by Sladek, John
‘And now we’d like to have you take a few more tests.’ Travers marked him down for the Müller-Fokker Insecurity Rating. ‘OK? Well, it’s been real swell talking to you, Ray. Stop in again, like I say, in a year or so.’
Ray stood up and gulped back a large egg of air. Since he could not shake hands with the interviewer, he bent and kissed his ring.
IDEAL SEX INVENTORY 7373/0380/B
Revised Detainer Report B
Place: Format:
Subject: Index:
Eventuality: Zip Code:
Additional Specification: …………………………………………
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Compare or match:
1. Taking walks A. Ornateness
2. The other side B. This side
3. Rock wool C. Tubed debut
4. Gradually lighter D. Forensic award
5. Soft drawings (sex) E. ‘Klondike’
6. Taken one at a time F. Coupon bouquet
7. A smash hit G. Brainbag
8. Felt hat H. Felt hate
9. Lion oil I. Platonic (ideal) shit
10. Prawn warp J. Flexing the arm near
(a) Protection all day (1) Dagger
(b) Semite Times (2) Deliver, reviled
(c) ‘press conference’ (3) Open end
(d) Swings tension (4) Several related hobbies
(e) Corners (5) So many dynamos
(f) Corresponding toe (6) Tressed dessert
(g) Animal lamina (7) Sample pain
(h) Gift (poisoned) fig (8) Salad alas!
(i) The Cayman who smiles (9) Same finger
(j) Flexing the arm (10) Terrible island tins
I. Gala
II. Venues
III. Polychrome ‘Rotor’ Mary
IV. Dagger
V. Danger
VI. Opinion, 1937
VII. Ohio Hall of Fame
VIII. Semiramis
IX. Talking wakes
X. Sex
Travers changed from the hump, black glasses and loud suit to a ski sweater and a pair of army pants. He fitted on the half-shells of his cast and taped them in place. He had already signed the cast with the names of all company employees who had disappeared – Dot Hanson and all the rest. Now, as he put on the false smile and deep sunburn, as he sutured dimples into his cheeks and chin, he thought back on the Ray Galt interview. What a mess! The kid was committing suicide in pieces, but how could you explain that to him?
One nice bit, though, the ring-kissing. He hadn’t felt it, really – his whole surface seemed to be getting anaesthetised – but he’d appreciated the idea. Be even more fun with one of those girls from the unending cafeteria line across the way. Why not carry it on? Invest in a mitre or what the heck, a triple tiara:
‘My child, my child, you seem troubled. Come, put it in the lap of God …’
Who was he kidding? Travers wasn’t a company pope, he wasn’t anything. He watched them come in or go out, day after shuffling day, the whole company going to pieces, maybe the whole world. He could pose as anything, a sacred bear or eagle, an armed ghost – it made no difference. They came in to be processed, he processed them. They were his data.
He was not even a complicated computer, just a simple component. YES or NO was his choice, the content of the simplest message, ON/OFF. Like holy smoke.
Which brought him back to the bishop again, the crozier dividing the SHEEP and the GOATS, the SAVED and the DAMNED, the YES and the NO.
Damnit, he didn’t want to be a transistor! A YES/NO man! He wanted to be a message of maximum content, a line of poetry, say, very obscure poetry. At the rim of obscurity, where infinite content becomes zero content, where everything is said and everything is noise. He pounded his fist silently on the desk. Why? Why couldn’t everything be different, yet somehow the same?
Nebransas! Miles and miles of flat corn country where a man can feel the big neon sky pressing milk down into the red plush earth. Nebransas! Mighty steel pylons picket the horizon, carrying power, power to light the linoleum, power to iron the honest Sunday shirt, power to scrape the plain Sunday dishes, power to pump the mail through the mail-slot of the homely country kitchen door, power to mill the flour to bake the bread to make the sandwiches to feed the faceless faces of countless thousands who assemble the air-conditioned car which now speeds along a highway past giant grain terminals resting like isolated white temples upon the brown sward of Nebransas!
