by John Sladek
THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM
John Sladek
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Website
Also by John Sladek
Dedication
Author Bio
Copyright
PROLOGUE
DID YOU SEE HER IN ‘HEIDI’?
Suppose that it is once more 196–, that fateful year, and suppose that you are passing through Millford, Utah, that most fated of crossroads. Population, a battered, bird-spattered sign informs you, is ‘3810 And Still Growing ! Home of Shelley B—’
Home of Shelley something, Millford lies about half-way between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) buried deep in a Colarado mountain. The name ‘Millford’ is honorific; there has never been a stream through this part of the desert, nor a mill, nor anything to grind in a mill. Perhaps it was named ironically, or wishfully. Founders of other desert towns have, after all, given them pretty names, hoping that (by sympathetic magic) pretty reality would follow.
Millford is not pretty, it is worn and warped. There is little to distinguish it from Eden Acres, Greenville or Paradise. Its feed store, like theirs, is checkered red and white. Along its main drag lurk old familiar faces : The Eateria; The Idle Hour; Marv’s Eat-Gas; The Dew Drop Inn Motel.
You, the casual tourist—say you are an Air Force General from NORAD on his way to get a divorce—are more interested in your odometer than in that Coca-cola bottling plant or whatever it is over there on the right. You are barely conscious of an ugly factory of glazed brick, with a glass-block window on its rounded corner. ‘Wompler Toy Corporation. Makers of—’
The worn sign slides past you, lost for ever. There is only one sign you are interested in : ‘Resume Speed’. Ah, there it is. And there’s another : ‘You are now leaving Millford, Utah, Home of Shelley Belle. Hurry Back !’ Your foot comes down on the gas, hard. The rattle of tappets asks :
Who the hell
Is Shelley Belle?
You are irritated with Millford. You are annoyed with your own faulty memory. You are bored with all ugly little desert towns with their smug signs : ‘Biggest Little City in the Universe !’ You are hot and bored and tired, and you exceed the speed limit a little, fleeing from the place where world history is being made …
CHAPTER I
THE WOMPLERS AT WORK
‘She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight.
… And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.’
WORDSWORTH
‘Sorry I’m late, gang.’ Louie Guthridge Wompler, vice-president in charge of public relations, bounced into the conference room on ripple-soled shoes. He smiled at the other three members of the board, but they seemed not to notice.
‘Where were you?’ asked the president, Grandison Wompler. His jowls shook with annoyance. ‘We’ve got important business to discuss.’
‘Sorry, Pop.’ Louie threw himself into a chair at the right hand of his father. ‘I was getting in some work on my lats. You know, latissimus dorsi? That’s here.’ He pointed a thick finger at his own armpit.
‘We’re dissolving the company, son.’
‘You know, I’m getting some pretty clean definition—Dissolving the company ! But why, Pop? Why?’
Grandison’s gavel made a sound like a pistol shot. ‘Meeting to order,’ he rumbled.
‘What’s the scoop, Pop?’ Louie persisted, and shone upon his father a winning, Harold Teen smile.
‘Son,’ the old man began, then stopped. He was searching for a cliché that Louie could grasp. Though forty-one years old he did not seem, at times, far removed from adolescence. Now, as he toyed with a spring grip developer and a jar of Sooper Proteen tablets, Louie seemed even—his father frowned at the thought—even childish.
The two men did not look much like father and son. The president was tall, sunburnt and rangy, fleshing out slightly in his middle age to a dignified thickness. His face was heavy and serious, with a stern jaw and thick, dark brows. There were, however, laugh lines, and his black eyes were festooned with
kindly wrinkles. With no grey in his hair, Grandison (‘Granny’) Wompler looked ten years younger than his sixty-five.
Louie, known by some as ‘Louie the Womp’, was pale and porcine. He somehow managed to resemble a water-colour of his father, one which had been through the laundry. His blond, tentatively wavy hair, milk-coloured eyes and pastry-cook skin might have made him effete but for his immense bulk. There was something athletic in Louie’s sagging shoulders and pyknik belly; he seemed a man who had been hit repeatedly in the face. His nose was flattened, and indeed all his features were a trifle smooth, a trifle melted.
He wore no tie, and beneath the white fabric of his shirt could be discerned the T-shirt legend : ‘SOOPERPROTEEN CLUB’. His smile, as he waited for his father to go on, was as pure and meaningless as that of dentures in a glass, and as constant.
‘Son, I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you—’
‘Let me try, Granny.’ Go wan Dill, the joky ninety-year-old production manager, turned to Louie and said, ‘What your father wants to say is, we’ve hitched our wagon to a
falling star.’
