by Sladek, John
ALIEN ACCOUNTS
John Sladek
www.sf-gateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Introduction
Masterson and the Clerks
New Forms
198-, a Tale of ‘Tomorrow’
Scenes from the Country of the Blind
The Interstate
Name (Please Print):
Anxietal Register B
The Communicants
Original Appearances
Website
Also by John Sladek
Author Bio
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
The aliens here are human. This book contains no giant flying snails or telepathic octopods, no Ganymedean cat-women dressed in silver, no aggressive dugong chiefs roaming the galaxy in their pulsar-powered yoyo ships. The aliens here are human aliens. Most of them work in ordinary offices, and they do not commute to work from Proxima Centauri, either. Yet these here humans are aliens.
Office life attracts them, perhaps because of its futility. At least they’ve inhabited offices in fiction since Dickens’s day. Since the Circumlocution Office we’ve had the petty officials of Kafka, the double-thinkers of Orwell, the pathetic cogs of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, and that super-clerk of Herman Melville’s, Bartleby the Scrivener. In The Grey Ones, J. B. Priestley outlined an entire alien conspiracy: Having no souls, They cannot possibly be bored. Thus they must always rise to the top in business and governments, where they can set about killing the souls of others.
Notice that none of these authors can separate the monsters from the victims in office life, for aliens are both. The sociologists who speak of ‘alienation’ manage to alienate themselves through official jargon like this:
… a set of arrangements for producing and rearing children the viability of which is not predicated on the consistent presence in the household of an adult male acting in the role of husband or father …
(meaning ‘families where Dad isn’t home much’). A person who thinks like this may not exactly breathe methane, but there is a giant flying snailiness here.
Here are the human aliens.
MASTERSON AND THE CLERKS
‘Whoever is in charge of operations should be designated with real authority to be used in case of an emergency.’
A.P. Sloan
My Life with General Motors
PART ONE: CLERKS ALL!
Section I: The Lutte Agency
Division A: Mr. Gelford
Henry found that, when he had filled out the orange card listing his education, work experience and hobbies, he was permitted to pass beyond the railing next to the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist was a fat, pretty girl whose bare feet would be soft and pink. Being bored in the evenings, especially Sunday evenings, she would draw on black silk stockings and fuck someone in front of a movie camera. Once a famous American executive, watching her in a movie, had had an unusual experience.
Henry moved down the light green hail to a barn-like room where each stall was equipped with a desk and a living soul. The black wooden floor was wavy. Little incandescent bulbs, strung on wires, pumped light into the room, but dark corners drained it away too fast. Henry sat down in the second rank of folding chairs, along with a blind man and a Negro who would someday be a well-known boxer. The blind man’s dog looked at Henry, seeing him.
Henry remembered visiting the dentist with just such an orange card in his hand. He was thinking of some way of explaining this to the blind man or the Negro, when far down the barn a tall man stood up and beckoned.
‘Henry,’ he called. Henry and the blind man stood up together.
‘Did he say Amory?’ asked the blind man.
‘No, Henry.’
‘Eh? Henry?’
‘Henry.’
‘Henry!’ called the tall man again, beckoning over the waves. Henry walked towards him, past the desks of Mr. Blair and Mr. Clemens and Mrs. Dudevant and Mr. Beyle and Miss Knye.
Division B: Mr. Nind
Mr. Gelford asked Henry to call him Al. With a special pen, Al initialled the orange card in several places, maintaining the attitude of a dentist marking caries. His eyes, small and dark – like human nipples, they were surrounded with tiny white bumps – looked searchingly at Henry’s hair or teeth.
‘Henry C. Henry, eh? What does the C. stand for?’ Henry looked at him in silence until Al turned his nipples to a mimeographed list. ‘Nothing here, I’m afraid, for someone with almost no experience. I’ll turn you over to Mr. Nind.’
Don kept a telephone receiver well in front of his mouth as he spoke, because the inside of his lip had developed a terrible cold sore he wished to hide. It was, as he already suspected, syphilis.
‘I have a really challenging job in a small, friendly engineering company,’ he said. ‘No experience necessary, and there is no limit to how far you can work your way up. What do you say, fella?’
Henry leaned forward and laid a hand on Nind’s desk calendar. ‘Fine, Don,’ he said softly.
Section II: An Interview
In an almost bare room evenly coated with dust, Mr. Masterson toyed with a slide rule, a clipboard, a retractable ballpoint pen and a thin book, Steam Tables, by Keynes and Keyes. Henry sat motionless before him. Out of the window he could see a soup line, and in the distance a building was being demolished. A man in uniform walked up the soup line, pulled a man out of it and began hitting him in the face. Perhaps later the victim would go to a movie theatre, buy a ticket, enter the Gents and comb his hair.
