by Jerry
For a long moment, Amelia Spindizzy stood ramrod-straight and unmoving. Radio Jones sank to the deck, crouching by her side. She couldn’t help herself. The cold and windy openness of the flight deck scared her spitless. She couldn’t even stand. But, terrified though she was, she didn’t look away. Someday all this would be in the history books; whatever happened, she knew, was going to determine her view of the world and its powers for the rest of her natural life, however short a time that might be.
Then Amelia strolled forward toward Eszterhazy and said, “Let me help you with that.” She stooped and took the mechanic’s legs. Eszterhazy took the arms. They straightened, swung the body—one! two! three!—and flung it over the side.
Slapping her hands together, Amelia said, “Why’d you do it?”
Eszterhazy shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “It had to be done. So I stepped up to the plate and took a swing at the ball. That’s all.” Then he grinned boyishly. “It’s good to know that you’re on my team.”
“That’s you on the radios,” Amelia said. They were still booming away, even though the buffeting winds drowned out half the words that came from them.
“Wire recording.” Eszterhazy strode to a support strut and slapped a switch. The radios all died. “A little talk I prepared, being broadcast to the masses. Radio has been scandalously underutilized as a tool of governance.”
Amelia’s response was casual—even, Radio thought, a bit dunderheaded technologically. “But radio’s everywhere,” she said. “There are dozens of public sets scattered through the city. Why, people can hear news bulletins before the newspapers can even set type and roll the presses!”
Eszterhazy smiled a thin, tight, condescending smile. “But they only tell people what’s happened, and not what to think about it. That’s going to change. My people are distributing sets to every bar, school, church, and library in the city. In the future, my future, everyone will have a bank of radios in their home—the government radio, of course, but also one for musical events, another for free lectures, and perhaps even one for business news.”
Radio felt the urge to speak up and say that fixed-frequency radios were a thing of the past. But she suppressed it. She sure wasn’t about to hand over her invention to a bum the likes of which Eszterhazy was turning out to be. But what the heck was the matter with Amelia?
Amelia Spindizzy put her hands behind her, and turned her back on her longtime archrival. Head down, deep in thought, she trod the edge of the abyss. “Hah.” The word might have meant anything. “You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this . . . this . . . new world order of yours.”
“I’ve been planning this all my life,” Eszterhazy said with absolute seriousness. “New and more efficient forms of government, a society that not only promotes the best of its own but actively weeds out the criminals and the morally sick. Were you aware that before Lycurgus became king, the Spartans were a licentious and ungovernable people? He made them the fiercest warriors the world has ever known in the space of a single lifetime.” He stopped, and then with a twinkle in his eye said, “There I go again, talking about the Greeks! As I started to say, I thought I would not be ready to make my move for many years. But then I got wind of certain experiments performed by Anna Pavlova which proved that not only were the Naked Brains functionally mad, but that I had it in my power to offer them the one thing for which they would give me their unquestioning cooperation—death.
“In their corruption were the seeds of our salvation. And thus fell our oppressors.”
“I worked with them, and I saw no oppressors.” Amelia rounded her course strolling back toward Eszterhazy, brow furrowed with thought. “Only nets of neurological fiber who, as it turned out, were overcome by the existential terror of their condition.”
“Their condition is called ‘life,’ Millie. And, yes, life makes us all insane.” Eszterhazy could have been talking over the radio, his voice was so reassuring and convincing. “Some of us respond to that terror with useless heroics. Others seek death.” He cocked a knowing smile at Amelia. “Others respond by attacking the absurdity at its source. Ruled by Naked Brains, humanity could not reach its full potential. Now, once again, we will rule ourselves.”
“It does all make sense. It all fits.” Amelia Spindizzy came to a full stop and stood shaking her head in puzzlement. “If only I could understand—”
“What is there to understand?” An impatient edge came into Eszterhazy’s voice. “What have I left unexplained? We can perfect our society in our lifetimes! You’re so damnably cold and analytic, Millie. Don’t you see that the future lies right at your feet? All you have to do is let go of your doubts and analyses and intellectual hesitations and take that leap of faith into a better world.”
