by Jerry
“Fine.”
“Just peachy,” said Ricks. “I get my merit badge, don’t I, Cargomaster?”
Blair shook his head at Mendel, and went on toward the elevator without answering Ricks.
He headed immediately for Section Five. Three crewmen were already at the bulkhead, which was still sealed shut. Blair looked at the pressure gauge, and saw that the dial was above the halfway mark and noticeably climbing. He talked with the crewmen a few minutes, discussing the strike and its repairing, and then at last the bulkhead door slid back into its recess, and they went on in. The crewmen went to work on the permanent repair of the inner hull, and Blair checked his cargo. A few of the food cartons had exploded when the section had gone to vacuum, but he gave them hardly a glance. He found the seven aluminum crates for QB. All had split open, releasing interior air, but their contents looked to be still in good condition. Blair grinned to himself with relief.
QB was the maintenance base. As such, it had a permanent crew of eighty-four men. These men were on thirty-minute call at all times, and were fulfilling a two-year contract with General Transists. They spent every moment of those two years inside the QB satellite. Most of the time, they had little work to do, but the size of the crew was the statistical minimum required for any foreseeable accident to any part of the General Transits lifeline between the Earth and the Moon. When there was any sort of breakdown, such as this meteor strike on Station One, they went to work. The rest of the time, they were completely on their own. Their world, for two years, was a small metal ring nearly a quarter million miles from home. They couldn’t leave it, and they had little to do inside it.
That was why the contents of the seven aluminum crates was so important. Four cartons of motion picture film and three cartons of microfilmed books. Six months of entertainment, of distraction. The only way the men of QB could keep from going stir-crazy in their two years of self-imposed imprisonment, the only way to last through the inactive days and weeks between the infrequent calls for their skills and labor.
With no books, no motion pictures, no cheerful distractions for their minds, the men of QB would falter. Irritations would mount, squabbles would turn to hatreds, aggravations to bloody vendettas. Efficiency would collapse, morale disappear. Statistically, there would be within the first sixty days five suicides and eight murders.
Entertainment. Tinsel. But, to the men of QB, as vital as food.
Glenn Blair patted the aluminum crates, and grinned with relief.
NOW that it was over, Harvey Ricks was terrified. Before he’d gone out, he’d been too full of the challenge he’d hurled at Blair; while he’d been outside, he’d been too busy. Now it was over, and he had time to realize the extent of the risks he’d taken, and he was terrified.
He spent the next four hours in his cubicle, staring at the wall, vowing great resolutions of reform. From now on, he would mind his own business, accept his limitations.
Then, after four hours, the barbell arrived from Station Three, and the transfer of cargo and passengers was made. There were five men coming back to Earth, there was stack after stack of cargo. The huge hold of the barbell was emptied, and then the shipment for the Moon—and the cargo for QB—was loaded aboard, and the three passengers for the Moon left Station One, carrying their one-suitcase-each to the new cubicle, where they would live another fifteen days of their lives. Ricks looked around at the new room, and already the retroactive terror was receding, already he was thinking of his exploit in self-congratulatory terms. He’d done well. He’d showed the Cargomaster that Harvey Ricks was a good man to have at your side, a man who can do the job right the first time.
After a while, Blair knocked at the cubicle door and entered, smiling hesitantly, saying, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you, Ricks. You did a good job out there.”
Ricks smiled, the old self-confident challenging smile. “Why, any time, Cargomaster.”
Blair’s face tightened. “Well,” he said. “So I’ve thanked you.”
“So you have, Cargomaster.”
Blair left without another word.
Ricks settled back on his bunk, arms behind his head, and smiled at the ceiling. He’d made it again. He’d sent the hunters away, and when the wolf had come he’d tromped it all on his own. He still hadn’t run across the wolf he couldn’t handle.
But there was time. There was still plenty of time for Harvey Ricks to have his reckoning.
Two years’ worth. THE END
1962
2 B R 0 2 B
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Got a problem? Just pick up the phone. It solved them all—and oil the same way!
EVERYTHING was perfectly swell.
There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.
One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.
Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.
X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.
Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.
The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.
A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like.
Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.
The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer.
Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners.
Never, never, never—not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan—had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use.
A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath a popular song:
If you don’t like my kisses, honey,
Here’s what I will do:
I’ll go see a girl in purple,
Kiss this sad world toodle-oo.
If you don’t want my lovin’,
Why should I take up all this space?
I’ll get off this old planet,
Let some sweet baby have my place.
