by Sladek, John
They cornered him one day. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you care that millions of Asians are starving while you sit here well-fed and complacent?’ Harold did not deign to reply, or perhaps had not the strength. His skeletal face showed odd emotions, but he did not look up from his chart. Steadying a hunger-quaking hand, he went on with his beautiful, flowing uncials.
Living on the scraps of other clerks’ lunches, and on the crumbs of cream cheese in Clark’s law books, Harold was under a hundred pounds. He gulped water from the cooler, until Karl stopped him, saying that it ruined the line on the water-consumption estimates.
Once Harold fainted, and Mr. Masterson revived him with a little natural soya meal. Harold gulped it down until Karl, alarmed at the way the expensive stuff was disappearing, grabbed the canister away. ‘Easy does it, now,’ he said. ‘Not good to take too much at once.’
Willard made tables to replace all desks, but more tables were required. The volume of business, as Karl explained it, was steadily increasing. Consulting a table of Willard’s table-making progress, he was not satisfied. ‘Why don’t you make tables out of the doors? It might be faster.’
‘Or make coffins,’ whispered Ed.
Willard converted all the doors into tables. When still more were needed, he unputtied window-panes and began using them for table-tops. The windows were grimy, and nearly everyone appreciated the increase in light.
Clark’s sight was failing. Eddie Futch now read Law to him. Clark’s sedentary life had made him gouty, and he began to walk about with a stick. From time to time, he would take a turn about the room, flicking with his stick at the dead forms that lay everywhere like leaves, like history. He would mutter legal phrases to himself through gritted teeth.
It was spring again, and a chill, dirty wind whipped through the office, whirling drawings and forms in a constant flux. To keep some of them in place, Henry borrowed weights from Mr. Masterson’s office.
The boss was rarely there these days. He worked out at a gym most of the week, and only bounced in occasionally to assure them that the company was recouping its losses at a truly fantastic rate. The litter of dirty forms was now ankle deep.
MEMO: Dreams
I dreamed of finding pieces of hate.
I dreamed an obscure dream: part of it was talking with a psychiatrist who looked something like Hemingway and something like Jung, and showing him my written-down dreams. It seems that I had never remembered the important parts. I forget the rest.
I dreamed of loving the princess of the glass house, Geopatra, full of mirrors and swimming pools.
– Masterson
No one talked, except Eddie Futch, droning periods of Law. Whenever the youngster stumbled, Clark caned him across the back, screaming epithets. Once the non-lawyer grew so excited that he had to take a turn around the room, limping and muttering, ‘… ergo sum … ignoratio elenchi … petitio principii … non compos mentis … mons veneris …’
‘Ed’ nudged Henry, pointed to the ponderous figure and laughed. ‘They’re fattening him up for the kill,’ he said.
‘Who is?’ Henry’s ass felt a chill.
‘Who knows? Maybe no one. Maybe “they” is just a figure of speech … but then maybe, you know, maybe we’re just figures of speech, eh?’
MEMO: Park conditions today
Thick pink balloons were drifting over the park from some unknown source. They reminded the boy and the girl of giant drops of rosy sperm. Flowers seemed to be exploding at their feet as the boy took out his gold-filled ballpoint pen and wrote, in an unpretentious, sturdy, masculine hand, a love poem.
The poem spoke of fire-trucks and other excitements, of televisable passions, of a love nest made of food, wherein they settle:
No car honks madly;
The mayor gives the death penalty for honking tonight;
And cars have nightingales in place of horns.
The girl placed a drop of perfume on the pulse of her throat, and began to curve the soft inner part of her arm about the boy’s writing hand. Inside every pink balloon was a hundred-dollar bill. A passing policeman thrust his nightstick at the polka-dot sky and laughed out of pure joy. The flowers made a noise like distant target practice. The boy leaped and the girl laughed. The policeman’s gun belt shook with laughter, while overhead the opalescences bumped one another silently.