‘Summer slump, that’s all it is,’ Louie whined, still smiling. ‘Sales gotta pick up by Christmas.’
‘We’ll be rooned by Christmas !’ snarled his father. ‘Rooned !’
‘—summer slump, or—’
‘No, son. The truth is, we’re finished. No one wants Wompler’s Walking Babies any more.’
Grandison’s gnarled hands trembled slightly as they lifted a doll from its tissue paper packing and placed it on its feet. It began to toddle along the polished surface of the table, mewing at every step. The president’s jaw clenched with emotion. A kazoo in his head was faintly playing ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’.
Hardly anyone knew what really happened to Shelley Belle. She had been put away in tissue paper, so to speak, with other, happier memories of the thirties (Al Jolson, Bank Nite movies, the Cord roadster, Paul Whiteman’s orchestra), as though she were indeed a sunny, golden-haired doll. Just as no one wished to remember the real thirties (soup lines, bread lines, work lines), so no one wished to remember the real history of Shelley (grown, married, divorced, married, suicide attempt, bit parts in Alfred Hitchcock movies). She would always be as they first knew her, in 1935, tossing her curls and grinning impishly at W. C. Fields
or Wallace Beery. All over America, housewives clutched their free dishes and gaped. As this five-year-old shrugged, tap-dancing her way through ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’, they asked in blank amazement. Wasn’t she precious? Wasn’t she the darlingest, sassiest, ittiest yummykins sweetheart, though? Wasn’t she a living doll?
Doll. The word exploded in the brain of Grandison Wompler during a performance of Heidi at the Belmont Theatre. He had leaped up and begun cursing joyfully, until the manager, Ned Lambert, had been obliged to throw him out. Granny didn’t mind. He didn’t even mind missing the Spin-O-Cash. What were a hundred silver dollars to him? He was bursting with a million-dollar plan ! He went straight home and wrote, in the centre of a sheet of paper : ‘DOLL = DOLLARS’.
Why not make dolls of Shelley Belle right here in her home town, and why not distribute them all over the nation—the world? He would by God make a million and put Millford on the map at the same time.
There had been a few catches, as time went on. He had already got production started when a court order enjoined him from use of the name ‘Shelley Belle’. But Grandison had established his market; he did not need her name any longer. Soon, Wompler’s Walking Babies became famous in their own right, and his fortune was assured.
Even during the war he’d done well. The main plant had turned to making howitzer shells, while the seamstresses sewed canteen covers. The company had won two ‘E’ awards. Louie had gone into the army and been decorated with the Quartermaster’s Cross. It seems he had bought more canteen covers than any other quartermaster. Father and son had been sorry to see the enemy give up so easily.
In 1946 Wompler’s Babies walked again, but not nearly so profitably. Sales kept slipping, slipping, as people forgot about the ageing, alcoholic Shelley Belle. Now, twenty years later, the factory had come to a stop. As Gowan Dill put it, with many winks and digs of his frail elbow, ‘Production has come to the end of the line, boys. The eye division is tight shut. Not a head rolling off the assembly line. We might just as well take the remainder of our dolls and—’
‘Stuff them, I know,’ said Grandison wearily. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ He stared, bleary-eyed, at the doll walking away from him.
It had huge blue eyes and gold, stiff sausage curls. It wore a red-white-and-blue pleated dress with silver spangles, and a tiny pillbox hat. Its pink dimpled knees were barely visible between the silver fringe of the skirt and the thick white boots with silver tassels.
‘Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,’ it said.
‘Looks swell to me, Pop,’ said Louie loyally. He had caught his fist inside the jar of Sooper Proteen tablets. It had not occurred to Louie not to reach into a jar with the spring grip developer in his hand. ‘I think it’s a neat little product.’
‘But it isn’t wanted, son. Little girls don’t want Wompler’s Walking Babies any more. They want Barby dolls. Dolls they can dress up in fashions.’ His voice grew thick with fury, and he flushed purple beneath his sunburn. ‘Dolls that can’t walk a single step !’
‘Gee, Pop, that’s keen ! Why don’t we build a doll they can dress up?’
‘Because we don’t know the first thing about fashion, that’s why. Mrs Lumsey’s seamstresses can’t sew anything but spangles and pleats.’
‘And canteen covers,’ cracked Dill, shooting his cuffs.
No one was smiling. Grandison stared at the walking doll, looking as if he wanted to cry, but was just too strong. Louie was staring, mystified, at his entrapped hand. Moley, the chairman, was sliding down in his chair, preparing to sleep.
