The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library)

by John Sladek

  ‘It does seem superior,’ Cal admitted, pointing to the Wompler Laboratory, from which issued forth a constant stream of grey boxes. There was not a trace of electric power cabling, smoke, dust or noise. ‘That, for instance, is my idea of a perfect factory. But shouldn’t there be more to superiority than just efficiency? And if we shut it off, are we not proving ourselves its superior in at least ability to survive?’

  ‘Sophistry !’ Brian shouted. ‘It is sinful, yes, sinful to tamper with rational perfection. The Reproductive System is the embodiment of all that is right and reasonable. It cannot, it must not be diluted by our vexatious theories. If there is not room for man, so be it ! Let man step aside, so that his greater, more perfect successor may have room in which to grow !’ Shaking out his snuff-stained handkerchief, he blew his nose with a vigorous and angry flourish, then led the way into the Wompler Research building.

  ‘Put up your hands !’ shouted a faint, distant voice. ‘Get over against that wall !’ After looking about, they discovered the voice to emanate from a thin, hungry-looking youth in a Marine Corps dress uniform, who sat on the floor at their feet. He seemed to be struggling with something at his side, and at length drew forth a .45 automatic. Slowly, holding it with both hands, he raised the gun to train upon them. It wavered there for a second, then dropped to the floor. The youth made unhappy noises and assumed an unhappy expression. ‘You shouldn’t go in without a pass,’ he said, again the faint, faraway voice.

  ‘Here.’ Daisy exchanged the gun for a chocolate cupcake from her sack of groceries. Brian accepted the gun and tucked it away in one of the deep pockets of his coat while Daisy peeled the cupcake for the young man.

  ‘Who are you?’ Daisy asked the guard. ‘What are you doing here, you poor thing?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you anything but my name, rank and

  serial number,’ he replied, taking a sullen bite of a second cupcake.

  ‘Are you strong enough to walk, if we help you?’ Cal asked.

  ‘I’m staying right here till I’m relieved !’

  The marine was adamant. After a consultation, during which Brian called the boy a ‘pertinacious puppy’, the three divided their provisions into four parts, left one part with him, and moved on down winding corridors, ever more gloomy.

  The building seemed utterly deserted. Cal found the door to the cafeteria impossible to budge, and it seemed to be seeping cold, greasy liquid around the edges.

  They climbed to the upper level, where the dim hall was lined with rough iron plates. Two parallel grooves had been cut into the floor, for what reason they could not determine.

  ‘This is spooky,’ Daisy whispered, looking round at the scaly walls. ‘There isn’t a soul anywhere.’

  ‘Air,’ sighed the echo along the length of the hall. Otherwise it was silent, but for an occasional faint drip of water somewhere far in the distance.

  ‘Come on, this way,’ Cal beckoned. ‘The laboratory is the last room at the end of the hall, on the right.’

  ‘Labra, this, labyrinth, all, right,’ quavered the liquid echo. It took up their footsteps as they approached the dark end and opened a door.

  Bright fluorescent glare streamed across the rust-pitted floor and gleamed in the twin grooves.

  ‘Hello, is anyone here?’ Cal shouted.

  Pointing a trembling finger to the corner of the room, Daisy said, ‘Yes and no.’

  When they stood still, they were so utterly motionless, and when they moved, it was with such blurring speed and precision, that it was impossible to mistake the two armoured figures for humans. They looked alike, with big, square, blocky heads, with cathode-ray tubes where their faces ought to be. They moved about with inhuman agility in utter silence, performing tasks the nature of which Cal could only guess. They wore the red identification badges of Kurt and Karl Mackintosh.