– Masterson
‘You want to know why I was declared officially dead?’ Ed asked. Henry shook his head and pointed to a sign affixed to his table: ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’
‘I was declared officially dead because Karl put four staples in my death certificate.’ The water was cut off. Henry seized Ed by the throat and tried to strangle him, as one might strangle an empty faucet, not to choke it off, but to make it flow again.
‘Art’s cut off the water, now,’ Rob and Dob reported to Art’s son.
‘Oh, trying to starve us out, is he?’ His heavy handsome jaw took a stern set. ‘We’ll just see about that.’
Harold showed him his latest, indeed his last effort, a chart of the basic natural foods and their constituents, arranged in a segmented circle. Heavy with gold-and-red illumination, the chart was called: ‘THE WHEEL OF LIFE’.
‘Very nice indeed, Harold,’ said the boss, reaching for it. A ripple of muscle was visible through his specially-tailored suit. ‘But you seem to be losing weight. Why is that? Dieting to improve the strength of your grip? I tried that, and it worked wonders.’
‘By the way, I hate to ask you for it, Harold, but when are you going to pay me that twenty you owe me? I really need it – got a big week-end in Boston coming up. You know what I mean.’ He winked, and winked again at Clark.
‘Well, now, mouthpiece, say something legal,’ boomed the boss. A voice croaked from the tangled depths of Clark’s beard. Holding his cane to the sky, he said, ‘Mens sana in –’ he belched painfully, ‘– in corpore sano.’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Masterson, not hearing him. His powerful calves waded through the knee-deep debris effortlessly and carried him to his office.
MEMO: On Communication
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– Jqw534w9h
From the office came the clink and chunk of weights, and breath hissing through clenched teeth. Suddenly, as he lettered the words ‘The Form Divine’, Harold collapsed. Henry reached him first and held up his head. Harold cast a rueful look on his unfinished work, murmured, ‘I go … I go to the Death Registration Office,’ and died.
‘Now where,’ said Karl, ‘did I put that fatal accidents chart?’
There came a deep reverberation, not Masterson. He came bounding from his office in sweatpants, his chest gleaming with perspiration. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. ‘Is someone else lifting weights around here? He’s fucking up my timing.’
The crew made its way down the stairs after him, to see the other weightlifter. Eddie led Clark down last, a step at a time. Naturally Ed and Harold remained behind.
The offices all the way down were empty. When they reached the sidewalk, the clerks found a derrick smashing at their building with a steel ball.
Masterson walked over to have a word with the foreman, who held up the destruction for the moment.
‘We’re tearing it down.’
‘Why?’
‘Abandoned.’
‘… some mistake, or …’
‘But nobody works there.’
Masterson said something else as the foreman gave a signal and the derrick engine roared. The tall tower turned awkwardly, like a hand puppet, setting the ball into motion.
The man shook his pink helmet. ‘I don’t know nothing about no father,’ he shouted. ‘All I know is, we got work to do.’ He signalled the derrick operator, who swung the movi
ng ball far back, then towards the wall.
Mr. Masterson ran headlong towards it, springing with the grace of a dancer on his ripple soles. For a moment, it looked as if the steel ball would bounce harmlessly off his great chest.
NEW FORMS
198-, A TALE OF ‘TOMORROW’
Ernest thought it would be fun to let his computer call up Frank’s computer on the telephone.
‘Good to hear yours, too! But hey, do you know what a.m. it is out here?’
Al is seen glancing at his watch. Thanks to a vibrating quartz crystal in it, the watch keeps very, very accurate time. He looks from its Swiss face to the American face of Dot, his wife, out in the back yard eating a piece of fruit that has been picked the day before yesterday in the Orient. Will miracles – or anything – ever cease? The digital clock reports a new minute.
‘I met you,’ Al said into a portable tape recorder no larger than a packet of cigarettes, ‘a year, three days, seven hours and forty-three minutes ago, through that computer dating service. You had brushed your teeth electrically, using stannous fluoride toothpaste to prevent decay. I had just had dacron veins put in.
