A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “It’s the Rejuvenation Clinics,” his wife said. “They’re costing more to run, I believe.”

  “Oh, we mustn’t knock them, must we?” he said, sarcastically. “Where would we be without them?”

  “Dust hath closed Helen’s eye,” she quoted, vaguely.

  “Two hundreds years dead.” He dug at the stew. “I sometimes wonder why we bother, though.”

  She sat opposite him, and unwrapped the ready-buttered bread, arranging the pieces carefully on a plate. “You know why,” she said, quietly. “One of them was here today.”

  He swallowed some of the food, and looked uneasy. “Here? You mean outside the flat?”

  She nodded. “I was going to have a chat with Mrs. Benz. She gets very lonely, you know, being on her own. Well, I opened the door and he was standing there. I felt as though I should know him; but I didn’t. And then he’d gone. He was near the end of the corridor, walking away from me.”

  “No time interval?”

  “You know how it is. He was by the door, and then he wasn’t. I’ve been trying to think ever since about what he looked like; but I can’t.”

  “I know. He looked like everyone you ever knew, and nobody in particular.”

  “Oh, someone in particular, I think; but it was hazy.” They finished the meal in silence, and when she pressed the appropriate button the center of the table with the remnants of the meal rolled silently back into the wall and disappeared. He turned in his chair, and switched on the video. After idly watching the images form on the mock stage he switched off again, and sat with his back to it.

  “No washing up,” he mused, looking at the early sky-ads flare up over Ford Capitol on East Twelfth Level, which was the highest they’d got. “No rattle of dishes, no smell of cooking. I’ve lived too long.”

  She came and sat next to him, moving her chair through the floor slots. “Stew doesn’t agree with you,” she said. “Maybe you should have milk and bananas odd days.”

  He shook his head. “Not for me. You never see a real banana these days. They’re always ready-skinned and in one of those cute little plastic jackets. What was wrong with the original skin? I’ll tell you what. They couldn’t charge it, that’s what. They’re pre-package mad these days. Oranges peeled so you can see the fruit, all yellow and slimy. And those apples, sans peel, sans core, and sans taste. Or maybe you want a fresh egg so you can go old-fashioned and actually beat it up yourself in your milk. Well, the machine will humor you, if you press the right button. But what do you get? You get the palest of pale yellow eggs in a transparent little doodah. It’s indecent! An egg should be in a shell.”

  She smiled at him indulgently, and switched off the table light. It was silly to waste credits. Timothy, it seemed, was in one of his grumbling moods. These were usually triggered off by indigestion, and covered everything from food and other Government shortcomings to the putrid programs on the video, which he never looked at anyway.

  “Perhaps you should have a talk with the hens,” she chaffed. “They could be eating plastic instead of grit.”

  “Hens?” He sounded as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “Hens? Get up to date, woman, for heaven’s sake! You know what? I saw an egg production unit once. It’s just a damn great automated hell! There were three-thousand hens there; but you couldn’t see a single one. Not one. They were de-squawked and built in. Machines of flesh. Just parts of a larger machine, and each one fed at precise intervals with measured quantities of food through the neck. What does a hen want with head or eyes? It doesn’t need to peck grit either. The soft eggs drop into neat little plastic containers, which are whipped away by the belt to be sealed and stamped.

  “When the production figures decline for any unit it is automatically replaced, and still you don’t see a hen. Just a metal box, wired and tubed, and inside is a legless, feather-less, headless creature; a bit of equipment that wore out. So, I don’t like eggs without the shells.”

  She was horrified. “You’re making it up,” she said. “No one would be so wicked.” She tried to think when she had last seen a shell-egg; but gave it up. “Someone should do something about it,” she decided.

  He nodded. “That’s up to the youngsters. But they won’t do anything. They have that mindless look about them.”

  “The young always seem like that to the old. They’ll be all right. You see.”

  “Maybe they’ll blow us all up,” he said, with a grin, “and go off somewhere else to live on an acre apiece and a cow. By God, if only I were young again! That’s what I’d do. I’d blow it so high it would rain plascrete and people for three days solid. What good are we doing? What’s the use of it all?”

  “You’ve been missing attendances at the clinic,” she said. “You shouldn’t do that. You don’t want to be like . . . like . . .”

  “One of those,” he finished for her. “No, I don’t. When I feel it coming on I’m going to walk off the Level.”

  She looked at him a trifle anxiously. The tell-tale signs of neglect were there on his thin, almost waxen face, as though a warm hand had been passed over the image of a man, erasing his personality.

  “You’ll really have to go to the vats very soon, Timothy,” she urged. “It must be three years since you were there last.”

  “Five years and some odd days,” he corrected her. “You could do with some treatment yourself.”

  She nodded, brightly, and essayed a brief smile. “I’m going this afternoon,” she said.

  “Forget it,” he told her. “I went along yesterday. The vats are closed for extensive alterations, or so the notice says. They’ve been closed for over a week.”

  Her eyes widened with fear. “You mean you can’t get treatment until the stupid alterations are finished?”