  Avoiding the three humans as bats avoid obstacles, they veered gracefully without altering their speed. Now one would carry a smoking test tube to a centrifuge, while the other manipulated a switchboard of test equipment. Now one glided to a typewriter and typed, at blinding speed:

  11011 HIGH CTR GRAVITY TIPS GLASS

  11012 IRON TOROID KEEPS PROPORTIONS WHILE EXPANDING

  11013 THE TRUCK DRIVER IS WRONG

  11014 AE2 PLUS BE2 EQUALS CE2

  11015 DEFINITION: (DO NOT PUNCTURE OR INCINERATE) MEANS (DO NOT PUNCTURE) AND (DO NOT BURN) AND (DO NOT PUNCTURE AND BURN)

  11016 OIL FLOATS ON VINEGAR

  11017 DOWN IS IN THE DIRECTION OF GRAVITY SOMETIMES

  11018 KWALITEIT, HOE WORDT DIE GEMETEN?

  11019 HAT: HEAD: : SHOE: FOOT

  11020 MILL, JOHN STUART (1806–73): PHILOSOPHER AND ECONOMIST.

  At the same time, the other began writing down figures and equations on a peculiar copper clipboard, using a stylus. Both stylus and board were connected electrically to the wall.

  Now and then one of the two figures would turn to the other and display upon its face-screen a series of numbers. Otherwise there seemed to be no conversation between the two, nor any need for conversation, for they glided about effortlessly in what seemed almost a ballet of order and harmony. When they finished a step or process the revolving apertures atop their heads would swivel towards a display console at the end of the room, but as soon as it had lighted its WELL DONEsign, the ballet resumed.

  ‘Amazing and beautiful,’ murmured Prof. Gallopini. ‘I’d gladly give up my life of crime to know how such wondrous engines work.’

  ‘I’d give a lot to know how to shut all of this off,’ Cal mused, looking around him in some bewilderment. ‘I don’t recognize any of the equipment I’ve seen here. If this thing can metamorphose that fast …’

  ‘Metamorphose? Ah yes,’ said Brian, looking around with a smile. ‘Mere metal transcends itself. These exquisite automatons strive for equilibrium, just as the earth strives to become a perfect sphere, just as the universe becomes always more ordered.’

  ‘What funny-looking robots !’ Daisy remarked. ‘They have cast-iron ears ! And no mouths !’

  ‘Nor need they mouths,’ Brian insisted. ‘These are the men of tomorrow ! These are the inheritors of the earth ! These are

  the Übermensch, the equilibrists, the dynasts !’ Extending his arms towards the busy robots, he declaimed, ‘Men of the future, we who are about to become extinct salute thee !’

  Without seeming to notice his speech, the two machines carried out their next task. One opened the lab door, the other lifted Brian Gallopini and set him on his feet in the hall. Before Cal and Daisy could remark on this, they were given identical treatment.

  The hall was far from dark now, and far from quiet. A string of fluorescent tubes along the centre of the ceiling lit up the entire empty length of it, while there was all about a deep rumble, hideous and deafening that made cymbals of the floors and walls. It grew so loud so rapidly that there was not even enough time to ask one another what it meant. Then the far end wall of the corridor split open like a curtain, and the nose of an enormous steam locomotive rumbled towards them.

  It moved only at the rate of perhaps one mile per hour, spattering hissing steam as it ground ineluctably towards their cul-de-sac. The brakes were on, and the wheels spewed fire from the grooves as they slid and spun backward, but the engine did not appear to be slowed in the least.

  Screaming at one another noiselessly in the din, the three companions pulled at the lab door, their only refuge. It budged open only an inch or two, just enough for Cal to glimpse the two robots pulling it shut. The screen of one displayed a picture of the amused features of Karl; the other showed his twin. Their metal muscles moved, and the door closed against all the efforts of the three humans.

  Daisy whirled on Brian and mouthed the words, ‘Well, get ready for another helping of poetic justice.’

  The three backed up against the end wall of the corridor, watching Old Number 666 roll towards them.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  OBITU
ARY

  ‘Soon as the evening shades prevail,

  The Moon takes up the wondrous tale;

  And nightly to the listening Earth

  Repeats the story of her birth.’

  ADDISON

  At times it seemed to Suggs as if the man across the Monopoly board from him were not Vetch, but someone else. The little Russian’s bearded features would gradually blend themselves into those of someone long forgotten, some agent Suggs had killed, or wanted to kill … but now it was himself Suggs wanted to kill, and the enemy agent who prevented him from doing it.

  Suggs had been thinking all day of secret suicide, of killing himself in some way right in front of Vetch by opening a vein inside his suit, or—but it was no use, the Russian caught on too fast. Neither man dared sleep, for fear the other would annihilate himself. Vetch hadn’t blinked for hours.