The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. “Looks so real,” he said, “I can practically imagine I’m standing in the middle of it.”
“What makes you think you’re not in it?” said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. “It’s called ‘The Happy Garden of Life,’ you now.”
“That’s good of Dr. Hitz,” said the orderly.
HE was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital’s Chief Obstetrician. Hitz was a blindingly handsome man.
“Lot of faces still to fill in,” said the orderly. He meant that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blanks were to be filled with portraits of important people on either the hospital staff or from the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Termination.
“Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something,” said the orderly.
The painter’
s face curdled with scorn. “You think I’m proud of this daub?” he said. “You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?”
“What’s your idea of what life looks like?” said the orderly.
The painter gestured at a foul dropcloth. “There’s a good picture of it,” he said. “Frame that, and you’ll have a picture a damn sight more honest than this one.”
“You’re a gloomy old duck, aren’t you?” said the orderly.
“Is that a crime?” said the painter.
The orderly shrugged. “If you don’t like it here, Grandpa—” he said, and he finished the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn’t want to live any more were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced “naught.”
The number was: “2 B R O 2 B.”
It was the telephone number of an institution whose fanciful sobriquets included: “Automat,” “Birdland,” “Cannery,” “Catbox,” “De-louser,” “Easy-go,” “Good-by, Mother,” “Happy Hooligan,” “Kiss-me-quick,” “Lucky Pierre,” “Sheepdip,” “Waring Blendor,” “Weep-no-more” and “Why Worry?”
“To be or not to be” was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination.
THE painter thumbed his nose at the orderly. “When I decide it’s time to go,” he said, “it won’t be at the Sheepdip.”
“A do-it-yourselfer, eh?” said the orderly. “Messy business, Grandpa. Why don’t you have a little consideration for the people who have to clean up after you?”
The painter expressed with an obscenity his lack of concern for the tribulations of his survivors. “The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me,” he said.
The orderly laughed and moved on.
Wehling, the waiting father, mumbled something without raising his head. And then he fell silent again.
A coarse, formidable woman strode into the waiting room on spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag and overseas cap were all purple, the purple the painter called “the color of grapes on Judgment Day.”
The medallion on her purple musette bag was the seal of the Service Division of the Federal Bureau of Termination, an eagle perched on a turnstile.
The woman had a lot of facial hair—an unmistakable mustache, in fact. A curious thing about gas-chamber hostesses was that, no matter how lovely and feminine they were when recruited, they all sprouted mustaches within five years or so.
“Is this where I’m supposed to come?” she said to the painter.
“A lot would depend on what your business was,” he said. “You aren’t about to have a baby, are you?”
“They told me I was supposed to pose for some picture,” she said. “My name’s Leora Duncan.” She waited.
“And you dunk people,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“Skip it,” he said.
“That sure is a beautiful picture,” she said. “Looks just like heaven or something.”
“Or something,” said the painter. He took a list of names from his smock pocket. “Duncan, Duncan, Duncan,” he said, scanning the list. “Yes—here you are. You’re entitled to be immortalized. See any faceless body here you’d like me to stick your head on? We’ve got a few choice ones left.”
She studied the mural bleakly. “Gee,” she said, “they’re all the same to me. I don’t know anything about art.”
“A body’s a body, eh?” he said “All righty. As a master of fine art, I recommend this body here.” He indicated a faceless figure of a woman who was carrying dried stalks to a trash-burner.
“Well,” said Leora Duncan, “that’s more the disposal people, isn’t it? I mean, I’m in service. I don’t do any disposing.”
The painter clapped his hands in mock delight. “You say you don’t know anything about art, and then you prove in the next breath that you know more about it than I do! Of course the sheave-carrier is wrong for a hostess! A snipper, a pruner—that’s more your line.” He pointed to a figure in purple who was sawing a dead branch from an apple tree. “How about her?” he said. “You like her at all?”
“Gosh—” she said, and she blushed and became humble—“that—that puts me right next to Dr. Hitz.”
“That upsets you?” he said.
“Good gravy, no!” she said. “It’s—it’s just such an honor.”
“Ah, You admire him, eh?” he said.
“Who doesn’t admire him?” she said, worshiping the portrait of Hitz. It was the portrait of a tanned, whitehaired, omnipotent Zeus, two hundred and forty years old. “Who doesn’t admire him?” she said again. “He was responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago.”