While Miss Bunne took notes, Max spoke earnestly to the rumpled grey flannel suit of Mr Murd. ‘I’ve marked on this map the location of coaxial cables, microwave antennae, power towers, local newspapers, and billboards. Anything else?’
The pattern of wrinkles shifted slightly.
‘Ah yes,’ said Max, ‘those mail-order catalogues. It won’t be hard to intercept the ones actually in the mail, but the others, those in privies, etc., may be tricky to alter.’
‘What about social security numbers?’ Miss Bunne asked, tasting the ink in her fibre pen. ‘And the drive-in movies?’
‘I got the numbers in our bank job. We’ll take care of the drive-ins on the way back to the secret heliport, I believe. Lefty, turn on the radio.’
Kravon turned the traditional knob, and the stereo speakers spoke to them:
‘… Vatican announced today the successful test-firing of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Ave Maria. Together with their longer-range Miserecordia Dei, this …’
‘Tch, tch,’ said Miss Bunne. ‘All this violence in the world. Where will it all end?’ She patted the barrel of the automatic rifle clipped to the door.
‘Turning from the international scene, the Fremont State Bank was held up today by three men and a woman, wearing the masks of dead movie stars. Ignoring more than half a million dollars in payroll money, the bandits escaped with only worthless carbon copies of bank records, including a list of social security …’
‘Now stop it, Ray. This injection moulder I’m running is a dangerous piece of equipment, and I’m not going to let you mess around and tease me like this. Stop it, I said. You should be back in the inspection area, not wandering around like this.
‘Ray! That’s just plain dirty! Yes, I know you can’t exactly put your arm around me. I know it’s just an innocent hug, but what will the other girls think?
‘Now stop! I’ve already told you, I can not go out with you tonight – I already have a date. And never mind who with, it’s none of your business. If you must know, it’s with the new supervisor. Eric Bland.
‘What did you say? The machine’s making so much noise I can’t – Ray! Keep your foot away from that molten plastic! Look out for the ram – RAY!’
Max was making a list of Utopias, from which he hoped Mr Murd might be able to make a selection, checking two alternate preferences:
Utopia in the hands of an angry God
Utopia in boots
Utopia as the dictatorship of the proletariat
Utopia through whole-grain cereal health
Utopia: the seven-fold way
Utopia as Law and Order
the computer Utopia
the millenial Utopia
the genocidal Utopia
the noble savage Utopia
Utopia as a warm puppy
sharing the wealth
living by fear
living in a house by the side of the road (and being a friend to man)
the orgone Utopia
the Superman Utopia
Utopia through meditation, vibration, reincarnation and revelation
the global village
the radiant city
the city of God
the Lost City
the genetic Utopia
Nirvana
Heaven
the Earthly paradise
the free enterprise Utopia
&
nbsp; the conclave of immortals
‘less is more’
‘I can and I will’
the ultimate deterrent
the ultimate detergent
Utopia served up (by intelligent, sensitive extraterrestrials) on flying saucers
Utopia of a garden community of not more than 400 white industrialists, all good-looking, of surpassing wisdom, and in direct contact with the Deity through their mayor, George Washington.
‘Glad to have you with the art department, Ray. I’ll explain your duties: You take the letters from this letter tray – we’ve cut away a piece here so you can get your chin in there – and you just take them around to the various people in the department. And I hope you have a soft mouth – we don’t want any tooth-marks if we can help it. Just try imagining you’re a bird dog and these letters are very delicate birds, OK?’
‘Gee, thanks, Mr Wang, I appreciate …’
‘No “misters” here, Ray. I’m just plain Phil, and you’re just plain Ray. That leg thing give you any trouble? No? Good enough.