  Sleeplessness was affecting Sugg’s own mind, he knew, and weightlessness irritated his body. He chafed himself against the straps, or pressed hard against the soft cushion, almost as if to prove his own existence. He felt no more substantial than a spectre.

  Haroun Al Raschid took his seat across from him and began talking at once, moving his fat bejewelled hands expressively but making no sound. They were taking a ride on the Reading, Suggs supposed, or the Orient express.

  ‘I’m disoriented,’ he explained to Haroun. But the fat man went on talking, talking, unaware that his words made no noise, unaware, too, of the purple stain spreading across the front of his pale silk shirt.

  Vetch had landed on Chance. Had that been the last turn? Suggs found he couldn’t remember; he couldn’t even remember how many days had gone by since … since what?

  Vetch’s face kept changing to that of Scotty, his broken features spattered with blood and bits of bone.

  ‘You really faked me out with that typewriter shotgun, old buddy,’ he murmured. ‘It was a good trick, Suggsy.’

  If he talked to Vetch, he thought, maybe Scotty would go away.

  ‘Have I told you how I killed my first partner in Marrakech?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe so. Tell me.’

  ‘It was pretty funny. I had this portable typewriter rigged up so the carriage was also a sort of hollow tube that could shoot a shotgun shell. It fired by pressing the question mark.’

  Scotty spoke, forming sticky bubbles of blood. ‘The question is, why?’

  ‘He double-crossed me,’ Suggs said shrilly. ‘I knew it was him got the other half of that photo of Brioche from Haroun. They were trying to swindle me and sell out to the—to you guys.’

  ‘Not to us,’ said Vetch. ‘I thought you knew there never was another half to that photo. Brioche’s vanity, you see. He never let anyone have a photo of what he called his “bad side”. I thought you knew that.’

  ‘You did know it, Suggsy, but you don’t want to remember,’ Scotty chuckled. ‘That’s the funny part of it. You really just wanted an excuse to kill a couple of people, didn’t you?’

  ‘My partner,’ said Suggs, affecting not to hear him, ‘would like to weasel out of his death even yet. But I won’t let him get away with it. I’m glad I killed him, and if he were alive today, I’d kill him again. I think it must have been him who put her up to it.’

  ‘Put who up to what?’ asked Vetch.

  ‘Put my wife up to divorcing me.’

  Laughing, Scotty faded imperceptibly into scowling Vetch. Suggs developed an uncontrollable tremor in his left leg. He thought of his trenchcoat back in Marrakech, and cursed himself for leaving it there. There was cyanide sewn into one epaulet.

  Through the tinted faceplate of his helmet, Vetch’s savage gaze bored into Suggs’s eyes. Vetch did not appear to hear the knock at the door.

  The door opened and Barthemo Beele, eyeshade in hand, came in. He had to crouch for the low ceiling, as he moved right over to the chair where Vetch was sitting and sat down in him. Grinning self-consciously, he began to crush the brim of the eyeshade.

  ‘I never killed you, at least.’ Suggs snarled.

  ‘You would have, if you had stayed around long enough, chief,’ said the earnest young man. He dropped a press card, and it fluttered to the floor.

  ‘That was a mistake, Beele,’ said Suggs with a nasty laugh. ‘You forgot there is no gravity here. Things don’t fall.’

  ‘I forgot? If it comes to that, it was your mistake,’ Beele said politely. ‘Am I a figment of your sleepless imagination or not?’

  ‘I could find out.’ Suggs reached for his gun, then relaxed and laughed again. ‘No, you’d like that wouldn’t you? I’d be killing Vetch, which is just what you, my unconscious mind, want me to do.’

  ‘Guess again,’ said Beele, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Vetch has been dead for hours, and you know it.’

  His smile faded to Vetch’s scowl, and the press card in his ringers became an orange Chance card. The Russian’s face was blue, and there were poison blisters on the lips.

  ‘I’ll be damned !’ Suggs slapped his knee. ‘Vetch, you did it, and right in front of me !’

  The corpse looked contempt at him. ‘The question is, what are you going to do?’ it said. ‘You poor son of a bitch.’

