Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  “A rubber duck,” he continued, “which the late Robert Tyrone Dubic had the habit of filling with bird shot and ball bearings before he used it to beat his defenseless five-year-old brother into unconsciousness. The same rubber duck with which he often threatened to kill that younger brother, James Patrick Dubic, here before you on charges from what the prosecution claims is a pathological hatred of birds in general and ducks in particular.

  “But I ask you—is there anything really all that sick or irrational in the defendent’s feelings about birds? Would you, any of you, have had a great fondness for the creatures if you had been repeatedly beaten by a sadistic older brother with a lead-filled rubber duck during your formative years? If you had been so badly mauled by your aunt’s flock of geese that you were hospitalized for three days? Would you have had any overwhelming love for our feathered friends if your grandfather had disinherited you in favor of a bird sanctuary in Guatemala, a country which neither you nor he had ever visited? Is there anything odd about the fact that James Patrick Dubic is, as you yourselves have heard him testify, disgusted with the evident hypocrisy of people who publically demand increased protection for the California environment while at the same time spending a fortune in certain local restaurants for meat from wild boar they know perfectly well have been killed illegally inside the Los Padres Forest preserve?

  “I’m not going to try to pretend to you that James Patrick Dubic is immensely likeable, or that he’s just like everybody else. He isn’t. But what he is is a man of intelligence and principle, a former teacher who was always respected by his students, and he is neither irrational nor insane. His dislike of birds, regrettable though it may be, is a perfectly normal reaction to the rather unique and unfortunate circumstances of his childhood . . .”

  It wasn’t going to work. Not this time. Wibsome wasn’t even trying. They were going to lock me up again, and not just for a little while this time. Maybe even get me committed to Atascadero, put me away for the rest of my life by claiming I was criminally insane. That sounded like what Wibsome was really after this time. Get me out of Father’s hair for good. And even if they let me out later he could always have me put back in if I made any more trouble for him. If they ever let me out. He’d like that now, with Mother remarried so she couldn’t make him do anything for me anymore.

  “We’re going to appeal,” Wibsome told me when he came back and sat down again. Meaning that there was no way they weren’t going to find me guilty. “Those articles in the RAG—I’m pretty sure we can prove they prejudiced the jury and kept you from getting a fair trial. And there may be other things I can turn up when I’ve had the time to study the court recorder’s transcripts of the trial for a while.”

  “Wibsome,” I said, “you know I didn’t have anything to do with the dogs, or with those cats either. You know how I’ve always liked dogs and cats—”

  “Of course, Jimmy.” He didn’t believe me even though he was supposed to be on my side. “Not the dogs and cats. Just those nasty, nasty birds.”

  “Yes!” He was laughing at me again. Just like Bobby used to, before they shipped him off to Vietnam and killed him. But if I ever got out of here I was going to get him just like I was going to get all the rest of them. That oh-so sweet little girl and her bull-dyke mother and her paralyzed father who was the one who’d lied about me at that other trial, the time that he’d been the one who’d arrested me. That bastard who’d written all those articles for the RAG and all those restaurant owners who’d tried to put each other out of business by accusing each other of having hired me to get their sea gulls and cats for them, when all the time they’d hired me to get sea gulls for them themselves and they knew I wouldn’t have anything to do with killing cats. And Judge Hapgood and Florio Volpone and the jury and Wibsome and my father and the ducks.

  All of them. But especially the ducks.

  III. From the SAND CITY SHORELINE RAG AND TATTLESHEET, August 8, 1983:

  . . . remember that the judge and jury agreed with our editorial staff and that Dubic was sentenced to three concurrent terms of ten to twenty years in the state penitentiary. Since then his lawyers have made repeated attempts to have his convictions overturned, most recently by charging that the RAG’s crusading editorials and reportage unfairly prejudiced the jury against him and so precluded the possibility of a fair trial. Dubic’s lawyers accompanied this latest appeal with a simultaneous multimillion dollar suit against the RAG and its editorial staff for libel and defamation of character.

  We are very happy indeed to report that Dubic’s appeal has been denied and that all charges against us for libel and defamation of character have been unconditionally dismissed.

  IV. From THE BUZZBOMB, House Organ of the Dubic Aerospace and Munitions Industrial Group, January, 1984:

  Aerospace Guidance System Division Chief Damien Holmes announced today the purchase of THE OTHER CHESSPLAYER, INC., designers and manufacturers of the popular PROGRAMMED PRO line of computerized tennis opponents, as well as of the increasingly popular computer games SHARK ALERT, ROBOBRAWL, and GET THE PROWLER BEFORE HE GETS YOU. “With their genius for innovative software and our technical expertise,” Vice President Holmes told the Buzzbomb, “it shouldn’t be more than a matter of months before we’re not only light-years ahead of our competitors here in the United States but even further ahead of everybody else in the rest of the world, and most especially our counterparts in Soviet Russia.”