‘Your other duties will be lighter, just running the postage meter and the big electric paper guillotine over here. We have to crop photos now and then, nothing to worry about. If it gives you any problems, I’ll have Anne take care of it. She can also give you a hand – excuse me, Ray – with the postage, if you need help. Annie’s a real looker, isn’t she? That’s her over by the door.’
‘She sure is a knockout, Phil.’
‘Say, Ray, I hear you’re quite a ladies’ man, right?’
‘What? I mean, what, Phil?’
‘I said, I hear you’ve been cutting quite a swathe with the ladies in other departments. Heh heh, well, just don’t keep the girls from their work, OK?’
‘I won’t, Phil.’
‘OK, Ray? OK, boy?’
Max spent a lot of time working it all out:
Ignoring other factors, a force’s ‘fighting strength’ is proportional to the square of its size (Lanchester’s N-square Law). Then a force of n men could defeat a larger force of n 2 men, if the larger force can be divided into two parts:
That seemed clear enough. He tucked it away with his other notes on military operations research:
‘Root Tooth Structure Tensile Strength as a Factor in Combat Efficiency’
‘The “Shared Spearhead” Paradox Resolved’
‘The Unified Front System’ (A unique method of combining the war on poverty, any current Southeast Asian conflict, the gold war, the restraint of rioting, the war on cancer, etc., etc., so that guided by game theory and critical path analysis, the regime might make multi-dimensional (‘Lshaped’) moves, e.g., an attack on Southeast Asian poverty, on cancer-susceptible rioters, on auric cancer, on Southeast Asian riots involving gold.)
‘Maxideath as an Information Retrieval Problem’
‘A New Interpretation of Maxideath’
‘The Mutual Infinite Boundary Dilemma’
One of his favourites was ‘Heiliger’s “Bombed Baby” Problem’, for which he had never found a satisfactory solution: Given a single baby in a house at some unknown location in a city, how is it possible to ensure that a bombing raid (not using nuclear devices) will certainly kill that baby? No standard method (saturation bombing, raising a fire storm with incendiary bombs, pin-point bombing of every structure) was good enough; it was impossible to guarantee a kill.
But these monographs, while applicable to the coming conflict, were Max’s toys. His heart, soul, mind and strength were devoted to his monumental treatise, ‘On War as Information’. He was fascinated with the analogies between military strategy and information theory; the idea of killing as the simplest, clearest message; the consideration of the enemy as a ‘black box’, or unknown arrangement of components; tactics as the ‘alphabet’ or strategic ‘language’; the ergodic analysis of military operations considered over a period of time.
His talks with ‘David’, the chemical vision in Dr Logan’s lab, had led Max to consider speech and other sensory communication as analogues of war. His work went on apace, but ‘David’ had made him dread tackling the final paradox:
There seems to be no difference at all between the message of maximum content (or maximum ambiguity) and the message of zero content (noise).
Travers was at it again, watching the girls in the cafeteria line. With their bright jello-colored suits and honey hair they looked more transparent than translucent, he decided, and thought for minutes about the layers of glass that closed him off from them, the layers of dust, the layers of air and light. Who were all these girls? he wondered. What might they mean?
He looked at the crystal of his watch. In five minutes he would have the interview of interviews, with a Mr Kravon. What image to force upon him, that was the question. Kravon’s folder indicated a cautious type, inhumanly perfect, not excitable. Thirty-five years’ service. Try impressing him with – what? Sturdy youth? Nobler age? The sincerity angle? Simple humility? No, none of this could penetrate Kravon’s wall of suspicion. And it was impossible to dress as a dog or cat, or an honest stone …
That weekend, Anne and Eric went to their special place.
After parking the car in a shady grove of frismia, he led her along their own hidden path, down to a slanting platform of rock, half-awash in the mountain stream. Here they were completely hidden from the world by merriwether, frondy bagwort, smilax and the dark shiny leaves of rufus. At the very edge of the stream grew grieving nace, lithia, bright bloodmedal. Alone with him in this paradise, Anne felt no compulsion to speak; Eric seemed to feel the natural sanctity of the place no less than she.
