“There is something terribly wrong here.”
“You can say that again.”
“But why should I repeat it?”
“Oh, go fly a kite!” He put up a quick hand to stop her question. “I know, I know—what is a kite? Don’t ask.” Owen shook his head in bewilderment. “This is one crazy place! No organization all the way down the line. Honey, if the President heard about this town, he’d blow a gasket and send in the marines.” Owen gave a despairing wave of hand. “Around this town, the war effort is going to hell in a bucket. Hitler must be laughing in his sleep.”
She said, “I need to know more about you.”
“Let’s both start over again.” And he reached for her breast identification.
She ^stepped away from his hand. “Stop that. You are not supposed to touch me. Do you remember your name?”
“Owen Hall.”
“And you are twenty-eight?”
“Sure am.”
“When did you cease being twenty-eight?”
He said, “When the—” and came up short, astonished at her question and at his attempt to answer. “When—” She prodded. “When what?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed after a long minute of introspection. “I just don’t know. I thought I knew, but when I tried to say it, I lost it. I really don’t know.”
“Think about it.” She watched him carefully.
Owen poked about in the black cavern that used to be his memory. He pried and teased the blackness, searching for any familiar thing. After a long while something moved in the cavern, some vague object having almost familiar lines, and he tried to focus on it. Concentration: it was an automobile! More than that, it was a specific automobile, and he thought he knew it. Owen studied the harder and watched the vehicle take shape with an agonizing slowness.
“A truck! It’s a nineteen forty Ford panel job. I see it!” “What is that object?”
“I drove a nineteen forty Ford panel job—that’s a truck with paneled sides. You ride in it, haul things in it.” “Did you haul things in it?”
“Well, of course I—”
He peered hard at the new memory, trying to see and recognize the load in the truck. There was nothing to reward him, nothing beyond those vague but recognizable lines of a Ford panel job. Owen couldn’t even peer inside the cab; he was unable to ascertain who was driving the truck. It was a most frustrating memory.
“I can’t see anything more,” he said ruefully.
“Are you connected with the truck?”
“I think I owned it. I guess I drove it.”
“Do you remember anything before the door? Before you came through the green door this morning?”
“Nope, nothing at all. That old bat just shoved me through it. Lordy, she was drunk!”
# “And you don’t know the location of that door?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
“Where will you spend the night?”
That gave him pause. “Well, I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought about that.” Owen scanned the roadside, looking first along the row houses and then away to the empty prairie. “You got any park benches around here?” “What is a park bench?”
A dismal nod. “That’s what I thought—I could see it coming. Honeybee, whatever happened to Indiana? The one I used to live in?”
“Is Indiana a town? I don’t know that name.”
“Ah, skip it. You don’t know any more than I don’t know. Me and Sam Bass, we come from Indiana.”
The woman said briskly, “You are instructed to come to my house tonight. You cannot be permitted to roam around and you must have a place to sleep. Do you fully understand me? It is important that you understand me.” Owen’s jaw dropped. “Do you really mean that?” “Certainly. You have to sleep somewhere indoors. You will stay overnight with me while I attempt to correct your flaws. You have been improperly reconstructed.”
Owen stole a glance at the men riding nearby. “Won’t people talk?”
“Talk about what?”
“Honey, this sure as hell ain’t Indiana!”
“Do you clearly understand what I am saying? There must be no more confusion. I insist upon orderliness.”
“I read you, baby doll, I read you. Your house tonight —I’ll be there with bells on.”
“Bells aren’t necessary.”
The tall blonde gave Owen a metallic plate about the size of a business card. He moved his thumb across it, inwardly pleased with his newfound reading skill. The plate repeated the legend he’d already read on her steel bar, and immediately below that line was another, bearing a house number—at least, he guessed it was the number to one of the doors along the rolling road.
The wonderment was still in his voice. “Gotcha! And you want me to spend the night with you.?”
“Precisely that. It has become necessary. I want to examine you in detail. There is more than a suspicion that you are incomplete. Your present behavior isn’t normal and needs correcting.” Again she bent down to study the pupils of his eyes. “Do you understand me? Do you read my number? Are my instructions clear?”
Owen returned the study with a keen interest. Her face and her freckle were so close he wanted to stand up on his toes and kiss one or the other, but caution stopped him. A rash act now might spoil the night to come.
“Honeybee, I’ve memorized your number. I know what to do, believe me—I’m no tenderfoot. I’ll watch out for a jug, and maybe I can teach you to dance.”
“Obey your previous instructions,” the woman said. “Report to my house when you are dismissed from work.” The tall pink warden left him without a further word, swinging off the road to take up a stance on somebody’s walk before a door. She crossed her arms and began studying the zombies as they rolled by, watching over them like a guardian or a traffic policeman eyeing drivers.
Owen turned around and watched her out of sight. Her pink-clad figure was magnificent. After a while he pulled himself from an anticipatory dream and found himself staring into the face of a workman riding the road.
The man stared blankly at him, seemingly unaware of his existence.
