by William Tenn
All around him, others were joining it, too, until at last there was a steady, unanimous shriek from the tight mob that slipped and fell and chased itself all over the green meadow. Mr. Mead, in the back of his mind, experienced a childlike satisfaction in getting onto the rhythm they were working out—and in being part of working it out.
It went pulse-beat, pulse-beat, shriek-k-k-k, pulse-beat, pulse-beat, shriek-k-k-k.
All together. All around him, all together. It was good!
He was unable to figure out how long they had been running and yelling, when he noticed that he was no longer in the middle of a tight group. They were spread out over the meadow in a long, wavering, yelling line.
He felt a little confused. Without losing a beat in the shriek-rhythm, he made an effort to get closer to a man and woman on his right.
The yells stopped abruptly. The noise-music stopped abruptly. He stared straight ahead where everybody else was staring. He saw it, a brown, furry animal about the size of a sheep. It had thrown one startled, frightened look at them. Then it had begun running madly away across the meadow.
“Let’s get it!” the shriek leader’s voice sounded from what seemed all about them.
The shriek started again, a continuous, unceasing shriek, and Mr. Mead joined in. He was running across the meadow after the furry brown animal, screaming his head off, dimly and proudly conscious of fellow human beings doing the same on both sides of him.
Let’s get it, his mind howled. Let’s get it, let’s get it!
Almost caught up with, the animal dodged back through the line of people. Mr. Mead flung himself at it and made a grab. He got a handful of fur and fell painfully to his knees as the animal galloped away.
He was on his feet without abating a single note of the shriek and after it in a moment. Everyone else had turned around and was running with him.
Let’s get it! Let’s get it! Let’s get it!
Back and forth across the meadow, the animal ran and they pursued. It dodged and twisted and jerked itself free from converging groups.
Mr. Mead ran with them, ran in the very forefront. Shrieking.
No matter how the furry brown animal turned, they turned, too. They kept getting closer and closer to it.
Finally, the entire mob trapped it in a great, uneven circle and closed in. Mr. Mead was the first one to reach it. He knocked it down with a single blow. A girl leaped onto it and began tearing at it with her fingernails. Just before everyone piled on, Mr. Mead managed to grab a furry brown leg. He gave it a tremendous wrench and it came off in his hand. He was distantly surprised by the loose wires and gear mechanisms that trailed out of the torn-off leg.
“We got it!” he mumbled, staring at the leg. We got it, his mind danced madly. We got it, we got it!
He was suddenly very tired, almost faint. He dragged himself away from the crowd and sat down heavily on the grass. He continued to stare at the loose wires that came out of the leg.
Someone came up to him, breathing hard. “Well,” puffed Mr. Storku. “Did you have a nice shriek?”
Mr. Mead held up the furry brown leg. “We got it,” he said bewilderedly.
The yellow-haired young man laughed. “You need a good shower and a good sedative. Come on.” He helped Mr. Mead to his feet and, holding on to his arm, walked him across the meadow to a dilated yellow square under the grandstand. All around them, the other participants in the shriek chattered gaily to each other as they cleansed themselves and readjusted their metabolism.
After his turn inside one of the many booths which filled the interior of the grandstand, Mr. Mead felt more like himself—which was not to say he felt better.
Something had come out of him in those last few moments as he tore at the mechanical quarry, something he wished infinitely had stayed at the dank bottom of his soul. He’d rather never have known it existed.
He felt vaguely, dismally, like a man who, flipping the pages of a textbook of aberrations, comes upon a particularly ugly case history which parallels his life history in every respect and understands—in a single, horrified flash—exactly what all those seemingly innocent quirks of his personality mean.
He tried to remind himself that he was still Oliver T. Mead, a good husband and father, a respected business executive, a substantial pillar of the community and the local church—but it was no help. Now, and for the rest of his life, he was also… this other thing.
He had to get into some clothes. Fast.
