Why not? Why not?
But I can’t. Maybe I like to suffer. I’ve liked to inflict suffering, and according to what I understand, those who like to inflict, unconsciously hope to be inflicted upon.
No, that can’t be it. At least, not all of it. My main reason for hanging on to the recs is that I don’t want to lose my identity. A major part of me, a unique person, is not in the neurons of my mind, where it belongs, but in an electromechanical device or in tracings of lead or ink on paper. The protein, the flesh for which I owe, can’t hang on to me.
I’m becoming less and less, dwindling away, like the wicked witch on whom Dorothy poured water. I’ll become a puddle, a wailing voice of hopeless despair, and then . . . nothing.
God, haven’t I suffered enough! I said I owe for the flesh and I’m down in Your books. Why do I have to struggle each day against becoming a dumb brute, a thing without memory? Why not rid myself of the struggle? Press the button, fill the wastebasket, discharge my grief in a chaos of magnetic lines and-pulped paper?
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
I didn’t realize, Lord, what that really meant.
10
I will marry Carole in three days. No, I would have. No, I did.
I remember reading a collection of Krazy Kat comic strips when I was twenty-one. One was captioned: COMA REIGNS. Coconing County was in the doldrums, comatose. Nobody, Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, Officer Pupp, nobody had the energy to do anything. Mouse was too lazy even to think about hurling his brickbat. Strange how that sticks in my mind. Strange to think that it won’t be long before it becomes forever unstuck.
Coma reigns today over the world.
Except for Project Toro, the TV says. And that is behind schedule. But the Earth, Ignatz Mouse, will not allow itself to forget that it must hurl the brickbat, the asteroid. But where Ignatz expressed his love, in a queer perverted fashion, by banging Kat in the back of the head with his brick, the world is expressing its hatred, and its desperation, by throwing Toro at The Ball.
I did manage today to go downtown to my appointment. I did it only to keep from going mad with grief. I was late, but Chief Moberly seemed to expect that I would be. Almost everybody is, he said. One reason for my tardiness was that I got lost. This residential area was nothing in 1968 but a forest out past the edge of town. I don’t have a car, and the house is in the middle of the area, which has many winding streets. I do have a map of the area, which I forgot about. I kept going eastward and finally came to a main thoroughfare. This was Route 98, over which I’ve traveled many times since I was a child. But the road itself and the houses along it, were strange. The private airport which should have been across the road was gone, replaced by a number of large industrial buildings.
A big sign near a roofed bench told me to wait there for the RTS bus. One would be along every ten minutes, the sign stated.
I waited an hour. The bus, when it came, was not the fully automated vehicle promised by the sign. It held a sleepy-looking driver and ten nervous passengers. The driver didn’t ask me for money, so I didn’t offer any. I sat down and watched him with an occasional look out of the window. He didn’t have a steering wheel. When he wanted the bus to slow down or stop he pushed a lever forward. To speed it up, he pulled back on the lever. The bus was apparently following a single aluminum rail in the middle of the right-hand lane. My recs told me later that the automatic pilot and door-opening equipment had never been delivered and probably wouldn’t be for some years—if ever. The grand plan of cybernating everything possible had failed. There aren’t enough people who can provide the know-how or the man-hours. In fact, everything is going to hell.
The police chief, Adam Moberly, is fifty years old and looks as if he’s sixty-five. He talked to me for about fifteen minutes and then had me put through a short physical and intelligence test. Three hours after I had walked into the station, I was sworn in. He suggested that I room with two other officers, one of whom was a sixty-year-old veteran, in the hotel across the street from the station. If I had company, I’d get over the morning disorientation more quickly. Besides, the policemen who lived in the central area of the city got preferential treatment in many things, including the rationed supplies.
I refused to move. I couldn’t claim that my house was a home to me, but I feel that it’s a link to the past, I mean the future, no, I mean the past. Leaving it would be cutting out one more part of me.
