Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Captain Baker watched them argue. “Is this something I should know about?” he asked.

  “No,” said Vanna.

  “Tomorrow,” said Penzias.

  “Right,” said Captain Baker, and thought to himself: You’re going to regret this, Chance.

  The Story of Little Jon Frum

  “My Melanesian ancestors were members of the Cult of Cargo, Mr. Gant,” Bartholomew Frum began.

  At seven P.M. the Public Opinion Cortex was deserted except for the four men gathered near the window wall and the Electric Janitor vacuuming over by the elevator banks. Whitey Caspian stood a few paces behind Fouad and Bartholomew, a father supporting his children, while Harry Gant leaned back in a swivel chair with his feet up to listen to what Whitey had described as “one hell of a story, Harry.”

  “The Cult of Cargo,” Gant repeated. “Is that anything like Dianetics?”

  “No sir, I don’t think so, though I don’t know that much about Dianetics. The Cult of Cargo first flourished on Fiji in the 1880s. The natives who lived there, having had glimpses of European and American affluence, decided they deserved the same luxuries enjoyed by the white man. But they weren’t an educated people, and they knew nothing about the Industrial Revolution or the means of production. They assumed, reckoning from what little they did know, that all they needed to do was build docks, lighthouses, and customs stations—or at least the best imitations of these things that they could construct from the crude materials they had on hand—and ships would appear, by magic, bearing cargo.

  “As time passed and the Cult spread to other parts of the Melanesian chain, it evolved, adapting to more modern circumstances. My own family joined the Cult in 1935, and instead of a dock they built an airstrip, with burning torches for landing lights and a driftwood ticket counter. They took the name Frum, for Jon Frum, the white pilot who was supposed to fly out of the clouds in a Red Cross plane and bring them electric lights, automobiles, and Coca-Cola.”

  “Huh,” Harry Gant said. “Huh, how about that.”

  “Of course, the plane never came . . .”

  “And eventually they gave up.”

  “Oh no. No sir. I guess in that sense it is like Dianetics . . . the magic didn’t work, but the Cult never quite died out, it just changed tactics. In 1940, after five years without a single cargo plane landing, the Frums took a more aggressive stance. They pooled what few valuables they had and bartered a one-way steamship passage to America for my grandfather, whom they called Little Jon Frum. His mission was to find and kidnap President Roosevelt—or buy him, if that were possible—and bring him back alive to Melanesia. Once the Frums had their own American president, the cargo planes were sure to come . . .”

  “Such poor reasoning is to be expected,” Fouad Nassif interjected, “from a people with no grounding in Aristotelian logic. My own countrymen—”

  “Grandfather’s ultimate destination,” Bartholomew continued, “was New York City, which the Frums had heard was the greatest city with the greatest cargo in the world. It was only natural that President Roosevelt would be found there too. But the steamer only took Grandfather as far as San Francisco. He arrived in California with no more than a few coins in his pockets, and he probably would have starved to death if a Japanese-American industrialist named Hideyoshi hadn’t taken pity on him.

  “Hideyoshi owned a pair of successful pharmaceutical factories. Being an immigrant himself, he was impressed by Little Jon’s courage and determination in coming to an unknown land, even if he also thought the Cult of Cargo was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard of. He found Grandfather a place to live, hired a tutor to make him literate, and gave him a job in a warehouse loading boxes of medical supplies for shipment. Grandfather thought he’d found the Promised Land, and he was overjoyed with the slave wages Hideyoshi paid him, most of which he sent back to the other Frums in Melanesia.

  “Then came World War II, and Pearl Harbor. In 1942 President Roosevelt ordered all West Coast Japanese relocated to internment camps. The government gave Hideyoshi two weeks to sell his home and his business and set his other affairs in order. As you can imagine, Mr. Gant, with that little time it was more like a yard sale than a careful liquidation of assets. Hideyoshi lost his shirt, and, in the process, his respect for America. He was particularly resentful of the white businessmen who took advantage of his helpless position to buy his property at cut-rate prices, and he vowed vengeance, but in the internment camp he contracted cholera and pneumonia and nearly died.

  “Grandfather, meanwhile, spent his war years painting cargo planes for the army. He also got a night job mopping floors at the San Francisco Patent Office, which is where he met my grandmother, Hannah Kazenstein.”

