Alternating Currents

by Frederik Pohl

  ‘Um,’ he said again; and that was the end of the discussion.

  Oh, the Chief is a cagey man. He gave me my orders: keep my mouth shut about it. I have an idea that he was waiting to see what happened to my hives, and whether any craving would develop, and what the test series on animals and Cloud’s Bowery-derelict volunteers would show. But even more, I think he was waiting until the time was exactly, climactically right.

  Like at the Plans meeting, the day after the doctor’s report and the panic at Mason-Dixon.

  And that’s how Cheery-Gum was born.

  ~ * ~

  Hazel just came in with the cardboard container from the drug store, and I could tell by looking at it - no steam coming out from under the lid, beads of moisture clinging to the sides - that it wasn’t the coffee I ordered. ‘Hey!’ I yelled after her as she was dreamily waltzing through the door. ‘Come back here!’

  ‘Sure ‘nough, Massa,’ she said cheerfully, and two-stepped back. ‘S’matter?’

  I took a grip on my temper.’ Open that up,’ I ordered.’ Take a look at what’s in it.’

  She smiled at me and plopped the lid off the container. Half the contents spilled across my desk. ‘Oh, dear,’ said Hazel, ‘excuse me while I get a cloth.’

  ‘Never mind the cloth,’ I said, mopping at the mess with my handkerchief. ‘What’s in there?’

  She gazed wonderingly into the container for a moment; then she said, ‘Oh, honestly, boss! I see what you mean. Those idiots in the drug store, they’re gummed up higher than a kite, morning, noon and night. I always say, if you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t touch it during working hours. I’m sorry about this, boss. No lemon! How can they call it a lemon Coke when they forget the -’

  ‘Hazel,’ I said, ‘what I wanted was coffee. Coffee.’

  She looked at me. ‘You mean I got it wrong? Oh, I’m sorry, Mr McGory. I’ll go right down and get it now.’ She smiled repentantly and hummed her way towards the door. With her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned to look at me. ‘All the same, boss,’ she said, ‘that’s a funny combination. Coffee and Coke. But I’ll see what I can do.’

  And she was gone, to bring me heaven knows what incredible concoction. But what are you going to do ?

  No, that’s no answer. I know it’s what you would do. But it makes me break out in hives.

  ~ * ~

  The first week we were delighted, the second week we were triumphant, the third week we were millionaires.

  The sixth week I skulked along the sidewalks all the way across town and down, to see Leslie Clary Cloud. Even so I almost got it when a truckdriver dreamily piled into the glass front of a saloon a yard or two behind me.

  When I saw Cloud sitting at his workbench, feet propped up, hands clasped behind his head, eyes half-closed, I could almost have kissed him. For his jaws were not moving. Alone in New York, except for me, he wasn’t chewing Cheery-Gum.

  ‘Thank heaven!’ I said sincerely.

  He blinked and smiled at me. ‘Mr McGory,’ he said in a pleasant drawl. ‘Nice of you.’

  His manner disturbed me, and I looked more closely. ‘You’re not - you’re not gummed up, are you ?’

  He said gently, ‘Do I look gummed up ? I never chew the stuff.’

  ‘Good!’ I unfolded the newspaper I had carried all the way from Madison Avenue and showed him the inside pages - the ones that were not a mere smear of ink. ‘See here, Cloud. Planes crashing into Radio City. Buses driving off the George Washington Bridge. Ships going aground at the Battery. We did it, Cloud, you and I!’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t get upset about it, old man,’ he said comfortably. ‘All local, isn’t it?’

  ‘Isn’t that bad enough ? And it isn’t local - it can’t be. It’s just that there isn’t any communication outside the city any more - outside of any city, I guess. The shipments of Cheery-Gum, that’s all that ever gets delivered anywhere. Because that’s all anybody cares about any more, and we did it, you and I!’

  He said sympathetically, ‘That’s too bad, McGory.’

  ‘Curse you!’ I shrieked at him. ‘You said it wasn’t a drug! You said it wasn’t habit-forming! You said -’

  ‘Now, now,’ he said with gentle firmness. ‘Why not chew a stick yourself ?’

  ‘Because I can’t! It gives me hives!’