  ‘I’m gonna radio the news of your death back, and then I’m gonna … I’m not sure.’

  He encoded his message and sent it: ‘IVAN DEAD, FOLLOWING ARE PERFORMANCE TAPES ON EQPT.’

  There was no need to wait for a reply. He knew what it would order him to do. Go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass God. He closed up his suit, hooked in a fresh tank of oxygen, and climbed out of the ship. After straddling it for a moment indecisively, he pushed himself free. At this distance the moon was brighter, but it looked as boringly hieroglyphic to him as ever. He drifted off to sleep, wondering if he were falling away or towards the moon.

  He awoke trying to remember if he had finished balancing his bank statement. He did so now, visualizing the neat, meaningful rows of expenditures like a lattice …

  He realized he was looking at a tower, very like the Eiffel Tower, sliding by him slowly. Amazingly real it was. On the top platform he could even make out the tiny, frosty figure of a man, gripping the rail with both hands. For no apparent reason, the man was wearing an eyeshade. Suggs went to sleep.

  He awoke trying to remember whether he had finished balancing his bank statement or not. He did so now, wisely deciding not to postpone it. His oxygen was giving out, he supposed; thinking was becoming difficult.

  He unsheathed his knife and held it at arm’s length. It was

  a moment to make a fine, self-sacrificing speech, but his oxygen-starved mind was slowing. There was only one speech Suggs could remember:

  ‘Take that, you dirty—!’

  The postcards were so banal they just had to be code—yet the plain fact was that they weren’t. After tearing off the stamps for his nephew’s collection, the Russian code clerk consigned Bubby to the incinerator.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  TIME AND CHANCE

  ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’

  DARWIN

  Cal felt a handle on the wall behind him. He twisted it, and a firedoor rolled back smoothly, revealing a new section of hallway. The three companions scrambled into it, the locomotive following at a more dignified pace.

  The first door they tried was open. As they ducked into it, Daisy and Cal grinned at one another with relief. Brian’s brow remained puckered, however, as he stared at the oncoming engine’s wheels and feet.

  The wheels were reversing to throw grindstone sparks. Behind the engine, a seemingly endless line of cars creaked and groaned to a halt. Out of the hissing vapour an engineer in goggles descended, pulled off one oily gauntlet, and handed down an attractive young woman.

  ‘Whew !’ The engineer whistled. ‘You people were nearly demised on the spot. That could have been a most unfortuitous vicissitude.’

  ‘Dr. Trivian !’ Cal
shouted, peering at the sand-caked, goggled face. ‘Is it really you?’

  ‘By gad, it is Calvin Potter !’ Trivian seized his hand. ‘This is indeed an audacious occasion, my boy.’

  ‘But what are you doing here? So far from MIT?’

  ‘I am realizing my lifelong dream of driving a steam loco-

  motive. That is, the little grey box does the actual driving, but I am entitled to make suggestions—which are never heeded.

  ‘But I forget myself, or I forget my passenger, which is not the same thing at all, eh? Dr. Aurora Candlewood, may I present my former pupil, Calvin Potter?’

  She was nearly Cal’s height, slim, with small hands and feet and the shallow breasts and slender, arching neck of a dancer. Yet there was a decided awkwardness about her movements, as if she deliberately chose to disguise her natural grace by holding her body always in stiff, unlovely positions. Her hand was cold.

  Cal became depressingly aware of his own uncombed hair, muddy clothes and dirt-grained face. A sudden fiery itch stung his chin where a neophyte beard, tough and patchy, clung desperately as lichen to a crumbling rock. Mechanically he introduced Aurora and Trivian to his companions.

  Brian was morose and silent as a watchmaker over Aurora’s hand.

  ‘Strangers call me Miss le Due,’ said Daisy to the engineer. ‘My friends call me Daisy. But to remain my friend is to resist the temptation to call me you know what.’

  Aurora explained to them her interest in Project 32 and her purpose in coming to the Wompler Lab. She was relieved at finding in Cal someone who knew something about the functioning of the Reproductive System, from the individual cell level upwards.

  Brian announced that he was going to ‘find out what time it is’, and left, by a door leading to a second corridor.