“You poor sap,” Owen said. “The trouble with you is, you’re all there. Know what I mean?”
The workman hung his head to stare at his feet.
Three
Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a
man is composed info a kind of real harmony, the instant
he sets himself to work.
—Thomas Carlyle
The dullards were leaving the road. They dropped off in twos and threes, in groups of a dozen or more, and at one point nearly a hundred of them quit the roadway together. They knew their destinations.
The endless row of houses with painted doors had given way to an endless row of industrial buildings with open doors—to factories, or warehouses, or chewing gum sweatshops for all Owen knew. There were no neon signs or billboards to advertise their wares, there was nothing to suggest a product, and the drab buildings may have housed arsenals, foundries, power stations, or tin mines. Some one of those featureless buildings may have turned out the rolling road, while the building next door may have manufactured the invisible wheels or the air jets to keep the road moving. Owen’s nose failed to detect the scent of a brewery or a distillery.
Every man, every group stepped off the rolling road and vanished through some doorway, not to emerge again. They plodded to work as lifelessly as walking matchsticks. Owen Hall thought it wise to practice safety in numbers: he followed the hundred men through an oversized doorway, while yet others left the road and followed him.
A factory, Owen decided. An outsized factory.
In that first curious look around the place he saw what appeared to be hundreds of machines of totally alien design, machines geared to produce some product that was equally alien. His long years of reading Amazing Mechanics magazines failed to provide him with a clue. There were no scraps of anything on the floors t
o hint at the product and no stockpiles of raw materials at hand waiting to be fashioned into something. He found no sawdust or oil drippings. There was nothing—nothing but the bulky machines aligned row upon row along wide aisles, reaching from one end of the building to the other. The machines hulked over the workmen in monolithic masses with the topsides reaching almost to the roof of the factory.
Owen didn’t think the factory manufactured snoods or hairnets for the pink ladies.
The incoming workmen pushed past him, ignoring him, and scattered throughout the building to take up positions before the machines. Each man chose his own machine with a ready familiarity and stood before it, staring at it, awaiting some instruction or signal. There was no talking between them and they appeared to wait without interest or motion, prepared to stand and stare forever if need be.
“I give up on you guys—I just give up.” Owen addressed the nearest worker, a balding fellow who would not answer back. “Not one of you—not one of you has got sense enough to pour beer out of a boot. What kind of a union you got here, anyway?”
The workmen silently studied their machines.
Owen walked a hundred feet along the nearest aisle until he judged he was at about the center of the building.
“Hey! Is anybody home?” His shout echoed about the cavernous walls.
The soulless workmen didn’t turn to stare at the dis-tractor or cover their ears to close out his shouting. They did nothing but stolidly stand and wait.
“Where’s the boss? Where’s the union steward?”
The zombies studied the massive machinery.
Owen cupped his hands to make a megaphone.
“Fire!”
The zombies were unimpressed.
Another shout: “All right, everybody out! We’re going out on strike. Everybody to the picket lines!”
The workmen declined to strike.
Owen uttered a discouraging word.
A whistle shrilled somewhere in the depths of the cavernous factory, and the zombies obediently moved. They bellied up to their machines and leaned against them, resting their foreheads against them, and seemed to go to sleep. That was all. Owen was thunderstruck. No wheels, turned, no gears clanked or whirred, no motors raced or strained under a load. Each ,man appeared to be asleep standing up, using his machine as a kind of pillow. Owen had to admit that was a pretty good job to latch onto—of course, a stool would be handy when a man got tired.
He turned around, seeking the whistler. A sudden flash of pink—baby pink—was glimpsed in the distance, and he knew what was coming. His third encounter of the morning and the day was still young. The woman came along the aisle on the run, panting with the unaccustomed exertion. A whistle dangled from a cord about her neck.
“Who did that?” she demanded.
“Who did what?” -
“Who shouted?”
“Me, Owen Hall. I’ll shout at anybody.” He didn’t bother to explain the President’s Four Freedoms.
“What is the matter here? Why did you raise your voice? Why aren’t you working?”
“Which answer do you want first?”
“Be quiet!”
“Well, now, Granny, make up your mind.”
Owen inspected the newcomer, but he wasn’t impressed. This specimen of the pink squad was a distinct disappointment, and he didn’t try to conceal that judgment; this one was a far cry from the attractive traffic warden, and again removed from the drunken woman of the doorway. This was a much older woman than any he’d seen thus far. She was gray haired, gray eyed, gray skinned, and—he suspected—gray tempered. She was singularly straight up and down inside her coveralls and utterly without humor; she could qualify as somebody’s unkindly old grandmother. The woman was shortened or wizened with age, standing no taller than he did. Owen counted that a plus.
“We don’t raise our voices in here, man.” Her enunciation of man contained a built-in gibe.
“Grandmaw, except for you and me nobody in here has a voice.”
That brought a hostile frown to the gray forehead. She raised her hand to slap him, but changed her mind in mid-thought and instead jabbed at the identification bar pinned under his pocket flap. The bar was roughly pushed into his chest, but this time Owen had no desire to reciprocate.
