope to get hired, wait in line, fill out applications, perhaps miss the job after all, perhaps find out the bureau isn’t hiring today, the budget has been cut.., hoping all the while that I did not marry, have children, write letters to the editor, go to court, vote, sign petitions, buy something on credit, change dentists.., a foreign conspiracy it cannot be, and an American conspiracy is too terrible to think of.
After a week of waiting, Agent Barkley phoned me to say they were still investigating, and would I please remain available? I saw my mistake at once. It is a kind of crime, after all, to be unidentified. So long as the FBI were on the track of my identity, I was a house prisoner. When they gave up, I would be too dangerous not to arrest.
I packed at once and moved out, walked into the factory district across the river, and registered in a cheap hotel as ‘A. Barkley’. It is not necessary that a certain person exists. The mere use of a name, a fistful of cards of identity means nothing. I think of student pranks, of registering for classes fictitious persons: Mort Arthur, Phil Morris, Art Lesson and Mac Hines. These are figureless fields, I suppose, while I am a faceless, rather, fieldless figure. Gene DeFect.
Now I’m cut off. Even if some trace of me has now been found, I can’t contact the appropriate agency or bureau without coming to the attention of Barkley and his friend. Before, I could have found my old copies of tax returns, rent receipts, bills, the ones I saved. If any. I could have taken a lie detector test, affidavits from acquaintances and co-workers, thrown myself on the mercy of the FBI, the agents are human, too, they sweat, they bleed, they do pee-pee, choose one.
Yesterday a new telephone book came out. My name was not in it. Was it in the old? I …
Things aren’t too bad, really. I was unable to pay my bill for room and meals, so Mr Gurnt, the manager, arranged for me to mop the halls for my keep. Despite the beatings, I’m getting to feel at home here.
I’m keeping a journal, from which some of this is copied. Some of it is really written by me, the hall-mopper at this hotel. The person filling out this form is the same object of Mr Gurnt’s kicks and punches. Here I am. Not the government clerk, perhaps, not even the man who signed the register, but here I am writing this, this sentence, and the period at its end. Is this not proof of my true, dense, solid material substance? Answer in full.
No one has seen the journal yet, but me. I hide it from Gurnt and the others. I stop writing and slip it into a drawer when the door opens, always. At night, I keep it in my underwear, in the front, and endeavour to remain on my stomach all night. If anyone had seen it, I’d have been visited by Agent Barkley by now.
The beatings come daily, along with threats to fire me. Empty threats, empty as many of my tooth sockets. The beatings come daily, regular as the meals of boiled cabbage and boiled potatoes, far more regular than my bowel movements. Things aren’t too bad, really.
It is not necessary for a certain person to exist. I said that. Did I mention the telephone directory? Yes. It is beautiful, and I enjoy its beauty still, from outside the page. As a child I was plagued by beauty: rainbows in the puddles by the gas station, dead birds by the gas station, the thumbless attendant at the gas station (I heard he had lost his thumb and believed it to be literally misplaced among his greasy tools. The stump was streamlined and elegant). Now I find teeth on my floor.
To simplify things, I’ve erased my alias from the hotel register. This made the page look odd, so I tore it out. But the pages are numbered – to hide the gap I burned the whole book. But the hotel looks strange without a register.
That about concludes my remarks, except for one. Diet and beatings have greatly altered my appearance. Loss of weight has wrinkled me, I’m missing most of my hair and teeth, my nose is broken, etc. Now, even if Agent Barkley were to stride in here in his well-padded suit and look things over, I doubt very much if he could recognize me as one of the ‘wanted’.
NOTE: The above MS is attached to form MP-788 1-b, apparently filed at the Bureau of Missing Persons on the date shown. It was found crumpled down in the back of the file drawer. Not signed. Disposition: Destroy.
(Approved) Lazarus Cameforth
Bureau Chief
Directions.
READ CAREFULLY. Before answering any of the questions below, be sure to have all pages of this form, in order. Fill out in triplicate, using ballpoint pen or, preferably, indelible pencil. Press hard. PLEASE PRINT. Sign name to all copies.
1. State full name at present: ____________________
2. Full name at birth, or baptism: _________________
3. Give any aliases, abbreviations, or nicknames by which you have ever been known: ___________________
4. Attach copies of birth and baptismal certificates.
5. Social security number: _________________
6. Name on your last income tax return: ____________
7. Date: __________ 8. Date of tax return: ____________
9. State your full permanent address: __________________
___________________________________________
10. Where may you be quickly reached by: a)Mail: ______________
b)Telephone: ___________________
c)Telegram or cable: ___________ d)Messenger: ___________
11. List every address at which you have resided, since birth, in chronological order. Include every address, with the following exceptions: a) Hotel accommodations in the United States, Mexico or Canada, for stays of up to or less than three days, occurring more than five years ago. b) Accommodations at U.S. Embassies, in other than an official capacity, for any duration, occurring more than seventeen years ago. c) Antarctic expeditions not using APO addresses. ALL OTHER ADDRESSES MUST BE SHOWN, WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Note: extra sheets (Form AR-B Supplem) may be attached.
Street address: City: State: Date from: Date to:
12. Occupation: _________________________
13. Name and address of company where you are presently employed/were last employed: ____________________________________
13a Last position held:
14. Salary: ____________ 15. Name of superior: ______________
16. Starting date: ____________ 17. Terminating date: __________
18. Attach references. 19. If unemployed, give reason: __________
20. Why did you leave your last job? __________________
21. Give your entire employment history, except for your last or present job. List all employment in chronological order, and include part-time employment. Note: Extra sheets (Form AR-B Supplem.) may be attached.
Company name and address:
Position
Supervisor
Salary
From
To
Reason for leaving
22. Have you ever been fired for: a)Theft: ______ b)Embezzlement: _____ c)Dishonesty: _____ d)False References: _____ e)Absenteeism: _____ f)Tardiness: _____ g)Loafing: _____ h)Inefficiency: _____ i)Personal reasons (Explain): __________________________
23. Have you ever quarrelled with fellow employees? ___________
24. Have you ever had difficulty with employers? Describe: ______________________________
25. Have you ever stolen any property belonging to an employer, no matter how small in value? 26. Have you ever feigned illness? _______________________
27. Name of your bank or banks? _________________
28. Explain any foreign bank accounts: _________________
29. Bank Account Number(s): _____________________
30. Present balance(s): ________________________
31. Number and amount of withdrawals during past year: ______________________________________
32. Father’s name: ______________________
33. Mother’s maiden name: _________________________
34. Attach birth certificate and marriage licence.
35. Have you ever been arrested a)As a minor: _____ b)As an adult: _____ c)Misdemeanor? _____ d)Felony? _____ e) Convicted? _____ f)Sentenced? _____
36. Give full details of any arrest and/or conviction, including name of offence, whether convicted, sentence and/or fine. Include all traffic offences other than overtime parking.
37. Do you love your mother more than your father? __________
38. If you do not love your mother, explain: _____________
39. Circle which of the following you have ever suffered from: a)Rheumatism b)Arthritis c)Chronic fatigue d)Rupture e)Tuberculosis f)Night sweats g)Nocturnal emissions h)Nightmares (frequent) i)Sleepwalking j)Ringing noises k)Chronic or severe headaches l)Bronchitis m)Homosexual tendencies n)Hot flushes o)Tumours p)Cancer q)Gastric ulcer r)Gonorrhea s)Syphilis t)Asthma u)Hay fever v)Severe cough w)Trenchmouth x)Hepatitis (jaundice) y)Diabetes z)Anaemia aa)Poliomyelitis ab)Heart attack ac)Stroke ad)Heart murmur ae)Blindness af)Deafness ag)Tunnel vision ah)Astigmatism ai)Unexplainable pains (Explain) aj)Visions ak)Epilepsy al)Impotence am)Obesity an)Chronic nausea ao)Drug addiction (Explain) ap)Alcoholism aq)Double vision ar)Frequent or severe accidents as)Amnesia at)Laryngitis au)Malnutrition av)Precognition aw)Cleft palate ax)Harelip ay)Multiple digits az)Paralysis (specify).
40. Have you ever had any serious physical or mental disorder? Describe, specifying dates, physician, treatment, hospitalization etc.: _________________
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
41. Briefly describe your own condition at present: ____________
42. Are you under medication? Describe: ___________
43. Attach medical records and physician’s affidavit.
44. Have you ever undergone surgery? Describe: __________
45. Have you all your natural teeth? (Attach chart) ______________
46. Describe any amputations, giving dates and reasons: ______________________________________________
47. Have you: a) Both kidneys b) Both lungs c) Ovaries d) Prostate e) Gall bladder f) Both eyes g) A bladder h) A complete stomach i) A complete colon j) Both breasts k) Lower jaw l) Nose
48. Have you ever undergone sterilization? _____________
49. Castration? ____________ 50. Hysterectomy? ____________
51. Do you feel sexual desire for, about, during: a) Those of your own sex b) Those of both sexes c) Children d) Your mother e) Your father f) Your son g) Your daughter h) Sister i) Brother j) Babies k) Cadavers l) Animals m) Birds n) Fish o) Insects p) Cripples q) People who hurt you r) People whom you hurt s) People of special professions (describe) t) People in particular costumes (describe) u) Watching others in the act of coition v) Peeping at naked persons w) Drinking blood x) Drinking urine y) Drinking semen z) Eating faeces aa) Looking at photographs ab) Looking at drawings ac) Drawing pictures ad) Telephoning ae) Confessing sins af) Listening to music ag) Dancing ah) Exposing one’s sex organs to someone else ai) Anal entry aj) Axilial entry ak) Oral entry al) Nasal entry am) Rape an) All members of the opposite sex, regardless of age or condition ao) Watching movies ap) Watching television aq) Performing your ordinary work ar) Masturbating as) Urinating at) Defecating au) Menstruating av) Wearing clothing belonging to the opposite sex aw) A particular part of another’s body ax) Of your body ay) Crowds az) Rubbing against people ba) Clergy bb) Weapons bc) Machines bd) Plants be) Trees bf) Sunsets bg) People of other races bh) Apparel bi) Dangerous or unusual surroundings bj) Inanimate objects bk) Mathematical propositions bl) Thoughts bm) The law bn) God bo) The act of filling out a form
52. List all the persons in your household:
Person:
Age:
Sex:
Income:
Source:
Relation to you:
53. Why do you believe you have been asked to fill out this form? _________________________________
54. Describe briefly your feelings about filling out this form: ______________________________________
55. Describe in detail other forms you have been asked to fill out, explain their use, and estimate your performance: _____________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
56. Describe your character in detail, giving examples of your behaviour to illustrate points. Note: extra sheets (Form AR-B Supplem) may be attached.
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
57. Do you believe in God? ______ If ’no’, explain: _____
58. Have you answered all the above questions? ____________
59. Have you answered truthfully? ____ 60. Have you ever lied? ____
61. Have you ever stolen anything? __________________
62. Why do you believe that you have been asked to fill out this form? _________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
63. If you are merely reading this form, why do you believe that you have not been asked to fill it out? _______________
____________________________________
64. Have you been asked to fill out this form? 65. To read it? _______
66. Not to fill it out? _____ 67. Not to read it? Explain: ______________________
____________________________________
68. Compare this form with others which you may have read or filled out, whether or not you were asked to read them or fill them out: ________________________
____________________________________
69. Be sure your comparison is fair and correct. If it is not, you may rewrite it on extra sheets (Form AR-B Supplem). If you do so, be sure your revision is correct.
70. Was your original comparison correct? _____ Fair? _____ If not, explain: _________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
71. If you revised your comparison, why? _____________
____________________________________
72. Write your life history in brief, explaining in passing your answers to questions 11, 21, 39 and 51 fully. Take as much time, and as many extra sheets (Form AR-B Supplem) as necessary, but do not lie, omit, falsify, distort or invent. If there are any portions you genuinely do not fully remember, you will be asked to complete and attach three copies of Form WH6, Hypnotic Drugs Waiver of Rights.__________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
73. Sign the following statement:
I hereby agree to submit to a Keeler Polygraph (“Lie Detector”) examination, to be conducted by or in the presence of a psychiatrist and police officer, during which I will endeavour to answer all or any questions about my past life as truthfully as I am able.
(X) Signed: _________________
Witnessed: ________________
74. Describe your feelings upon reading and signing the above statement: ___________________________
____________________________________
75. Do you believe you have anything to hide, about your past life? If not, explain: _____________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
76. Have you anything to add, regarding the answers to questions 11, 21, 33, 39, 51, 72 or 75? _________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
77. Do you ever have feelings of anxiety? ____________________
I swear that all the statements above are true and complete and that I have not attempted any falsification, on penalty of perjury.
(X) Signed: ____________
Witnessed: ____________
AN ADVENTURE IN MANAGEMENT
The blinds were drawn, the desk lamp glowed.
‘I’ve been having these terrible dreams – locked in an inappropriate box.’
‘Go on.’ The man behind the desk had a heavy, block-salt look. He would gladly give you the time, change, a light, a push when your car was stalled. Probably his seat in the last life-boat.
After a minute, David went on: ‘Just above is this heavy line and the lines “Do not mark below heavy line. For use of lines of Authority only.”’
‘Hmm. And?’
‘I’m printed, see? That’s not the point. The dots are printed all over everything, and they’re – sliding. So the colors change. There’s a bunch of fake clouds around, or something, I’m right in the middle of this big poster.’
The interviewer delved in the pocket of his tweed jacket and brought out a scarred pipe and a small knife.
‘Any more?’ He began to scrape the bowl.
‘Yes, every night – I don’t know why I’m telling you this – every night there’s a woman-thing standing beside my bed. A kind of coke bottle with a woman’s head. She seems to be a poster too. Across the front is a ribbon that says: “Humfrey’s Hollywood Novelties.” That’s all.’
‘Haheh. I see.’ The interviewer stopped scraping and peered at him over the lamp. ‘You realise of course that still does not answer my question: Why do you want to work for Drum, Inc.?’
David did not falter. Raising his chin slightly, he said, ‘Sir, I love my father more than my mother, and I sincerely believe that it just isn’t enough to sprinkle the baptism candidate. That don’t do nothing for the deep-down dirt. You have to immerse …’
‘Thank you.’ As the interviewer hunched forward to mark something on David’s application, light flashed from his lapel.
The Nat Hawthorne Social Club pin: the same red enamel A that David himself wore He began to recall the old songs …
‘Now then, David, we’d like to have you take a few tests. Just follow Miss Bunne to the testing room, will you?’
