by Pat Frank
Maria and Tommy left about one. Smith Field never seemed so wonderful.
When I awoke, sleet and rain were beating against our windows. Marge was scratching me behind the ears, and I relaxed with the luxurious determination to spend the day in bed and thumb my nose at the weather, Washington, the N.R.P., A.I., and unsterilized Mongolians.
All our lives, most of us have been the targets of a devilish propaganda campaign designed to rout us out of bed at the same hour as the beasts of the field and the farmyard. Whoever invented the slogan “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” was an advertising genius. That slogan bullies most of us from childhood to old age. It shows the power of repetition, which Goebbels so well understood. We have heard “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” so often that we believe it without question, although when you analyze it, it is obviously hokum. It is hokum in all three claims, particularly the part about making you wealthy. Who is it who gets to the office at eight on the dot—the shipping clerk or the Chairman of the Board? I drowsed in Smith Field, thinking how successful the inventor of that slogan would be if he were alive today, and what he could do for cigarettes, soap, hair tonic, and soda pop.
Around noon I flicked on the television, and who should be there, looking directly into my eyes, but Senator Fay Sumner Knott. Marge said, “Isn’t that a charming suit? I saw one like that at Best’s the other day, only it was a different shade.”
“Hush,” I said, “I can’t hear what she’s saying.”
“Oh, switch it off,” said Marge. “She’s only talking politics in the Senate. She is photogenic, isn’t she?”
Then I heard something about N.R.P., and I concentrated on listening, instead of watching. For months, very likely, Fay had been waiting to insert her stinger into the Administration. If she hadn’t miscalculated her timing, I shuddered to consider the consequence. As it was, it was bad enough.
She was, obviously, just at the beginning of her speech in the Senate Chamber. The first thing I heard distinctly was that the N.R.P. was a total failure, and worse, a public scandal.
“I speak at a critical moment,” she said. “News has just reached us that in Outer Mongolia there are two men capable of perpetuating the human race. Now I do not begrudge the Communists the right to continue, but think what it would mean if the world were swarming with Communistic Mongols?”
She smiled, and paused so that her listeners would have time for the picture to sink in. “Our most critical and vital resource,” she went on, “is one man—Mr. Adam. And what has the Administration done about Mr. Adam?
“The Administration is apparently unaware of the fact that people are dying every day, and nobody is being born—at least here in the United States. We don’t know how many are being born in Russia. Not only has the N.R.P. failed to promote the conception of a single baby—although it has been provided with unlimited funds—but it has as yet announced no definite plans for utilizing Mr. Adam.”
Not only that, Fay continued, but the Administration had allowed Mr. Adam to consort with a number of women. She herself had seen Mr. Adam drinking with a notorious actress. She understood, “from the highest military authorities,” that there was a woman living with Mr. Adam even now.
She said she very much regretted being forced to expose this scandalous state of affairs. She was not one to interfere in anyone’s private life. However, this was a matter of transcendent importance to the nation, and it was particularly important to the nation’s womanhood. Was the eternal hope of motherhood to be forever condemned by the soiled politicians who, for the time being, composed the Administration clique?
Marge said, “Stephen, isn’t this awful!”
“No,” I said. “I think it’s wonderful. Wait until people find out that the woman with whom he is living is only his wife.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
“Don’t be silly.”
N.R.P. was nothing more or less than a gigantic boondoggle, Fay told us, and a swindle. Mr. Adam was being allowed to run wild on the taxpayers’ money. She began to go into details. She mentioned “a woman known as The Frame, whole real name is Kitty Ruppe, and whose screen name is Kathy Riddell.”
“I think she’s catty,” Marge said. “She’s just jealous. I’d never vote for her.”
“In her state,” I pointed out, “there are more men than women. Otherwise she’d never have been elected in the first place.”
Fay began to talk about tete-à-tete in the Footlight Club. It occurred to me that Mr. Adam’s movements had been pretty closely watched, and when I pieced this together with her reference to “high military authorities,” I could smell Phelps-Smythe.
The television’s eye shifted so that it encompassed the whole Senate Chamber. An announcer’s voice said, “The Senate Chamber, which was almost empty when Senator Knott began to speak, has been rapidly filling.” You could see that was true, and I recognized several members of the House standing in the background, a certain indication that this was the day’s main attraction on Capitol Hill.
The announcer said that Senator Knott had yielded the floor to Senator Frogham, and immediately Frogham’s face, jowls hanging down like a tired bloodhound, appeared on our screen. He started off by saying that he was shaken by his colleague’s revelations, although hardly entirely surprised. “This is a terrible blow at our democratic and capitalistic system. What’s going to happen to free enterprise and everything? How can we tell our school children they can grow up to be President when there aren’t any school children?” He suggested that the Senate form a committee to investigate the N.R.P., with Senator Knott as chairman.
Senator Knott reappeared, and said it had been a mistake to take Mr. Adam out of the hands of the military in the first place, and that she was sure that there was sabotage, “probably inspired by a foreign power,” within the N.R.P.
I shut her off and climbed out of Smith Field. “Where are you going?” Marge asked.