Radio trembled with impotent alarm. She knew that, small and ignored as she was, it might be possible for her to be the wild card, the unexpected element, the unforeseeable distraction that saves the day. That it was, in fact, her duty to do so. She’d seen enough Saturday afternoon kinescope serials to understand that.
If only she could bring herself to stand up. Though it almost made her throw up to do so, Radio brought herself to her feet. The wind whipped the deck, and Eszterhazy quickly looked over at her. As though noticing her for the first time. And then, as Radio fought to overcome her paralyzing fear, Amelia acted.
She smiled that big, easy Amelia grin that had captured the hearts of proles and aristos alike. It was a heartfelt smile and a wickedly hoydenish leer at one and the same time, and it bespoke aggression and an inner shyness in equal parts. A disarming grin, many people called it.
Smiling her disarming grin, Amelia looked Eszterhazy right in the eye. She looked as if she had just found a brilliant solution to a particularly knotty problem. Despite the reflexive decisiveness for which he was known, Eszterhazy stood transfixed.
“You know,” she said, “I had always figured that, when all the stats were totted up and the final games were flown, you and I would find a shared understanding in our common enthusiasm for human-controlled—”
All in an instant, she pushed forward, wrapped her arms around her opponent, and let their shared momentum carry them over the edge.
Radio instantly fell to the deck again and found herself scrambling across it to the edge on all fours. Gripping the rim of the flight decking with spasmodic strength, she forced herself to look over. Far below, two conjoined specks tumbled in a final flight to the earth.
She heard a distant scream—no, she heard laughter.
* * *
Radio managed to hold herself together through the endless ceremonies of a military funeral. To tell the truth, the pomp and ceremony of it—the horse-drawn hearse, the autogyro fly-by, the lines of dignitaries and endlessly droning eulogies in the Cathedral—simply bored her to distraction. There were a couple of times when Mack had to nudge her because she was falling asleep. Also, she had to wear a dress and, sure as shooting, any of her friends who saw her in it were going to give her a royal ribbing about it when next they met.
But then came the burial. As soon as the first shovel of dirt rattled down on the coffin, Radio began blubbering like a punk. Fat Edna passed her a lace hanky—who’d even known she had such a thing?—and she mopped at her eyes and wailed.
When the last of the earth had been tamped down on the grave, and the priest turned away, and the mourners began to break up, Radio felt a hand on her shoulder. It was, of all people, Rudy the Red. He looked none the worse for his weeklong vacation from the flesh.
“Rudy,” she said, “is that a suit you’re wearing?”
“It is not the uniform of the oppressor anymore. A new age has begun, Radio, an age not of hierarchic rule by an oligarchy of detached, unfeeling intellects, but of horizontally-structured human cooperation. No longer will workers and managers be kept apart and treated differently from one another. Thanks to the selfless sacrifice of—”
“Yeah, I heard the speech you gave in the Cathedral.”
<
br /> “You did?” Rudy looked strangely pleased.
“Well, mostly. I mighta slept through some of it. Listen, Rudy, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but people are still gonna be people, you know. You’re all wound up to create this Big Rock Candy Mountain of a society, and good for you. Only—you gotta be prepared for the possibility that it won’t work. I mean, ask any engineer, that’s just the way things are. They don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to wing it, huh?” Rudy flashed a wry grin. Then, abruptly, his expression turned serious, and he said the very last thing in the world she would have expected to come out of his mouth: “How are you doing?”
“Not so good. I feel like a ton of bricks was dropped on me.” She felt around for Edna’s hanky, but she’d lost it somewhere. So she wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “You want to know what’s the real kicker? I hardly knew Amelia. So I don’t even know why I should feel so bad.”
Rudy took her arm. “Come with me a minute. Let me show you something.”