As soon as the kid was gone, Travers took off the jacket, dumped the junk back in its pocket, and stripped off the plain tie. He removed the Hawthorne pin and tossed it in a drawer. Lighting a cigarette, he sat back and exhaled. Too gloomy in here. The rich mahogany (veneer) and silver (plate) of the office furniture brightened as he opened the blinds. At eye level across the street, the company cafeteria. A line of trim translucent girls in pale colors filed past the pastries and took glasses of jello.
Travers closed the blinds and sat down. Holding up the next application as if it were a hand-mirror, he sighed at what it reflected. The elastic bands across his back were beginning to itch.
‘Have a cigarette?’ he repeated several times to the empty chair across from him. His tone varied from casual to commanding.
Every day at about the same time, Marilyn’s extension would ring. She would pick it up to hear a woman say carefully:
‘Marilyn? He loves you.’
‘Who? Who loves me? Is this supposed to be a joke?’ But there would never be more.
She thought of saying something to the supervisor, Miss Bunne, or someone else in the typing pool – but what to say? What if it were just some joke of Eric’s? Or a mean trick of Ray’s, to lose Marilyn her job? No, better to say nothing.
Marilyn was engaged to a wonderful boy, Raymond, but she realised she didn’t love him. How on earth could she break it off after the party his parents gave them and all the wonderful presents they had been given? She had thought of going away without telling him, but she did not think this would be fair. She was eighteen.
No, it would not be fair, and the newspaper thought it would be on her conscience for a long time. She had to face the disappointment her news was bound to cause, and tell him about her change of mind. She certainly couldn’t let the party and presents alter her decisions. They were nothing compared with marrying someone she didn’t love. So she should go through with telling him, and she would be respected for handling a difficult situation well.
The newspaper gave her an idea of how to go about it. Marilyn went with Eric to the amusement park at Punk Island, where they sold ‘newspapers’ with any headline you wanted.
HE’S NOT FOR ME!
Marilyn Breaks Engagement
She went to visit him, a copy of this paper tucked in her odor-free armpit. They chatted pleasantly over milk and cookies in his Mom’s spacious, easy-to-clean kitchen, while she waited for the right moment.
‘What’s that paper you’ve got there?’ Ray asked. She handed it to him slowly, as if offering her nakedness. He read through the headline several times. Then:
‘Oh, I don’t believe everything I read in the papers.’
‘It’s true, Raymond.’ The refrigerator fell silent, and she could hear the scream of Dad’s wood lathe in the basement.
Ray jumped to his feet. ‘You’ll never get away with this!’ he shouted, and ran off down the basement stairs. It took Marilyn a few minutes to dab the splashes of milk off her face and sweater and by the time she was able to follow him, it was too late.
Someone’s adding machine wasn’t working; he sat in disgrace, the thirty-fourth man in the fifteenth row, quietly weeping. All around him people were adding up feet and inches of cable and wire underneath the city, but old 34/15 just sat there like an unlit bulb in the great rippling sign that burned on the roof by day and by night:
Mr Kravon was superb with tidy rage. He asked Miss Bunne to get him Personnel.
‘Let me talk to Travers … Hello? This is Sam Kravon, Estimates. Yes, look, we’ve a hell of a mess down here. A man whose machine doesn’t work … That’s it, all right. I’ll send him right up, OK?’
Above the Frenzak music, the cool voice of Miss Bunne paged a Mr Eric Bland, asking him to report to the personnel office on the tenth floor. The Frenzak finished a furious medley of Avalon, I want to Hold Your Hand, and Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen. The weeping man rose and left the room.
Genial Dad, that furnace of amusement, turned off his lathe and watched Ray fiddling with the table saw.
‘What’s up, son?’
Ray mumbled something about cutting off his arm.
‘Mmm.’ Dad lit his pipe. ‘Mmm. Mmm. Might work, at that. Girl trouble, I s’pose?’
The eighteen-year-old, six-foot-one, husky youth did not reply.
‘Hem. Excuse an old codger for butting in, my boy, but you’ll never do it like that. Get your fingers in the way. Here, let me help you.’
And he showed Ray how to hold his arm and push it towards the blade with a piece of two-by-four. The blade sang.
‘That’s the way to do her! More amateurs have lost more fingers, just by forgetting that one simple trick – statistical fact!’
Travers was standing looking at the jello girls when Miss Bunne entered without knocking.
‘Oh I’m sorry!’ she said. He whipped around and kicked a drawer shut.
‘Don’t ever do that again, Miss Bunne. You know I don’t like to wear this stuff. And now I have no doubt you’ll be going off to laugh about me behind my back, with one of the other Misses Bunne.’
‘Oh no, Mr Travers. You don’t know me very well, or you could never suppose a thing like that!’
‘Well, I’m sorry. Who do we have out there?’
‘A Mr Galt. He’s – handicapped.’
‘Give me ten minutes, then?’ He lent her a special smile.
When she had backed out, he slipped the elastic off his shoulders and the blue-serge-suit-with-TV-blue-shirt-and-maroon-tie outfit fell away from him. After checking the application on his desk, he put on a similar garment, a black-blazer-stiff-white-shirt-regimental-stripe-tie. On the blazer he pinned the crest of the college Galt had attended until recently. Then he whitened half his hair, and added an eye-patch. The applicant had one arm, and Travers kidded himself about not letting him get the upper hand. It was true he hated being at a sympathetic disadvantage.
Ready, he sat back and waited for Raymond Nixon Galt.
Dr Freag of Drum Laboratories addressed the stock-holders, describing a number of new telephone services his department had tested against the day when Drum should replace the Bell System as the nation’s telephone monopoly. Tele fun would connect subscribers to a computer capable of playing over 700 games as diverse as Boccaccio, slapjack, Chinese checkers. Another service would enable users to disguise their voiceprints. An anonymity service, Dialerase, would change a subscriber’s telephone number as often as hourly, signalling each change only to him and to his current register of friends.
Dr Born of Drummer Boy Enterprises addressed the stockholders, describing a number of new computer devices his department was investigating. Scribeauty was intended to change users’ handwriting to conform to any desired standard. One would write on a sensitised slate, and the computer would then ‘correct’ one’s writing and reproduce a finished manuscript on paper. A small, portable jukebox with a fast-response mechanism, Swingit could be used to ‘talk’ in ‘song’ instead of words. Useful in therapy with disturbed adolescents, it could be worn internally without discomfort. Wordfreak was the name of a projected monitor system for security agencies. Its computer would scan quantities of taped conversations, sorting them for high ‘wordfreaks’, or high frequencies of words/phrases of a suspicious nature. He demonstrated.
‘Mind if I call you Ray? Here, have a cigarette.’ The man behind the desk moved only the left side of his face as he spoke. His left hand shoved a silver box across the desk; the right hung down out of sight.
Ray accepted a cigarette and reached for the lighter.
‘No, let me.’ With difficulty, the man forced himself up out of his chair and lunged forward to give Ray a light. When at last he sat, or flopped back, he was sweating. Ray felt moisture running down his own face and neck.
‘I fee you’re handicapped. Well, as you can fee, Ray, Drum Inc. couldn’t care less about that. Got mine, by the way, on Porkchop Hill.’ And you? his left brow asked.
Ray blushed. ‘Oh, just a crazy freak accident. With a table saw. At home.’
The sight of this hopeless cripple, sitting behind his big desk and laughing at Ray’s injury, shocked him. He began to have second thoughts about working here, even as a janitor …
‘Forry, fon, I didn’t mean to laugh at you. It’s just … they fay most accidents happen … at home, ha ha … I’ve never actually feen one … boy o boy, I’ve feen guys shot up fo bad they had to walk ten miles on frozen feet, with their guts in their hands … but you! Hoo hoo hoo, you can’t even faw a sucking piece of board across …’
Ray jumped up. ‘Now just a minute!’
‘… ha ha ha, how ftupid can you …’
‘JUST A MINUTE! IT WASN’T NO ACCIDENT, I DONE IT ON PURPOSE, TO TEACH MY GIRL A LESSON!’
The interviewer wiped his eyes and checked a box on Ray’s card. ‘Now we’re getting fomeplace. Atta boy. Now fuppose you fit down and tell me all about it?’
OBEY YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS
Advice to the management trainee at Drum, Inc.
by H. H. Murd, President
Phil Wang, the art director, stuck his head in the door.
‘OK in here? Any new problems, Marty?’
The fat man at the drawing board shook his head, but not in negation. ‘I can’t get it right, Phil. If I line up things the way they want, the girl’s hair just about has to blow across the guy’s face. How about if I – oh, I don’t know.’
‘Take it easy, guy. Let’s have a look.’
The picture showed a young couple at an amusement park. Other people have turned to stare admiringly at them. The girl’s hair is wind-tossed; the man is dark and ruggedly handsome. They are about to enter a telephone booth.
The caption was roughed in below: ‘Togetherness is the nearest friendly phone booth.’
‘What’s this guy in the background? Is he supposed to have an arm missing or what?’
‘I was, uh …’ Marty paused for a moment, fumbling with his expression, as the electronic pacemaker that controlled his heart seemed to miss. This happened to him about once a week, though the doctor assured him it could not possibly happen at all. ‘… changing perspective a little. I’ll clean that up.’
‘Do that little thing for me, and for Christ’s sake, get the girl’s hair blowing the other way. Come to think of it, I don’t like that face anyway. It isn’t – standard enough, if you get me.’
‘Well, Phil, I thought I’d make her a little bit individual. I mean, well, you and I aren’t exactly standard.’
Phil looked at him a long time. ‘So now it comes, eh? The stab in the back.’
‘What do you mean, Phil?’
‘I’m not standard, eh? You mean I’m not white. I’m Chinese.’
‘No, Phil. Honest, I …’
‘I guess you’ve always felt that way about me, eh, Marty? I guess while I was taking you on here and giving you a job, despite the fact that you might drop dead of a heart attack at any moment and leave me with tons of work to do, while I was giving you a job so you could buy a fancy gadget to save your Caucasian heart, all the time you were just thinking how Chinese I was. Right? Right.’
Marty’s pacemaker missed again; he was unable to answer.
‘I guess maybe you think I look like a “dirty Jap” in some old war comic, right? Eh? With buck teeth and bad eyes, eh? Well thanks for cluing me in, buddy. Thanks for telling me what the score is.’
Marty gasped an irrelevant reply.
‘Well let me tell you something. I fought in the Second World War, risked my life – and on the right side. And as for the Japs, they’re a damned fine bunch of people – did you see Sayonara, with Marlon Brando? – and they make a bunch of clever little products, including that thing in your chest.
‘I’m not going to fire you, and make it easy for you to feel sorry for yourself. But don’t you ever say I’m not standard again, see?’
At the door Phil paused again. ‘And fix up that girl. Don’t draw her, use a few of those expensive sheets of wax faces Drum paid so damned much for.’
Marty opened a file drawer and took out the trembling sheets. Here were row on row of standard faces, admiring crowds, hands holding cigarettes, empty hands ready to hold or point at a product. Here were couples embracing, laughing, dancing, exchanging gifts, pouring champagne, walking in the country, getting into and out of sports cars, throwing beach-balls. Here were office workers comparing notes, talking on the telephone, slipping on overcoats. Here were housewives shopping, cooking, kissing babies, serving something with a delicious aroma that curled around them. And here were the backgrounds to set them against: carpeted offices, TV-equipped living rooms, built-in kitchens, shopping plazas, elegant bistros, neat countryside.
Marty held up a page of twenty neat countrysides and looked at them with loving eyes. More than anything, even more than going to Hawaii, he wanted to be young and slim and alone with a girl in countryside just like that.
But it was rush time. He chose the most standard-looking blonde, frantically grinning, freckled, and burnished her down on a fresh white page. Beginning with her wax loveliness, with her hair swept to the left by an invisible, presumably wax, wind, he would start all over and build the ad around her.
But he burnished hastily, so that when he peeled up the plastic film, her freckles were still on it, untransferred.
‘Jesus!’
And Phil was sure to ask Why no freckles? Marty washed his sweating hands and cleaned a tiny crow-quill pen. Steadying his right hand with his left, he began the miniature cosmetic surgery.
‘We’ve made up a selection of code or jargon words/phrases used by some imaginary anarchist group,’ said Dr. Freag. ‘These are: “lafodul”, “breughel”, “whee”, “the basic assumption” and “I have the hymnal in the car”. The basic assumption here is that the group will use these words in conversations with sufficient frequency to be detected. And WORDFREAK, scanning vocal patterns at high speed, can do the job.’
Little were any of the stockholders to know that these very words of Dr Freag’s were being selected for scanning, and that one day he would be killed by plant security guards! But that is another story.
Ray was sobbing. ‘… and then the sign on the prescription blank? It turned into something else. Like this.’ He drew two shaky signs:
Travers marked the last box below the heavy line on Ray’s application.
‘And then the …’
‘Yes, yes, I know. And then the caduceus turned into a crozier, and fo on. It’s a common enough dream, nothing to worry about. Everyone does those things you fpeak of. And believe me, cutting off your arm was no folution. It wouldn’t even help to cut off your other arm; you’d be at it with your toes. And now, if you’ll go with Miss Bunne to the testing room, we’d like to give you a few fimple tests and a couple of forms to fill out.’
Their left hands clasped, then Ray backed awkwardly out of the room.
ARM CASSEROLE À LA MOM
Ingredients: 1 lean arm, 3 tbs. butter, 1 clove minced garlic, 3 onions minced, 2 cups stewed or canned tomatoes, 4 cups cooked egg noodles, 1 tbs. brown sugar, 1 can mushroom soup, salt and pepper to taste.
Skin and devein arm, cut carefully away from bones (which may be saved for soup), and dice. Sauté meat in butter for minutes, then add garlic and onions and cook over medium flame for 10 more minutes. Add tomatoes, sugar, spices. Mix with cooked noodles, fill glass casserole dish and bake 45 minutes in hot oven.
Note: Some people like to save the fingers and hand with the bones for soup. I prefer to boil the hand, oven-brown it, and serve it (palm up) on the casserole for a festive garnish.
Twenty-four tiny perfect freckles done, seven to go. Marty refilled the pen from the ink dropper and poised it. An air-hammer began clattering in the street, and he turned to look out.
A telephone crew seemed to be working down there. At least their truck was a telephone truck. But instead of the familiar black bell on the door, there was a snare drum.
Then Drum Inc. really did make telephone equipment! It was all real, or at least ‘real’! Even the rows of faces in wax, printed on plastic film?
