Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Oscar Grill, director of the Chicago office of the Bureau of Family Planning slumped back in his chair and gazed unhappily at the image of his secretary in the intercom plate. “What’s he here for?” The same as usual, I suppose.”

  “I tried to find out, sir, but he was vague. I suppose the same as usual.”

  Grill made a grimace of annoyance. He had barely had time this morning to sit down and assure himself of what a busy day he had ahead, and now here came Barnaby again. About a year ago the president of the Illinois Homosexual League had begun a series of drop-in visits, coming around about once every two months. Barnaby came, and talked mostly in generalities, and sometimes they had lunch together, and Grill had never been able to understand just what his visitor was hoping to accomplish by visiting. It wasn’t that Barnaby was personally attracted to him; that surely would have been made plain by now, and didn’t seem too likely anyway, given Grill’s paunchy, jowly appearance and the fact that he was sliding fast past middle age.

  What made the situation difficult for Grill was that the president of the state Homo League was too important to be casually brushed off. No politician wanted to risk alienating a bloc of votes of the League’s size, and Oscar Grill was, among other things, very much a politician. And general elections were coming up within a year.

  Grill sighed, mentally trying to rearrange his morning schedule. He wondered which appointments he might be able to put off. “I suppose you’d better send him in right away. Maybe I can cut it short.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Seizing the moment of peace before Barnaby walked through the door, Grill closed his eyes and tried to achieve an instant of total relaxation. But his job was difficult, and his thoughts were hard to quiet quickly. He wanted to be sure to get to today’s luncheon meeting, with the local heads of other bureaus, Art, Poverty, and Vandalism. Important political decisions were in the offing. And sometime today he wanted to try to talk again with his semi-official contacts at the UN’s Chicago consulate, to try to find out what might be delaying the latest population forecast. There was a fog of rumors surrounding that report; probably when he did learn what it contained, he would wish that he hadn’t.

  The door was opening, and Grill opened his eyes and stood up and came around his desk, setting himself to be courteous but still to ease his visitor out as quickly as he could. At least he had an obviously and honestly crowded desk for Barnaby to notice.

  The president of the Homo League entered, moving with his usual slightly feminine walk. His basic physique was that of an average male, but his face was strikingly handsome— or perhaps pretty—and his long hair was a natural-looking bright red. In the League as elsewhere, appearance evidently counted for a lot in getting to be president. Barnaby wore a conservatively tiny bikni not too much different from the standard female model, the bottom lacking the exaggerated fullness of the usual male codpiece. Mr. Barnaby’s bra was functional; medical science had given him that much in the way of matching his biology to his lusts.

  “How do you do, sir?” Grill asked formally, extending a hand in greeting.

  “Not well today, Oscar, not very well.” Barnaby’s voice was husky rather than deep. He shook Grill’s fingers delicately. “I am becoming afraid to travel through the streets. There is an organized harassment that I must endure. Good citizens pay taxes, then find that their government offers them no protection.”

  Grill said: “Won’t you sit down? You mean you’re being picketed again by that bluenose group?”

  “Again? One might say that it has become almost continuous.” Adjusting his shoulder bag with a large hand, Barnaby settled himself in a visitor’s chair. “Not only is our headquarters under seige, as it were, but some of these Young Virgins have taken to following my car through the streets. I should warn you that some of them have followed me here today.”

  Grill had seated himself and was toying with the corner of a stack of printout that lay awaiting his attention in his desk, though he had little hope that the hint would be taken. “Well, I can certainly sympathize. I really wish there was something I could do but, twins, we’re sometimes picketed here ourselves.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you are, and by many of the same people.” Barnaby crossed his hairless, slightly plump legs. “Oscar, it seems to me of the utmost importance that those of us who lead in conserving traditional values should support one another, for the cause of Eros and the good of society. Men and women of good will should stand together whenever possible, that’s all I mean. I realize that you have no power to punish those wretches who are out there picketing.”