  V. From “Philanthropy for the Year 2000”, a speech delivered by James Damien Dubic to the Orange County League of Republican Women, March 19, 1984

  “. . . not just new ways of doing things that have never really done anybody much real good. To put it another way, we don’t want to compete with any of the other charitable and philanthropic organizations now operating, we want to put them out of business altogether by making the very need for charity and philanthropy obsolete.

  “Furthermore, there’s no question in any of our minds that our society’s future lies with increased computerization. Now, there are some disadvantages to this, as I’m sure some of you may have noticed every now and then when you’ve caught a computer error on your bank statement or your Mastercharge, but that kind of problem doesn’t come from using computers, it just comes from the fact that we haven’t been using computers long enough to have learned everything there is to know about using them. A good comparison would be to think of yourselves in the same position as the first railway passengers, who inevitably got covered with soot and smoke from the locomotive’s engines because nobody’d yet found out how to make them burn cleaner and how to keep the smoke away from the passengers. But after trains had been around for a while they found all sorts of solutions to the problems, so they weren’t really problems at all anymore.

  “But let me get back to what we at the Dubic Foundation are trying to do right now, which is to find new ways to use the future’s increased computerization for the social good. Not just new ways of doing old things—like a robot soup-line to compete with the Salvation Army’s human volunteers—but ways to do new things altogether, things that nobody’s ever been able to do before. And we’re pretty sure we’ve found some new ways of doing things, all of them so far based on the concepts of shared computer time and decentralization.

  “Let me make that a little clearer for you. Take a look at oh, any of the big banks here in California. Bank of America, UCB, even the Japanese Maritime Bank, any bank with a lot of branches scattered all over the state. All their records are computerized, but there’s no way that any of these banks could have ever afforded a separate computer system for every one of their branches, even if they’d wanted to have them for some reason. No, what they’ve got is a single master computer connected by telephone linkages to separate data terminals in every branch, so that each branch is sharing the master computer’s capabilities with all the other branches. There are even a number of companies that rent their spare computer time to companies too small to have a cost-effective c
omputer capacity of their own. Dubic Aerospace is one such company, which is one of the reasons I know what I do about the subject.

  “Anyway, ladies, think about what would happen if you took the whole process one step further, and took at least some of the data terminals out of the branch offices or whatever and put them into the employees’ homes, so that you had a double telephone linkage working for you, not only between the master computer and the branch offices, but also between the branch offices and the employees’ home terminals. There are an awful lot of peripheral benefits we haven’t yet had a chance to examine to be gained from having people work at home like that—no commuting time wasted and less traffic jams, for one thing, possible savings on expensive office space for another, to pick just two examples—but that sort of thing’s not really what we, as philanthropists, are interested in right now. What we want to know is, how can we find new ways to use this development to make things better for people?

  “Well, one of the first things we thought of was the way this could help shut-ins, perfectly competent and intelligent people who because of some accident or chronic illness are unable to leave their homes or, even worse, have been condemned to live the rest of their lives confined to their beds. Just think what it would do for these people’s sense of self-esteem if they had a way of holding a real job and of becoming more or less self-supporting. Not to mention the savings to society involved in getting them off welfare. This wouldn’t really affect all that many people, probably, but it could make an enormous difference in the lives of the people it did affect, and save the taxpayer some money in the process.

  “But there’s another kind of shut-in this kind of set-up could help, and help in a way that could quite possibly do all of us an enormous amount of incidental good. I’m talking about convicts, convicted criminals, all those men and women that society has been forced for its own protection, and in the hope of reforming them, to put behind bars. And there are a lot of them, make no mistake of that, all our jails, prisons, penitentiaries and work farms are not only full but dangerously overcrowded with men, women and adolescents whose care and keeping is paid for by the rest of us, all of us who pay taxes.

  “And what we’re paying for, really, is a kind of school system or fraternity where all the petty criminals—the kids who hot-wired cars to go joyriding or the clerk who for the first and only time in his life needed money so badly that he took a hundred dollars out of his employer’s cash register and got caught at it—where all these people who have nothing better to do with their time than break rocks or stamp out license plates learn from the other prisoners, the real hardened criminals, how to become hardened criminals themselves. And when they finally do get out the only people they know are criminals, they can’t get a job because of their records and because, especially if they were pretty young when they went in, all they know how to do is break rocks or make license plates or hang around with criminals. And so what their stay in prison has really done for them is just to put them on the road to becoming far more dangerous and expensive to society than they might ever have become on their own.

  “But think about a convict who gets the training he needs to be a computer programmer of some sort in prison. He’s already learned a skill that will be useful to society and that has a good chance of taking him away from the poverty and bad influences that may well have been what turned him to crime in the first place.

  “So far, so good. But now let’s assume that some company or group of companies has arranged to have some of its data terminals installed within the prison walls, in much the same way as the terminals for the shut-in patients I mentioned earlier would have been installed in their homes, and that this company agrees to accept qualifying prisoners for some sort of apprentice program, so that they can not only be gaining useful skills and on-the-job training while still in prison, but they can already have a job waiting for them when they get out AND have a bank account they’ve built up from what they were being paid during their apprenticeship waiting for them outside. That way, they’ll be able to sidestep the whole grinding cycle of poverty and humiliation and living on welfare that right now drives so many ex-convicts straight back to a life of crime.