His pacemaker began to act up, trying to cope with the multiple rhythms of his racing heart, the air-hammer, others … a different drum.
The last drop of his living sweat grew, gathered itself in an armpit, began the slow journey down the inside of his arm. But can I really afford Heaven? It’s much more expensive than Hawaii. Out of the question now. Maybe in a few years …
The drop zig-zagged, crossed his wrist-pulse and ran down the pen. From there it dripped black on the face of the freckled girl.
‘Hello, Marilyn? He loves you.’
‘Who does?’
A crew from the telephone company, the other one, were tearing up the street near a manhole. On the windshield of a passing car was a sticker reading ‘Hello, Charlie!’
The driver leaned out, looked at the snare drum on the door of the telephone truck, and waved. ‘Hello, Charlie!’ he called. The crew foreman gave him the finger.
EXPLAIN THIS SCENE. Look at this example:
1. Why were the crew digging near a manhole?
a) For extra light.
b) They were rescuing a man.
c) They were outflanking it.
d) Never mind.
The correct answer (c) has been marked. Now do the rest of the problems in the same way.
2. Why did the driver call out?
a) The foreman was Charlie.
b) He looked like Charlie.
3. Why else?
a) ‘Hello, Charlie!’ is the unofficial password for employees of the Bell Telephone System.
b) The crew were Viet Cong.
4. What is Drum, Inc.?
a) One name of the Bell Telephone System in some regions.
b) The official telephone company.
c) The real owner of the Bell Telephone System.
d) A private telephone company with a vendetta against the Bell near-monopoly.
e) Vietnam.
f) It is to the Bell Telephone System as the ‘Aggressor Force’ is to the Army: an imaginary enemy, set up for training purposes. Bell employees who play rôles in it speak Esperanto, count in a duodecimal system, wear the snare-drum insignia, color-code their cables (unlike the Bell code): fuchsia, mimosa, rose, primrose, lavender, cerise and mauve.
‘Hello, Marilyn? He loves you.’
‘Listen, you, I’ve had about enough! You make me feel dirty all over, dirty with deep-brown ground-in dirt, the kind that makes washday a chore and plays havoc with delicate complexions. Do you hear?’
I tried making the general a Negro and a Nazi, then I opened my eyes and sat up on the table.
‘David sees reality as – ah – refrangible.’
In the next panel, the ‘doctor’, an elderly scientist from another comic book, held up a red tube. His balloon read: ‘Tell me, Herr Heiliger, what is this?’
‘A laser? The famous mail-order elixir?’
‘Ha. You are interested in its contents.’ Camera 3 in on Dr Born, seeing him from about chest level, deep shadows as in Return of the Son of Man. ‘Now let us ask David.’
I said, ‘It’s an ink drawing. Red wash and white airbrush highlight.’
‘I came all the way from Washington, or Africa, for this?’ The general picked up his attaché case and made to walk out of the picture. I changed his typeface to Garamond, adopted for myself Univers, a Frutiger-designed face suited to I.B.M. ‘That man is nuts, “doctor”. I have no time …’
‘Wait!’ Exhibit B is an infra-red Polaroid shot of Born holding up his hand to count upon the fingers. ‘Let me pose for you the four great “reality” problems. One: are physical objects real, or only sense perceptions?’
‘But …’
‘Wait …’
‘I have …’
The page was getting covered with dashes, interrupted thoughts; I set it aside and began over with a story called ‘The Sinister Bean’.
‘Two: do others have thoughts and feelings as I do, or are their thoughts and feeling clever simulations? Three: are the entities of science, like atoms and quasars, real, or only convenient fictions? Four: …’
‘I offered to come to work for Drum only on condition that I be given vital communications work,’ the general indicated. ‘Heliograph, semaphore …’
Born speaks with his back to him, make this a circular panel, set at the end of the top right-hand page, so the reader’s eye will be drawn to it twice: once as he reads the top row, again as he reads the second row. The doctor’s glasses heliographed an urgent message: Esperanto, duodecimal number system …
‘Certifiably nuts.’
‘David, I’m going to lock you in this solid closet, and you are to get out without opening the door.’
‘I’ went in the ‘closet’. Nothing much to examine: the cellular plastic sponge, good replica of animal organisation; broomstraws to draw for randomising next move; cleaning ether to change words to sounds, to make a centrifuge, to help David understand what it is the mop and pail are getting at.
Nothing to it; one side of the closet had to be left open, so the reader could see I was really in there. I just stepped out of that side and around and back into the room.
‘A trick!’ said Heiliger. ‘A trick?’
‘Of course,’ David communicated. A cough code was sufficient.
THE SINISTER BEAN
It lay there, perfectly harmless-looking, on a plate or plane or whatever, in the middle of a lot of places. Perhaps the most sinister thing about it was …
‘Transmission of …?’ the general opined, using the old opinion poll code. ‘Twins?’
I tore the money of his words in half, in quarters, and so on, five times, until they were too big a wad to handle. Then David opened my eyes and sat up on the table.
‘… sees reality as – ah – refrangible.’
‘And repeatable,’ I denoted.
Replacing his cracked monocle, the general said, ‘Tell me something, Herr Bland.’
‘Blandings,’ I said.
‘Blandish?’
‘No, Blandworth.’
‘Blanders, then. Tell me, what is it you – see?’
The pages of the calendar flipped past, indicating passage of time. The drivers of a locomotive, then a stationary plane, pasted against droning clouds, indicated movement in space. The slow dissolve of a wavering image indicated recollection. Then the background music came up full and newspapers rolled off the presses, to indicate an important event.
Dr Ortiz of the Lion Oil Research Branch addressed the stockholders, describing a number of new projects his group was engaged in: ‘Organic computers’ could be constructed of cheap, simple organisms; bacteria and fungi from common products like cheese had already been tested in this connection. ‘Cheese farms’ were a related project involving the use of deadly viruses to ‘grow’ cheeses from common materials. Using less potent forms in a ‘stepped’ or ‘cascaded’ system, he explained, would cut down on the type of unfortunate accident that had so far plagued his project. ‘Organic-to-inorganic’ processes would use a similar virus system to ‘grow’ from human cadavers such popular products as phonograph records and bowling balls.
INDIANA NAME OPINION REGISTER
Q-Q-QQ
1937
Name ……………………………………………………….
Address …………………………………………………….
Age ………… (Give latest date) ……………………………
1. Give your own name in full: ………………………………..
……………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………
2. Print your name in block capitals: ………………………….
……………………………………………………………
3. State surname, Christian name, middle name: ………………….
……………………………………………………………
4. Now give your NAME: ……………………………………….
……………………………………………………………
READ the instructions CAREFULLY and do not begin until the teacher tells you. In the first part, you will be expected to write as many names as you can in the time available, but you need not have every name correct. In the second part, tell what it is that you have named, and do so correctly.
NOW BEGIN PART ONE:
Part One. Name as many things as you can before the teacher says STOP. Begin with your own name, then add other names. Now stop. Begin with other names. Then stop. Begin. BEGIN.
1. ……………………….
2. ……………………….
3. ……………………….
4. ……………………….
5. ……………………….
6. ……………………….
Part Two. Fill in the blanks, then explain:
7. My name is ……………………………………………..
8. The name of ………. is ………………………………..
9. This is the name of ……………………………………..
10. This is my name: ……………………………………….
11. ………………………………………………………
12. Explain the names given above, and explain: ……………….
…………… ……………………………………………
…………………………………………………….. ….
Marilyn, the girl with the birthmark, had so far forgotten herself as to take away the hankie with which she had been dabbing at it. Her palms-up hands lay on her knees, and the ball of pink linen lay on the carpet.
‘… this frail heat. Daddy was a Justice of the Peace; I don’t suppose you know what that … I was eight, Eric was six, and Billy, the baby. Daddy was an engineer. We had a log cabin by the lake, with a log of visitors and everything. Daddy accidentally broke Eric’s nylon fishing rod, and he said he would give him a pair of nylons to replace it. A fish swallowed Daddy’s nylon log log slide rule, and …’
The apparent Negro behind the desk smiled sympathetically. His withered left hand lay before him on the desk like a horrible trophy, while with his good one he toyed with a syringe and a burnt spoon. ‘Go on?’
‘Well. I, Marilyn Hartsock, had to take care of the baby. I liked that, I liked to squeeze him till he kept giggling and I couldn’t stop. They had to take us to the hospital to remove Billy from me. Sometimes I think that’s how I got my withered hand, I mean my – oh!’
She snatched up the handkerchief and began dabbing at the hideous mark once more.
‘No use, it’s indelible,’ sighed the Negro, a Mr Travers. ‘I’ve tried everything myself. Even …’ The apparently tortured eyes in his drawn face sought, and connected with, the syringe.
Dr Reynolds of Lion Pharmaceutical Laboratories addressed the stockholders, describing new drugs his team is working on:
Dilasurg is a new hormone which promises to fix human growth at any pre-adolescent age. Tiresan II, a sex-change drug, requires hardly more testing before it is marketed. Estiviotrol causes a person to go into a state of suspended animation within minutes. Researchers are now working with police riot-control units in developing an effective aerosol delivery system.
Dr Gibbel of Lion Oil Electronics United addressed the stock holders, describing a new ‘surprise’ computer. After complex pre-programming by a team who does not know the computer’s ultimate use, it is leased to someone who does not know the pre-programming routines.
‘Ultimately,’ he said, ‘and without warning, the computer may do something either very stupid or very shrewd.’
Dr Lionel Logan, head of the Lion Oil Automotive Research Foundation, addressed the stockholders, describing a number of new advances. Talked about during his two-hour talk were hover-shoes, ‘chameleon’ body paints, and the use of hallucinogens to give a car ‘that new, yet strangely familiar feel’.
Something is troubling Marilyn, thought Eric. She keeps that pink hankie in front of her nose all the time.
But no matter I’ll just sit here on this train very quietly, I’ll just sit here and look at that young man No he’s looking back maybe thinks I’m queer and hates queers or maybe is queer I’ll look
I’ll sit here and look at that young woman No she thinks I’m trying to pick her up my god the man next to her is her husband or something now he’s looking at me they’re both looking at me I’d better
Sit here and look at that young woman very good looking who has taken the place of the queer or queer hater Christ she gave me a funny contemptuous look and opened a book she knows too well what nasty thoughts were starting
I wish I had a book I’ll just sit here and look at that man with the briefcase god he’s a cop he’s looking back like a cop would quick look anywhere No not too fast better casually glance over
To this old woman what harm could she do me but I just know she’s the type that imagines every young man who looks at her is some kind of rapist look away quick not too quick to the respectable well-dressed young Negro obviously a Black Power person hates all whiteys thinks I stare at him because he’s black I’ll just glance over at that innocent child is that a piercing glance I’m getting back from the mother what does she think I’m a pervert of some kind oh well how about the nice old immigrant workman across from me surely I can look at him his fly’s open others are looking at me looking studying my reaction none look over at that man reading a newspaper interesting half of a headline he sees I’m reading rattles his paper and folds it with the headline inside I may never know who is To Drive ‘Bad-Luck’ Lotus is that the knee of the man next to me touching mine yes Christ the car is full of queers now what I can’t move away without giving up some of my lebensraum but if I push him back he’ll think it’s a signal follow me home is that pair of teenaged girls giggling about me just two more stops hold on I’ll just look at that fat lady No she sees I see how fat she is do I look fat to her too she looks firmly at the advertisement over my head I look firmly at the advertisement over her head stalemate.
Dr Stoneweg spoke to the assembled stockholders of Lion Oil and Drum Inc. on his work at the Hannibal (Missouri) Institute for Adanced Studies, in particular the ‘solar bomb’ project. ‘I pray to God we’ll never need this big baby,’ he said, referring to the weapon, which could cause the sun to become a supernova. ‘But if we do need it, we’re ready.’
Drs Freag, Born, Ortiz, Reynolds, Gibbel, Logan and Stoneweg then asked if the stockholders had any questions.
Mr Fenster Moold asked what was the point of all this talk, talk, talk? Wasn’t it time for action? Mr H. Greubhel asked if any of these airy inventions meant anything in hard dollars and cents. Mrs Rose Garland said that she, a Gold Star mother, was not going to sit here and let anyone run down America that way. Mr Joyce Britt asked if there were anyone in the hall who doubted that Jesus Christ was a regular fellow. If so, would that person care to step outside for a thrashing?
(Radio-TV Advertisement)
A Modern Miracle.
A Modern Miracle of action.
Double action. Quick-acting deep-down action,
Where it counts.
Yes, deep-down action,
Truly,
A Modern Miracle.
(Radio-TV Advertisement)
Wherever you see this sign
It means a place you can trust,
People you can rely upon …
Friendly people.
Wherever you see this sign,
It means good things in store for you.
‘EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR’ DIES – PACEMAKER FAULTY
Grave to be marked with Suggestion Box
DISASSEMBLY OF THE G18-OKO-II HUMAN BEING
Fig. 1 G18-OKO-II HUMAN BEING
Marilyn listed all possible men who loved her:
Ray
Eric
her father
her brother, Bill
Jesus?
What if we fail to describe the president, Hernando Horario Murd?
Then we have no guarantee of his physical identifiable reality. Miss Bunne, his secretary, might not know what to do with important letters marked ‘For the Immediate Attention of H. H. Murd.’
Certainly. First she could take them to the door marked with the above name. Then through it, to the desk placarded with the above name. Then she could check the name on the letterhead stationery in the desk drawer. Then she could check the name on the memo stationery in the other desk drawer. Then she could check the initials on the golf balls, if any, if initialled, in the other desk drawer.
Then she could check the monogram on the shirt pocket of any person seated at the desk, the monogram on the gold pen clipped to the shirt pocket, and the name on the ALL AREAS CLEARANCE company I.D. badge pinned just above the shirt pocket. Then she could check the full-color photo on the badge against the face of the sitter, the wearer.
And she could read the name and traceable numbers on papers from the sitter-and-wearer’s billfold, including driver’s license, credit cards, Health Salon Membership, parking ticket(s), love letter(s), business cards, business letters, an ‘I Am a Diabetic, in Case of Collapse, Notify a Physician’ card, an ‘I Am a Catholic, in Case of Accident, Notify a Priest’ card, or an ‘I Am Deaf’ card, bearing on the obverse a request for money, on the reverse an Alphabet of the Hand.
Then, using the Alphabet of the Hand, she could ask the person at the desk for a signature, fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, a retina photograph, and an earprint, hair and skin samples, an ounce of blood, a complete personal history. She could question the person on the person’s personal history, using a polygraph and/or truth serums.