  ‘Oh, that’s right.’ He looked self-reproachful. ‘Well,’ he said dreamily at last, ‘I guess that’s about the size of it, McGory.’ He was staring at the ceiling again.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘What is what?’

  ‘What’s about the - Oh, the devil with it, Cloud, you got us into this, you have to get us out of it. There must be some way of curing this habit.’

  ‘But there isn’t any habit to cure, McGory,’ he pointed out.

  ‘But there is!’

  ‘Tem-per,’ he said waggishly, and took a corked test tube out of his workbench. He drank it down, every drop, and tossed the tube into a wastebasket. ‘You see ?’ he demanded severely. ‘I don’t chew Cheery-Gum.’

  ~ * ~

  So I appealed to a Higher Authority.

  In the eighteenth century I would have gone to the Church, in the nineteenth, to the State. I went to an office fronting on Central Park where the name on the bronze plaque was Theodor Yust, Analyst.

  It wasn’t easy. I almost walked out on him when I saw that his jaws were chewing as rhythmically as his secretary’s. But Cloud’s concoction is not, as he kept saying, a drug, and though it makes you relax and makes you happy and, if you take enough of it, makes you drunk, it doesn’t make you unfit to talk to. So I took a grip on my temper, the only bad temper left, and told him what I wanted.

  He laughed at me - in the friendliest way. ‘Put a stop to Cheery-Gum? Mr McGory!’

  ‘But the plane crashes -’

  ‘No more suicides, Mr McGory!’

  ‘The train wrecks -’

  ‘Not a murder or a mugging in the whole city in a month.’

  I said hopelessly. ‘But it’s wrong!’

  ‘Ah,’ he said in the tone of a discoverer, ‘now we come down to it. Why is it wrong, Mr McGory ?’

  That was the second time I almost walked out. But I said, ‘Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t want you digging into my problems. That’s not why I’m here. Cheery-Gum is wrong, and I am not biased against it. You can take a detached view of collisions and sudden death if you want to, but what about slow death ? All over the city, all over the country, people are lousing up their jobs. Nobody cares. Nobody does anything but go through the motions. They’re happy. What happens when they get hungry because the farmers are feeling too good to put in their crops ?’

  He sighed patiently. He took the wad of gum out of his mouth, rolled it neatly into a Kleenex and dropped it in the wastebasket. He took a fresh stick out of a drawer and unwrapped it, but stopped when he saw me looking at him. He chuckled. ‘Rather I didn’t, Mr McGory? Well, why not oblige you? It’s not habit-forming, after all.’ He dropped the gum back into the drawer and said: ‘Answering your questions, they won’t starve. The farmers are farming, the workers are working, the policemen are policing, and I’m analysing. And you’re worrying. Why? Work’s getting done.’

  ‘But my secretary -’

  ‘Forget about your secretary, Mr McGory. Sure, she’s a little fuzzy-brained, a little absent-minded. Who isn’t? But she comes to work, because why shouldn’t she ?’

  ‘Sure she does, but -’

  ‘But she’s happy. Let her be happy, Mr McGory!’

  I looked scandalized at him. ‘You, a doctor! How can you say that ? Suppose you were fuzzy-brained and so on when a patient desperately needed -’

  He stopped me. ‘In the past three weeks,’ he said gently, ‘you’re the first to come in that door.’

  I changed tack: ‘All right, you’re an analyst. What about a G.P. or a surgeon?’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps
,’ he conceded, ‘perhaps in one case out of a thousand - somebody hurt in an accident, say - he’d get to the hospital too late, or the surgeon would make some little mistake. Perhaps. Not even one in a thousand - one in a million, maybe. But Cheery-Gum isn’t a drug. A quarter-grain of sodium amytol, and your surgeon’s as good as new.’ Absent-mindedly he reached into the drawer for the stick of gum.

  ‘And you say,’ I said accusingly, ‘that it’s not habit-forming!’

  He stopped with his hand half-way to his mouth. ‘Well,’ he said wryly,’ it is a habit. Don’t confuse semantics, Mr. McGory. It is not a narcotic addiction. If my supply were cut off this minute, I would feel bad - as bad as if I couldn’t play bridge any more for some reason, and no worse.’ He put the stick of gum away again and rummaged through the bottom drawers of his desk until he found a dusty pack of cigarettes. ‘Used to smoke three packs a day,’ he wheezed, choking on the first drag.