  “Of course, there are still a few safeguards we’re going to have to work out before we can put our pilot program in practice because these are, after all, convicted criminals we’re talking about. To give you just one example of the kinds of things we’re going to have to guard against, you wouldn’t want to put a genius embezzler or even safecracker in total control of Bank of America’s computer system . . .”

  Julie: 1988

  It was a really hot night even though it was still only April and the air conditioner was broken again. Mother was yelling at Father and he was whining back at her again. Pretty soon he’d start yelling and then she’d start hitting him again. They’d been drinking a lot too, both of them, like they always did. I was eleven and they’d been doing the same thing ever since I could remember. I couldn’t stand them, either of them.

  I put my slingshot—the hunting kind you get at sporting goods stores that shoots steel balls, not one of those homemade rubber band things for little kids—into my bag and went down to the lake to sit around for a while. We lived about four blocks away, up by the Naval Postgraduate School. Sometimes when there wasn’t anyone else at the lake I’d try to get one of the swans or even one of the ducks with my slingshot—I’d killed a swan once, one of the black ones with the red beaks, and hit one or two others and a couple of ducks—but there were a lot of people out on the lake on those stupid little two-person aquacycles, those boat-things you pedal like bicycles. Couples mainly, some high school kids but mainly old people, tourists and golfers. Some fathers with their kids. They all looked stupid.

  I didn’t like the park all that much but I didn’t have any friends that lived close and I didn’t feel like walking or even riding my bike very far, especially not all the way up Carmel Hill to where Beth lived. But I couldn’t stand staying home any longer either, not while they were still fighting. It would be OK later on, when something they both wanted to watch came on TV or when Father had a little more to drink. After a while he just got quieter and quieter until he went to sleep. Which was why I was glad he drank all the time, even though he got pretty nasty in the evening and when he first woke up in the morning. And that was OK anyway, because he had a right to get angry even if not at me, the way Mother treated him. She treated him like shit and he never did anything wrong, all he did was sit around all day watching television and reading magazines and detective stories and drinking a little beer through his tube. He didn’t hurt anybody and it wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t wash himself and if sometimes he smelled bad and that he’d gotten all sort of fat and droopy-faced and pasty-looking, not at all like he looked in those pictures Mother still had of him from before the accident, when he still looked a lot like that mess sergeant Mother sometimes brought home with her from Fort Ord, the one who kept telling me he was going to fix the air conditioner but never did. Only Father’d been a lot cleaner and handsomer and younger than the mess sergeant was, then.

  The sun was going away even though it wasn’t quite dark yet and it looked like it was going to rain pretty soon. A lot of people were coming back in to shore and turning in their aquacycles to the man that rented them out, though there were still a couple of chicano-looking kids in an aluminum canoe who didn’t look like they were going to quit before dark. And I had to be careful, I could still remember sitting there on that bench watching Mother arrest that man who’d been killing the ducks under his car. I still had all the clippings that Mother’d saved for me from that, including the ones with my picture in them from the Post-Sentinel and the RAG, and the other one where they’d had me talk a bit for the Pine Cone.

  The highschool kids in the canoe were down at the other end of lake. I was watching the ducks and the swans out on the lake feeding—I didn’t want to try anything with any of the ones up on shore, where so
mebody could see what happened to it and where there wouldn’t be that much skill involved anyway—because I had to know where they all were so I could find them again if I had to wait until it was almost all the way dark before everybody else went away. The swans were mean but I didn’t dislike the ducks or anything—though I didn’t much like them either, with their mean little suspicious eyes and the way they walked around when they were on land like they thought they were the most important things in the world—but there wasn’t anything else I could do to go get back at something when I felt like this. Just like Father yelling at Mother whenever he got to thinking about how really bad it was to be paralyzed and that we had to feed him and help him go to the bathroom, or Mother hitting him whenever she couldn’t stand to look at how horrible it was for him anymore.

  A lot of the ducks and swans were up on the shore near me looking for food somebody might have left and quacking and honking at each other or lying down on their stomachs with their heads tucked in and sleeping. The swans that were in the water were down at the other end of the lake but the ducks in the water were all paddling around in groups and quacking at each other. A lot of the male mallards were doing that thing they do together when they all swim after one of the brown females without ever catching her and then they all take off together and they chase her through the air but they still don’t catch her, and a few of them every now and then were doing that thing where they beat their wings and sort of get up out of the water like they were standing on their tiptoes and beating their chests like Tarzan. But most of them were just swimming around and sticking their heads down underwater the way they do when they’re looking for something to eat down there but don’t feel like diving for it, or doing that thing where they turn all the way upside down like they’re standing on their heads with their tails sticking straight up out of the water.