Antigrav : Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters

by Philip Strick

  ‘If so, maybe we could get them to act as speaking clocks.’

  He sounded crazier than ever. What trivial projects for one of the best brains in our century—no wonder he was on leave.

  ‘Blenheim, I’m busy. Institute work must go on, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Tell you what, why don’t you drop over this afternoon?

  I have something to talk over with you.’

  ‘Can’t. I have a meeting all afternoon.’

  ‘Fine, fine. See you, then. Anytime around 4:43.’

  Madmen never listen.

  Helmut Rasmussen came in just as Blenheim hung up. He seemed distressed. Not that his face showed it; ever since that bomb wrecked his office, Hel has been unable to move his face. Hysterical paralysis, Dr Grobe had explained.

  But Hel could signal whatever he felt by fiddling with the stuff in his shirt pocket. For anger, his red pencil came out (and sometimes underwent a savage sharpening), impatience made him work his slide rule, surprise made him glance into his pocket diary, and so on.

  Just now he was clicking the button on his ballpoint pen with some agitation. For a moment he actually seemed about to take it out and draw worry fines on his forehead.

  ‘What is it, Hel? The costing on Project Faith?’ He spread the schedules on my desk and pointed to the snag: a discrepancy between the estimated cost of blasting apart and hauling away the Rocky Mountains, and the value of oil recovered in the process.

  ‘I see. The trains, eh? Diesels seem to use most of the oil we get. How about steam locomotives, then?’

  He clapped me on the shoulder and nodded.

  ‘By the way, Hel, I won’t be at the meeting today. Blenheim just called up. Wants to see me.’

  Hel indicated surprise.

  ‘Look, I know he’s a crackpot. You don’t have to pocket-diary me, I know he’s nuts. But he is also technically still the Director. Our boss. They haven’t taken him off the payroll, just put him on sick leave. Besides, he used to have a lot of good ideas.’

  Hel took out a felt-tip pen and began to doodle with some sarcasm. The fact was, Blenheim had completely lost his grip during his last year at the Institute. Before the government forced him to take leave, he’d been spending half a million a year on developing, rumours said, glass pancakes. And who could forget his plan to arm police with chocolate revolvers?

  ‘Sure he’s had a bad time, but maybe he’s better now,’ I said, without conviction.

  Institute people never get better, Hel seemed to retort. They just kept on making bigger and better decisions, with more and more brilliance and finality, until they broke. Like glass pancakes giving out an ever purer ring, they exploded.

  It was true. Like everyone else here, I was seeing Dr Grobe, our resident psychiatrist, several times a week. Then there were cases beyond even the skill of Dr Grobe: Joe Feeney, who interrupted his work (on the uses of holograms) one day to announce that he was a filing cabinet. Edna Bessler, who believed that she was being pursued by a synthetic a priori proposition. The lovely entomologist Pawlie Sutton, who disappeared. And George Hoad, whose rocket research terminated when he walked into the Gents one day and cut his throat. George spent the last few minutes of consciousness vainly trying to mop up the bloody floor with toilet paper .. .

  Something was wrong with the personnel around this place, all right. And I suspected that our little six-legged masters knew more about this than they were saying.

  Finally I mumbled, ‘I know it’s useless, Hel. But I’d better find out what he wants.’

  You do what you think is best, Hel thought. He stalked out of my office then, examining the point on his red pencil.

  The bug was a cockroach, P. americana. It sauntered across the wall until it reached the curly edge of a wall poster, then it flew about a foot to land on the nearest dark spot. This was Uncle Sam’s right eye. Uncle Sam, with his accusing eyes and finger, was trying to recruit men for the Senate and House of Representatives. On this poster, he said, ‘The Senate Needs men’. So far, the recruitment campaign was a failure. Who could blame people for not wanting to go on the ‘firing line’ in Washington? The casualty rate of Congressmen was 30 per cent annually, and climbing, in spite of every security measure we could think of.

  Which reminded me of work. I scrubbed off the blackboard and started laying out a contingency tree for Project Pogo, a plan to make the whole cabinet—all one hundred and forty-three secretaries—completely mobile, hence, proof against revolution. So far the Security Secretary didn’t care for the idea of ‘taking to our heels’, but it was cheaper to keep the cabinet on the move than to guard them in Washington.

