Fun House

by Appel, Benjamin

  “How do you know that, Captain?”

  “We’ve got our men in their outfit just as they have their men in ours,” Comrade Nyet said cynically. “But we’re still ahead, thank Univac!”

  He looked like a rough-and tumble type, but I had a hunch that his first loyalty was not to the Commissioner but the L. and O. Board and Her Excellency, the Minister of Police Affairs. “How are we ahead?” I asked.

  “We know where the professor is, Crockett. It isn’t much because we don’t know where he’s hidden the A-I-D. That’s the big question. That damned A-I-D!” He stared at his five men and said gloomily. “We could arrest the professor. In fact, that’s our orders, and we’ll arrest him when the time comes.”

  “We have until eleven tonight,” I said. “We have until eleven for me to negotiate with him. What time is it now?”

  He shuddered. “Please, let’s not talk of the time.” His face had become an awful white. He pulled out a box of U-Latus. Only Gladys refused. When I thought of the watch in my pocket ticking away, I couldn’t resist a pick-me-up.

  There was a moment of silence as we chewed on the happiness pills. Captain Weir-Comrade Nyet wiped his sweating face and grinned wanly. “To get back to the professor. He’s a good player, or perhaps they value intellectuals in this place. Anyway, he has a big job with Ivan Radizl. He’s one of the Judges in the Peace Prize Contest. That’s a game tied up with their Space Ship Program. This is what we’ve worked out, Crockett. You and Gladys are inventors, follow me? Tomorrow at three o’clock — or should I say today — the Peace Prize Judges, the professor among them, will be receiving inventors. You and Gladys will present your invention and that’s how you’ll contact Professor Fleischkopf or Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf, to give him his party name. He knows you, Crockett, and the rest is up to you.”

  And quickly, he outlined the invention which in the dialectic of Russoplayo, might be — at least so he hoped — a means to the end. The end being the recovery of the A-I-D.

  Gladys and I didn’t leave right away. “I want to talk to you where we won’t be overheard,” she said, and we went into another room. Portraits of Ivan Radizl hung on the walls but otherwise it was furnished simply. “I’m exhausted,” she sighed, dropping into a chair.

  “Have you any of that Bee-Ambo on you?”

  “No, it was confiscated before we passed through customs. Darling, I want to ask you a question. If all goes well today, what will you do?”

  “Go home I suppose.”

  “Take me with you!” she said impulsively.

  I was silent, and she smiled. “Where are the roses of yesterday? The roses and the poses, the poses of love?”

  “Gladys, I don’t know what to say — ”

  “Don’t say it, my little sparrow.” Her face was bright and flippant like the face of the old Gladys.

  “Gladys, this talk is silly. We might all be dead by tomorrow.”

  She shook her head. “No, I have a feeling there’ll be a tomorrow. Death won’t give up his bad habits, but at least he’ll go back to his old job as a retailer. The wholesale merchant’ll be through! The wholesale merchant he became when we stupid blind fools took away his scythe and gave him the A-I-D.”

  I stared at her — this was the new Gladys. “I can’t get over the change in you!”

  She smiled at me. “Would you like to do the autobiog of my life? I’m tired of writing autobiogs. I’m tired of heroes. If we get the A-I-D, I’ll have to do one on Commissioner Sonata, not to mention one on you. The new heroes. I’m so tired of heroes. Did you know I wrote an autobiog on Barnum Fly, and another on old Doctor Bangani? Well, I did. And after the big trials, every book on a magicientist was burned. I’m tired of heroes, darling, tired of this Pleasure Republic if you must know, where science serves magicience and magicience serves the Rulers.”

  “You’d go back with me to the Reservation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gladys, I think it’s impossible. I wish you could, but how?”

  She was silent for a second and then her hands moved before her as if at her Talko-Typo. She lifted an imaginary page and read: “Impossible is a word I’ve forgotten!” Crockett Smith retorted as he climbed on board his space ship, where the crew, Gladys Ellsberg, saluted smartly. In a split second, they were travelling towards the planet Utopia. Crockett Smith trembled when they approached the Disaster Point of 43,281 miles from Earth. ‘Is it possible,’ he said to his fellow-traveller Comrade Ekaterina. ‘No space ship has ever flown past this point.’ Interstellar silence. Interstellar mystery. 43,280 miles. 43,281 miles. 53,281 miles. 63,281 miles. ‘It is possible,’ the crew said laconically. On the planet Utopia, the two intrepid travellers found a race of Superior Beings who lived in small cities limited to 43,281 population. The Superior Beings had atomic power for all their needs. Each man and woman worked and read and thought on what was closest to his or her heart. ‘Your multi-million cityurbs are too large,’ the Superior Beings advised the two intrepid explorers. ‘We pity you. Your civilization is a circus and your culture is a clown with a painted face. You have surrendered your skills and your brains to the Circus Masters. We of Utopia pity you, for among us all men have skills, and all skills are for men and are never used against men. Return to earth, Crockett Smith and Comrade Ekaterina, and dream of Utopia and maybe even work for the day when men will recreate themselves in the image of Man.’ ”