True date: late 1984. Subjective date: early 1967
My mother died today. That is, as far as I’m concerned, she did. The days ahead of me are going to be full of anxiety and grief. She took a long time to die. She found out she had cancer two weeks after my father died. So I’ll be voyaging backward in sorrow through my mother and then through my father, who was also sick for a long time.
Thank God I won’t have to go through every day of that, though. Only a third of them. And these are the last words I’m going to record about their illnesses.
But how can I not record them unless I make a recording reminding me not to do so?
I found out from my recs how I’d gotten this big scar on my face. Myrna’s ex-husband slashed me before I laid him out with a big ashtray. He was shipped off this time to a hospital for the criminally insane where he died a few months later in the fire that burned every prisoner in his building. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to
Myrna after that. Apparently I decided not to record it.
I feel dead tired tonight, and, according to my recs, every night. It’s no wonder, if every day is like today. Fires, murders, suicides, accidents and insane people. Babies up to fourteen years old abandoned. And a police department which is ninety percent composed, in effect, of raw rookies. The victims are taken to hospitals where the nurses are only half-trained, if that, and the doctors are mostly old geezers hauled out of retirement.
I’m going to bed soon even if it’s only nine o’clock. I’m so exhausted that even Jayne Mansfield couldn’t keep me awake. And I dread tomorrow. Besides the usual reasons for loathing it, I have one which I can hardly stand thinking about.
Tomorrow my memory will have slid past the day I met Carole. I won’t remember her at all.
Why do I cry because I’ll be relieved of a great sorrow?
11
True date: 1986. Subjective date: 1962
I’m nuts about Jean, and I’m way down because I can’t find her. According to my recs, she went to Canada in 1965. Why? We surely didn’t fall in and then out of love? Our love would never die. Her parents must’ve moved to Canada. And so here we both are in 1962, in effect. Halfway in 1962, anyway. Amphibians of time. Is she thinking about me now? Is she unable to think about me, about anything, because she’s dead or crazy? Tomorrow I’ll start the official wheels grinding. The Canadian government should be able to find her through the International Information Computer Network, according to the recs. Meanwhile, I burn, though with a low flame. I’m so goddamn tired.
Even Marilyn Monroe couldn’t get a rise out of me tonight. But Jean. Yeah, Jean. I see her as seventeen years old, tall, slim but full-busted, with creamy white skin and a high forehead and huge blue eyes and glossy black hair and the most kissable lips ever. And broadcasting sex waves so thick you can see them, like heat waves.
Wow!
And so tired old Wow goes to bed.
February 6, 1987
While I was watching TV to get orientated this morning, a news flash interrupted the program. The president of the United States had died of a heart attack a few minutes before.
“My God!” I said. “Old Eisenhower is dead!”
But the picture of the president certainly wasn’t that of Eisenhower. And the name was one I never heard, of course.
I can’t feel bad for a guy I never knew.
I got to thinking about him, though. Was he as confused every morning as I was? Imagine a guy waking up, thinking he’s a senator in Washington and then he finds he’s the president? At le
ast, he knows something about running the country. But it’s no wonder the old pump conked out. The TV says we’ve had five prexies, mostly real old guys, in the last seven years. One was shot; one dived out of the White House window onto his head; two had heart attacks; one went crazy and almost caused a war, as if we didn’t have grief enough, for crying out loud.
Even after the orientation, I really didn’t get it. I guess I’m too dumb for anything to percolate through my dome.
A policeman called and told me I’d better get my ass down to work. I said I didn’t feel up to it, besides, why would I want to be a cop? He said that if I didn’t show, I might go to jail. So I showed.
True date: late 1988. Subject date: 1956
Here I am, eleven years old, going on ten.
In one way, that is. The other way, here I am forty-three and going on about sixty. At least, that’s what my face looks like to me.
Sixty.