“Nothing would please me more,” said the painter, “than to put you next to him for all time. Sawing off a limb—that strikes you as appropriate?”
“That is kind of like what I do,” she said. She was demure about what she did. What she did was make people comfortable while she killed them.
AND, while Leora Duncan was posing for her portrait, into the waitingroom bounded Dr. Hitz himself. He was seven feet tall, and he boomed with importance, accomplishments, and the joy of living.
“Well, Miss Duncan! Miss Duncan!” he said, and he made a joke. “What are you doing here?” he said. “This isn’t where the people leave. This is where they come in!”
“We’re going to be in the same picture together,” she said shyly.
“Good!” said Dr. Hitz heartily. “And, say, isn’t that some picture?”
“I sure am honored to be in it with you,” she said.
“Let me tell you,” he said, “I’m honored to be in it with you. Without women like you, this wonderful world we’ve got wouldn’t be possible.”
He saluted her and moved toward the door that led to the delivery rooms. “Guess what was just born,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Triplets!” he said.
“Triplets!” she said. She was exclaiming over the legal implications of triplets.
The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die. Triplets, if they were all to live, called for three volunteers.
“Do the parents have three volunteers?” said Leora Duncan.
“Last I heard,” said Dr. Hitz, “they had one, and were trying to scrape another two up.”
“I don’t think they made it,” she said. “Nobody made three appointments with us. Nothing but singles going through today, unless somebody called in after I left. What’s the name?”
“Wehling,” said the waiting father, sitting up, redeyed and frowzy. “Edward K. Wehling, Jr., is the name of the happy father-to-be.”
He raised his right hand, looked at a spot on the wall, gave a hoarsely wretched chuckle. “Present,” he said.
“Oh, Mr. Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz, “I didn’t see you.”
“The invisible man,” said Wehling.
“They just phoned me that your triplets have been born,” said Dr. Hitz. “They’re all fine, and so is the mother. I’m on my way in to see them now.”
“Hooray,” said Wehling emptily.
“You don’t sound very happy,” said Dr. Hitz.
“What man in my shoes wouldn’t be happy?” said Wehling. He gestured with his hands to symbolize carefree simplicity. “All I have to do is pick out which one of the triplets is going to live, then deliver my maternal grandfather to the Happy Hooligan, and come back here with a receipt.”
DR. Hitz became rather severe with Wehling, towered over him. “You don’t believe in population control, Mr. Wehling?” he said.
“I think it’s perfectly keen,” said Wehling tautly. “Would you like to go back to the good old days, when the population of the Earth was twenty billion—about to become forty billion, then eighty billion, then one hundred and sixty billion? Do you know what a drupelet is, Mr. Wehling?” said Hitz.
“Nop
e,” said Wehling sulkily.
“A drupelet, Mr. Wehling, is one of the little knobs, one of the little pulpy grains of a blackberry,” said Dr. Hitz. “Without population control, human beings would now be packed on this surface of this old planet like drupelets on a blackberry! Think of it!”
Wehling continued to stare at the same spot on the wall.
“In the year 2000,” said Dr. Hitz, “before scientists stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn’t even enough drinking water to go around, and nothing to eat but seaweed—and still people insisted on their right to reproduce like jackrabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever.”
“I want those kids,” said Wehling quietly. “I want all three of them.”
“Of course you do,” said Dr. Hitz. “That’s only human.”
“I don’t want my grandfather to die, either,” said Wehling.
“Nobody’s really happy about taking a close relative to the Catbox,” said Dr. Hitz gently, sympathetically.
“I wish people wouldn’t call it that,” said Leora Duncan.
“What?” said Dr. Hitz.
“I wish people wouldn’t call it ‘the Catbox,’ and things like that,” she said. “It gives people the wrong impression.”
“You’re absolutely right,” said Dr. Hitz. “Forgive me.” He corrected himself, gave the municipal gas chambers their official title, a title no one ever used in conversation. “I should have said, ‘Ethical Suicide Studios,’ ” he said.
“That sounds so much better,” said Leora Duncan.
“This child of yours—whichever one you decide to keep, Mr. Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz. “He or she is going to live on a happy, roomy, clean, rich planet, thanks to population control. In a garden like that mural there.” He shook his head. “Two centuries ago, when I was a young man, it was a hell that nobody thought could last another twenty years. Now centuries of peace and plenty stretch before us as far as the imagination cares to travel.”
He smiled luminously.
The smile faded as he saw that Wehling had just drawn a revolver.