“We’re going to Florida. I just resigned.”
“Oh, no you didn’t,” Marge said. “You’re not going to let a bunch of politicians chase you out of your job. Remember, there are a lot of people depending on you—Maria, and Thompson, and poor Mr. Adam. You can’t just run away and leave Mr. Adam in this mess.”
I put on my trousers. The telephone rang, Marge answered it, and said it was Mr. Gableman, for me. “Tell him I’m not in. Tell him I just had apoplexy.”
“Stephen,” Marge said sweetly into the telephone, “wants me to tell you that he’s not in or he has just had apoplexy.”
I took the telephone and said, “It’s me, Smith. I quit.”
“Oh, you heard about it,” said Gableman. “Well, you can’t quit now while we’re under fire. That’s the worst possible thing to do. That’s what starts an organization disintegrating. Anyway, what’s the dope? We’ve got to get out a press release, fast. Who’s the woman staying with Adam?”
“His wife.”
“His wife!” I could hear Gableman sigh. “Why, that’s not bad! That’s not bad at all. But what about this tomato, The Frame?”
“Purely platonic,” I lied. “It just turns out that they’re both interested in archeology.”
“Even if that’s true, which I doubt, we’re not going to say anything about it,” said Gableman. “We will just give out a simple, dignified statement that Mr. and Mrs. Adam are living together. That’ll create sympathy, and it’ll make Knott seem like a gossipy bitch. But what about The Frame?”
“You don’t have to worry about her,” I told him, “because her studio doesn’t want her to get involved. They know it would be bad box office.”
“Well, then, there’s hardly anything to worry about at all. It will all blow over in a couple of days.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“We’ll ride this out, all right, but you’d better come on back right away.”
Suddenly I thought of Mary El
len, and Adam, and Jane Zitter, and I wondered what was going on in suite 5-F, and whether Mary Ellen had scalped Homer by now, and whether he had confessed, and what the Knott blast would do to his nerves. “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll get out to La Guardia and catch the first plane.”
Marge said, “Thank goodness, you aren’t ducking your responsibilities.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I’m just curious.”
Marge helped me fix my tie. “Darling,” she said, “won’t you try some of Tommy Thompson’s tonic, or whatever it is? I do wish you would try something because I do want you to be the father of my children.”
“Preposterous!” I told her. “There are probably a thousand varieties of snake oil being consumed all over the world, and none of them are going to do any good. Your only chance of becoming a mother is for Homer to be the papa, unless, of course, it is true about the two Mongolians, and the Russians agree to share them with us. And when you consider how many women there are in the world, I don’t think your chances are very good. Honestly I don’t.”
“I am going to have a baby,” Marge said. “I am, I am!”
CHAPTER 8
On the Washington plane I sat next to a man who said his name was Seymour Foreman, and that he was in real estate in Hartford. He asked me if I’d heard the news and I said I had. He said it was a terrible state of affairs, and that by God he was going to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing. He complained that now that he was able to get building materials in quantity, and architects could let their imagination run in designing new and smart low-cost homes, nobody wanted to build houses any more. “It is this way,” he explained: “People don’t build houses for themselves. They build for their children. And if they’re not having any more children they’re not having any more new homes. I don’t see why Washington doesn’t lash this Adam down and at least start token production.”
I told him, logically I thought, that Adam was like an oil well. You had to be very patient and careful in bringing in the well, else the production might gush for only a short time, and then stop altogether. By practising conservation, the future of the race could be assured. This was particularly important when you considered that research was going forward to utilize all Mr. Adam’s capabilities, instead of A.I. being forced to use the present wasteful methods.
That was all right, Foreman pointed out, but meanwhile the real estate and construction business was getting shaky. If he were in automobiles, or washing machines, or drug stores, or haberdasheries it would be different. Some businesses were not affected. But who wanted to invest in an apartment house when there was a good chance that two generations hence it would be inhabited solely by the rats, and a few surviving octogenarians? The trouble with real estate, there wasn’t any future in it.
I said, “Mr. Foreman, that is the whole point. If we don’t handle Mr. Adam properly, there will be anarchy.”
“Well,” he growled, “Washington had better get on the ball, or there won’t be a businessman in the United States—big or little—who will support the Administration in the next elections.”
“What difference will that make?” I inquired. “The Republicans are just as sterile as the Democrats. The only solution is to make A.I. work.”
Mr. Foreman looked at me sharply, as if he had not really seen me before. “Do you work for the government?” he asked.
“Yes,” I admitted. “Temporarily.”
“Do you know anybody in the N.R.P.?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you better tell them the public is damned sick and tired of this fooling around. Now you take my daughter. She graduates from college this year, and majored in Home Economics. Boy, is she mad!”