‘Times change. You now have someone else’s liver and kidney: I have ridden on an atomic submarine.’
On the atomic ship, Al will notice an interesting article about LSD, a drug commonly supposed to cause visions and insights. He would reproduce this article by xerography, a fast electrostatic process making use of powdered ink.
Al called Bertha, his ex-wife, on the hall video phone.
‘I just took a stay-awake pill,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so sleepy ever since the sauna I took, on the airbus from –’
‘What’s new?’
‘I’m pregnant again, due to the fertility drug I’m taking. Ah, and I have a new non-stick milk saucepan. See?’ On the screen she cuts open a tetrahedral carton of milk which was sealed for almost a year, then pours some into a special pan. The pan has previously been coated with a compound to prevent sticking and burning. So Bertha, wife of Ernest, was pregnant!
She and Al soon fell into their old argument about riot control. She favoured tanks with aluminium armour, while Al defended the judicious use of Mace, a gas which irritates the mucous membranes.
‘What’s new with you and Dot?’ she asks.
‘Oh, I’ve been sterilized. Dot has this detached retina, but luckily they can now weld it back on with lasers.’
They spoke of Dot’s trip to the Orient on a ballistic, supersonic plane. There Dot makes the acquaintance of an amateur biologist named Frank, who’s all keyed up about the isolation of the gene. His real business is the manufacture of cosmetics for men, in factories he claimed were 97% automated.
LIFE AFTER DEATH – AL WONDERS.
Ernest took a tranquillizer before he called Dot on the teletypewriter. They were lovers, not to Al’s knowledge. This was a conveniently private mode of communication, not often used by spirit mediums, though.
As they ‘spoke’, Ernest drank coffee that had been percolated, frozen, vacuum dried and packed in jars. A spoonful of this substance to a cup of boiling water, while Dot watched the five-inch screen of her portable television set: there is a baseball game in far-off Texas, played on nylon grass beneath a geodesic dome, and she is part of it. When they have said the private things lovers must, Dot took a sleeping pill and slept.
Clement, or Clem, was Al’s son by a previous marriage. Next day he fuelled his car at a coin gas station, dry-cleaned his clothes in a similar manner, and fell foul of a peculiar police arrangement: At one end of a bridge police read the licence numbers of all passing cars into their radios. The computer at headquarters checks these for old violations.
Clem lived avoiding the army in a module apartment house, which has been made up at a factory in complete, decorated rooms, then bolted together at the building site. When he gets home he tries to call Bertha, his former stepmother, by means of a telephone message relayed through a communications satellite many thousands of miles, but she is at the hospital, having her third child.
Bertha’s first child was now a bright little five-year-old, using an unusual teaching machine to learn to type and spell at the same time. This machine would give an instruction, then lock all but the necessary keys. If only life could be like that, Al thought, with no chance to err! In a programmed novel, the reader determines the ending.
Her second child was very intelligent, possibly because Bertha wore a suit pressurized with oxygen during the brain-growing months of pregnancy. Her present delivery is difficult. The child has worked down too far for a Caesarean yet not far enough for forceps. What is the obstetrician to do?
He used a new suction device to grip the child’s head and draw him from the womb. Soon it cried, and before long, Bertha knew, it would be joining its siblings in immunity to polio, once a dread crippler and killer of children. She only hoped it would grow up to be a president like the one she now watches on colour TV, announcing the landing of men on the moon (this president had not yet been assassinated). O Frank, Frank! Where are you?
Frank had given up smoking, drinking and excessive eating since his heart-lung transplant. Yet here he is, enjoying a cigar, a martini, and what looks like boeuf Stroganoff! What can possibly be the explanation of this?
It was a photograph of Frank made many years before, to demonstrate a process that made colour prints, right in the camera, seconds after the photo was snapped. Dot became a secretary. As she rode the helicopter to the Pan Am building, she typed on her personal portable plastic typewriter. The ride compared favourably with her former trip on the 125 mph train from Tokyo to Osaka, where she met Frank. Unforgettable Japan! She revisited in memory that factory where thousands of workers began the day with the company song, followed by ‘Zen jerks’ to limber up mind and body for the assembly of portable record players.