Mr. Storku understood immediately. “You probably had a lot saved up. About time you began discharging it. I wouldn’t worry: you’re as sane as anyone in your period. But your clothes have been cleaned off the field along with all the rubbish of our shriek; the officials are already preparing for the next one.”
“What do I do?” Mr. Mead wailed. “I can’t go home like this.”
“No?” the government man inquired with a good deal of curiosity. “You really can’t? Fascinating! Well, just step under that outfitter there. I suppose you’d like twentieth-century costume?”
Mr. Mead placed himself doubtfully under the indicated mechanism as a newly clad citizen of twenty-fifth-century America walked away from it. “Yes. But please make it something sane, something I can wear.”
He watched as his host adjusted the dials. There was a slight hum from the machine overhead: a complete set of formal black-and-white evening wear sprang into being on the stout man’s body. In a moment, it had changed into another outfit: the shoes grew upward and became hip-length rubber boots, the dinner jacket lengthened itself into a sou’wester. Mr. Mead was perfectly dressed for the bridge of any whaling ship.
“Stop it!” he begged distractedly as the sou’wester began showing distinctive sports shirt symptoms. “Keep it down to one thing!”
“You could do it yourself,” Mr. Storku pointed out, “if your subconscious didn’t heave about so much.” Nonetheless, he good-naturedly poked at the machine again and Mr. Mead’s clothes subsided into the tweed jacket and golf knickers that had been so popular in the 1920s. They held fast at that.
“Better?”
“I-I guess so.” Mr. Mead frowned as he looked down at himself. It certainly was a queer outfit for a vice-president of Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc., to return to his own time in, but at least it was one outfit. And as soon as he got home—
He took a deep breath. “Now look here, Storku,” he said, putting aside the recent obscene memories of himself with as much determination as he could call up. “We’re having trouble with this Winthrop fellow. He won’t go back with us.”
They walked outside and paused on the edge of the meadow. In the distance, a new shriek was being organized.
“That so?” Mr. Storku asked with no very great interest. He pointed at the ragged mob of nude figures just beginning to jostle each other into a tight bunch. “You know, two or three more sessions out there and your psyche would be in fine shape. Although, from the looks of you, I’d say Panic Stadium would be even better. Why don’t you go right over there? One first-rate, screaming, headlong panic and you’d be absolutely—”
“Thank you, but my psyche is my own affair!”
The yellow-haired young man nodded seriously. “Obviously. The adult individual’s psyche is under no other jurisdiction than that of the adult individual concerned. The Covenant of 2314, adopted by unanimous consent of the entire population of the United States of America. Later, of course, broadened by the international plebiscite of 2337 to include the entire world. But I was just making a friendly suggestion.”
Mr. Mead forced himself to smile. He was distressed to find that when he smiled, the lapels of his jacket stood up and caressed the sides of his chin affectionately. “No offense, no offense. It’s just that I’ve had all I want of this nonsense. But what are you going to do about Winthrop?”
“Do? Why, nothing. What can we do?”
“You can force him to go back! You represent the government, don’t you? The government invited us here, the government
is responsible for our safety.”
Storku looked puzzled. “Aren’t you safe?”
“You know what I mean, Storku. Our safe return. The government is responsible for it.”
“Force may never be applied to a mature citizen and even official persuasion may be resorted to only in rare and carefully specified instances. This is certainly not one of them. By the time a child has gone through our educational system, he or she is a well-balanced member of society who can be trusted to do whatever is socially necessary. From that point on, government ceases to take an active role in the individual’s life.”
“But Winthrop isn’t a citizen of your world, Storku. He didn’t go through your educational system, didn’t have these psychological things, these readjustment courses, every couple of years, and didn’t—”
“But he came here as our invited guest,” Mr. Storku pointed out. “And, as such, he’s entitled to the full protection of our laws.”
“And we aren’t, I suppose!” Mr. Mead shouted. “He can do whatever he wants to us and get away with it. Do you call that law? Do you call that justice? I don’t. Red-tape bureaucracy, that’s all it is!”