He performed his usual ritual first, alone, then she followed suit. Yet not alone, for it was the cool little stream which, without touching them, brought them together. Anne wondered for a moment whether her husband, Stoat, had someone watching her now – but then her shame, too, was washed away by the purifying trickle.
Afterwards, Eric offered her a mentholated cigarette, and took one himself. They consumed this fragrant communion in silence, watching the sky go from gold to red. Anne imagined she were inside a great, translucent eyeball, looking out through the pupil of the sun to see …
‘The drive-in’s open at sundown. We’d better get going.’
‘What is it? I think I’ve seen it – Witch of Agnesi?’ She bent to pick a fragrant sprig of parson’s nose.
‘No, Return of the Zomboids and I think The Gurk.’
‘Yes, I remember Attack of the Zomboids. They were the ones made of clouds or pus or something, weren’t they? And all covered with electric hair?’
‘No,’ said Eric. ‘I think you’re thinking of the Fings. The Zomboids were transparent. They were like man-shaped jellyfish.’
The President of the United States rose to welcome Kravon, beckoning him to sit down at the desk with the Great Seal.
‘Mr President!’
‘Surprised to see me, Kravon? Well, I know it’s not my usual office, but I heard they were interviewing you for retirement, and I thought I’d look in. Now, we’ll talk in a moment about that pension plan, gold watch and so on, but right now let’s examine your safety record.
‘You see, the country – and the company – just can’t see turning loose a man who lets his department get a mess of accidents on the books. Now I see here …’
As the president lunged forward to check the record, one of the elastics holding on his vinyl face snapped. The face fell on his desk, spun around clumsily on the famous nose, and came to rest. Lucky, Travers thought, he’d had the foresight to wear another under it.
Kravon leaped up. ‘You’re not the president!’ he screamed. ‘Impostor! Fake! You’re fake like everything else!’
The other spoke calmly, moving closer to the lamp. ‘A little test of your faith, my child. Don’t you recognise me?’ He turned the desk lamp upwards, to shine on the shadowy eyes, the sucked-in cheeks, the tight, senescent smile like a rictus mortui.
‘No! It can’t
be!’ Kravon was confused. He mustn’t be allowed to doubt again, to reach for this mask.
‘His Holiness? No, my son, I bear some resemblance, true, to the infallible personage, but no, I am but a humble priest. The name is Father (he rhymed it carefully with lather) Patrick O’Brien.’
Removing the rest of his presidential shell, he stood revealed in his threadbare black cassock. ‘Tell me what ails yer soul, me boy. Have ye broken inny of the Lard’s commandments on conthraception, now? Throubled by guilty dreams, are ye? Peerify yerself through confession, the sacrament of Pinance. Kneel down.’
Kravon knelt on the comfortable carpet and bowed his head, displaying the tonsure of age.
‘Now I hope ye won’t mind if I put on a few vestments while ye talk. I’m goin’ ta the stockhalders’ meetin’, ta invoke a blessin’ on the union of Drum Inc. with Lion Oil.’
So while the manager of Cable Accounts began to murmur his secrets, Travers kissed, flashed, and girded himself in appropriate and inappropriate quasi-religious garments: alb, stole, cincture, scapular, rosary, cross, crucifix, skullcap, wimple, dalmatic, chasuble, cope, medals religious, sacred heart badge, epaulets, chevrons, stars, wings, battle ribbons, medals military, badges, buttons, pins, stars, garter, codpiece, doublet, stomacher, belts, bandoliers, spurs, studs, dickey, rosette, holster, scabbard, corsage, cockade, toga, ermine, jackboots, fez, homulka, tiara, coronet, crown, mitre, triple tiara, biretta, stetson, campaign hat, helmet, living bra, overseas cap, green beret, baseball cap, football shoulder pads, g-suit …