  The cockroach, observing my industry, left by a wall ventilator, and I breathed easier. The contingency tree didn’t look so interesting by now, and out the window I could see real trees.

  The lawn rolled away down from the building to the river (not the Orinoco, despite our name). The far bank was blueblack with pines, and the three red maples on our lawn, this time of year, stood out like three separate, brilliant fireballs. For just the duration of a bluejay’s flight from one to another, I could forget about the stale routine, the smell of chalkdust.

  I remembered a silly day three years ago, when I’d carved a heart on one of those trees, with Pawlie Sutton’s initials and my own. x '

  Now a security guard strolled his puma into view. They stopped under the nearest maple and he snapped the animal’s lead. It was up the trunk in two bounds, and out of sight among the leaves. While that stupid-faced man in uniform looked up, the fireball shook and swayed above him. A few great leaves fell, bright as drops of blood.

  Now what was this headache going to be about?

  All the big problems were solved, or at least we knew how to solve them. The world was just about the way we wanted it, now, except we no longer seemed to want it that way. That’s how Mr Howell, the Secretary of Personal Relationships, had put it in his telecast. What was missing? God, I think he said. God had made it possible for us to dam the Amazon and move the Orinoco, to feed India and dig gold from the ocean floor and cure cancer. And now God—the way he said it made you feel that He, too, was in the Cabinet—God was going to help us get down and solve our personal, human problems. Man’s inhumanity to man. The lack of communication. The hatred. God and Secretary Howell were going to get right down to some committee work on this. I think that was the telecast where Howell announced the introduction of detention camps for ‘malcontents’. Just until we got our personal problems all ironed out. I had drawn up the plans for these camps that summer. Then George Hoad borrowed my pocket-knife one day and never gave it back. Then the headaches started.

  As I stepped outside, the stupid-faced guard was looking up the skirt of another tree.

  ‘Prrt, prrt,’ he said quietly, and the black puma dropped to earth beside him. There was something hanging out of its mouth that looked like a bluejay’s wing.

  ‘Good girl. Good girl.’

  I hurried away to the helicopter.

  Drew Blenheim’s tumbledown mansion sits in the middle of withered woods. For half a mile around, the trees are laced together with high-voltage fence. Visitors are blindfolded and brought in by helicopter. There are also rumours of minefields and other security measures. At that time, I put it all down to Blenheim’s paranoia.

  The engine shut down with the sound of a coin spinning to rest. Hands helped me out and removed my blindfold. The first thing I saw, hanging on a nearby stretch of fence, was a lump of bones and burnt fur from some small animal. The guards and their submachine-guns escorted me only as far as the door, for Blenheim evidently hated seeing signs of the security he craved. The house looked dismal and decayed—the skull of some dead Orinoco Institute?

  A servant wearing burnt cork makeup and white gloves ushered me through a dim hallway that smelled of hay and on into the library.

  ‘I’ll tell Mr Blenheim you’re here, sir. Perhaps you’d care to read one of his monographs while you wait?’
r />   I flicked through The Garden of Regularity (a slight tract recommending that older people preserve intestinal health by devouring their own dentures) and opened an insanely boring book called Can Bacteria Read? I was staring uncomprehendingly at one of its pages when a voice said:

  ‘Are you still here?’ The plump old woman had evidently been sitting in her deep chair when I came in. As she craned around at me, I saw she had a black eye. Something was wrong with her hair, too. ‘I thought you’d left by now—oh, it’s you?

  ‘Madam, do I know you?’

  She sat forward and put her face to the light. The black eye was tattooed, and the marcelled hair was really a cap of paper, covered with wavy ink lines. But it was Edna Bessler, terribly aged.

  ‘You’ve changed, Edna.’

  ‘So would you, young man, if you’d been chased around a nuthouse for two years by "a synthetic a priori proposition.’ She sniffed. ‘Well, thank heavens the revolution is set for tomorrow.’