He led her to a gravestone that was laid down to one side of the grave, to be erected when everyone was gone. It took a second for Radio to read the inscription. “Hey! It’s just a quotation. Amelia’s name ain’t even on it. That’s crazy.”
“She left instructions for what it would say quite some time ago. I gather that’s not uncommon for flyers. But I can’t help feeling it’s a message.”
Radio stared at the words on the stone for very long time. Then she said, “Yeah, I see what you mean. But, ya know, I think it’s a different message than what she thought it would be.”
The rain, which had been drizzling off and on during the burial, began in earnest. Rudy shook out his umbrella and opened it over them both. They joined the other mourners, who were scurrying away in streams and rivulets, pouring from the cemetery exits and into the slidewalk stations and the vacuum trains, going back home to their lives and families, to boiled cabbage and schooners of pilsner, to their jobs, and their hopes, and their heartbreaks, to the vast, unknowable, and perfectly ordinary continent of the future.
THE STRANGE CASE OF MR. SALAD MONDAY
G.D. Falksen
Inspector Wilde was in a fine mood when he arrived at the headquarters of Salmagundi’s Legion of Peace, carrying three paper-wrapped sandwiches and an armload of printed broadsheets. He had a spring in his step and walked in time to one of the latest music hall ditties, which he whistled cheerfully for the benefit of his coworkers. All along the gaslit passage, clerks and secretaries poked their heads out of their rooms and stared, in wonder and admiration at his audacity. Most of them smiled as he passed, and a few of the braver ones tapped their feet along with the tune for a few moments before dashing back to their desks to avoid the ire of their supervisors. Wilde laughed as he passed a room full of secretaries who somehow managed to type in time with the music.
Midway down the hallway was the Chief Inspector’s office, which was fronted by a small antechamber in which her secretary, Marguerite, was busy making sense of several unsightly piles of documents. Her work table was a model of efficiency. Her pens and pencils were all neatly arranged to one side, along with writing paper and a three-section typewriter for preparing documents in triplicate. A rack of empty pneumatic capsules waited nearby to be filled and dispatched.
Marguerite smiled as Wilde approached, delighted by the cheerful whistling. Wilde leaned down, eyebrows arched, and tossed Marguerite the top sandwich in his stack.
“And a girl in uniform’s just the thing for me ...” Wilde said playfully, completing the refrain of the tune in Marguerite’s ear.
“Max!” Marguerite exclaimed, her cheeks flushing. She pushed him away and made a show of reorganizing the papers on her desk. “You mustn’t say things like that to me. People will talk.”
“Well, if ‘people’ are going to talk, don’t you think we should give them something to talk about?” Wilde asked, flashing one of his trademark recruitment smiles.
Marguerite was trying to come up with a reply when a third voice interrupted. “Max, get in here!”
Marguerite jumped in shock and pulled a handful of papers between herself and Wilde, as if to deny that they had even been speaking. Wilde was also caught by surprise, but retained his composure. He looked over at the polished voicepipe mounted next to Marguerite’s table just in time to hear the Chief Inspector’s voice again.
“Now!”
Wilde kept his head high as he sauntered across Chief Inspector Cerys’s cluttered office. Behind him, a sheepish Marguerite closed the door as quietly as she could. What might normally have been a sizable, bland, and dutifully bureaucratic office had, since the Chief Inspector moved in, been transformed into a nest of filing cabinets, pigeonhole shelves, and chairs covered in files and loose papers.
The room was lit entirely by gas lamps, for both of its windows had been tightly shuttered. Located on the top layer of Salmagundi, Legion Headquarters was gifted and cursed with an overwhelming view of the vast horizonless sky that surrounded the city. The silver-gray expanse of ether was a sight of unparalleled majesty and terror. Though sky-borne steamships traveled freely from one floating city to another, urban dwellers could not help but fear the mysterious beasts and horrors that lurked in the great beyond, thanks to old sailors’ stories of unfathomable monstrosities. However, even fear could not defeat the human drive for commerce. For every cargo ship lost to the ether, five more were already being built in Salmagundi’s shipyards, like heads of a great industrial hydra.