‘Send this company to camp !’ ventured Dill. No response. ‘Ah well,’ he sighed. ‘Let’s put on our thinking caps.’
The doll, still mewing, walked off the end of the table. There came the crack of a gutta percha face against the floor.
‘The end of a great era,’ the president muttered hoarsely.
They thought. Louie had a hard time concentrating. He wanted to be outside, doing some road-work, or just getting a tan. He wanted to study up on his karate. He wanted to get home to see if that book had come in the mail : Seventeen New Ways to Kill a Man with Your Bare Hands. And the book on Sumo wrassling.
The trouble with books was, they didn’t give a guy the feel of killing with his bare hands. That was the trouble with living in Millford, too. There was nowhere a guy could go to learn from an instructor. Louie wanted to learn all those Jap systems of self-defence. He wanted to learn how to kill a man with Zen—without even touching him, they say. Then there was Kabuki,
and there was deadliest Origami. Man !
He continued staring out the window for inspiration, until a car, air-force blue, whizzed by. It reminded him of isometric exercises. Then, somewhere in Louie’s rudimentary forebrain, a tiny circuit completed itself.
‘I got it !’ he shouted. ‘I got an idea !’
Dill groaned. ‘Not another idea,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even finished paying for that coffee machine yet.’
Louie’s last brain-storm had been to sell the workers coffee from a machine he’d bought and installed in the cafeteria, at 25 cents a cup. To increase profits on the machine, he ran the grounds through again and again. The machine would thus, he reasoned, pay for itself. The workers agreed. The machine should pay for itself.
‘No, this is a real keen idea. Listen. Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’
‘Why don’t we …’ his father repeated uncomprehendingly.
‘I think he has something, Granny !’ shouted Dill. ‘Why don’t we get some money from the government?’
‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ said Moley, sitting up and opening his eyes a little. ‘He does have something. Why don’t we—’
‘Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’ said Louie excitedly, and strained to complete the thought. His hand, encased in glass, waved impatiently. ‘From the govermint—for research !’
Bald heads nodded. ‘For research, yes !’
‘But wouldn’t we have to be making some product the government needs?’ Grandison asked, puzzled. ‘Something vital to the defence of our nation? Something important to its welfare? The government doesn’t just throw its money around, does it?’
When the others had finished laughing, Dill placed a bird-claw hand on Grandison’s sleeve. ‘You’re an old-fashioned, unpractical dreamer, Granny,’ he croaked, chuckling. ‘Maybe I am, too. We got to look to the boy here for real ideas. Times have changed since WPA, y’know. This here’s the age of the astronaut. In the old days, I’ll admit, you had to build a battleship or a municipal swimming pool—something useful. But tell me : practically speaking, of what use is it to have a man on the moon?’
‘Well, I guess …’
> ‘None ! No earthly use at all,’ cackled Dill. ‘But seriously, the government spends millions, zillions, to put one man on the
moon. On the other hand, if you have some real, some practical idea to sell them, forget it.’
‘That’s right !’ shouted Louie, jumping up and pacing about the room. ‘Remember the time I tried to sell them my idea for invisible ink? Milk, it was, plain milk. Spies could write messages in it, like invisible ink. Then you heat it up and the writing appears, as if by magic. I wrote to the Pentagon, remember, Pop?’ He threw himself into his chair again. ‘They never answered,’ he added, in a more subdued tone.
‘The fact is,’ Dill went on, tapping his sere hand on the table, ‘if we can show the government a project that is utterly, hopelessly useless, they’ll give us a grant for pure research.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know it as sure as I know that the head of the Industrial Spending Committee is Senator Dill—my cousin, get it?’
Grandison was not yet used to the idea. ‘But—but what could we do research upon? We have no facilities.’
‘They provide all that stuff, don’t worry,’ smiled Dill. ‘Concrete labs, bomb shelters, marine guards, you name it. All we have to do is figure out a project.’
‘How about a robot?’ suggested Louie.
‘No money in it,’ Dill snapped. ‘We need something which sounds easier, so that the rest of the committee can’t object to it, but which is so hard in practice that we can spend years on it. Like a bigger, faster plane.’
‘How about a robot, though?’ Louie put forth.
Ignoring the frantic waving of the jar under his nose, Moley said, ‘Now, why don’t we build a machine that can reproduce itself? I was reading about an idea like that in Life, just the other day. A self-reproducing machine—sure sounds hard enough, don’t it?’