  “That’s just an excuse,” he said. “It’s all over the city that the Lunar strike-petered out. The total stock of selenite could be heaped on a dinner plate. Process that and you are left with maybe a teaspoon of catalyst-49; just about enough for three full treatments. I videoed the Appointments Bureau six times before I finally got through. I was told that they are only doing emergencies; but my name would be placed on the priority list. They’ll get in touch with me in due course, I don’t think. It’s my guess that the emergencies are really private stockholders.”

  He shifted his position so that he faced the video, and snapped the News-Flash button. A smooth-faced announcer with a little brush moustache was halfway through an item on traffic casualties. Timothy switched off.

  “Fifty-per-cent up on last week’s,” he remarked. “With the birthrate falling the way it is, and the youngsters killing themselves off wholesale, this will be a world of ghosts before another century has passed. Unless, of course, Professor Gorgon is successful with his artificial womb. In that case we can look forward to having a race of zombies to nod at. Those of us who are left, that is. With a bit of luck we’ll be dead by then, though.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that,” she said uneasily.

  “Better that than being a kind of wraith, blocked off from both life and death, and existing in some sort of Limbo. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. There’s not much else to do, is there, at our age? Anyway, I’ve come up with a kind of theory.” He drew an imaginary line on the table with his forefinger. “The Life Force carrier wave,” he explained. “Now we’ll have some modulation.” His finger traced this up and down and along the carrier wave. “You know what that is? It’s a speech pattern wave. It’s the Word. A single word spoken by the Almighty.” He placed an imaginary dot near where he thought he’d drawn the base line. “A point of life,” he said, while she watched with a faint, puzzled frown; but the frown was for the closed Rejuvenation Clinics. Worrying about this she hardly heard what he was saying, and wouldn’t have understood anyway.

  He gave a quick side glance to ensure that he had her attention, and then tapped the dot again. “A point of life,” he repeated, “which moves gradually upwards and forwards as th
e creature matures. The whole wave train feeds it at first, and then it begins to miss the shorter peaks, which is when time seems to be going faster, and then faster, still as we grow older, and older. When we are really old only the longer peaks feed life into us. Normally, around about this time we’d be old and tottery, and a fair target for everything lethal; in fact, a living write-off.”

  “Yes,” she said quickly, as he paused and looked at her again.

  “Nowadays, however,” he went on, and allowed himself a sardonic smile, “the catalyst treatment can pull you back; but if, after a great many years, you stop the treatment what happens? What happens is that you shoot up and away from the Life Force modulation, if you see what I mean, until just the tip of an occasional peak fires your conscious mind, and then only the tip of an exceptionally long peak. Eventually—we don’t know when because we don’t know how long the longest peaks are—we should just fade into oblivion.

  “As it is,” he said, seeing it all in his mind’s eye, and searching for the means to describe it, “there is a period when we are just asprawl in the great gaps between the longer peaks, and during that time we aren’t here at all. We? I mean they, of course. Those poor ghosts we see all around us these days, and almost recognize. They exist only in spasms, and even though we may have known them we find it impossible to recollect anything about them. Oh, they are never completely forgotten, just unremembered. They are beyond help, and too insubstantial even for Death to claim.”

  “You sound just like the man on the video,” she said, contriving a smile. “He was on last week sometime, and he was explaining it all with diagrams and things, and squiggly bits that didn’t make any kind of sense at all. But he said that the apparitions—he called them that—he said the apparitions would increase; but not to be frightened because they were harmless.”

  “Did he?” he said, and seemed disconcerted. “I didn’t see it,” he added, “but I heard someone talking about it, and it set me thinking . . .”

  There was a haziness about him. She began to think of the dog that had been killed in the crash, and wondered why she should be more concerned about an animal than the human beings killed at the same time. It was its essential innocence, of course. It wasn’t in any way concerned with the mechanical muddle that Man had got himself into.

  She looked at the empty chair next to her, and something flickered in her mind, some vague memory that wouldn’t reveal itself. It was almost as though someone should have been sitting there with her. Nonsense, of course, she told herself. There had never been anyone.

  She got to her feet slowly, almost painfully, and looked out of the picture window. Just below, on the near Level someone was looking up at her. She wondered who it could be, and decided it looked like the man she had seen standing outside the door of the flat earlier that day. Then he was gone, to reappear further down the Level. It was one of them, she thought, and felt troubled.

  She looked around the room, and a little frown creased her rapidly aging features. There seemed to be something missing somehow. She sighed.

  “I’ll have to get a little dog,” she said, aloud.

  On Level 17, East Block, where the flat building that housed the Rejuvenation Clinic was situated, there was a small crowd of people of both sexes assembled in a rough queue. Timothy Gregwold joined them.

  “What goes?” he asked the man in front. “Have they got the vats working?”

  The other shook his head. “They’re issuing euthanasia permits.”

  So it had come to that. Timothy looked around at the busy Levels; at the tall buildings, the cloud-toppers, piercing the huge layered structures, and at the linking flyovers and pedways, bright with the late spring sunshine. He watched the hordes of jets, and hovercabs, and the stripped-down sporter-flivs darting like dragonflies between the shining facade of glass and plascrete and suddenly, for the first time in years, he realized, with a little tug at the heart, that it meant something to him. He didn’t want to leave it. Idiot, he thought. You sentimental old idiot! There’s no room here for you. Your world is dead and buried. All this belongs to the younger ones, God help them!