  “I certainly don’t.” Grill sneaked a look at his clock.

  “I did go to the police about the picketing, as I believe you suggested once before.” Barnaby seemed unable to keep from exciting himself over the pickets. “I tried to point out to the police the difference between our country’s traditional freedoms and the anarchy those bluenoses want. They paint their dirty words right on their signs and wave them about in public places, and the police and courts will do nothing to put a stop to it!”

  Grill shrugged. “I suppose if the police are providing you with physical protection, that’s really about all you can expect.”

  “Oscar,” said Barnaby reproachfully. He leaned across the desk and lowered his voice. “Which is the more to be feared, injury to the body or poisoning of the mind? And I am more concerned for youth of the community than for myself. What will happen to them, growing up in a world where nothing is considered obscene any longer?”

  ART woke up slowly. There was something very nasty that he would have to face on waking, and so it was pleasant to delay the process. Then he moved, and felt a twinge in his shoulder, and all his memories of yesterday came back. With a groan he sat up in the guest room bed. His watch read half past eight.

  His situation looked no better in the morning light than it had in midnight gloom. There was nothing for it but to be a good citizen and go to Family Planning. Mr. Hall had said they were not out to get anyone, at least not anyone like Rita. People like her were only the innocent victims of the midwifers and their gangs. And of their well-meaning relatives. Too bad if the relatives got in trouble. Art’s first responsibility was to his wife, not to the relatives who should never have gotten her into this mess in the first place. Even if they were only trying to help.

  He didn’t want to think about the Parrs right now, but it was hard to avoid while he was in their house. He got out of bed and began to get ready to go downstairs.

  While he showered and shaved and dressed he pictured raiding police breaking down the doors of that former nurses’ quarters, carting off hysterical whores, handcuffing thugs. Then along came their quietly efficient lieutenant, leading Rita safely out. When she saw Art (who had ridden along in the lead car with the lieutenant) she burst into tears, and threw repentant arms around his neck . . .

  More likely she would slap his face again. The scenario was fundamentally unconvincing, so Art had to give up on it and think of something else while he held fast to his determination.

  Aromas of coffee and warm food now reached him in the upstairs hall. He promised himself that he would say nothing to the Family Planning authorities about George and Ann. Well, sooner or later he would doubtless have to say something about them, for he was going to be asked a lot of questions. But he might make their immunity a condition of his giving information. Something like that. Anyway, he kept telling himself, if they wound up in trouble it would serve them right, for helping Rita get herself into such a mess. His shoulder definitely felt better this morning. He would get Ann to rub it with liniment again tonight, if he was still staying here. If she was still staying here.

  After taking a quick peek into the children’s room and finding it already deserted, Art went downstairs. In the kitchen he found George and Ann facing each other across the breakfast table, where Art’s place was also set. Dirty dishes and a minor litter of garbage testified that the children had already eate
n before going out to play.

  Even as Art’s in-laws said good morning to him, they seemed to him to be exchanging guilty looks. They had provided Art and his children with food and lodging, but what did they count for, compared with the harm they were doing Rita? Their intentions had been good, of course, but what of that?

  George raised troubled eyes. “Art, what are your plans now?”

  “I don’t know.” As soon as Art was seated, Ann began to ply him silently with toast and protein bars and coffee. His fingers fumbled on the jelly jar. He asked unnecessarily: “Are the children out in the playground?”

  He was assured they were, and with that an awkward silence fell. He wished he had gone straight out of the house, but that would have been insulting, and besides, being under a strain increased his tendency to get sick if he didn’t eat any breakfast.

  Still, he couldn’t stand to sit there. He gobbled his food and quickly pushed back his chair. “I’m going out.” No one said anything to him as he fled the house.