‘Are you a good, steady worker?’ asked Masterson.
‘Yes.’
Fingers like white slugs curled around the slide rule. Undoubtedly Masterson was puffy and white all over, like a drowned corpse. His unpleasant glasses were hinged in the centre like motorcycle goggles, and folded hard against the colourless bubbles of his eyes. Mr. Masterson contained a great quantity of liquid.
‘Do you work good?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘If you work good, we’ll do good by you.’ Henry was never to forget this senten
ce, for he wrote it on a sheet of paper and taped it in the drawer of his desk, where it became a kind of motto.
‘You start at fifty.’ The corner of Mr. Masterson’s mouth lifted in a kind of smile, revealing a rotten tooth.
Section III: The Arrangement
The Masterson Engineering Company occupied the third and fourth floors of the building. Henry was to work on the third floor. An old man, whose tie was fastened with a paper clip, whose sleeves were rolled high above his parched elbows, led Henry downstairs into a room full of clerks at oak desks. There were in the room perhaps a dozen, perhaps a hundred men of various sizes and ages.
Gesticulating wildly with his skinny arms, the old man began in a high, clear voice to explain Henry’s duties:
See this here form
This here is the system sheet.
You’ve got to mark it down every time
An assignment bill comes in
You’ve got to mark it down every time
An assignment bill goes out
And put the tally number here off the spec
Or else the item identification.
See this here list
This here is the transfer list,
Where you put the part number here
From the compiled list of numerical transfers
Where you put the description number here
From the B column of the changeover schedule
And mark it down.
We have always initialled our work
We always will.
Be sure you initial the backlist
When you add a serial number
Be sure you initial the adjustment form
When you check this here.
Fill out the job number;
Fill out the item identification index
(Blue and yellow copies),
Make a note on the margin of the drawing
Or on the margin of the transfer book
If the alphabetical register is stamped
And initialled by the proper authority.
‘You’ll catch on …’ Winking, the old man gave his sketches of arms a final flourish and went away. Henry fingered various piles of clean forms tentatively, murmuring fragments of the old clerk’s song; he picked up a coloured pencil and laid it down again. It seems that being a clerk is not all fun!
Henry consulted with himself and decided to learn by observing and imitating the other clerks around him. There were eight clerks around him in the following arrangement:
Clark Markey
Willard Bask
Karl Henkersmahl
Robert Kegel
Henry C. Henry
Rodney Klumpf
Harold Kelmscott
Edward Warner
Edwin Futch
Henry was never to learn the names of any of the sixteen or forty clerks outside this circle of desks, but soon he ‘caught on’, or moved into the general work rhythm. He accepted from Rod or Ed Warner a batch of forms, removed paper clips from some, marked a few of them with numbers and initials, erased the numbers or initials from others, sorted them by his own arrangement, clipped them together, and gave them to either Bob or Willard.
Willard was born and raised in the Southern part of the United States, while Bob’s younger sister was sure to become salutatorian of her high school class. Meanwhile Bob or Willard was undoing part or all of Henry’s work, then passing the stuff on to Clark or Harold or Karl, who in turn undid part or all of his (Bob’s or Willard’s) work, then passed the stuff on to Rod or Ed W. or callow Eddie Futch; each man along the chain approaching the work as if no one had gone before and no one would come after. Numbers would be erased, altered, changed back to their original values. Forms might be sorted by names, then dates, then colour, then in numerical order, alphabetical order and alphanumerical order. Often enough, work came back to Henry from two to three times. This was indeed a vicious circle!
Section IV: The Happy Ending
Happily, sooner or later every form ended up with Karl, the stapler, who might put a staple in it and send it out of the department for good. Work flow was thus:
Thus a kind of progress was achieved, without, however, sacrificing routine. The happy days blended into one another like molten glass.
Section V: The Departures
No one ever saw Mr. Masterson on the third floor. He seemed to send all his orders through the old clerk, who descended every morning with a memorandum to be tacked to the bulletin board.
The speaker of the intercom, fixed in the ceiling, made crackling noises that might have been the voice of Masterson. The shape of a name emerged from the static. A clerk at once rose, squared his shoulders and climbed the stairs. He did not come back.
The room was filled with the anxious murmur of the clerks, discussing his departure. The same thing had happened a dozen times or more, it was said. They never came back.