But all these things can be faked.
True, as can ordinary recognition signs. Gentlemen, we are at an impasse. I suggest we vote to describe him, and put the description on record, reserving our question of its validity until the committee has finished fact-finding about the question of ‘validity’ itself. Agreed?
Begin, then, with his shoelaces, double-tied, black. The ferrules resemble tightly-rolled strips of microfilm.
These are laced through sixteen holes of his two black, perforated, wing-tip oxfords. The perforations resemble those of edge-notched cards used in one popular index system. The mirror finish reflects dark distortions of the scene around them, a scene chiefly of other shoes and the lower parts of furniture.
The heels of these oxfords are suspiciously large and thick. They might almost be hollow heels of the type favoured by smugglers and spies for concealment of heroin or deathkit. A deathkit is simply a tiny hollow needle and a soft plastic ampule of strychnine. Being a diabetic, though neither a Catholic nor deaf, Mr Murd would not be afraid of needles.
The suit is enormous, the colour and roughly the shape of some prototype atom bomb. There is no tie. Every day the suit walks in at the same time. Miss Bunne takes its arm to help it sit down heavily, easing the seat of the huge trousers into the day’s pattern of wrinkles.
Now I think we can turn it over to Stoat from here.
Agent Bob was thirty years old, though he was not writing a poem about it. Instead, he knocked out his usual daily thousand words of Memoirs of a CIA man, which he had tentatively entitled I Killed for You:
I gave her a rabbit punch to knock the poison capsule out of her mouth. Then I kicked her until she wasn’t pretty anymore. I kept thinking of what that .375 Magnum slug had done to Larry’s face …
The memoirs included plenty of travel to Rome, Paris, Monaco, and various pleasure centres, where Bob won large sums of money at roulette, baccarat, etc., just after he had explained the rules in detail. He also knew plenty about wines, sports cars, weapons and anything else difficult to get through Customs, which he had no difficulty doing. He managed one exciting fuck per chapter, one good kill per chapter, or the equivalent. People who phoned him rarely finished their call alive, and when he approached his own Hilton hotel room, Bob usually got an eerie feeling …
In short, the whole thing managed to disguise pretty well Bob’s job as a code clerk. Now and then he tailed a suspect – always the same one – and his only other duty was clipping periodicals for the hunchboard.
The hunchboard was not an information source; that was the domain of the CIA computer which daily digested 200 world magazines and newspapers. The hunchboard was a source of inspiration. Mr Stoat, Bob’s chief, would select a few items almost at random, have Bob clip them out, and tack them up with his constantly-changing collage of headlines, pictures, features and ads. From these, Mr Stoat was somehow able to develop hypotheses about world affairs.
Bob’s thirtieth birthday found him clipping out a bra ad, and lost in a daydream about gunning down Stoat where he stood.
For almost no reason, Bob hated this sun-bronzed little man who resembled a handsome, if foreshortened, executive. He hated everything about him: the hunchboard, the way he hummed, the fact that he wore his shaggy wool overcoat in the office, the fact that he carried, not a real gun, but a toy: a wooden block printed with a picture of a gun.
Piff! Blat! Puffs of dust rose from the shaggy wool. The stocky man spun and flopped like a rag doll, gushing blood through its tanned nostrils.
Bob snipped viciously across the page. Unaware of his death, Mr Stoat stood before the hunchboard, gaining insights. He gained insights into subversive plots, subversive counterplots, his own plan for world domination. He looked worriedly at the ceiling, the toy gun he was using as a pointer, Bob, the board, Bob.
‘Look out, Bob, you’re spoiling her tits.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
Buddha-buddha. Bob gripped the two scissor handles, one in each hand, and pulled the trigger. Tracer after tracer plowed into the placid back. Stoat made irritated little hums.
‘Hmm. Hmm.’ He studied clippings from Grit, Rod & Custom, The Sacred Heart Messenger. ‘Ummm.’ He compared war news with suppository ads. ‘Choo-de-choom.’ He marked the conjunction of General Motors’ sales graph with pictures of dead movie stars, then with a thalidomide item. ‘Hmp?’ Russia’s Secret Space Deaths went between Is Your Marriage Really Sublime? and The Kind of Girl Tab Hunter Wants.
‘Hmp. Hmp. Hmp.’
Bob drowned the little noises in a wave of .50 calibre fire. Tun. Tununun. Tununununun.
‘Ho!’ Stoat tore scraps of McCalls, The IBM Song Book and Detective Comics from the board and threw them on the floor. Then he knelt and stirred them with the toy weapon. ‘Yup!’ His face was grim. ‘Looks bad, Bob.’
‘A crisis, sir?’
‘In transportation or communication. Could be only a bomb in a train station, such as Batman here finds, but Mars is in conjunction with Saturn, is it? – that means something really big. Subliminal panic messages inserted in a prime-time TV show, causing a run on rifles that could cripple our rifle industry maybe, I don’t know. An army strike? Who can say? A pop singer discovers a new sound that sets off a slow-destruct mechanism buried one million years ago in the cerebral cortex. Your guess is as good as mine. The palm of the president, as revealed in the blown-up photo of a speech, reveals tendencies towards aggression, self-deprecating remarks, constipation, should seek new friends this week, not keep analretentive hold on Vietnam, cloacal gold standard. It’s anybody’s ball game.
‘Los Angeles and San Francisco riding the San Andreas fault, due for earthquake – could be a tie-in with the Original Fault. Can’t rightly say. Film industry, half TV industry wiped out next Columbus Day, cross-reference to Columbia Broadcasting? To Christopher movement? Their motto: “YOU can change the world”. California is altogether a bad complex; maybe it should be removed without narcotics, astringents, or surgery. Could demonstrations at Berkeley (“I am a human being. Please do not fold, staple, spindle or mutilate”) be link-up with Bishop Berkeley (“all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind … their being is to be perceived or known”)? You tell me.’
Pocketing his wooden gun, Stoat said slyly, ‘I want you to follow someone in connection with this crisis. My number one suspect.’
Not again, thought Bob, but he kept his expression interested. The ‘number one suspect’ was always the same: Stoat’s wife Anne.
‘I want you to go to this address,’ he said coyly. ‘Follow this red-haired woman.’ He gave him a picture from his billfold. ‘And stay with her.’
‘Yes sir.’
Stoat unwrapped a small but distinguished smile and tried it on. ‘Good luck, son, and be careful.’
Bob lobbed a grenade into the office as he left, and shut the door quickly behind him.
SUMMIT CONFERENCE ON ‘GOVT SWAP’
US may become USSR
ANIMATED FILM STAR TO RUN FOR CONGRESS
CARDINAL BRAKESPEARE APPROVES PILL
LION OIL PLANS ESSO MERGER
Gen. Max Heiliger (Ret.) was a tall, emaciated African with good-luck scars on both cheeks. As head of Operations at Drum Inc., he developed company strategy along unusual lines, using sophisticated mathematics and Dr Gibbel’s ‘surprise’ computer. He had a summit meeting with Mr Murd almost daily, but whenever reporters from the house organ, The Drum Call, asked him what was going on, he would reply with something vague about Marshall McLuhan and the global village, or quote Tarzan on the necessity for intercommunication between man and other species.
Why are they all trying to get me, Max wondered. The FBI thinks I’m a Black Panther. The CIA thinks I’m a Panafrican revolutionist. The KKK thinks I’m a Negro. The American Nazi, Party thinks I’m a Jew. The Zionists think I’m an ex-Nazi. Mr Murd thinks I spy for Bell, Bell wonders if I’m not an East German spy. The DAR thinks I’m a cannibal, someone keeps writing anonymous letters to The Drum Call saying I’m an extraterrestrial of superior intellect, and my barber thinks I’m a vivisectionist. Snip, snip, snip. ‘What do you do all day, over there in that windowless blockhouse? Cut up small animals, ha ha?’ The scissors poised to shear off an ear.
In any other story I’d be the hero. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. It’s the good-luck scars, that’s it. Dad’s idea. As always, the younger, audiotactile generation is left in a mess by the older, visual generation. So now everyone thinks maybe I used to wear a bone through the nose. It’s a bone through the nose to them, that’s all. They think I dine on missionaries cooked up in a big iron pot. What a disgusting idea, a cooked missionary with hairy legs. I’m just a cartoon figure, bone through the nose. Whenever I see one of those cartoons, I’ll point it out to them and ask them one simple question: Who supplied the big iron pots?
(From The Drum Call)
Well, team, we’re sorry to report the accident rate is up once again. The department with the highest a.r. is Cable Accounts, who now have lost the safety pennant to the typing pool by a score of 3-0. Nice going, girls, and keep it up! And of course we hope the ‘cabies’ will try extra hard next month, and maybe win back their title!
The most serious accident in Cable Accounts was Ray GaIt’s, and a darned shame it was. Ray, in case you don’t know him, is the young one-armed janitor with the big smile. Everyone seems to miss his cheery ‘Hello!’ each morning, and we sincerely hope he’ll be back with the gang soon!
The mishap was just one of those things, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Because there have been wedding bells tinkling around the Cable Accounts office, mainly in connection with Ray and Dot Hanson, the file clerk with the famous dimples. They say that whenever Ray had a window in the department to wash, Dot would soap a little note to him on the glass – certainly original in their love-letters, aren’t they?
Maybe Ray was reading one of these, or just thinking about that little vine-covered cottage for two, but anyway yesterday while mopping the hall, Ray somehow caught his good arm in the elevator doors. Talk about tough luck! The hospital says he may lose his good arm, but we know he’ll never lose his good humour.
Our newest employee in Cable Accounts, Eric Bland, will be taking care of the fruit n’ flower fund. And so, on behalf of the staff and management, may we wish Ray a speedy recovery, and hope he’ll be back on his feet in no time.
(Radio-TV Advertisement)
Everyone likes to have Fun,
But no one likes to miss out on the Fun;
When everyone is having a good time,
Don’t you be the one left out.
You’ll have more Fun if you get more Fun,
And you’ll get more Fun – today!
(Magazine Advertisement)
(Headline)
We’re really sorry, but we’re only human.
(Copy)
You’re human, too, of course. Like us. Everyone is.
And we humans have a lot in common, don’t we? Sure,
some of us like to bowl, while others like to take it
easy with a cold beer. But we’re still a lot alike,
we humans.
Or are we? Maybe we’re a lot different, too. We
don’t pretend to know the answer to that one.
We haven’t got all the answers. Yet.
Mr Kravon read The Drum Call. ‘I’d like to kill that son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘Here I thought we had the pennant sewed up. I thought we’d grab the yearly safety plaque, too. Well, he’s washed up now. Out of the company he goes. Or stick him out in a factory somewhere, where they don’t give a god damn about accidents anyhow.’
To put the upsetting incident out of his mind, he leafed slowly and with pleasure through a new brochure of watertight caskets and vaults.
RULES FOR WRITING LOVE-LETTERS
1. Be neat.
2. Get the name right – that’s important!
3. If you must criticise, praise first.
4. Make words work for you:
Use analogies.
Use short words.
5. Remember the ‘We/you/I’ formula.
6. Put in plenty of ‘curiosity value’.
7. Keep it short.
Holding hands, Eric and Dot watched the replacement janitor scrub the hall window, cleansing away Dot’s last message to Ray:
Dear Ray Darlin … asy to … especially since you’ve been so… eet, but.., met someone els… feel I re … e for, and so you see how it … dn’t possibly … u while my heart belo … nother. En … lly wonderful, and I’m so hap … st working near… esk, and the only flaw in my ha … knowing th … ke you feel bad. But dar … n’t be. I’m su … ind someone else. In fact, Eric… gested and old … end of his, Marilyn Hartso … ks in the typing poo … Anyhow, we … ix you up … ll always think of you as a …
It was signed ‘.’
Why are they all trying to get me, Max wondered. Jane and Jean and Jane and Janet, my four girl-friends, June my wife, Jeanne and Joan my lovely wanton mistresses, all trying to get me. Not to mention Mr Murd, who fears my sable splendor, and my secretary, Jeanette. I wonder what that new girl at the office thinks of me?
(Newspaper Advertisement)
STOP DEATH COLD!
Amazing new scientific discovery! Hair health can add years to your heart, inches to your prestige. Lucky holiday stamps guaranteed SAFE! Armchair learning of psychic power increases natural size visibly. Why be old? Ancient wisdom gives you a real He-Man voice – flattering new lines of confidence. Absolutely no narcotics or surgery for FREE booklet mailed to your door from all over the world! Raise cute ‘Fairy Penguins’ (not a religious organisation) in just 15 minutes a day, and BANISH acne through organic-approved, FAST police-training methods.
(Classified Newspaper Advertisement)
CONC. CMP. – 1 owner. Nw. elec. fnce., late mod. full secur. meas., grd. blk. + 4 like-nw. m/g twrs. Lites, alrms., 2 bldgs. ea. approx. 200 × 150', mesh wndws., escp.-proof. Latrines, mess, Exprmntl.med.lab, the works. 50 acres brl. grnd., cap’y. 10,000+. Blt to U.S. Govt. specs. Ideal schl. cmp., retire. cntr. 1st offer takes.
It seemed to make no difference when Travers stopped sending people into the company and decided to start ‘interviewing them outwards’. He was a component, that’s all, with a single YES/NO decision to make in each case.
‘And tell me, Ray, why is it you want to leave Drum?’
‘Well sir, I’ve always wanted to work somewhere else, somewhere with a solid base salary, some big-bracket benefits, security and plenty of room for advancement. And that’s about the size of it.’
‘That’s it in a nutshell, eh? Now I want you to think about those benefits a moment, vis-à-vis your – ah – disability.’ Travers’s putty-colored fingers moved lightly over the braille copy of Ray’s application. He leaned forward to give Ray a good look at his hump, straining against the garish fabric of his suit. The boy gulped.
‘Well sir, you see – I mean …’
‘I don’t see, as you jokingly put it. And you’re not here to play jokes on a blind man, you cruel, intolerant young bastard! You – excuse me.’
An alarm was ringing in a drawer. Travers shut it off, then fished out a syringe and a small bottle. ‘If you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my insulin.’ He gave himself an injection of water, all the time studying Ray through the dark glasses, noting with approval that he was hanging his head and blushing.
‘Well, excuse me for flying off the handle like that. We each have our own problems. But tell me this: Where in hell do you expect to get group insurance, after you’ve had two major accidents?