The largest piece of furniture in the Chief Inspector’s office was her massive Legion-issue desk, which was covered in papers, pens, and miscellanea. However, it was a metal coffee percolator resting on a stand nearby that was the true focal point of the room. A set of insulated pipes extended from the wall and into the percolator’s base, keeping the coffee hot by pumping steam through it from the building’s main line.
Chief Inspector Cerys looked up from a collection of reports, coffee cup in hand, and gave Wilde a look. “Max, I’ll thank you to stop flirting with my secretary all the bloody time.”
“Why, Chief?” Wilde asked, setting one of the sandwiches down by Cerys and then pulling over a chair. “If you ask me, I think she rather likes it.”
Cerys gave him another look as she began to unwrap her meal. “She does, Max. She likes it too much.” Cerys waved a typewritten form in front of Wilde’s face. The document was so complex as to be less legible than a massive ink spot, but it would drive some anonymous bureaucrat into a frenzy if even a single T was left uncrossed before filing. “Marguerite’s the only person in this blasted place who can read these damn things, and she’s useless for half an hour after you bat your pretty little eyes at her.”
“ ‘Pretty little eyes,’ Chief?” Wilde asked. “Why, I didn’t know you cared.”
“Shut up, Max.”
“Yes, Chief.”
Cerys bit into her sandwich and let out a sigh; Wilde suspected it was her first real meal of the day. “Mmmm! Herr Grosse comes through again.”
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear it,” Wilde replied. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“We’re unusually light on terrorist attacks and serial murderers at the moment, so we’re ‘lending a hand’ with Surveillance.”
“Espionage and tailing suspects?” Wilde asked hopefully.
“Examining subversive propaganda for clues,” Cerys replied.
Wilde made a face at the thought of such a boring activity. “Just so we’re clear, I’m not on duty for another five minutes.”
“You’re not on duty until I finish my sandwich,” Cerys countered.
“Deal.”
Leaning back in his chair, Wilde began to read one of the broadsheets he had brought with him. Within a minute, he was all but giggling like a schoolboy.
“What’re you so happy about?” Cerys asked, between mouthfuls of sandwich and mayonnaise.
Wi
lde quickly cleared his throat. “Er . . . Nothing, Chief.” His eyes involuntarily read the next line of text and another fit of laughter took him.
“Nothing?”
“Eh . . . heh . . . Um, yes, nothing.” Wilde held up the broadsheet for Cerys’s inspection. “It’s just Mr. Salad Monday. He’s giving Deacon Fortesque a roasting over his latest political tract.”
“What?” Cerys demanded, bewildered.
“Here, here, listen to this. He writes, quote, ‘While I suspect that the Hon. DeacFort is sincere in his belief that the threat of terrorism can be removed by simply shooting every suspected saboteur or socialist, plus one in ten persons of an inferior income distribution, he has forgotten two significant points. First, that the same result could be achieved more rapidly, cheaply, and without a reduction of the work force by improving working conditions and raising lower-income pay rates; and second, that he is an unmitigated fool whose longevity in the printed world can only be ascribed to his wealth, influence, and the public demand for entertaining fiction to read after breakfast,’ unquote!” Wilde lowered the broadsheet, the grin on his face outstripping most industrial bridges. “Isn’t that terrific?”
Cerys blinked several times. “Max, what in Heaven’s name is wrong with you?”
“You don’t think it’s funny?”
“I think it’s a waste of print, and I’m surprised you don’t agree. Besides, we’ve got more important things to do.” She tossed him a folder of documents. “Here, make yourself useful and read this.”
Wilde set the broadsheets aside and thumbed through the folder. It contained a number of obscure pamphlets and political chapbooks, all machine-printed on cheap paper. They had been bound with red ribbon, and each was plastered with a paper tab bearing the ominous statement “Forbidden!” As he opened one and began to skim the text, Wilde felt a nagging sense that he had read the author’s work somewhere before. After a moment, the recollection came to him and he burst out laughing.