  It was a bright warm morning; only puddles here and there gave evidence of last night’s rain. Once outside the blockhouse walls Art breathed a little easier, at least at first. As soon as he came to a public computer terminal he went in and obtained the address of the Chicago office of Family Planning. With a slight feeling of relief he saw that he would have to travel a considerable distance to reach the place; he needed some time to think over just what he was going to say. They weren’t out to get Rita, though, they were really on her side. Once on the proper slidewalk, he drew a deep breath, and again remarked to himself that the weather was fine today. Who cared?

  Reaching the Family Planning office seemed to take almost no time at all, and somehow he could get no constructive thinking done en route. The office occupied a new, fairly large building, one of the foothills surrounding the central Loop’s high range. From a block or two away Art could see that there was an unusually dense crowd gathered on the statwalk in front of the place. As he drew a little nearer he realized this was no ordinary pedestrian jam. There was a stack of placards on the pavement, ready for distribution; some kind of demonstration must be shaping up. Should he go in? If he didn’t make himself go in and-face the authorities now, he never would. Ignoring the murmuring, jostling crowd as best he could, he pushed his way into the lobby.

  In the vast ground-floor lobby of glass and marble he approached a receptionist, a voluptuous girl who smiled at him enticingly from behind her desk. As befitted her place of employment she was very conservatively dressed, wearing only a few electrostatically clinging sequins and pads.

  Art halted in front of her desk, not as by the application of brakes, but as with a complete loss of momentum. This was it. He was finished. His mind had gone as blank and bare as the smooth expanse of receptionist’s skin confronting him. Somehow he had convinced himself that once he got this far all the right words would flow, but that had been a lie. Now here he was, and all the words were gone in fear. To ask for Mr. Hall would be like leaping over a cliff.

  “I’m from California,” he began with a great effort, helped along by the girl’s encouraging eyes. “Still, I have important business with you here. I’d like to see—the director or someone.” Art was suddenly and completely sure that he never wanted to talk to Mr. Hall again. He would never be able to convince Hall that George and Ann were innocent, or at least that they deserved a break, not after the tough time Ann had given him. And she and George hadn’t even asked Art where he was going this morning.

  The girl’s eyes turned grave. “The director is a very busy man,” she said. “If you’ll tell me the nature of your business, perhaps I can help you.”

  “My business is, uh, important.” Of course the director was not going to see everyone who just walked in. One could hope that everyone here would be too busy for that.

  The girl’s eyes narrowed slightly, searching Art’s face. He had the idea that she could see his guilty knowledge, and was already pressing an alarm button hidden beneath her desk. “I can arrange for you to talk to a social worker. Are you in a hurry?”

  “I—” When their computer learned his name it would give him to Mr. Hall, and Mr. Hall would seize upon him, not to be denied a single scrap of information. Art would stumble helplessly into a betrayal of the Parrs, and Rita would hate him for that, even if she were not thrown in jail and forcibly sterilized herself. “No, there’s no hurry,” he told the girl.

  “May I have you name, please?” the receptionist pulled a computer-input slate toward her on its decorative coiled cable, and took up an electronic stylus.

  “I—” Ann was at this moment caring for Art’s children. George was risking bloody beatings from machines, to pay for safe blockhouse playspace and midwifers and cinnamon flavored protein bars that tended to turn lumpy in the stomach. Art’s thought, now scrambling like a cornered animal for some way out, seized suddenly upon the possibility that Rita’s illegal operation was being performed this very morning. If so she would certainly be jailed instead of rescued if Art led Family Planning to her.

  In his present state he took this as excuse enough to flee. Without even delaying to pinch the receptionist goodbye, Art took a step back from her desk. He blurted out wild words about returning later. He turned and fled.

  “RADICALS and bluenoses, repressers of all that makes Man at one with a billion years of his animal heritage!” Barnaby’s voice had grown shrill. “Are we to abandon the youth of the world to them?”