This place is just like a prison except some of us get treated like trusties. According to the work chart, I leave through the big iron gates every day at twelve noon with a demolition crew. We tore down five partly burned houses today. The gang chief, old Rogers, says it’s just WPA work, whatever that is. Anyway, one of the guys I work with kept looking more and more familiar. Suddenly, I felt like I was going to pass out. I put down my sledgehammer and walked over to him, and I said, “Aren’t you Stinky Davis?”
He looked funny and then he said, “Jesus! You’re Gabby! Gabby Franham!”
I didn’t like his using the Lord’s name in vain, but I guess he can be excused.
Nothing would’ve tasted good the way I felt, but the sandwiches we got for breakfast, lunch and supper tasted like they had a dash of oil in them. Engine oil, I mean. The head honcho, he’s eighty if he’s a day, says his recs tell him they’re derived from petroleum. The oil is converted into a kind of protein and then flavoring and stuff is added. Oil-burgers, they call them.
Tonight, before lights-out, we watched the prez give a speech. He said that, within a month, Project Toro will be finished. One way or the other. And all this memory loss should stop. I can’t quite get it even if I was briefed this morning. Men on the moon, unmanned ships on Venus and Mars, all since I was eleven years old. And The Ball, the thing from outer space. And now we’re pushing asteroids around. Talk about your science fiction!
12
September 4, 1988
Today’s the day.
Actually, the big collision’ll be tomorrow, ten minutes before 1:00 A.M. . . but I think of it as today. Toro, going 150,000 miles an hour, will run head-on into The Ball. Maybe.
Here I am again, Mark Franham, recording just in case The Ball does dodge out of the way and I have to depend on my recs. It’s 7:00 P.M. and after that raunchy supper of oil-burgers, potato soup and canned carrots, fifty of us gathered around set No. 8. There’s a couple of scientists talking now, discussing theories about just what The Ball is and why it’s been taking our memories away from us. Old Doctor Charles Presley—any relation to Elvis?—thinks The Ball is some sort of unmanned survey ship.
When it finds a planet inhabited by sentient life, sentient means intelligent, it takes specimens. Specimens of the mind, that is. It unpeels people’s minds four days’ worth at a time, because that’s all it’s capable of. But it can do it to billions of specimens. It’s like it was reading our minds but destroying the mind at the same time. Presley said it was like some sort of Heisenberg principle of the mind. The Ball can’t observe our memories closely without disturbing them.
This Ball, Presley says, takes our memories and stores them. And when it’s through with us, sucked us dry, it’ll take off for another planet circling some far-off star. Someday, it’ll return to its home planet, and the scientist there will study the recordings of our minds.
The other scientist, Dr. Marbles—he’s still got his, ha! ha!—asked why any species advanced enough to be able to do this could be so callous? Surely, the extees must know what great damage they’re doing to us. Wouldn’t they be too ethical for this?
Doc Presley says maybe they think of us as animals, they are so far above us. Doc Marbles says that could be. But it could also be that whoever built The Ball have different brains than we do. Their mind-reading ray, or whatever it is, when used on themselves doesn’t disturb the memory patterns. But we’re different. The extees don’t know this, of course. Not now, anyway. When The Ball goes home, and the extees read our minds, they’ll be shocked at what they’ve done to us. But it’ll be too late then.
Presley and Marbles got into an argument about how the extees would be able to interpret their recordings. How could they translate our languages when they have no references—I mean, referents? How’re they going to translate chair and recs and rock and roll and yucky and so on when they don’t have anybody to tell them their meanings. Marbles said they wouldn’t have just words; they’d have mental images to associate with the words. And so on. Some of the stuff they spouted I didn’t understand at all.
I do know one thing, though, and I’m sure those big-domes do, too. But they wouldn’t be allowed to say it over TV because we’d be even more gloomy and hopeless-feeling. That is, what it right now the computers in The Ball are translating our languages, reading our minds, as they’re recorded? Then they know all about Project Toro. They’ll be ready for the asteriod, destroy it if they have the weapons to do it, or, if they haven’t, they’ll just move The Ball into a different orbit.