“I might have known it. A new one.” The gray lips curled in scorn. “Didn’t they teach you manners?”
“Wh,at are manners?” he asked in secret delight. Grandmother managed a double take and Owen thought it as good, as meaningful as anything Franklin Pangborn had done on the screen.
“Who was your fabricator?”
“My what?”
“Who was responsible for you this morning?”
“Oh, you mean that crazy babe who kicked me out of the house. Well, now, she didn’t introduce herself. She was hitting the bottle, see, one of the kind who booze it up and then want to fight. Lousy drinker. Stingy, too—she kept it all to herself.” Owen clucked his disapprobation. “But don’t worry, Granny, I’ve got another date tonight.” “You have a what?”
“A place to sleep, a bed warmer.” Owen fished out of his pocket and handed over the metallic business card the traffic warden had given him. “This dolly told me to come to her place tonight. I think she’s going to give me the works.”
“I should hope so,” the gray lady retorted. She read the card with her thumb and gave it back to Owen. “It is obvious that you are flawed.”
“That’s what people keep telling me. They want me to be like the rest of these stiffs.”
“Close your mouth and come with me.”
Owen closed his mouth and followed the gray woman along the aisle to an unattended machine. In the next five minutes he was introduced to the production line and it was confounding.
The machine itself was a monstrous, hulking thing the size of a highway truck—two trucks, when one considered the height, with one truck stacked atop the other and the whole nearly reaching to the factory roof. Almost all the working parts were concealed from view behind the casing, hiding any wheels and gears from curious eyes and at the same time preventing him or those mindless workmen from sticking their fingers into the works. The front face of the machine occupied the same position as the tailgate of the highway truck, and that face had the only visible working parts. There was a small window embedded in the face and a short row of push buttons below the window. A stainless steel bar was positioned above the window. The bar was about five inches wide and two inches high, of concave design, and set into the machine casing at the height of a man’s head.
Owen discovered that it was intended to receive a man’s head—his forehead.
Following the gray lady’s explicit instructions, he bellied up to the machine just as the other men had done, placed his forehead against the curved bar, and poised an index finger above the row of buttons, “Now what?”
“Visualize a slice of bacon.”
“Do what?” He turned around to stare.
She pushed his head against the machine. “Think bacon!”
Owen thought about a slice of bacon. When he had formed a complete picture in his mind, when he had visualized the image of a single slice of bacon fairly oozing with vitamins and protein and goodness, he pushed the first numbered button and the machine went into operation. A light blinked on inside the window and a little paper tray slid out of a side opening to position itself in the center of the working area. A single strip of bacon dropped down from somewhere overhead—from a height about equal to the steel bar where his forehead rested— and fell onto the tray. The machine waited.
Owen stepped back to stare at his handiwork. “Well, call me Chester White!”
“Don’t stop,” the woman snapped. “Continue the job. You haven’t completed the ration.”
“Say, that’s a damned good trick. How’d I do it?”
“It is reconstituted pork. You visualized it by memory and the production unit solidified the visualization.”
“Is it real b
acon? Edible?”
“Of course it is. Now follow my instructions. Keep on working.”
Again he bellied up to the machine and fitted his forehead into the concave bar to think bacon. Another slice as succulent as the first dropped from overhead. Owen kept at it until he had five tasty slices resting in the paper tray—a triumph of mind over matter. The bacon looked so good he was immediately hungry.
The woman said, “That is enough. Now wrap it.”
Pressing the number two button with a feeling of secret exhilaration, Owen watched through the window as a sheet of waxed paper spewed from the side opening, wrapped itself around the tray of bacon with an assist from a pair of mechanical fingers reaching down from above, and tidied up the package for someone’s breakfast in the morning.
“Dispatch it.”
He pushed the third button and the package was whisked out of sight. An empty tray slid into position and waited for the young creator’s next visualization.
“Neat, very neat. I didn’t even say shazam”
“Stop that noise. Talking isn’t permitted here. Continue working until the shift has ended.”
“You mean this is all I have to do?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
“Well, yeah, I guess so.”
“Then do it, and keep your mouth shut.”
The gray woman watched over his shoulder for the next several minutes, making certain he did a competent job. The product must have been satisfactory, since she said nothing more. He felt like a merchant prince.
Owen thought bacon, made bacon, wrapped bacon, and sent bacon on its way to some unknown place, five slices to the package. All of his bacon was of the finest quality, prime meat, because it had occurred to him that one of those packages might be his breakfast in the morning and he would surely be hungry if the charming pink-and-blonde creature lived up to her promise. Bacon fit for kings and queens fell from overhead—sprang from his forehead, in a manner of speaking—and filled the trays to be carried away. Owen admired the way the waxed paper appeared from nowhere and wrapped itself about the meat; he admired the dexterity of the slim mechanical fingers that reached down from above to finish the packaging. Owen recognized those fingers as a form of waldoes. They’d been invented by the same man who invented the rolling road, and both inventions were duly reported in the science-wonder magazines.
Ressurection Days Page 3