‘I’m no plaster saint to lecture you about anything, Ray. In fact, besides being blind, hunchbacked, and a diabetic, I have this drinking problem … But even so, I at least am entitled to group insurance – which means I’m entitled to leave Drum Inc. for a greener pasture.’
The head on the armless trunk still hung down, and tears fell from it to the carpet. Travers wondered if the carpet would be stained.
‘Tell you what. I’ll hang on to your application for a few months, see what happens. You go back to work, I think this time at the factory. I can’t be fairer than that, OK?
‘And now we’d like to have you take a few more tests.’ Travers marked him down for the Müller-Fokker Insecurity Rating. ‘OK? Well, it’s been real swell talking to you, Ray. Stop in again, like I say, in a year or so.’
Ray stood up and gulped back a large egg of air. Since he could not shake hands with the interviewer, he bent and kissed his ring.
| IDEAL SEX INVENTORY | 7373/0380/B | |
| Revised Detainer Report B | ||
| Place: | Format: | |
| Subject: | Index: | |
| Eventuality: | Zip Code: |
Additional Specification: …………………………………………
………………….. …………………………………………..
………………….. …………………………………………..
Compare or match:
| 1. Taking walks | A. Ornateness |
| 2. The other side | B. This side |
| 3. Rock wool | C. Tubed debut |
| 4. Gradually lighter | D. Forensic award |
| 5. Soft drawings (sex) | E. ‘Klondike’ |
| 6. Taken one at a time | F. Coupon bouquet |
| 7. A smash hit | G. Brainbag |
| 8. Felt hat | H. Felt hate |
| 9. Lion oil | I. Platonic (ideal) shit |
| 10. Prawn warp | J. Flexing the arm near |
| (a) Protection all day | (1) Dagger |
| (b) Semite Times | (2) Deliver, reviled |
| (c) ‘press conference’ | (3) Open end |
| (d) Swings tension | (4) Several related hobbies |
| (e) Corners | (5) So many dynamos |
| (f) Corresponding toe | (6) Tressed dessert |
| (g) Animal lamina | (7) Sample pain |
| (h) Gift (poisoned) fig | (8) Salad alas! |
| (i) The Cayman who smiles | (9) Same finger |
| (j) Flexing the arm | (10) Terrible island tins |
| I. | Gala |
| II. | Venues |
| III. | Polychrome ‘Rotor’ Mary |
| IV. | Dagger |
| V. | Danger |
| VI. | Opinion, 1937 |
| VII. | Ohio Hall of Fame |
| VIII. | Semiramis |
| IX. | Talking wakes |
| X. | Sex |
Travers changed from the hump, black glasses and loud suit to a ski sweater and a pair of army pants. He fitted on the half-shells of his cast and taped them in place. He had already signed the cast with the names of all company employees who had disappeared – Dot Hanson and all the rest. Now, as he put on the false smile and deep sunburn, as he sutured dimples into his cheeks and chin, he thought back on the Ray Galt interview. What a mess! The kid was committing suicide in pieces, but how could you explain that to him?
One nice bit, though, the ring-kissing. He hadn’t felt it, really – his whole surface seemed to be getting anaesthetised – but he’d appreciated the idea. Be even more fun with one of those girls from the unending cafeteria line across the way. Why not carry it on? Invest in a mitre or what the heck, a triple tiara:
‘My child, my child, you seem troubled. Come, put it in the lap of God …’
Who was he kidding? Travers wasn’t a company pope, he wasn’t anything. He watched them come in or go out, day after shuffling day, the whole company going to pieces, maybe the whole world. He could pose as anything, a sacred bear or eagle, an armed ghost – it made no difference. They came in to be processed, he processed them. They were his data.
He was not even a complicated computer, just a simple component. YES or NO was his choice, the content of the simplest message, ON/OFF. Like holy smoke.
Which brought him back to the bishop again, the crozier dividing the SHEEP and the GOATS, the SAVED and the DAMNED, the YES and the NO.
Damnit, he didn’t want to be a transistor! A YES/NO man! He wanted to be a message of maximum content, a line of poetry, say, very obscure poetry. At the rim of obscurity, where infinite content becomes zero content, where everything is said and everything is noise. He pounded his fist silently on the desk. Why? Why couldn’t everything be different, yet somehow the same?
Nebransas! Miles and miles of flat corn country where a man can feel the big neon sky pressing milk down into the red plush earth. Nebransas! Mighty steel pylons picket the horizon, carrying power, power to light the linoleum, power to iron the honest Sunday shirt, power to scrape the plain Sunday dishes, power to pump the mail through the mail-slot of the homely country kitchen door, power to mill the flour to bake the bread to make the sandwiches to feed the faceless faces of countless thousands who assemble the air-conditioned car which now speeds along a highway past giant grain terminals resting like isolated white temples upon the brown sward of Nebransas!
While Miss Bunne took notes, Max spoke earnestly to the rumpled grey flannel suit of Mr Murd. ‘I’ve marked on this map the location of coaxial cables, microwave antennae, power towers, local newspapers, and billboards. Anything else?’
The pattern of wrinkles shifted slightly.
‘Ah yes,’ said Max, ‘those mail-order catalogues. It won’t be hard to intercept the ones actually in the mail, but the others, those in privies, etc., may be tricky to alter.’
‘What about social security numbers?’ Miss Bunne asked, tasting the ink in her fibre pen. ‘And the drive-in movies?’
‘I got the numbers in our bank job. We’ll take care of the drive-ins on the way back to the secret heliport, I believe. Lefty, turn on the radio.’
Kravon turned the traditional knob, and the stereo speakers spoke to them:
‘… Vatican announced today the successful test-firing of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Ave Maria. Together with their longer-range Miserecordia Dei, this …’
‘Tch, tch,’ said Miss Bunne. ‘All this violence in the world. Where will it all end?’ She patted the barrel of the automatic rifle clipped to the door.
‘Turning from the international scene, the Fremont State Bank was held up today by three men and a woman, wearing the masks of dead movie stars. Ignoring more than half a million dollars in payroll money, the bandits escaped with only worthless carbon copies of bank records, including a list of social security …’
‘Now stop it, Ray. This injection moulder I’m running is a dangerous piece of equipment, and I’m not going to let you mess around and tease me like this. Stop it, I said. You should be back in the inspection area, not wandering around like this.
‘Ray! That’s just plain dirty! Yes, I know you can’t exactly put your arm around me. I know it’s just an innocent hug, but what will the other girls think?
‘Now stop! I’ve already told you, I can not go out with you tonight – I already have a date. And never mind who with, it’s none of your business. If you must know, it’s with the new supervisor. Eric Bland.
‘What did you say? The machine’s making so much noise I can’t – Ray! Keep your foot away from that molten plastic! Look out for the ram – RAY!’
Max was making a list of Utopias, from which he hoped Mr Murd might be able to make a selection, checking two alternate preferences:
Utopia in the hands of an angry God
Utopia in boots
Utopia as the dictatorship of the proletariat
Utopia through whole-grain cereal health
Utopia: the seven-fold way
Utopia as Law and Order
the computer Utopia
the millenial Utopia
the genocidal Utopia
the noble savage Utopia
Utopia as a warm puppy
sharing the wealth
living by fear
living in a house by the side of the road (and being a friend to man)
the orgone Utopia
the Superman Utopia
Utopia through meditation, vibration, reincarnation and revelation
the global village
the radiant city
the city of God
the Lost City
the genetic Utopia
Nirvana
Heaven
the Earthly paradise
the free enterprise Utopia
the conclave of immortals
‘less is more’
‘I can and I will’
the ultimate deterrent
the ultimate detergent
Utopia served up (by intelligent, sensitive extraterrestrials) on flying saucers
Utopia of a garden community of not more than 400 white industrialists, all good-looking, of surpassing wisdom, and in direct contact with the Deity through their mayor, George Washington.
‘Glad to have you with the art department, Ray. I’ll explain your duties: You take the letters from this letter tray – we’ve cut away a piece here so you can get your chin in there – and you just take them around to the various people in the department. And I hope you have a soft mouth – we don’t want any tooth-marks if we can help it. Just try imagining you’re a bird dog and these letters are very delicate birds, OK?’
‘Gee, thanks, Mr Wang, I appreciate …’
‘No “misters” here, Ray. I’m just plain Phil, and you’re just plain Ray. That leg thing give you any trouble? No? Good enough.
‘Your other duties will be lighter, just running the postage meter and the big electric paper guillotine over here. We have to crop photos now and then, nothing to worry about. If it gives you any problems, I’ll have Anne take care of it. She can also give you a hand – excuse me, Ray – with the postage, if you need help. Annie’s a real looker, isn’t she? That’s her over by the door.’
‘She sure is a knockout, Phil.’
‘Say, Ray, I hear you’re quite a ladies’ man, right?’
‘What? I mean, what, Phil?’
‘I said, I hear you’ve been cutting quite a swathe with the ladies in other departments. Heh heh, well, just don’t keep the girls from their work, OK?’
‘I won’t, Phil.’
‘OK, Ray? OK, boy?’
Max spent a lot of time working it all out:
Ignoring other factors, a force’s ‘fighting strength’ is proportional to the square of its size (Lanchester’s N-square Law). Then a force of n men could defeat a larger force of n 2 men, if the larger force can be divided into two parts:
That seemed clear enough. He tucked it away with his other notes on military operations research:
‘Root Tooth Structure Tensile Strength as a Factor in Combat Efficiency’
‘The “Shared Spearhead” Paradox Resolved’
‘The Unified Front System’ (A unique method of combining the war on poverty, any current Southeast Asian conflict, the gold war, the restraint of rioting, the war on cancer, etc., etc., so that guided by game theory and critical path analysis, the regime might make multi-dimensional (‘Lshaped’) moves, e.g., an attack on Southeast Asian poverty, on cancer-susceptible rioters, on auric cancer, on Southeast Asian riots involving gold.)
‘Maxideath as an Information Retrieval Problem’
‘A New Interpretation of Maxideath’
‘The Mutual Infinite Boundary Dilemma’
One of his favourites was ‘Heiliger’s “Bombed Baby” Problem’, for which he had never found a satisfactory solution: Given a single baby in a house at some unknown location in a city, how is it possible to ensure that a bombing raid (not using nuclear devices) will certainly kill that baby? No standard method (saturation bombing, raising a fire storm with incendiary bombs, pin-point bombing of every structure) was good enough; it was impossible to guarantee a kill.
But these monographs, while applicable to the coming conflict, were Max’s toys. His heart, soul, mind and strength were devoted to his monumental treatise, ‘On War as Information’. He was fascinated with the analogies between military strategy and information theory; the idea of killing as the simplest, clearest message; the consideration of the enemy as a ‘black box’, or unknown arrangement of components; tactics as the ‘alphabet’ or strategic ‘language’; the ergodic analysis of military operations considered over a period of time.
His talks with ‘David’, the chemical vision in Dr Logan’s lab, had led Max to consider speech and other sensory communication as analogues of war. His work went on apace, but ‘David’ had made him dread tackling the final paradox:
There seems to be no difference at all between the message of maximum content (or maximum ambiguity) and the message of zero content (noise).
Travers was at it again, watching the girls in the cafeteria line. With their bright jello-colored suits and honey hair they looked more transparent than translucent, he decided, and thought for minutes about the layers of glass that closed him off from them, the layers of dust, the layers of air and light. Who were all these girls? he wondered. What might they mean?
He looked at the crystal of his watch. In five minutes he would have the interview of interviews, with a Mr Kravon. What image to force upon him, that was the question. Kravon’s folder indicated a cautious type, inhumanly perfect, not excitable. Thirty-five years’ service. Try impressing him with – what? Sturdy youth? Nobler age? The sincerity angle? Simple humility? No, none of this could penetrate Kravon’s wall of suspicion. And it was impossible to dress as a dog or cat, or an honest stone …
That weekend, Anne and Eric went to their special place.
After parking the car in a shady grove of frismia, he led her along their own hidden path, down to a slanting platform of rock, half-awash in the mountain stream. Here they were completely hidden from the world by merriwether, frondy bagwort, smilax and the dark shiny leaves of rufus. At the very edge of the stream grew grieving nace, lithia, bright bloodmedal. Alone with him in this paradise, Anne felt no compulsion to speak; Eric seemed to feel the natural sanctity of the place no less than she.
He performed his usual ritual first, alone, then she followed suit. Yet not alone, for it was the cool little stream which, without touching them, brought them together. Anne wondered for a moment whether her husband, Stoat, had someone watching her now – but then her shame, too, was washed away by the purifying trickle.
Afterwards, Eric offered her a mentholated cigarette, and took one himself. They consumed this fragrant communion in silence, watching the sky go from gold to red. Anne imagined she were inside a great, translucent eyeball, looking out through the pupil of the sun to see …
‘The drive-in’s open at sundown. We’d better get going.’
‘What is it? I think I’ve seen it – Witch of Agnesi?’ She bent to pick a fragrant sprig of parson’s nose.
‘No, Return of the Zomboids and I think The Gurk.’
‘Yes, I remember Attack of the Zomboids. They were the ones made of clouds or pus or something, weren’t they? And all covered with electric hair?’
‘No,’ said Eric. ‘I think you’re thinking of the Fings. The Zomboids were transparent. They were like man-shaped jellyfish.’
The President of the United States rose to welcome Kravon, beckoning him to sit down at the desk with the Great Seal.
‘Mr President!’
‘Surprised to see me, Kravon? Well, I know it’s not my usual office, but I heard they were interviewing you for retirement, and I thought I’d look in. Now, we’ll talk in a moment about that pension plan, gold watch and so on, but right now let’s examine your safety record.
‘You see, the country – and the company – just can’t see turning loose a man who lets his department get a mess of accidents on the books. Now I see here …’
As the president lunged forward to check the record, one of the elastics holding on his vinyl face snapped. The face fell on his desk, spun around clumsily on the famous nose, and came to rest. Lucky, Travers thought, he’d had the foresight to wear another under it.
Kravon leaped up. ‘You’re not the president!’ he screamed. ‘Impostor! Fake! You’re fake like everything else!’
The other spoke calmly, moving closer to the lamp. ‘A little test of your faith, my child. Don’t you recognise me?’ He turned the desk lamp upwards, to shine on the shadowy eyes, the sucked-in cheeks, the tight, senescent smile like a rictus mortui.
‘No! It can’t be!’ Kravon was confused. He mustn’t be allowed to doubt again, to reach for this mask.
‘His Holiness? No, my son, I bear some resemblance, true, to the infallible personage, but no, I am but a humble priest. The name is Father (he rhymed it carefully with lather) Patrick O’Brien.’