  “Kazenstein?” The name sounded familiar; Gant had a vague recollection of seeing it on a list of suspected eco-terrorists that C. D. Singh had faxed from Washington.

  “She was a black sheep in her own family,” Bartholomew said. “Most of the Kazensteins were Zionists who moved to Palestine to agitate for an independent Jewish state, but Grandma Hannah wanted to be a famous American inventor. She came up with some useful gadgets, too, but didn’t have the business sense to successfully market them. Consequently she was almost as poor as Grandfather when they decided to get married.

  “At the end of the war Hideyoshi was released from the camp and returned to California. His bouts with disease had left him feeble, and his bitterness had made him crazy. He found my grandparents, who were the only people who would listen to his raving, and convinced them to join him in his bid for revenge. Even with the losses he’d suffered on the sale of his factories, he still had a small fortune, and Grandma Hannah was more than willing to play at conspiracy if it would fund her experiments. Grandfather still felt loyalty towards Hideyoshi, of course, and he’d also begun to miss the old Cargo Cult rituals . . .”

  “Wait a minute.” Gant leaned forward. “You’re not saying that your grandparents are bankrolling Philo Dufresne, are you?”

  “No, Mr. Gant, they’ve both been dead for forty years. Though come to think of it, I’m not sure what happened to the last of Hideyoshi’s money. At any rate, their revenge strategy didn’t involve any direct action against the United States or the white industrialists Hideyoshi had identified as his mortal enemies. They chose—and this just shows how badly Hideyoshi had deteriorated in the camp—to settle things Melanesian style. The Cargo Cult way.

  “They started in Hawaii, buying small plots of land and using bamboo poles and sugar cane to mark off landing strips. Grandma Hannah rigged up camouflaged loudspeakers to broadcast air traffic control orders in Japanese, at a sound frequency too high for human ears to hear. Live humans, anyway. This time the Cult of Cargo was hoping to attract not cargo planes, but Japanese Zeroes . . .”

  “But this was after the war.”

  “Yes sir. Grandfather still had no concept of chronological order or common sense, Grandmother didn’t care whether it made sense as long as she got to build things, and Hideyoshi was bonkers. When they were done in Hawaii they returned to the mainland, where they set up more landing strips all along the California and Oregon coastline. Then they started moving east. In the New Mexico desert (it was 1947 by this time, and the flying saucer craze had just hit the papers) they constructed UFO refueling and cattle mutilation sites; in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan they erected what Grandmother called ‘wind funnel inducers’ to attract tornados; and near Indian burial grounds in Georgia and Pennsylvania they established secret arsenals—containing some rather baroque Kazenstein weaponry—in case any ghost warriors wanted to take a crack at overthrowing the government. But their ultimate destination, and the master stroke of their conspiracy, centered on New York.

  “I’m afraid I’m not sure what that master stroke was, or whether they pulled it off, because around that time Hideyoshi’s health gave out again. He died of recurring pneumonia in the spring of 1949. My grandmother kept extensive diaries, which is how I know all this, but
she also tore pages out, and most of the hard information about what went on in New York is missing.

  “But I can make some educated guesses, sir, based on what I do know. Their plan is pretty easy to figure, actually, given the pattern they’d already been following. U-boats, Mr. Gant.”

  “U-boats?”

  “Yes, U-boats. They tried to summon Japanese warplanes on the West Coast, Martians in New Mexico, tornados in the Midwest, and Indians in the East. What would be the most obvious threat to Manhattan?”

  “More Indians, I’d think,” Harry Gant said. “Asking for another twenty-four dollars.”

  “No sir. Nazi U-boats. That was the big wartime fear, foreigners invading or shelling America, and I think Hideyoshi would have seized on it. A secret submarine base, sir. For what it’s worth, I believe my grandparents did build and outfit a U-boat station, though they may not have completed it before Hideyoshi’s death. And strangely enough, in a different way than any of them had planned, I believe the Cargo Cult magic finally worked. Instead of Nazis, it brought Dufresne.”