In seventy minutes I learned a good many things I hadn’t realized before about how things had gone since W.S. Day. For instance, practically nobody was getting married, but lots of people were living together. Manufacturers of baby shoes, in Massachusetts, had already closed down, and the toy business was acknowledged on the rocks. The Hays Office, in Hollywood, had banned all reference to motherhood, or babies, as being too painful a subject to portray on the screen. Fanny Brice, in the interests of good taste, abandoned her radio role of Baby Snooks. The school teachers had formed an association, looking towards the future, to concentrate on adult education. Harvard University was spending several millions to gather a compendium of all man’s knowledge, and bury it in time capsules, in case A.I. failed, Darwin was right, and man would again evolve from some lower species. The undertakers seemed to have the only business with a future.
Eight-column banner headlines greeted me in Washington. They all said the same thing—“ADAM LIVING WITH WIFE!”—which showed that within a few hours the shrewd Gableman had managed to counteract Fay Knott’s blast in the Senate. But apprehension harried me until I entered the Adam suite in the Shoreham.
When I rang the ball Jane opened the door a crack, and then released a chain latch. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Reporters. Photographers. In regiments.”
“Did you let them in?”
“Sure. I didn’t want them to pound the place into splinters. No interviews, though. I told them any official statement would have to come from either you or Mr. Gableman. Just pictures.”
“What kinds of pictures?”
“Chummy pictures. Pictures of Homer and Mary Ellen together.”
“Doing what?”
“Oh, in the kitchen washing dishes—she washing and him drying; and Mary Ellen sitting on the side of a chair while he read; and playing gin rummy—all sort of homelike.”
I kissed Jane on the nose. Jane’s nose isn’t quite sure what part of her face it ought to grace, but at that moment it seemed beautiful. There is nothing like a nice, chummy picture to drive the snakes of scandal out of the home. “You’re a smart girl,” I said, “and the Civil Service Commission shall hear about this, in an expurgated version, and the first thing you know you will have your classification raised.”
“That’s wonderful,” Jane said.
“How’s Mary Ellen taking it? What has she done to Adam?”
“It’s amazing,” Jane said. “It’s positively amazing. She didn’t do a thing to him. She just said she thought she understood, and that so far as she was concerned she knew it was strictly archeological, and he shouldn’t worry about it. They’re in the kitchen now, having a drink.”
I went into the little kitchenette, one of those hotel affairs with a lot of glasses, very few plates, and hardly any silver. There they were, as Jane said, having a drink. But Homer was about as relaxed as a high tension wire, and he was holding his glass as if he were afraid it would jump out of his hand. Conversely, Mary Ellen appeared unworried and gay. She was wearing a starched, cotton something that was so perfect you wanted to surround her with cellophane and put her on the back cover of a magazine as the happy wife with vacuum cleaner.
“Hello, Steve,” Homer said, keeping his eyes on the floor.
“Hello, Steve,” said Mary Ellen. “I was just telling Homer he shouldn’t worry. All big men have this sort of thing happen to them. Look at Lincoln. They maligned him, too. I do think Homer is Lincolnesque, don’t you, Steve?”
“Sure,” I said, “at least.”
“He shouldn’t let this thing worry him. It’s all politics, isn’t it Steve?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said. I kept wondering what was going on in her head, back of the wide-set gray eyes.
Homer lifted his head, started to speak, thought better of it, and gulped at his drink instead. I knew what Homer was thinking. He was a convulsive tangle of remorse, guilt, and downright fear. “Oh Lord,” he managed finally, “I wish I was like other men.”
“Other men,” I said gallantly, “wish they were like you.”
“I want to speak to Steve alone for a moment,” Mary Ellen said. “You don’t mind, Homer?”
“Oh, no, certainly not,” Homer said, and he went out of the kitchenette faster than
I had ever seen him move before.
Mary Ellen didn’t speak immediately. She whirled the ice in her glass, lit a fresh cigarette, and then looked at me directly a few seconds with those level gray eyes. I recognized the look. I’ve had it from Marge a few times. It is grim business. “It was pretty lucky for the N.R.P. that I happened to be in Washington, here with Homer, when this thing blew up in the Senate today,” she said. “Or did you plan it that way?”
“Who do you think I am, Machiavelli, Junior?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you didn’t encourage Homer to run around with that girl just to get his mind off the responsibilities of his home, so he’d go quietly when you were ready to lead him to the slaughter.”
I had to know how much she knew. “Exactly what do you think went on between Homer and Kathy Riddell?” I asked.
“I think I can tell you exactly,” Mary Ellen said calmly. “I think she seduced him—probably only once—after very careful preparation.”
“Did Homer tell you that?”
“Certainly not! And if he started to tell me about it I wouldn’t let him, because if he ever told me I’d have to give him up. And that I am not going to do!” I knew she meant it. “Poor Homer,” she continued, “is transparent as that window pane. He’s so honest, and decent, and gentle, and kind that when he tries to lie you just have to feel sorry for him. Why I knew—the first night I got here. He told me about this Kathy—and her archeology—and how nice it was to meet someone with mutual interests, and asked me whether I minded.”
“You knew?”
“Certainly I knew. Women always know, although most times they won’t even admit it to themselves, and they try to tell themselves that there is a chance they’re mistaken, and they don’t want to make any false accusations. They do that because their husband’s infidelity presents a problem they’re afraid of facing. They’d rather pretend it didn’t happen. They’re weak. I’m not.”