Removing the rest of his presidential shell, he stood revealed in his threadbare black cassock. ‘Tell me what ails yer soul, me boy. Have ye broken inny of the Lard’s commandments on conthraception, now? Throubled by guilty dreams, are ye? Peerify yerself through confession, the sacrament of Pinance. Kneel down.’
Kravon knelt on the comfortable carpet and bowed his head, displaying the tonsure of age.
‘Now I hope ye won’t mind if I put on a few vestments while ye talk. I’m goin’ ta the stockhalders’ meetin’, ta invoke a blessin’ on the union of Drum Inc. with Lion Oil.’
So while the manager of Cable Accounts began to murmur his secrets, Travers kissed, flashed, and girded himself in appropriate and inappropriate quasi-religious garments: alb, stole, cincture, scapular, rosary, cross, crucifix, skullcap, wimple, dalmatic, chasuble, cope, medals religious, sacred heart badge, epaulets, chevrons, stars, wings, battle ribbons, medals military, badges, buttons, pins, stars, garter, codpiece, doublet, stomacher, belts, bandoliers, spurs, studs, dickey, rosette, holster, scabbard, corsage, cockade, toga, ermine, jackboots, fez, homulka, tiara, coronet, crown, mitre, triple tiara, biretta, stetson, campaign hat, helmet, living bra, overseas cap, green beret, baseball cap, football shoulder pads, g-suit …
‘Hell, Anne, I know you haven’t encouraged him, but the poor guy’s only human – what’s left of him – and you’re a damned fine piece.
‘The thing is, he’s fallen way the hell behind in the mail sorting. And every time you go in to help him catch up, he gets farther behind. It’s obvious the guy’s crazy about you.’
‘But Phil, I’ve tried everything I can to discourage him …’
‘Listen, tell him you’re all dated up with the vice president.’
‘Eric? Oh, Eric doesn’t mean a thing to me. I mean, we’re just – mutual friends, if you know what I mean.’
‘Makes no difference. Just go in there and say, “Listen, Ray, lay off. I’m Eric Bland’s girl.” That’ll cool him down. Oh yes, and while you’re at it, take in these photos to be guillotined, will you. And tell him to hurry up with it.’
‘Then, Father, I put my farm in the soil bank, and I joined a Christmas Club, and I bought Defense Bonds, and I put blood in the blood bank, and willed my cornea to an eye bank, and put my money in a Swiss bank, and the gold from my teeth I left instructions to be deposited in a safety deposit box under the name “Max Heiliger”.
‘And I invested some sperm in a sperm bank, bought some gilt-edge securities and some blue-chip stocks, and I invested more money in National Banks, State Banks, County banks, and then I bought some insurance.
‘I insured my home, life, wife, car, farm, crop, valuables, health, children, dog. Then I gained a plenary indulgence for myself, my wife and children, and our neighbors on both sides. And I built and stocked up our bomb shelter and insured that, and put in a machine gun, grenades, plenty of ammo, and then I installed new locks all over the house, burglar alarms, bullet-proof glass, and I put a second, secret bomb shelter under our basement.
‘Then I put up a cyclone fence with barbed wire across the top, and inside that a bomb-proof wall with broken glass on top, and inside that an ornamental wrought-iron fence with spikes on top, and inside that an electric fence. I put in an emergency generator, a nurse in residence, an operating room in the basement, electrostatically-filtered air conditioning, a gas leak alarm, and a well.
‘I studied all the consumer magazines, paying particular attention to safety recommendations, and I bought only approved appliances. I rewired the house, had new gas and water pipes fitted. Then I subscribed to a freezer plan, laid in a year’s supply of food, and I subscribed to a cryogenic storage plan for when I should die. I engaged the Night and Fog Security Agency to check all the locks and warning devices every night and report to me over television, I bought a pair of Alsatians and a pair of Dobermans and a canary to warn us of coal gas. I had the family immunised against tetanus, typhus, smallpox, etc., etc.; I fumigated once a month and bought a cat and a rat terrier.
‘I hired a mechanic full-time to check my car over, piece by piece, and I had him install every new safety device I could find. I rotated my tires weekly and traded them in every 5,000 miles.
‘I installed a door-answering system with one-way mirror, microphone, metal detector, radiation detector, and fluoroscope; I sealed the fireplace and reinforced the walls and roof, and had a monthly check for dry rot, mold and termites. Then I began giving tithes; took my wife to the best psychiatrist and my children to the best child-guidance psychotherapist, for check-ups; I put explosion-resistant screening in front of the TV set, moved all electric receptacles well out of the children’s reach, hired a round-the-clock guard to keep them out of the kitchen, locked all poisons in a safe to which only I knew the combination. I fireproofed the house, and …’
‘And so,’ Anne Stoat admitted, ‘I don’t really know my husband. I can’t really blame him for wanting someone to keep an eye on me. He probably thinks of me as “the enemy”.’
Bob signalled the waiter and ordered two more pigeon feathers. ‘But you’ve never even seen him?’
‘We were married by proxy. He was on a big case at the time, invasion of Antarctica or something. No, I’ve never seen him – though I do watch the Thursday night TV program based on his life, and they say it’s cast very authentically.’
‘But you, ah, sleep together?’
‘Sure, but in separate dreams. I think I’d go crazy, if it weren’t for my job at Drum Inc.’
‘Drum Inc.! Rings a bell. Wait a minute. Yes, we’re investigating them right now. In connection with the disappearance of a South American republic. And-other things. Anne, do you think you could help us?’
Anne finished her drink without replying. When she looked up, their eye-beams locked, exchanging messages of involvement. ‘Let’s have the next drink at my place,’ she said.
‘… and I’m still not really sure,’ Kravon finished. ‘I just know I’ve forgotten something. And don’t tell me I’ve forgotten God, because I haven’t.’
The grotesque bundle of clothing before the mirror put on a dog collar and threw a strait-jacket around its shoulder pads. Then it began tucking things in its belts, holsters, scabbards, bandoliers, obis and cincts: a sixgun, a sceptre, a crozier, a switchblade, a fasces, a roll, a sabre, a scout knife, a hanger, a rolling pin, grenades, a fuse, yarrow sticks, a flute, a splinter from the true cross, pencils with your name imprinted in 14-kt. gold, a fountain pen, a fountain pen which sprinkles holy water, a fountain pen which sprinkles teargas, a rectal thermometer, a syringe, a slide rule, Old Glory, a monstrance, a whip, a tampon, a coke, an electric toothbrush, an olive branch, carrots, a cigar, an umbrella, Keys to the Kingdom, silver bullets, an Ibis stick …
‘Father? What do you say?’
The face, invisible inside the hollow layers of space helmet, crash helmet, etc., may have moved; the figure may have spoken; but nothing came out.
‘God damn it, say something! Say something!’
Kravon leaped at him, tearing at the folds of brocade and khaki and nylon and leather. The overbalanced, swaying mass tipped back, collapsed softly on the carpet, cloth-to-cloth impact.
Snarling, Kravon tore away layer after layer, flinging aside an old school tie, a Nazi armband, a maniple.
‘Good God!’
The final transparency, thought Travers. The whole works, the jello girls, Kravon, the universe. They’re all completely insensible.
A little later they found Kravon on his hands and knees, still pawing over the pile of rags. After thumping and kicking him awhile, they estimated Kravon had a good ten years’ service left in him. But just to be sure, they would give him, as Dr Freag put it, ‘a change of heart’. The research team – Freag, Ortiz, Logan, Gibbel, Born and Stoneweg – was split into two groups. Freag’s group wanted to test a new surgery machine, while Born’s group wanted to see how many different organs from various donors could be stuffed into one skin and live. Now each team would begin the wearisome search for a donor. The first team to find one would get Kravon.
The company doctor had some objections. Who were they, non-medical men, to judge whether or not Kravon needed a new heart? In his opinion …
The two teams silenced him by threatening to do two heart transplant operations.
The pretty nurse did not have Ray fooled. He noticed the way she fussed around making his bed, taking far longer than with the other patients. Let her go on pretending to be all career and no heart, he knew better. Obviously she was enjoying feeding him his meals, he could tell by the loving way she spooned in every bite.
Okay, she never smiled or spoke to him, that was her way, maybe. Didn’t it prove all the more that she couldn’t trust herself to keep cool? Sure it did. And even the way she handled that bedpan …
Not that he really wanted to let himself go with her. There was always the outside chance of a mistake – then he’d find himself in a false position. He didn’t really trust her. Maybe she, too, would go off with Eric Bland. She was probably making a date with Eric right now, this minute!
Ray nudged the emergency light switch with his nose. If she didn’t come to answer it within, say, five minutes, he’d know something was up. She was off somewhere in the nurse’s lounge, screwing Eric Bland … letting Ray die, for all she knew.
He could see just how it might happen, too. He might accidentally bite the end off the bent glass straw in his glass of water on the side table. Then he might accidentally run his neck against the jagged edge, and cut the jugular vein or the carotid artery or something. Something pulsing.
‘Marilyn? He l …’
Bob rolled back and lit a cigarette. The front side of his body was tingling with information about Drum Inc., and he knew without asking that Anne felt the same about the CIA. Trying to make words of what he felt, he watched the script of smoke curl towards the acoustical ceiling. The words were garbled, but they were there:
Drum. Drum would corner information? Drum would compress all information into a single message, which it (someone?) would eat. Drum was taking over the microwave towers, the coax, the telephones, the TV stations, the satellites … and one Thursday evening everyone would be told that they (all the others?) were under arrest. Under body arrest, whatever that meant. Drum was having its heart transplanted? To another company, Lion Oil. Spell it backwards.
No, or Drum was buying, stealing, getting at that feeblest of all communication links – between inside man (‘My bowels now function normally, Ground Central. All systems go. Repeat …’) and outside man (‘Do you read Breughel? I read Mao. Anyone read the Bible? He has not read Carter Brown’s No Blonde Is an Island.’).
‘What are you thinking?’ Anne asked.
‘Huh?’
‘You look like a Xomboid. I’ll bet you didn’t know it could be like this, is that it?’
‘There’s more where that came from. Just put down that cigarette.’
More? There had to be more, and he turned to her again, seeking. His tongue probed her mouth, taking readings from electrical fillings in his mouth her mouth probed his tongue probed his mouth taking electrical fillings from her readings his readings; under his hand a pulse; their nerve ends took hold swelling with data merging … merged.
Who was Murd? What was the fictitious Lion Oil Company? What about the Misses Bunne? Who was asking all these questions of whom? What happened to Travers? Did ‘David’ control the reality of the firm? Of the firmament? Who controlled the reality of ‘David’? Why was Max Heiliger?
The messages flowed and structured himherthem; he looked into her eye once; again he looked out of her eye. Their double back shivered as nerve splices made, coded molecules unzipped to one another, particles collided and collapsed (emitting final pictures of the return of the Yomboids, final answers looped through final answers that doesn’t make sense I know but get to a telephone no time to pick it up and dial just flow in with the final answer a gun inside a never mind the exchange hurry on to the CIA tape constantly running constantly playing The Time Is Exactly the time is running the final answer a gun barrel in a flower in a banana in a gun my back brain your back brain squeezes the trigger) and they watched the delicate metal petals curl back slowly exposing the rifled ballistic message (O ballistic missal O O O cabalistic O:) ‘Hello, Marilyn …’ ‘Disappeared! Damnedest thing I ever saw,’ said Stoat, running through the film again. ‘Both of them? Looked like they just sort of melted together, then disappeared!’ His suntan was fading.
Behind him a pair of code clerks were arguing. ‘Well, all I can say is, I read the same story under a different title when it first came out. Lion Oil, it was called, and I say it was a lot of poop.’
‘God, it’s Galt again. He’s been signalling every two minutes, all damned day. Then he’ll say he wants a bedpan, and as soon as I get him on it, “Never mind.” I’m tired.’
‘Maybe he’s got a crush on you.’
‘Probably. He doesn’t know I’m married, because I can’t find my name badge. I thought I had it in my pocket – here it is … there. “Mrs E. Bland.” Maybe next time he starts ogling me while I’m feeding him his pablum or putting him on the pan, maybe next time he’ll take the hint.’
‘But you’re not actually physicians?’ The chief surgeon smiled.
‘Well, then, I’m afraid I couldn’t allow …’
Freag spoke in a tone of kindly menace. ‘Don’t be a dumb shit!’ he said quietly. ‘All we want to do is get the body first. Warm, if possible. As for medical doctors – well, we can buy a couple of hundred or so, over and above the hundred we have running around the lab right now.’
‘That’s right,’ said Dr Logan, who breathed with increasing difficulty. ‘Who believes in symptomatic medicine, anyway?’
Seeing the surgeon stiffen as if taken by a total body erection, Freag turned savagely on his colleague. ‘For Christ’s sake, Logan, shut up! Don’t listen to him, Doctor, he’s a Zen macrobiotics nut. Brilliant innovator with cars, knows nothing about the – ahem – life sciences.
‘But let me just say this, doctor to doctor. Do us a little favor. Fix up all the waivers, papers, etc., then just shoot the body over to us in dry ice. You won’t regret it, I promise you.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Professional favors, yes, but you three gentlemen are not exactly in the profess …’
‘Well, we’ve got a dying heart patient over there at Drum Labs, that’s all I know! This isn’t a matter of professional favors!’
The surgeon looked shaken. ‘Dying? But this “donor” isn’t critical, you know. You may never get a heart from him. Unless you count on something like his “accident-proneness” to knock him off. And where could he be better protected against accidents than right here?’
‘We’ll take that chance. If I know Galt, he’ll probably fall out of bed on his head or something. Could happen any day.’
Logan erupted in a sudden coughing fit. The surgeon drew back, while Ortiz patted the brilliant innovator on the back. Dabbing at blood-flecks on his lips, Logan whispered, ‘Yes, Galt is very Yin, very Yin. Needs a proper diet: whole-grain cereals and very little liquid.’
A professional cast came into the chief surgeon’s eye. ‘I believe you’re hemorrhaging; better step down to the emergency ward and have someone take a look.’
He made a move as if to support his arm, but Logan drew back quickly. ‘Keep your symptomatic hands off! I know what the hell’s wrong with me! Too much centripetal downward force – I’m overloaded with salads and Vitamin C.’
‘Doctor, come quickly!’ Nurse Bland came pounding down the stairs, looking radiant. ‘It’s Mr Galt! He …’
Ortiz, Logan and Freag shoved past her and ran up the stairs.