  “Huh,” Gant said. “Huh. Well.” His hands slapped the front of his thighs and he stood up as if to leave. In fact he wanted to call Joan and see if she felt like meeting him for a late dinner. “Well, Whitey was right, that is a hell of a story, I’m sure you’ve got a great future in Public Opinion, but—”

  “That’s not the whole thing, Mr. Gant. If it were just a funny story my parents had told me I would never have wasted your time. But I did a term paper on the role of conspiracy in American corporate politics in school last year, and because I was on the general topic anyway, I decided to investigate my grandparents’ history a little more closely. I went to the Public Library and looked up newspapers and magazines from the late Forties, to see if there were any traces of strange goings-on; I also checked geological surveys and old maps to discover where around New York, if anywhere, someone would be likely to hide a U-boat pen.

  “Now I don’t know if you’ve ever studied a geological survey, Mr. Gant, but I can tell you, it’s boring. Nobody does it for laughs, and in fact most of the materials I asked for had only been borrowed once before—all on the same day, twelve years previously. Then I noticed this . . .” He showed Gant a color Xerox of a map of New York Bay. One of the islands on the map had been circled in red.

  “’Bedloe’s Island,’” Gant read.

  “Liberty Island, Mr. Gant. Bedloe’s is what they used to call it before the statue was erected. It turns out there’s a natural cavity underneath the island, one that’s supposedly full of sea water. But what if. . .”

  “This still isn’t very convincing,” Gant told him. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed by your thoroughness, but I don’t think—”

  “I found out his name.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The name of the man who borrowed this map before me. They keep computer records of who borrows what, and I bribed a librarian to run a file search for me. The man’s name, get this, was Savin Dixon Wales.”

  Gant looked at Whitey. Whitey looked excited. Gant didn’t get it.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Is that somebody famous?”

  “Savin Dixon Wales, Mr. Gant. Savin D. Wales.”

  Gant blinked. “Savin’ de whales?”

  “Yes sir. Coincidence? I think not.”

  Gant looked at Whitey again. “Have you asked Vanna for her take on this?”

  “Vanna had other things on her mind,” Whitey said, diplomatically. “But we don’t really need her input. Fouad here has already come up with a plan to nail Dufresne, if we can verify the existence of the U-boat station. You’ll have to pull some strings with the city government, but the plan is nonviolent and it turns the pirates’ own strategy against them.”

  “Do not thank me,” added Fouad. “To think of this plan was only logical.”

  “Huh,” Gant said. He forgot about dinner with Joan and sat back down. “So let’s hear the details.”

  Five Hundred Dollars a Day Selling Pencils

  Clayton Bryce took dinner at the Invisible Hand Supper Club, a Wall Street bar and grill that catered exclusively to creative accountants and tax lawyers. It was a private, relaxed atmosphere in which to unwind, sip Mai Tais, and perhaps swap gossip with a brother CPA after a hard day’s number juggling. This evening, as he fattened himself on the Diminishing Returns All-You-Can-Eat Rib Platter, Clayton Bryce traded indiscretions with a friendly stranger in a spotless gray suit.

  “Vanna Domingo, our comptroller of public opinion,” Clayton said to the stranger. “I caught her skimming profits. . . . Oh, I’ve had my suspicions for months. It wasn’t hard to spot the discrepancies. She was fairly clever at covering her tracks, for an amateur—must’ve read a primer on covert fund appropriation—but to a man such as myself, who spends his days making two and two equal five. . . . No, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. You develop a nose for wooden sums, so to speak. Particularly when the misplaced figure has six zeroes at the end of it. . . . No, I haven’t reported her yet. Once I discovered it was Domingo doing the skimming, I knew that something more than simple theft must be taking place. She’s got a dragon’s temper, but she’s too damn loyal to steal. . . . Well, I kept my mouth shut and watched where the money went. . . . A war chest! I nearly killed myself laughing when I realized she was assembling a war chest! . . .

  “Shhh! Loose lips, old son! Yes, you’re right, that’s precisely whom she’s planning to go to war against. On behalf of our beloved employer. . . . Some kind of back-channel deal with the French government. I’m not certain whether they’re supplying personnel or just hardware. . . . Soon. The bulk of the money has already been transferred to Paris. . . . No, I doubt Gant knows a thing. Pacifist, you understand. Doesn’t believe in doing business that way. . . . Job security probably has some bearing, but mainly it’s loyalty. He rescued her from homelessness, now she’s going to return the favor. Believe me, Harry Gant could use some rescuing, not to mention wising up . . .