  Looking down, with Barnaby, from an open window of his office, Director Grill had a good view of the wide statwalk in front of the Family Planning building. Two competing picket lines had just been organized down there, and both of them were on the march, weaving and writhing like antagonistic serpents. The lines had formed with a healthy distance between them but were gradually being forced closer to each other by the pressure of a mass of onlookers, whose expectation of a riot was probably going to fulfill itself. It seemed likely to Grill, who had seen this sort of thing happen elsewhere, that a critical mass of active humanity would soon be reached. To carry the analogy with atomic fission further, a block away a column of helmeted city police was marching in, a damping rod about to be thrust into an overheating pile.

  Sporadic shouting drifted up to Grill’s office window, but as yet he had seen no actual violence. He was not too high above the picket lines to tell that one of them was composed mostly of radical-looking young people, the girls wearing their hair long, the men short-haired and clean-shaven, both sexes dressed in opaque garments that covered half their bodies or more. These of course were the Young Virgins, the objects of Barnaby’s wrath. In the opposing picket line, men and women of ordinary appearance were in the majority, though there was a noticeable admixture of men in biknis, and women in codpieced, translucent business suits.

  “I see your League has some counter-picketers out today,” Grill commented.

  “Naturally we do!” Barnaby ran nervous fingers through his bright red hair. “We don’t intend to succumb without a struggle.”

  Grill decided that the time had come for bluntness, whatever the result might be. “Frankly, I wish you hadn’t decided on counterpicketing. Not in front of my building.”

  “What? But we must take action. Look, look down there! A sign that says ‘sublimate’, in big bold letters, being waved around in a public place!”

  Grill looked down and saw. He also saw another sign, in bigger, bolder letters yet: STOP MORAL FREE FALL. He wondered honestly which side that one was intended to be on.

  “Let them go to their monasteries and lamaseries and nunneries to have that kind of freedom,” Barnaby was saying. “Let them go behind walls, away from the innocent, and do what they like.”

  Grill drew a deep breath. “You know, if I was coldly logical about my job . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I might look with official favor upon the bluenoses. After all, the less sex activity there is,. generally speaking, the fewer pre
gnancies and the less population pressure.”

  “Only in the most primitive societies!” snapped Barnaby. But then he fell silent and put on a mask of careful control, which Grill thought was concealing more fear than anger.

  Emboldened by this, Grill went on: “I don’t know if any society has ever been run on the basis of cold logic. Probably not. I’m sure ours isn’t. People’s emotional attitudes are the ultimate power, of course. And most of the people are with you, at least in your attitude toward bluenoses. If I were to come out strongly in favor of chastity today I’d doubtless be fired tomorrow.”

  Barnaby relaxed slightly. “You are joking. Of course there’s no excuse for chastity. For a long time our League has shown the way toward the fullest enjoyment of sex without the slightest risk of pregnancy.”

  “Most people just don’t enjoy your kind of sex, though,” said Grill deliberately. “At least not as a steady diet. And the monasteries and other religious places you talk about are from my point of view very much like Homo League enclaves—they have a vanishingly low birth rate. So, I may not agree with the bluenoses emotionally, but I’m not going to try to put them out of business. I still don’t dare to praise them publicly, but I can tell you off the record that I’m rather glad there are more and more lamaseries and nunneries these days.”

  There was silence, except for Barnaby clearing his throat. He seemed to be giving some point a deep reconsideration. “Really,” he said at last. “I didn’t come here with the main objective of getting your help against the blue-noses. I know I let them upset me too much. I can see, they do help you in your difficult job. But we’ve helped you even more, haven’t we? For many years? I like to think that we in the League are your favorite citizens, so to speak. That there’s a large backlog of goodwill built up between us.”

  “Of course.” Grill sighed, left the window, and walked back to his desk. He did not want to watch another riot.

  Privately, he had no more emotional sympathy for homosexuality than he did for chastity. Professionally, he was glad to accept all the help, from every quarter, that Family Planning and the world could get. The human world was in danger of collapsing by the weight of its own numbers, though you might not be able to tell that by what went on in Illinois.