The yellow-haired young man put his hand on Mr. Mead’s shoulder. “Listen, my friend, and try to understand. If Winthrop tried to do anything to you, it would be stopped. Not by interfering with Winthrop directly but by removing you from his neighborhood. In order for us to take even such limited action, he’d have to do. That would be commission of an act interfering with your rights as an individual. What Winthrop is accused of, however, is omission of an act. He refuses to go back with you. Well, now. He has a right to refuse to do anything with his own body and mind. The Covenant of 2314 covers that in so many words. Would you like me to quote the relevant passage to you?”
“No, I would not like you to quote the relevant passage to me. So you’re trying to say that nobody can do anything, is that it? Winthrop can keep all of us from getting back to our own time, but you can’t do anything about it and we can’t do anything about it. One hell of a note.”
“An interesting phrase, that,” Mr. Storku commented. “If there had only been an etymologist or linguist in your group, I would enjoy discussing it with him. Your conclusion, though, at least in regard to this particular situation, is substantially correct. There is only one thing you can do—you can try to persuade Winthrop. Up to the last moment of the scheduled transfer, that, of course, always exists as a possible solution.”
Mr. Mead brushed down his overly emotional jacket lapels. “And if we don’t, we’re out of luck? We can’t take him by the scruff of the neck and—and—”
“I’m afraid you can’t. A government machine or manufactured government official would appear on the scene and liberate him. Without any damage to your persons, you understand.”
“No damage,” Mr. Mead brooded. “Just leaving us stuck in this asylum for the rest of our lives, no ifs, no ands, no buts.”
Mr. Storku looked hurt. “Oh, come now! It may be very different from your own culture in many ways. It may be uncomfortably alien in its artifacts and underlying philosophy. But surely there are compensations. For the loss of the old in terms of family, associates and experiences, there must be a gain in the new and exciting. Your Winthrop has found it so—he’s at Panic Stadium or Shriek Field at least every other day; I’ve run into him at seminars and salons three times in the past ten days; and I hear from the Bureau of Home Appliances of the Department of Internal Economics that he’s a steady, enthusiastic and thoroughly dedicated consumer. What he can bring himself to do—”
“Sure he gets all those gadgets,” Mr. Mead sneered. “He doesn’t have to pay for them. A lazy relief jack like him couldn’t ask for anything better. What a world—gahhh!”
“My only point,” Mr. Storku continued equably, “is that being ‘stuck in this asylum,’ as you rather vividly picture it, has its positive aspects. And since there appears to be a distinct possibility of this occurring, it would seem logical for you people to begin investigating these positive aspects somewhat more wholeheartedly than you have, instead of retreating to the security of each other’s company and such twentieth-century anachronisms as you are able to recreate.”
“We have—all we cared to. What we want now, all of us, is to go home and to keep on living the lives we were born into. So what it comes down to is that nobody and nothing can help us with Winthrop, eh?”
Mr. Storku called for a jumper and held up a hand to arrest the huge cylinder in the air as soon as it appeared.
“I wouldn’t want to go as far as that without conducting a thorough personal investigation of the matter. It’s entirely possible that someone or something in the Galaxy could help you if the problem were brought to its attention and if it were sufficiently interested. It’s rather a large, well-populated galaxy, you know. All I can say definitely is that the Department of State can’t help you.”
Mr. Mead pushed his fingernails deep into his palms and ground his teeth together. “You couldn’t possibly,” he asked at last, very, very slowly, “be just a little more specific in telling us where to go for help next? We have less than two hours left—and we won’t be able to cover very much of the Galaxy in that time.”
“A good point,” Mr. Storku said approvingly. ‘I’m glad to see that you have calmed down and are at last thinking clearly and resourcefully. Now who—in this immediate neighborhood—might be able to work out the solution of an insoluble problem? Well, first there’s the Temporal Embassy, which handled the exchange and brought you people here. They have all kinds of connections; they can, if they feel like it, tap the total Ingenuity of the human race for the next five thousand years. The trouble is, they take too much of the long view for my taste.