‘Good idea,’ whispered Born to his subordinates, as the three of them marched down the aisle between beds.
‘Eh?’
‘Putting on our lab coats, posing as staff. See Galt anywhere?’
Stoneweg shook his head. ‘How about behind that screen?’
‘Yes … Ah, Mr Galt. How are we feeling this morning?’
The patient did not reply.
‘Now, young man, we re just going to run a few tests, a few routine – my bag, Gibbel. Not that one, that’s the dry ice.’
Born drew a stethoscope from the proper bag. He took it in both hands, holding the rubber tubing like a garotte, and approached the bed.
Stoneweg, who had been leaning over the patient, exclaimed, ‘The son of a bitch’s croaked already!’
‘What?’
‘Must’ve just done it, sliced his neck on this glass tube. Still warm.’
‘Excellent. Boys, I think we’re the first to find the body. Now get busy with that scalpel, Duane.’
Dr Stoneweg, who had once had training as a mortuary assistant, began pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. Born seized his arm. ‘For Christ’s sake, we’re not washing dishes on television. Just grab the ticker and let’s move out!’
Stoneweg took up a likely-looking knife, bared the patient’s chest, and paused.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. But I – uh – hardly know where to start. I’m not very good at this, I guess. In fact, at Sunday dinners, my wife won’t even let me …’
‘Will-you-hurry-up?’
Stoneweg plunged in then, and in a few minutes was elevating the organ of emotion over the bag of dry ice. Freag’s hand, then his menacing smile, came around the screen. ‘I’ll take that, gentlemen. Thank you.’
‘Like hell!’ Gibbel slashed at his face with a scalpel, nicking Freag’s chin.
‘So that’s the way you want it?’ Freag flung a loaded urine flask at him, then grabbed another weapon from the medical bag and went into a fighter’s crouch. ‘All right, baby, if that’s how you want it, baby, come and get it, baby, anytime, come on, it’s waiting for you, baby, if that’s …’
Born kicked the screen over on him. Ortiz swung a wooden crutch and caught Born behind the ear. Stoneweg kicked Ortiz in the stomach. Logan leaped in the air and threw out one hand in a karate manoeuvre that knocked Stoneweg to his knees and sent the heart skidding under a bed. Gibbel carved the air and cursed, waiting for Freag to work his way out from under the screen. Logan went diving after the heart. Ortiz revolved the crutch again, slamming Born in the side of the head, breaking his upper plate. And so on.
DRUM PLANS SPLICE WITH BELL
DRUM-LION OIL MERGER?
BELL TO TAKE OVER DRUM INC
LION OIL TO ACQUIRE DRUM
BELL WILL ADD LION OIL
DRUM TO GET IN OIL
When Miss Bunne had cleared out the pile of rags from Travers’s office, she shovelled it onto the slot in the wall which led to the incinerator in the sub-basement. Winded, she sat down for a moment and fussed with her hair.
In so doing, her sleeve slipped back, and she read the retirement date stencilled on her arm.
‘Whew! No wonder I’m tired. I almost forgot.’ She rang for Miss Bunne.
‘It’s about my retirement, Miss Bunne,’ she said, ‘due yesterday’
‘Lucky you!’ They exchanged smiles. ‘Well, now, what do you have? Any keys, company property?’
‘It’s all right here, Miss Bunne,’ Miss Bunne said, indicating the neat pile on the desk.
‘That about does it, then.’ Miss Bunne stepped up to her, took her arm and read the date.
‘Wish my replacement luck.’
‘I will. Have a good time, now.’ Miss Bunne removed the staples holding the arm in place, flattened it, and pushed it in the incinerator slot. She did the same with the other arm, the other arm of Miss Bunne, then the rest.
When she had finished and tidied up, she was winded.
‘Can it be?’ she wondered aloud, and rolled back her sleeve. It was. She rang for Miss Bunne.
‘Phase One begins as soon as Kravon gets his new heart,’ Max explained to the polished shoe of Mr Murd. ‘He will feed the pigeons in the park. A “policeman” (really one of us) will accuse him of molesting the pigeons and “arrest” him.
‘This is a signal to the watchers on the rooftops, who will immediately lower a basket of deadly snakes to the pavement. This should divert a lot of police and firemen to the vicinity of Breughel Street, and if it doesn’t, our arson squad stands ready at the fireworks dealer here.’
He indicated a point on the map, hoping that Mr Murd did not notice how his forefinger was getting light in patches. That Argentine body paint guy saw me coming, he thought. A ‘two-year guarantee’. Ha.
‘Of course, Kravon will have slipped a few homing pigeons in among the others, and poisoned them. During the ruckus they take off, headed for here. But, depending on how much poison each one gets, they should drop anywhere from here to here.
‘The messages they carry are of course fakes, dummies to draw off the police and National Guard to this nearby ghetto. where they believe a riot is imminent. To convince them, we have Phil Wang right here in a tree, armed with a rifle. He’ll start picking off cops when the first bird has fallen. The real message will be indicated by the spacing of the fallen birds along this line from here to here, and we have briefed our departmentstore “pickets” on this. They are to seal off the entrances, pre venting the re-emergence of all telephone company operators who have gone shopping on their lunch hour. The “pickets” are equipped with Mace.’
He paused, momentarily fascinated by his own reflection in the dark surface of the shoe. A distant telephone rang. 1 am peeling. Jesus, how to explain this?
‘At that point the systematic exchange-jamming begins. Our 1000 agents in various parts of the city will each start dialling one number of this exchange, and continue dialling it throughout Phase One.
‘Here Able Company goes in to the main entrance of the telephone company building. They smash the displays of new Princess telephones in several exciting colors, and they bayonet all the pretty receptionists. The main objective is to block all the stairs and elevators, and Dog company, disguised as a telephone company bowling team, will stand by to come in and help. I don’t see why we shouldn’t rely on a few pounds of plastic explosives here, do you? Think it might hurt our image?’
The shoe said nothing, and the sock above it looked bored.
‘Now our anarchists start something here at the corner of Breughel and Nixon,’ he went on anxiously. ‘Our “kids” will be playing over here, hopscotch and the like, but actually chalking the location of buried manholes. Our “American Legion” will get in a fight with our anarchists, and our “National Guard” will move in to break it up, using flamethrowers. They may actually fry a few for effect, but – now get this – they will in reality be melting the asphalt at the chalked spots! If they can start another fire, too, so much the better.
‘Well, from there on, it’s 1-2-3. With all the deadly snakes and firehose around, nobody’s going to notice a few yards of telephone cable being pulled up. We just wind it up on the reel of a firetruck and drive away.’
A large flake of black fell from his face. The good-luck scars were beginning to look like sabre scars. Max excused himself and fled before Mr Murd could say anything sarcastic.
SPECIAL DETAIL 1A4A-ooo.9/Blue: PRIORITY 1A CONFIDENTIAL LIST SUSPECTED WORDS GRP 3:
communal
communal property
communalism
communalist
communalistic
communalise
communally
communicate
communard
commune w/spirits
commune
communicable
communicability
communicability of disease
communicably
communicant
communicate
communicate emotion
communicate info
communication
communication network
communicative
communicator
communicatory
communion, holy
communion of saints
communiqué
communism
communist
communitas
communitarian
community
‘I want facts!’ Heiliger shouted, or so the sub-title said he shouted. ‘I want statistics, flow diagrams, charts, programmes, bulletins, brochures, illustrated parts breakdowns, graphs, lists, instructions, memoranda, encyclicals, equations, probabilities, waybills, forms, registers, catalogues, time tickets …’
The doctors looked at one another. There were seven, though each saw six.
‘But you’ve seen with your own eyes …’
‘Nothing! Nothing to the nothingth power. Tricks, demonstrations. I want data, gentlemen. Where are your data?’
Here David interrupted the general and seven doctors, saying:
‘Know ye not it is written: “Unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” Know ye not even that?’ And they were confounded.
But who will help me turn the pages of the giant book? Not the giant book that I am in and you are in, but a lesser giant book. We are making the titles today, for this is the proverbial ‘book of the movie’.
I opened David’s eyes and sat up on the tablet.
‘… refrangible …’
‘The Sinister Bean’, I read. The players were King Real and his three daughters: Girl One, Range and Code Liar. Exit all. This may be the shortest play in my long and successful career.
Just for laughs I balled up the general, doctors, lab and all – the whole newspaper it was in – and set fire to it. But that would only be in first ‘world-set’, A. There would have to be a B where the paper was printed, where I sat in a dirty lab burning it. One may posit a further -B where I unburn the paper, unwrinkle it, and read. There might also be world-sets where the paper reads me, or where the paper and I read each other. Each of these has obvious extensions, and the whole set would make a nice matrix for General Heiliger.
I handed it to him and he said, ‘A code?’
‘And of course then it was a code. We spent the rest of the time before the commercial doodling word games,’ the next David explained. In the beginning was the Word Game (Even in Eden in Eve) and then came the War Game (Who will ever remember how Hayhanen fingered Abel; Hayhanen of the simple, unbreakable cipher: a substitution followed by two transpositions), and so on through Gematria (the angel guarding the seventieth quinary is I.B.M.) and the wary games of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson = Gorged on a chi[l]d’s lewd lust).
‘Break this code,’ I defined, ‘and you break it all.’
But how did they get into and out of the room? I posited a projectionist turning off the film long enough for them to slip off-screen, then someone to authorise this, and so on, I was off again. That’s what happens when your imagination can’t work up even a sinister bean.
Stoat addressed the CIA stockholders.
‘It’s the Hawthorne experiment all over again,’ he said, switching on the projector. ‘This is the factory of Western Electric (suppliers to the Bell System) at Hawthorne, Connecticut. When workers were isolated as an experimental group, cut off from ordinary supervision, their output went up – no matter what other changes were made in their environment.
‘Drum Inc. is trying something similar, isolating workers not only from job supervision, but from the supervision of reality. There is something shady about the entire company – shady in the sense of insubstantial – not to mention the Lion Oil Company, which I suspect to be a mapping on to the surface of reality of the wholly abstract Drum corporation.
‘Now this is a map of Connecticut. Notice how the name of the state has been slightly disjointed, thus:
CONNECT I CUT
‘And this is a picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), whose ancestor hanged nineteen women in one witchcraft trial. He remained a recluse for most of his life, and my hypothesis is that during that time he did not in fact exist. In evidence I submit the work of Dr Stoneweg on the curious absence of grocery bills during that period.
‘Hawthorne was obsessed with the notion of disappearance. In his story “Wakefield” he tells of a man who kisses his wife goodbye one day, moves to a place a few dozen yards away, and there remains in hiding for twenty years, watching his own house. In another story, he says:
The heart, the heart – there was the little boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord.
‘We of course are far from these “realities” of which he speaks. We sit or stand here in this expensively furnished room, having enjoyed perhaps our good meal at the state’s expense in the cafeteria downstairs, moderately well-dressed and enjoying the comfort of a good pipe.’
Here Stoat took out his wooden gun and mimed with it the gestures of satisfied pipe-smoking. Those who had them took out their own pipes and held them aloft, feeling perhaps that they were voting on reality.
‘But all of this real reality is in danger! The words “connect”, “I” and “cut” move ever farther apart. Drum Inc. is performing an experiment on a “David” – and on us! Maybe it is only a dexterity experiment – maybe it is something far more sinister. The election of a movie star to the office of governor of California (there is a Hawthorne there, too, and not far from Watts) already shows how easy it is to map one reality on to another. Life is a picture magazine, Time is a montage of weekly news, Space is where men become stars, while Reality is where “stars” take the place of men.
‘I have seen a certain incredible film of my own wife, cinema verité … newsreals … excuse me, I … TV dinners … pain in the South … sensory deprivation experiments … reality too is an experi … but why … they must understand … some things better left in the hands of the government …’
He moved into the beam of the projector. It lined him with a map of Connecticut, and gave him West Hartford as a third eye, while he moved his hands and mouth earnestly, and talked on and on.
‘Where the hell is it?’
‘Talk, Logan, or we’ll beat the living cancer out of you.’
‘Yang,’ Logan coughed. ‘Lung cancer, very Yang. As for your heart …’ He glanced towards the open window.
‘No!’ The others fought for a place to see out, down.
‘Where is it? See anything?’
‘There’s a big Alsatian down there – burying something!’
Born, Stoneweg and Gibbel rushed from the ward, but, at a wink from Logan, his two friends remained.
‘You didn’t throw it out?’
‘I threw out a worthless lymph gland, to attract that dog I happened to notice on the lawn. It had just been eating at a garbage can, therefore I deduced it would retrieve the gland and bury it – as in fact happened.’
‘But how did you know it would notice the gland at all?’
‘I have made a study of all breeds of dogs and their peculiar eating habits. The Alsatian is, above all others, fond of “sweetbreads”. It would have greatly surprised me had he not seized upon it.’
Logan lit a perhaps opiated cigarette and feigned ennui.
‘But the heart?’
‘I held it in my hand and nodded towards the window. My hand of course concealed it in the ample folds of my lab gown. It was simple mis-direction – an old conjurer’s trick.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I deposited the heart where I was sure no one would think to look for it – not if they dig up the entire lawn around the building. In the most obvious place of all, paradoxically the most well-concealed.’ The others seemed mystified, so he added, ‘Look in Raymond Galt’s chest, why don’t you?’
Having drawn their weapons from the small-arms pool, the employees were assembled in the cafeteria to be briefed.
‘This is it, men and women,’ said Max Heiliger, whose face and hands were swathed in white bandages. He unveiled the battle plan amid mild applause.
‘Hey, that looks like a pair of somebody’s pants!’
Max turned to give the employee a look. ‘That looks nothing like a pair of pants. It’s a battle plan. Anyone who refers to Mr Murd’s pants, or to anyone else’s pants, will lose all candy and ice cream and cigarette privileges until further notice. Is that clear?’ He then turned his attention to the plan, which was a pair of Mr Murd’s enormous pants. He outlined his plan for Phase Three, reading off the creases in the seat.
‘Our objective today is the telephone cable running from Stoneweg Street down 14th Avenue past the D Hotel, across Panavision Street and terminating at the Robert Hall Store on the corner of Reagan and Avenue of the Playmates of the Month. Write down all those addresses and get them right – we don’t want anyone wandering around asking cops directions at the last moment. Any questions?’
‘Yes, sir. Why is this particular cable important?’