The discussion stamped everyone. Some clerks stood leaning against their desks, arms akimbo. Some tapped pencils on their blotters, made spitting motions, or leaned back. Others pretended to move their jaws sideways, while still more others sharpened pencils and drank water from paper ‘cups’. Bob Kegel continued to read numbers from a list to Rod Klumpf, who punched the buttons of a small adding machine. Karl picked at his stapler with a preoccupied air. Big Ed Warner, an older man known for his leaky heart and halitosis, was swivelled around to talk to Eddie Futch. Had the bomb (or a Hiroshima-size atomic bomb) gone off at this moment, at 5,000 feet above Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the shadow of Ed would no doubt have protected the acne-riddled face of Eddie from the direct effects of the blast, or is this just wishful thinking?
Ed told the young man that the departed clerk was dead, and that nothing, no power on earth could bring him back.
‘Is that any way to talk? Jesus! Is that any way …’
Eddie ran off to the lavatory to pinch pimples from his hot, raw cheeks. Big Ed considered the word ‘laughter’.
Section VI: Kegel and Klumpf
Bob Kegel and Rod Klumpf were alike. Often Henry tried to envision some mirror arrangement that would allow him to see, in place of the back of Bob’s head in front of him, the back of Rod’s head behind him. Clearly the virtual image would be the same.
They were tall, slim and polite, with round heads, round shoulders and long, narrow feet. They wore fashionable clothes and reasonable smiles and neat cowlicks, and they read the same consumer magazine, which prompted them to buy many of the same articles: antifreeze, air conditioners, Ascots, attaché cases, beer mugs, berets, blazers, brandy snifters, cameras, carpeting, cars, cats, deodorants, door chimes, filter cigarettes, golf clubs, hats, L.P.s, luggage, movie cameras, movie projectors, shavers, silverware, slide projectors, tape recorders, typewriters, television sets, toothbrushes.
At first Henry supposed that he could tell them apart by Rod’s freckles and Bob’s half-rimmed glasses. But the sun soon brought out freckles on Bob also, and he proved to be quite vain in regard to his glasses, wearing them less and less. At the same time, Rod purchased and began to wear a similar pair of glasses, and since he kept out of the sun, his own freckles began to fade. Being of a size, the two friends loaned one another clothes. Occasionally, for a joke, they would exchange desks. Both spoke in the same modulated tones, and both moved with the grace of bowlers.
It was always Bob or Rod who got up a football pool, who sent out for coffee, who tacked up humorous signs, who started charity drives, who instituted fines for tardiness and swearing, who collected money for flowers whenever anyone fell ill, died or married. Tirelessly and good naturedly, these clean young men organized the life of the office. The others despised them.
Section VII: The Coffee Break
Division A: The idea of coffee break
Coffee break was an old tradition at the Masterson Engineering Company, instituted some years before by Mr. Masterson when he had read in a management magazine the following advertisement:
UP PRODUCTION W
ITH A COFFEE BREAK!
Get more out of your workers by giving them a short mid-afternoon rest, with coffee, the all-purpose stimulant. Coffee perks up flagging minds and bodies the way fuel injection pumps up the power of an engine. They will gladly pay for the coffee – while you reap the extra productivity!
His frequent memos on the subject claimed that coffee breaks cost him an enormous amount of money, but that he was determined his clerks should be happy at all costs.
Division B: Coffee break praxis
It was during coffee break that Henry began to learn the peculiar vocabulary of the clerk.
First he heard Clark Markey, the non-lawyer, say, ‘I certainly did finalize that item.’
A delighted smile invaded the solemn features of Karl Henkersmahl. ‘Finalized it, did you? You do not know the meaning of the word finalize. Did you expedite it or ameliorate it? Did you even estimate the final expenditures? Or did you merely correlate the old stabilization programs? Ha!’
Harold Kelmscott stirred his coffee with a peculiar new kind of pencil. Laughter hissing in his blue eyes, he said, ‘Quit it, Karl. We all know what a poor expediter you are yourself, and you’re a non-conservative estimator, unless I miss my guess.’
Karl nipped off his rimless glasses and polished them in aggravated silence. It was hard for him to acknowledge the presence of a superior will, but he did so with his best grace. His tiny, wide-set eyes, were on the move, looking for a smile he could challenge.
Karl often let his pride and quick temper draw him into an argument on any subject, especially on the subject of Germany, about which he possessed a number of interesting statistics. Claiming to know the exact reason Germany lost the Second World War, he usually won any arguments simply by shouting the same words over and over until his opponent gave up. The only man who ever won the war argument from Karl was Ed Warner, who maintained that Germany had won the war.