  I laughed nervously. ‘Well, Edna, it certainly is good to see you. What are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘There are quite a few of the old gang here, Joe Feeney and—and others. This place has become a kind of repair depot for mad futurologists. Blenheim is very kind, but of course he’s quite mad himself. Mad as a wet hen. As you see from his writing.’

  ‘Can Bacteria Read? I couldn’t read it.’

  ‘Oh, he thinks that germs are, like people, amenable to suggestion. So, with the proper application of mass hypnosis among the microbe populations, we ought to be able to cure any illness with any quack remedy.’

  I nodded. ‘Hope he recovers soon. I’d like to see him back at the Institute, working on real projects again. Big stuff, like the old days. I’ll never forget the old Drew Blenheim, the man who invented satellite dialling.’

  Satellite dialling came about when the malcontents were trying to jam government communications systems, cut lines and blow up exchanges. Blenheim’s system virtually made each telephone a complete exchange in itself, dialling directly through a satellite. Voice signals were compressed and burped skywards in short bursts that evaded most jamming signals. It was an Orinoco Institute triumph over anarchy.

  Edna chuckled. ‘Oh, he’s working on real projects. I said he was mad, not useless. Now if you’ll help me out of this chair, I must go fix an elephant.’

  I was sure I’d misheard this last. After she’d gone, I looked over a curious apparatus in the corner. Parts of it were recognizable—a clock inside a parrot cage, a gas laser, and a fringed shawl suspended like a flag from a walking-stick thrust into a watermelon—but their combination was baffling.

  At 4:43 by the clock in the cage, the blackface servant took me to a gloomy great hall place, scattered with the shapes of easy chairs and sofas. A figure in a diving suit rose from the piano and waved me to a chair. Then it sat down again, flipping out its airhoses behind the bench.

  For a few minutes I suffered through a fumbling version of some Mexican tune. But when Blenheim—no doubt it was he—stood up and started juggling oranges, I felt it was time to speak out.

  ‘Look, I’ve interrupted my work to come here. Is this all you have to show me?’

  One of the oranges vaulted high, out of sight in the gloom above; another hit me in the chest. The figure opened its faceplate and grinned. ‘Long time no see, Hank.’

  It was me.

  ‘Rubber mask,’ Blenheim explained, plucking at it. ‘I couldn’t resist trying it on you, life gets so tedious here. Ring for Rastus, will you? I want to shed this suit.’

  We made small talk while the servant helped him out of the heavy diving suit. Rather, Blenheim rattled on alone; I wasn’t feeling well at all. The shock of seeing myself had reminded me of something I should remember, but couldn’t.

  ‘... to build a heraldry vending machine. Put in a coin, punch out your name, and it prints a coat-of-arms. Should suit those malcontents, eh? All they probably really want is a coat-of-arms.’

  ‘They’re just plain evil,’ I said. ‘When I think how they bombed poor Hel Rasmussen’s office—’

  ‘Oh, he did that himself. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Suicide? So that explains the hysterical paralysis!’

  My face looked exasperated, as Blenheim peeled it off. ‘Is that what Dr Grobe told you? Paralysed hell, the blast blew his face clean off. Poor Hel’s present face is a solid plate of plastic, bolted on. He breathes through a hole in his shoulder and feeds himself at the armpit. If Grobe told you any different, he’s just working on your morale.’

  From upstairs came a kind of machine-gun clatter. The minstrel servant glided in with a tray of drinks.

  ‘Oh, Rastus. Tell the twins not to practice their tap-dancing just now, will you? Hank looks as if he has a headache.’

  ‘Yes sir. By the way, the three-legged elephant has arrived. I put it in the front hall. I’m afraid the prosthesis doesn’t fit.’

  ‘I’ll fix it. Just ask Jumbo to lean up against the wall for half an hour.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  After this, I decided to make my escape from this Bedlam.

  ‘Doesn’t anybody around here ever do anything straightforward or say anything in plain English?’

  ‘We’re trying to tell you something, Hank, but it isn’t easy. For one thing, I’m not sure we can trust you.’

  ‘Trust me for what?’

  His twisted face twisted out a smile. ‘If you don’t know, then how can we trust you? But come with me to the conservatory and I’ll show you something.’