  He wiped his streaming eyes. ‘You know, Mr McGory,’ he said sharply, ‘you’re a bit of a prig. You don’t want people to be happy.’

  ‘I-’

  He stopped me before I could work up a full explosion. ‘Wait! Don’t think that you’re the only person who thinks about what’s good for the world. When I first heard of Cheery-Gum, I worried.’ He stubbed the cigarette out distastefully, still talking. ‘Euphoria is well and good, I said, but what about emergencies? And I looked around, and there weren’t any. Things were getting done, maybe slowly and erratically, but they were getting done. And then I said, on a high moral plane, that’s well and good, but what about the ultimate destiny of man? Should the world be populated by cheerful near-morons? And that worried me, until I began looking at my patients.’ He smiled reflectively. ‘I had ‘em all, Mr McGory. You name it, I had it coming in to see me twice a week. The worst wrecks of psyches you ever heard of, twisted and warped and destroying themselves; and they stopped. They stopped eating themselves up with worry and fear and tension, and then they weren’t my patients any more. And what’s more, they weren’t morons. Give them a stimulus, they respond. Interest them, they react. I played bridge the other night with a woman who was catatonic last month; we had to put the first stick of gum in her mouth. She beat the hell out of me, Mr McGory. I had a mathematician coming here who - well, never mind. It was bad. He’s happy as a clam, and the last time I saw him he had finished a paper he began ten years ago, and couldn’t touch. Stimulate them - they respond. When things are dull - Cheery-Gum. What could be better?’

  I looked at him dully, and said, ‘So you can’t help me.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Do you want me to help you ?’

  ‘Certainly!’

  ‘Then answer my question: Why don’t you chew a stick yourself?’

  ‘Because I can’t!’ It all tumbled out, the Plans meeting and Leslie Clary Cloud and the beaker that hadn’t been diluted and the hives. ‘A terrific allergy,’ I emphasized. ‘Even antihistamines don’t help. They said at the clinic that the antibodies formed after a massive initial -’

  He said comfortably, ‘Soma over psyche, eh? Well, what would you expect ? But believe me, Mr McGory, allergies are psychogenic. Now, if you’ll just -’

  ~ * ~

  Well, if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em, that’s what the old man used to say.

  But I can’t join them. Theodor Yust offered me an invitation, but I guess I was pretty rude to him. And when, at last, I went back, ready to crawl and apologize, there was a scrawled piece of cardboard over the bronze nameplate; it said: Gone fishing.

  I tried to lay it on the line with the Chief. I opened the door of the Plans room, and there he was with Baggott and Wayber, from Mason-Dixon. They were sitting there whittling out model ships, and so intent on what they were doing that they hardly noticed me. After a while the Chief said idly,’ Bankrupt yet ?’ And moments passed, and Wayber finally replied, in an absent-minded tone:

  ‘Guess so. Have to file some papers or something.’ And they went on with their whittling.

  So I spoke sharply to them, and the minute they looked up and saw me, it was like the Rockettes: the hands into the pockets, the paper being unwrapped, the gum into the mouth. And naturally I couldn’t make any sense with them after that. So what are you going to do ?

  No! I can’t!

  Hazel hardly comes in to see me any more, even. I bawled her out for it - what would happen, I demanded, if I suddenly had to answer a letter. But she only smiled dreamily at me. ‘There hasn’t been a letter in a month,’ she pointed out amiably. ‘Don’t worry, though. If anything comes up, I’ll be with you in a flash. This stuff isn’t a habit with me, I can stop it any time, you just say the word and ol’ Hazel’ll be there. . . .’

  And she’s right because, when you get right down to it, there’s the trouble. It isn’t a habit.

  So how can you break it ?

  You can stop Cheery-Gum any time. You can stop it this second, or five minutes from now, or tomorrow.

  So why worry about it ?

  It’s completely voluntary, entirely under your control; it won’t hurt you, it won’t make you sick.

  I wish Theodor Yust would come back. Or maybe I’ll just cut my throat.

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  ~ * ~