I’m not going to say anything to the other guys about this. Why make them feel worse?
“It’s ten o’clock now. According to regulations posted up all over the place, it’s time to go to bed. But nobody is. Not tonight. You don’t sleep when the End of the World may be coming up.
I wish my Mom and Dad were here. I cried this morning when I found they weren’t in this dump, and I asked the chief where they were. He said they were working in a city nearby, but they’d be visiting me soon. I think he lied.
Stinky saw me crying, but he didn’t say anything. Why should he? I’ll bet he’s shed a few when he thought nobody was looking, too.
Twelve o’clock. Midnight. Less than an hour to go. Then, the big smash! Or, I hate to think about it, the big flop. We won’t be able to see it directly because the skies are cloudy over most of North America. But we’ve got a system worked out so we can see it on TV. If there’s a gigantic flash when the Toro and The Ball collide, that is.
What if there isn’t? Then we’ll soon be just like those grown-up kids, some of them twenty years old, that they keep locked up in the big building in the northwest corner of this place. Saying nothing but Da Da or Ma Ma, drooling, filling their diapers. If they got diapers, because old Rogers says he heard, today, of course, they don’t wear nothing. The nurses come in once a day and hose them and the place down. The nurses don’t have time to change and wash diapers and give personal baths. They got enough to do just spoon-feeding them.
Three and a half more hours to go, and I’ll be just like them. Unless, before then, I flip, and they put me in that building old Rogers calls the puzzle factory. They’re all completely out of their skulls, he says, and even if memloss stops tonight, they won’t change any.
Old Rogers says there’s fifty million less people in the United States than there were in 1980, according to the recs. And a good thing, too, he says, because it’s all we can do to feed what we got.
Come on, Toro! You’re our last chance!
If Toro doesn’t make it, I’ll kill myself! I will! I’m not going to get myself become an idiot. Anyway, by the time I do become one, there won’t be enough food to go around for those that do have their minds. I’ll be starving to death. I’d rather get it over with now than go through that.
God’ll forgive me.
God, You know I want to be a minister of the gospel when I grow up and that I want to help people. I’ll marry a good woman, and we’ll have children that’ll be brought up right. And we’ll thank You every d
ay for the good things of life and battle the bad things.
Love, that’s what I got, Lord. Love for You and love for Your people. So don’t make me hate You. Guide Toro right into The Ball, and get us started on the right path again.
I wish Mom and Dad were here.
Twelve-thirty. In twenty minutes, we’ll know.
The TV says the H-bombs are still going off around The Ball.
The TV says the people on the East Coast are falling asleep. The rays, or whatever The Ball uses, aren’t being affected by the H-bombs radiation. But that doesn’t mean that its sensors aren’t. I pray to God that they are cut off.
Ten minutes to go. Toro’s got twenty-five thousand miles to go. Our sensors can’t tell whether or not The Ball’s still on its original orbit. I hope it is; I hope it is! If it’s changed its path, then we’re through! Done! Finished! Wiped out!
Five minutes to go; twelve thousand five hundred miles to go.
I can see in my mind’s eyes The Ball, almost half a mile in diameter, hurtling on its orbit, blind as a bat, I hope and pray, the bombs, the last of the five thousand bombs, flashing, and Toro, a mile and a half long, a mile wide, millions of tons of rock and nickel-steel, charging toward its destined spot.
If it is destined.
But space is big, and even The Ball and Toro are small compared to all that emptiness out there. What if the mathematics of the scientists is just a little off, or the rocket motors on Toro aren’t working just like they’re supposed to, and Toro just tears on by The Ball? It’s got to meet The Ball at the exact time and place, it’s just got to!
I wish the radars and lasers could see what’s going on.
Maybe it’s better they can’t. If we knew that The Ball had changed course . . . but this way we still got hope.
Strangeness Page 14