  We went to a large room with dirty glass walls. To me it looked like nothing so much as a bombed-out workshop. Though there were bags of fertilizer on the floor, there wasn’t a living plant in sight. Instead, the tables were littered with machinery and lab equipment: jumbles of retorts and coloured wires and nuts and bolts that made no sense.

  ‘What do you see, Hank?’

  ‘Madness and chaos. You might as well have pears in the light sockets and a banana on the telephone cradle, for all I can make of it.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s better. We’ll crazify you yet.’

  I pointed to a poster-covered cylinder standing in the corner. One of the posters had Uncle Sam, saying ‘I Need men for Congress’.

  ‘What’s that Parisian advertising kiosk doing here?’

  ‘Rastus built that for us, out of scrap alloys I had lying around. Like it?’

  I shrugged. ‘The top’s too pointed. It looks like—’

  ‘Yes, go on.’

  ‘This is silly. All of you need a few sessions with Dr Grobe,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that. But it’s you who need another session with Dr Grobe, Hank.’

  ‘You think I’m crazy?’

  ‘No, you’re too damned sane.’

  ‘Well you sure as hell are nuts!’ I shouted. ‘Why bother with all the security outside? Afraid someone will steal the idea of a minstrel show or the secret of a kiosk?’

  He laughed again. ‘Hank, those guards aren’t there to keep strangers out. They’re to keep us in. You see, my house really and truly is a madhouse.’

  I stamped out a side door and ordered my helicopter.

  ‘My head’s killing me,’ I told the guard. ‘Take it easy with that blindfold.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, mac. Hey look, it’s none of my business, but what did you do with that tree you brung with you?’

  ‘Tree?’ God, even the guards were catching it.

  That evening I went to see Dr Grobe.

  ‘Another patient? I swear, I’m going to install a revolving door on this office. Sit down. Uh, Hank LaFarge, isn’t it? Sit down, Hank. Let’s see . . . oh, you’re the guy who’s afraid of cockroaches, right?’

  ‘Not exactly afraid of them. In fact they remind me of someone I used to be fond of. Pawlie Sutton used to work with them. But my problem is, I know that cockroaches are the real bosses. We’re just kidding ourselves with our puppet governme
nt, our Uncle Sham—’

  He chuckled appreciatively.

  ‘But what “bugs” me is, nobody will recognize this plain and simple truth, Doctor.’

  ‘Ah, ah. Remember last time, you agreed to call me by my first name.’

  ‘Sorry, uh, Oddpork.’ I couldn’t' imagine why anyone with that name wanted to be called by it, unless the doctor himself was trying to get used to it. He was an odd-pork of a man, too: plump and rumpy, with over-large hands that never stopped adjusting his already well-adjusted clothes. He always looked surprised at everything I said, even ‘hello’. Every session, he made the same joke about the revolving door.

  Still, repetitive jokes help build a family atmosphere, which was probably what he wanted. There was a certain comfort in this stale atmosphere of no surprises. Happy families are all alike, and their past is exactly like their future.

  ‘Hank, I haven’t asked you directly about your cockroach theory before, have I? Want to tell me about it?’

  ‘I know it sounds crazy at first. For one thing, cockroaches aren’t very smart, I know that. In some ways, they’re stupider than ants. And their communication equipment isn’t much, either. Touch and smell, mainly. They aren’t naturally equipped for conquering the world.’

  Oddpork lit a cigar and leaned back, looking at the ceiling ‘What do they do with the world when they get it?’

  ‘That’s another problem. After all, they don’t need the world. All they need is food, water, a fair amount of darkness and some warmth. But there’s the key, you see?

  ‘I mean we humans have provided for all these needs for many centuries. Haphazardly, though. So it stands to reason that life would be better for them if we worked for them on a regular basis. But to get us to do that, they have to take over first.’

  He tried to blow a smoke ring, failed, and adjusted his tie. ‘Go on. How do they manage this takeover?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think they have help. Maybe some smart tinkerer wanted to see what would happen if he gave them good long-distance vision. Maybe he was so pleased with the result that he then taught them to make semaphore signals with their feelers. The rest is history.’