  “Abject poverty; you wouldn’t believe how she was living when he found her. Sleeping in subway tunnels, eating rats for all I know. . . . In 2017. Gant’s antipapist ballbuster of a wife had just walked out on the comptroller’s job, much to the relief of those of us who’d had to put up with her for nine years. Gant seemed to take it well; his only noticeable reaction was that he started going for long lunches, alone, at a cafe in the Grand Central terminus. . . . It seems he was sitting at a table beneath one of the early New Babel promos. . . . You remember, the ‘Completing the Dream’ campaign, the posters showing the finished superskyscraper towering over Harlem? That’s the one. With Gant’s picture in a corner inset. That may have been what caught her eye. . . . She just marched up and dropped a box of sugar cubes onto his lunch plate. . . . I’m not making this up. . . . What did he do? He talked to her. Didn’t have her arrested, but actually sat there and chatted. And somehow—this must have come from suppressed grief over his divorce—Gant convinced himself that it would be neat to take this little Hispanic beggar in and make her his next comptroller . . .

  “True, she’s worked out well enough. More savvy to the way business is supposed to be conducted than her predecessor, anyway, though her moods aren’t any easier to handle. . . . Certainly she’s competent. It’s just that some of us—myself—have never been able to forget the way she looked and smelled when Gant first brought her back to the office with him. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for laughing. . . . Because I thought he was joking. The idea of giving a position of authority to anyone who’d allowed herself to sink that low. . . . I do think it’s repugnant. I’m aware that our economic system necessitates a limited amount of poverty, but that doesn’t mean I respect the career poor. . . . You’d never see me reduced to that level. You could take me tomorrow, take away my job, my bank account, my apartment, everything I own—it wouldn’t keep me down for long. Determination and ingenuity, that’s all that matters. The power of the human will. . . . I’
d sell pencils, if I had to. I could make five hundred dollars a day selling pencils on the street. . . . No, I’m not exaggerating. . . . All right, make it a day and a half just to be sure. Thirty-six hours, maximum. And then, of course, I’d be ready to invest and start making some real money . . .

  “So what’s your name, by the way?. . . I can call you Roy, can I? And who do you work for, Roy? . . . Ah, a freelancer. . . . Amberson Teaneck, really? I didn’t know he hired outside talent. Pity about what happened to him. . . . What does that mean? . . .

  “Going already? You haven’t eaten a thing. . . . Well, take care. . . . Yes, I meant it. Five hundred dollars in a day—a day and a half—selling pencils. I sold Amway when I was still in grade school. Electric Fuller Brush Boy in junior high. . . . I might be persuaded to make a bet on it. Of course if I were going to waste thirty-six hours dressed as a derelict, the stakes would have to be very high. . . . Well, feel free to track me down if you have an interesting enough offer. I’m in the book. . . . Ciao to you too, Roy . . .”

  The Eye of Africa

  A guy like that can’t know too much about computers, Morris Kazenstein had figured, but he was wrong. Of course Maxwell knew about computers; he’d been a tank commander, and you didn’t target the main gun on an M6 Buchanan Armored Heavy Assault Vehicle using a slide rule. Besides, no conscientious mover of library materials could afford to be computer-illiterate. Though Electric Books had so far only complemented, not replaced, the paper-and-ink variety—founded on hard copy, America had so far proved unwilling to give up altogether the tangibility and concreteness of cold print—the smart book-mover had to be ready for any eventuality. The New York Public Library already possessed extensive Electric Archives along with its other holdings; who knew when some technofetishist in the head librarian’s office might order a full conversion, bound volumes and shelves chucked out in favor of bubble drives and dataports? Such a switch was probably inevitable in the long run; and if and when it came, Maxwell and the other members of the secret brotherhood would have to turn Electric as well, riding in over the phone lines on custom virus programs, boring through library storage banks like virtual silverfish, surgically removing every bare-tit graphic, every dirty word and erotic sentence, every last lustful datum in memory. What the hell, it would be a lot more efficient than the present method.