Such as the one Clem now listened to as he avoided the draft. He did not want to die in Vietnam, but stay here, taking LSD. He saw God, was God, felt God, left God.
Frank was at this moment crossing the English Channel on a hovercraft. He liked unusual means of motion. In Paris he had stood upon a moving sidewalk. In London, he meant to ride on one of the famous ‘driverless’ Underground trains. Back in the US, he tries sitting on the beetle-like back of his robot lawnmower, as it moves its random pattern. Travel was his vice. Like Ernest’s drinking.
Ernest had thank God been cured of his drinking by aversion therapy. One by one, all the pleasant stimulus-response mechanisms linking him with alcohol were broken down. In real time, Al ponders life after death.
He had engaged a firm to freeze him soon after death and thus maintain him until such time as science should come across a way of reversing whatever killed him. Ernest would live longer than otherwise on account of his ‘pacemaker’, an electronic device to regulate the heartbeat of Ernest. In a programmed novel, he might or might not have this pacemaker; it all depends on the reader.
Al dialled Ernest’s number in another city. ‘Dialled’ is not strictly accurate, for the clumsy dial on Al’s phone had been replaced by pushbuttons and musical tones. They get into a heated discussion of missile defence systems. Ernest certainly presents his case fairly, but Al wouldn’t listen to reason. Dot counted her contraceptive pills, 20 of which must be taken each month. She also changed her paper panties. Clem receives a picture of Frank by almost magical means!
Bertha puts the picture into a machine and places the receiver of her phone upon it. Far way, Clem copies this motion, then finds the picture in his duplicate machine. Eagerly he gazes on the familiar lineaments of his real father.
Dot notices how much plastic there is around. Her plastic necklace, her boss’s plastic tie, Al’s plastic credit cards, which he claimed were displacing money in the realtime world – could there be any connection with that island where they issued bright plastic coins? Dot saw what she must do, later. Now –
She maintains that the ‘golfball’ typewriter, a highspeed ma
chine using interchangeable spherical type fonts, is a pain in the ass. The reader, Al, may choose …
Bertha took a new antibiotic tablet, while Ernest explained again the difference between ‘Quasars’ and ‘Quarks’.
‘“Quarks” are mathematical entities proposed to explain certain behaviour in subatomic particles. “Quasars” are quasi-stellar radio sources which have often puzzled astronomers.’ Clem tore Frank’s picture into thirty-two pieces. Why can’t the others share time, the whatyoucallems, the computer makers, the peoples? On a radio small as a pocket watch, Clem heard the news.
They had invented a polymer of water which, if uncontrolled, could turn all the water of the world into plastic.
Dot and Frank are in bed when Al
No, Dot is at home. Al dies of heart failure in his office, slumping across the digital calendar. ‘A black and white picture!’ muttered Clem, as his heart begins to beat. ‘What do they take me for?’ Dot and Ernest are in the vibrating bed. Clem hears of a plan to widen the Panama Canal with atomic blasts. Dot and Ernest are vibrating when Al walks in with the electric carving knife in his hand. This carving knife could run as now on batteries. Alternatively, it could use house power, ultimately derived from a distant atomic pile.
SCENES FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
Outside the window of the Faculty Lounge, between the great slabs of blind concrete that house University departments, there is a small square of empty green lawn. On the architect’s immaculate drawings, this is called ‘the Quad’, but no one here has ever called it anything, or made any use of it, either. Once ‘Corky’ Corcoran – but that comes later.
I was looking out of this window while Beddoes talked on andon. Out and down, from my privileged perspective, I could see the architect’s intention, an arrangement of little trees. I thought of that limerick, naturally, but it didn’t seem appropriate: It wasn’t the Quad, I wasn’t God, and all the little trees looked dead. Anyway, Beddoes was sure to quote it himself, sooner or later.