General Heiliger froze with his back to the audience, his elegant baton pointing to the Robert Hall crease. How could he begin to tell them? Robert Hall, mass-manufactured suits … look-alike clothes, uniforms … effective identification of friend and foe … disruption of all vital mass-consumption products, Howard Johnson restaurants, A & P essential … essentially a matter of molecular rearrangement of “society” … finding new isomers … people of gold, perhaps … purple of gold …
He cleared his throat and turned to them. The black splendor of his SS uniform contrasted with white bandages would give them confidence, he knew … secret of newspaper success …
‘All cable is important, son,’ he said. ‘Any more questions?’
MEMORANDUM
From the desk of Gen. Max Heiliger (Ret.)
To: H. H. Murd
The interesting thing about Phil Wang, about using him as a sniper, is that he’s had experience. Despite his Chinese (?) name, Phil is Japanese, and served with the Imperial Army.
This memo cancels and supersedes all other memos on the subject.
Regards,
Max
Wearing a peaked Imperial Army cap (bought from a war souvenir store), very large black-rimmed glasses (boutique) and artificial enormous buck teeth (novelty shop), Phil settled himself high in an elm at the corner of Nixon Ave. and Chas. Whitman Street. He picked off one cop before he’d even had time to adjust the sight for windage; maybe it was luck.
When he’d disposed of a half-dozen more, Phil took off the cap and ran his fingers around the inside, looking for the name. There it was, the ideograms faded but still legible: ‘the armour-maker from the armour-making land’.
Too cumbersome a translation. While he holed a few more badges, he tried cleaning it up: ‘The armour-maker from Armorica.’ The National Guard arrived; he picked off a dozen while they messed around trying to park their jeeps and trucks in a pattern.
As a professional, he appreciated the shiny new intricate weapons, the nylon bulletproof vests, the teargas – but pitied them for not realising that he was The Indestructible Jap. Wiped out in a library of war comics, he came to life in ten libraries more, to taunt them:
‘What the matter, Yankee dog? No gut, Joe?’
They milled around uncertainly, looking as if they wanted to give up and go back to their homeland across the tracks. He even tried sticking his face out in the open and giving them an evil grin, but – nothing.
Well screw ‘em, he’d commit honorable suicide; the Indestructible Jap always had that way out of the last panel. He bared a foot and clamped the false buck teeth around the gun muzzle. Fugg ‘em. None of these kids remembered Bataan or Corregidor any more; they all thought Japan was where diminutive people played baseball and made transistor radios. Fugg that.
‘Get set, armor-maker from Armorica,’ he mumbled, working his big toe inside the trigger guard. ‘I’m gonna make a hole in your cap.’ But who was the guy? He wanted to think of a good translation of the name first.
A Guardsman spoke to him through a faulty loudhailer: ‘You need helpEEEEEEE. Throw down your WHEEEE and we will help you. We’veEEEEAWWWrounded. Do you understand? WHOOOP!’
As he pulled the trigger, he came up with a good enough translation of the name in the cap: From Armorica = From Normandy = Norman Armor-maker = Mailer
The thought, along with the old cap, flew up to the topmost leaves of the elm.
MEMORANDUM
From the desk of Gen. Max Heiliger (Ret.)
To: H. H. Murd
There have been rumors circulating about the nationality hence loyalty of Phil Wang, so I may as well clear them up now:
He is a loyal American citizen of Chinese extraction, born and brought up in the Midwest. He is also a former comic book illustrator, and indeed won a Croix des Filles de Revolution d’Amerique for his war comic, ‘Guts of Glory’. That should straighten out any misunderstanding.
This memo cancels and supersedes all other memos on the subject.
Regards,
Max
A MENTAL NOTE
This is a rash and ill-considered business. Do we know Mrs Rockefeller smoked Camels in her monoplane (New Yorker, April 17, 1937)? Over which state? Whence coming, whither bound? Let X define that term the goal of A. Then let Y be a terrible crime against all peace-loving people of the world. A is the state of A (plus its environment), being the foliage nearby a nearby tree, when two keen eyes watch the withering away of this state. Y is the Corinthian Room of any Hotel Pierre (its environment). Now X is representable by co-ordinates X and Y in an abstract state. Now Y is a parameter representing all peace-loving people of the state. The word paowa means literally some constant X representing the forgiveness of all innocent people who love peace. That rash and ill-considered young man has the Volkbein arms, but I hope that all paowa people will smoke Camels.
This fine-looking young instrument implies a world error of prediction and its environment, yet this is a strange and terrible business at the Y. I know personally the average of A, or change in this inhuman thing.
I hope all business people will see it in their hearts to forgive me for this crime, which I see in my heart was a crime against all people of the Hotel Pierre. The fine-looking young man of the Camel arms – gave birth!
They are of Y, the people of great length and military beauty. That belongs to the co-ordinates of soul and office, Miss Bunne, yours of the history,
H.H. Murd
‘So it was you who called me all those times!’ Marilyn said with a laugh. ‘I wondered who it was.’
‘I thought you knew my voice,’ said the other woman. ‘But now that you know who it was, you know who loves you, too.’
‘Of course! Oh, this calls for a drink! Joe, would you bring us two invoices, plenty of ice?’
Stoat got them all together in the drawing room for a showdown. There were maps all over his face and clothes, and he did not in general look well.
‘Averaging all the worth-situations as main-part factors,’ he said, ‘the arrival at an approximation of the practical value (or value-set) for any projected application can be implemented in such cases where extrinsic worth-situations are assumed intrinsic. Otherwise, Heiliger’s Law applies.
‘Eric could not have arrived at the scene of the real crime until at least nine-thirty, by the clock in the hall. Since Murd had set this clock forward ten minutes at ten minutes before the other butler lit the fire, the body (which was cold) would have had to be lying before the fire before Marilyn phoned David. In other words, whoever came from the library into here, out through the dining room and up the back stairs to change and come down the front way again, looking as if they had just got up to see if that was a gunshot, that person would have thought the real time was nine twenty. But at nine twenty, Max here was out front, shovelling snow and unwittingly clearing away the first set of footprints, the footprints of …’
‘Oh God, I can’t stand it!’ Marilyn cried, and ran to bury her mutilated face in the comforting padded shoulder of Mr Murd. Stoat, smiling dangerously, ground on towards the inevitable Conclusion.
‘The clock was fast; the hands pointed to nine. The dog pointed to something frozen fast in the snow – a hand. As Phil pointed out, he was fast asleep. On the other hand, Murd moved fast. The hour was at hand. At this point, Eric gave Max a hand with his fast car, which needed a new set of points. David showed his hand a little too soon, and Anne, we know, was in fast company. Kravon pointed to a portrait by a false hand, a second-hand copy that still had its points. The point is …’
‘I confess,’ said the bandaged man, taking out a peculiar little gun.
‘Too late,’ Stoat reproached him. ‘I resume: Leprosy struck. The hour struck. The workers at the plant struck. A match was struck. I struck up a new acquaintance. Lightning struck the lightning rod. And so on.’
‘You have nothing on me,’ Freag sneered.
‘Max discovered he was white, an ex-Nazi from Argentina, with amnesia – and he knew Marilyn, despite her sympathetic birthmark, was an Israeli spy!
‘Murd, seeing the game was up, took the deathkit from his hollow heel and used it – but was it on himself? Kravon, posing as the other butler, came in to light the fire – really to get close enough to Anne to do what he had to do, what he had been plotting all those years in stir!
‘Phil, having thought for years he was of the royal house of Thailand, discovered that he had been changed in the cradle for Eric! Almost too late, Phil learned that Marilyn was his cousin!
‘At this point, the lights went out. David found himself not down in the lab at all, but somewhere in the mob on Breughel Street. Eric, thinking he was in the library, took down a book – it was a brick from the lab wall! He felt a stealthy step behind him, turned and struck out! Is it really necessary to describe the president, Hernando Horario Murd? Expiring in the flamethrower’s flames, David steadfastly refused to name the noble-woman who had betrayed him to the National Guard. Travers promised himself – one more interview, and he would have enough to retire – just one more big one. “Good God!” Eric realised what Freag and Logan had been creating all those months, down in that infernal laboratory. David, expiring, offered a prayer for the transmission of sins. Marilyn, locked in a creaking tower of the old self, suddenly turned and ran for her life! The lights went out again.’
The lights went out again, and when they came on, Stoat lay in a pool of ink. Eric had vanished. Marilyn, without her birthmark, was nowhere to be seen.
‘This is just the way poor Marty got it,’ Max said, sipping the tea that contained he knew not what. The figure of Connecticut on the floor groaned and moved. Everyone filed out.
The figure on the floor raised itself on one peninsula and spoke: ‘It’s what I’ve been trying and trying to get through to all of you; the murderer is …’
And making a vague gesture that took in everything, it fell back.
MARILYN MEETS MYSTERIOUS CALLER – SELF!
Girl with miraculous vanishing birthmark does it again
KRAVON TO DRIVE ‘BAD-LUCK’ LOTUS IN INDY 500
‘I’ve found new heart,’ he quips
EX-NAZI NAMED HEAD OF SOUTH AFRICAN MILITARY
Peculiar pigmentation causes scowls in Johannesburg
Eric, who called himself ‘David’ these days, sat in the Automat over a cup of black coffee, wondering if that girl over there with the thirty-one perfect freckles would like a date with him. He didn’t suppose so, but you never knew …
Marilyn sat in the Automat eating pale jello, wondering if Eric was ever going to get up and come over and speak to her, or what. Why didn’t he screw up his courage? The way he had screwed up their lives?
She could hardly keep this up. Seven dishes of jello so far, and no action. Was this the Eric of seaside newspaper days? Maybe he didn’t recognise her since ‘Mother-Scrubber’, with its deep-down cleansing action, had removed the hidden dirt and the clearly exposed dirt from her face. Well, here goes jello number eight.
She sure liked jello, Eric noted admiringly. Reminded him of a girl he once knew. That was a good opening line:
‘Excuse me, miss, but you sure seem to like jello. Reminds me …’
Something else drew his attention. A peculiar man was standing in the line at the cashier’s window. He was tall, rather stiff, and amazingly symmetrical, and he seemed to be wearing a toupee.
‘Ten dollars?’ the cashier said. ‘All change?’
‘… yes … please …’ The man spoke faintly in a tinny voice. When the change was finally before him, he removed his hat, bent from the hips, and scooped in all the coins in one movement.
As the man turned from the window, Eric noticed again how symmetrical his features were: two perfect halves, with a thin scar or seam running down the middle. He glided without hesitation to the section marked PIES. Eric, along with a few others, craned his neck to watch.
Inserting a coin next to ‘lemon meringue’, the man twisted the knob. The window popped open. Instead of removing the pie, he reached in a fist and smashed it, smearing it well around in its stainless steel box. Then he repeated this performance at the next window down, and the next.
After finishing the ‘lemon meringue’ column, he moved one step to the left and began on ‘apple’. Other customers froze, looking from the columns of windows smeared with broken pastry to the man’s constantly-moving left hand, which became in turn covered with apple, peach, cherry and berry syrup, custard, whipped cream, and gouts of pumpkin.
‘Hey!’
‘Hey, what the hell here! Dis pie’s all crumbled up!’
‘Him, he’s the guy. Hey, Mr Rich Man! You don’t care if anybody else wants ta eat?’
A manager bustled over. ‘What’s going on here? You can’t do that!’
The stranger said nothing, and the manager too was frozen, hypnotised by the combination of violent action and serene, even indifferent expression.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked again, baffled and afraid. ‘You don’t like pie or something?’
Having finished the PIES section, the odd man seized a handful of paper napkins and began wiping off his fingers, one by one. ‘… yes …’ he said, ‘… like … pies … very … much …’ Then he headed for the section marked BEVERAGES. Soon the spouts of ‘Coffee’, ‘Coffee with Cream’, ‘Coffee with Extra Cream’, ‘Tea’ and ‘Hot Chocolate’ were gushing beverages enough to overflow their respective drains, cover the counter top, and drizzle from the edge. The stranger continued to plug in nickles and pull cranks, standing in a puddle of mixed beverages.
Eric looked around to see if the freckled girl were sharing this experience with him. She was gone, and a busboy in white was hurrying to remove all trace of her existence.
Well, to sum up: I opened my eyes, etc., etc., and then the last doctor wanted to leave the room. In pity, I created an ‘outside’, reducing the thickness of the walls from infinity to just ‘thick’, and making part of one wall moveable. I made a kind of ‘hole’ that could be opened or closed. On the ‘other’ side of it, I lettered:
DRUM INC.
RESTRICTED AREA
NO VISITORS
Then he ‘opened’ it and went ‘out’.
A cop in crash helmet and other cop togs came into the Automat. Someone pointed out the peculiar man, and the cop went over to teach him a lesson. People speculated about it over the clatter of dishes and the metronomic beat of the billy.
‘Too much book if you ask me. Too much book.’
The cop sat down afterwards for a coffee and donut. When he had finished, someone pointed out Eric. So the cop came over and taught Eric a lesson, too.
Marilyn noticed she was headed for the river. People, scraps of newspaper flew by her:
GOD TAKES BRIBE
‘… suit becomes him …’
‘He sat up on the …’
U.S. TO TEST ‘SUN BOMB’
She had known her boyfriend since they were both eighteen. They were now twenty. They had always had a stormy relationship – one minute very happy together, the next arguing and miserable. Sometimes he’d say they would get married soon, and then he’d say he was ambitious, and marriage was impossible for at least five years. She’d suggested they part, but he didn’t want that. Now her belly was heavy, painfully swollen with jello, and she felt so unhappy and discontented. What do you advise?
‘198-, A Tale of “Tomorrow”’ – New Worlds #197, © 1970
‘Anxietal Register B’ – New Worlds #186, © 1969
‘The Communicants’ – The New SF ed. Langdon Jones, © 1969
‘The Interstate’ – Quark/2 ed. Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, © 1971
‘Masterson and the Clerks’ – New Worlds #175, © 1967
‘Name (Please Print):’ – New Worlds Quarterly #5, © 1973
‘New Forms’ – New Worlds #181, © 1968
‘Scenes from the Country of the Blind’ – A Book of Contemporary Nightmares ed. Giles Gordon, © 1976
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Novels
The Reproductive System (1968) (aka Mechasm)
The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970)
Roderick (1980)
Roderick At Random (1983)
Tik-Tok (1983)
Bugs (1989)
Wholly Smokes
Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy(1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning (1977)
Alien Accounts (1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra (1984)
Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2001)
John Sladek (1937 – 2000)
John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking New Worlds magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include The Muller Fokker Effect, Roderick and Tik Tok, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 1982
All rights reserved.
The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11063 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Table of Contents