“Then there are the Oracle Machines which will give you the answer to any question that can be answered. The problem there, of course, is interpreting the answer correctly. Then, on Pluto, there’s a convention this week of vector psychologists. If anyone could figure out a way or persuading Winthrop to change his mind, they can. Unfortunately, the dominant field of interest in vector psychology at the moment is fetal education; I’m afraid they’d find your Winthrop far too mature a specimen. Then, out around Rigel, there’s a race of remarkably prescient fungi whom I can recommend from personal experience. They have a most unbelievable talent for—”
Mr. Mead waggled a frantic hand at him. “That’s enough! That’s plenty to go on for a while! We only have two hours—remember?”
“I certainly do. And since it’s very unlikely that you can do anything about it in so short a time, may I suggest that you drop the whole matter and take this jumper with me to Venus? There won’t be another Odor Festival there for sixty-six years. It’s an experience, my friend, that should not be missed. Venus always does these things right: the greatest odor-emitters in the Universe will be there. And I’ll be very happy to explain all the fine points to you. Coming?”
Mr. Mead dodged out of the way of the jumper which Mr. Storku was gesturing down invitingly. “No, thank you! Why is it,” he complained when he had retreated to a safe distance, “that you people are always taking vacations, always going off somewhere to relax and enjoy yourselves? How the hell does any work ever get done in this cockeyed world?”
“Oh, it gets done,” the yellow-haired young man laughed as the cylinder began to slide down over him. “Whenever there’s something that only a human being can do, one of us—the nearest responsible individual with the appropriate training—takes care of it. But our personality goals are different from yours. In the words of the proverb: All play and no work makes Jack a full boy.”
And he was gone.
So Mr. Mead went back to Mrs. Brucks’ room and told the others that the Department of State, represented by Mr. Storku, couldn’t help them with Winthrop’s stubbornness.
Mary Ann Carthington tightened the curl of her blonde hair with a business-like forefinger while she considered the matter. “You told him all
that you told us, and he still wouldn’t do anything, Mr. Mead? Are you sure he knows who you are?”
Mr. Mead didn’t bother to answer her. He had other problems. Not only was his spirit badly bruised and scratched by his recent experiences, but his golf knickers had just woken into sentiency. And whereas the jacket merely had attempted to express its affection by trying to cuddle under his chin, the knickers went in more for a kind of patrolling action. Up and down on his thighs they rippled; back and forth across his rear they marched.
“Sure Storku knows who he is,” Dave Pollock told her. “Ollie waved his vice-presidency in his face, but Storku heard that Sweet-bottom Septic Tanks Preferred fell to the bottom of the stock market just 481 years ago today, so he wasn’t afraid of him or much impressed.”
“I don’t think that’s funny,” Mary Ann Carthington said, and shook her head at him once in a “so there!” gesture. She knew that old beanpole of a school-teacher was just jealous of Mr. Mead, but she wasn’t sure whether it was because he didn’t make as much money or because he wasn’t nearly as distinguished-looking. But if a big executive like Mr. Mead couldn’t get them out of this jam, then nobody could. And that would be awful, positively awful.
She would never get back to San Francisco and Edgar Rapp And while Edgar might not be everything a girl like Mary Ann wanted, she was quite willing to settle for him at this point. He worked hard and made a good living. His compliments were nothing much, true, but at least he could be counted on not to say anything that tore a person into worthless bits right before their very eyes, like somebody she could mention. And the sooner she could leave the twenty-fifth century and be forever away from that somebody, the better.
“Now, Mr. Mead,” she cooed insistently, “I’m sure he told you something we could do. He didn’t tell you to give up hope completely and absolutely, did he?”
The executive caught the strap end of his knickers as it came unbuckled and started rolling exultantly up his leg. He glared at her out of eyes that bad seen just too damn much, that felt things had gone just too damn far.