  A young couple passed, arms around each other, and glancing towards the queue laughed loudly. The young man said something that Timothy took to be derisive, and they laughed again; but the oldsters queueing for death ignored them. They had passed the point of no return, and felt themselves already dead.

  Timothy Gregwold turned on his heel and walked away. He felt that the important thing now was not to panic, and to try and preserve some semblance of human dignity. He wasn’t queueing for permission to die. If he reached the point where it was either that or worse then he would do it in his own way, and under his own steam. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a tall, wavering shape that shifted its position constantly over to his left. One of them, he thought. A lonely ghost looking for solace.

  On a sudden impulse he walked to the edge of the Level, and looked over the parapet. Here there was a sheer drop of nearly a thousand feet. He put one leg over and sat on the smooth plascrete. Then he tried to bring the other leg over to join it preparatory to a plunge that would take him into an abyss of fear and pain and then oblivion; but he couldn’t do it.

  “Haven’t got the nerve,” he said at last. A uniformed patrolman came over to him, hand resting lightly on his stun gun. “Not that way, old-timer,” he said. “It makes such a mess. What’s the problem? Credits or the clinic?”

  Timothy brought his leg back over the parapet and stood up. “Neither,” he said, bitterly. “Just lack of guts.”

  He walked away. The patrolman’s mocking voice came after him. “Try a Mother Reilly’s special. That’s our problem just now.”

  He was referring to a drink consisting of three parts of cheap wine with one part of pure alcohol and a dash of wood spirit. It was much favored by the city’s poorer drunks and the flotsam that could be found in every niche and doorway on almost every Level despite the Government’s massive welfare programs. The trouble was, Timothy reflected, that most of the money was being siphoned off and into the pockets of a rat pack of professional leeches, and greedy entrepreneurs.

  Just the same, he decided, a drink might help at that. In an effort to combat alcoholism and its attendant ills the authorities had opened a number of bars as an experiment The idea was to wean the bulk of the addicts from the more lethal concoctions. Ironically, they had been taken up by the bored but respectable strata of society, and no member of the submerged tenth would have dared to show his nose in any of them, even supposing he could pay the exorbitant prices now demanded.

  He called in at Randy’s Bar, and asked the white-coated barman for a double Scotch. He drank this off almost in a gulp, while the man passed his credit card through the register, and ordered another.

  The barman looked sympathetic. “They’ll be shipping a load in any day now,” he reassured Timothy.

  Timothy gave a wry smile. “It shows, huh?” he said.

  “I’ve had over a dozen in this morning all worried to hell about the same thing, the clinic shut-down.”

  The old man looked around the empty bar. “We must be your only customers,” he remarked.

  The barman took up a spotless glass and polished it “It brightens up towards evening,” he said. “People calling in on the way home from business mostly; but later on we get crowded. I have to switch over to auto-service. Can’t cope on my own. It makes me wonder sometimes what blessed use I am. The auto could handle it right through.”

  “The human touch,” Mr. Gregwold said, a bit thickly after downing his second double. “This place would be nothing without the human touch. Will you have one with me?”

  “Thank you, sir,” the barman said. He passed Timothy’s card through the register again, and transferred the drink price to his tip credit Then he poured the double whisky for his customer, and ginger ale for himself out of a similar bottle. “Your good health, sir,” he said, “and here’s to the clinics opening again
shortly.” They drank to that.

  “Yes,” murmured Timothy to himself, “that’s what the whole damn set-up lacks. The human touch.” He nodded to the barman. “That’s what makes this place such an oasis. I should have come here more often; but now I won’t be able to.”

  “Any day now they’ll be shipping it in,” said the barman. “You see if they don’t.”

  This time it sounded even less convincing. Timothy shook his head. “The mines are worked out. They were just pockets anyway. The only deliveries still going through are from private stockpiles.”

  The barman nodded, and began to polish the same glass all over again. “You tumbled to it,” he said. “I hear a lot in this bar. People forget you’re around when they’ve had a few. That’s what it is, dad. They’re slinging in the private stuff because that’s all there is. These characters were allowed to buy themselves in to ease Government expenditure, and they were able to stockpile about twenty per cent of the raw selenite. On top of this they took ten per cent of Earth deliveries in lieu of freightage for their own stock. Now these boys are the only ones with any selenite. Only they’re not selling. They’re keeping it for their old age, and their children’s old age, if they have any children. Yeah, that’s it; but what can you do about it?”

  “Get drunk, maybe,” said Timothy. “That’s about all.”

  The barman put the glass under, the counter somewhere. “What about a massive dose of anabolic steroids? I’ve heard they’re treating some people with that and a few other drugs. They used to get some pretty spectacular results with those things years ago.” He wiped his hands on the cloth, and hung it up.

  “I’m past that,” Timothy said. “Long past it.” He drank the rest of the whiskey and slid the glass across the counter. The barman looked at him, pityingly. As he moved away the room shifted slightly, and he was outside without knowing how he got there.