  She stood up and stroked her hair with a nervous hand. “I’ve been dreaming too much this last day and not the Sweet Dreams we manufacture. Maybe we need a 29th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing life, liberty and the pursuit of a human happiness. Human happiness, the sweetest of all Sweet Dreams.”

  I stared at her wet eyes, a common enough sight on the Reservation, but practically subversive among the denizens of the Fun house.

  “Why so solemn, comrade inventor?” she said and laughed like the old Gladys. “We better go back and get some rest.”

  We returned to the Hotel Five Year Plan. It was exactly 3.07 a.m. Seven hours and fifty-three minutes remained before what might be called D-Day — Death-Day.

  The sun arose on the historic day of July 3rd, 2039, blinding me as I lay in my room. Sleepily I thought I’d get up and pull the shade. I was halfway to the window when I remembered we were a quarter of a mile below the surface of the earth. Yet the windows were a dazzling golden red1. I touched the glass. It was warm to the touch, but when I tried to haul the window up, it wouldn’t budge.

  “Comrade,” I heard Gladys-Ekaterina saying behind me. “The windows won’t open!”

  She was sitting up in bed, her yellow hair tousled, her blue eyes rested; the left one, the squinty one, still drooping slightly. Across the front of her red pajamas was a Russian slogan in gold letters.

  “These windows,” I complained.

  “A supreme scientific achievement, comrade from America!”

  I took the hint. This room too was a miracle of science, with every word monitored, every move photographed. “Well,” I said grimly. “This is the day of days — ”

  “To present our invention,” she said quickly. “Think, comrade, we may win the Peace Prize! Oh, what a thought, comrade. Let us have a comradely drink!”

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Our appointment is at three o’clock.” She hopped out of bed and went to the wall taps where she filled two glasses, drinking her glass in one quick gulp. The transformation was astonishing. She was all smiles, leers in fact. She fetched me my glass but I had been forewarned. I glanced at the smoky red liquid2 in my glass and perhaps it was an opgin-type illusion but I could have sworn that I saw miniature little things swimming about that reminded me of mermaids. Leering mermaids, if that’s possible …

  Smiling, she began unbuttoning her pajama top. She had reverted to the old Gladys, lock, stock and barrel.

  “No, comrade,” I said. “We’ve got work to do. Long live Comrade Ivan Radizl!”

  She only laughed, holding out
her arms and offering me the Garden of Eden body so like my own wife’s. “What better work is there, comrade?”

  “This isn’t the time, Gladys,” I said nervously.

  “Time!” she laughed. “You’re back in your element now, you bureaucrat, the alimentary like every capitalistic bureaucrat infested with Red Tapewormitis.”

  I was revolted at her humor and also worried, for under the effect of the drink she seemed to have forgotten that every word, every move was being recorded.

  “Comrade, at three o’clock we are seeing the Peace Prize Judges — ” I reminded her.

  “Three o’clock, darling? We’ve a lifetime ahead of us, darling. It’s Paris in June, my little bulfinch. I mean Moscow in June!” she laughed and, naked as she was, danced across the room.

  I stared at that abandoned woman who might have been my own wife, that is in flesh, not the spirit. Who was she, I wondered or perhaps the question was, who wasn’t she? A writer of autobiogs, an L. and O. operative, an R.T.R., my wife and yet not my wife….

  (Fellow Americans of the Reservation, I won’t sugarcoat any of my actions. Let it be a lesson to our young people. Life on the Outside would corrupt a saint.)

  I thought of the Peace Prize contest and of Professor Fleischkopf alias Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf who alone knew where the A-I-D was. I thought of how time was racing away, perhaps for the last time on this doomed earth, and then weak, tempted and all too human, I swallowed the smoky red drink she had poured for me …

  At two-thirty we left the hotel, walking down the tunnel again. The subway elevator took us to the surface where a real sun was shining in the sky. The streets were crowded with people on their way to the daily examinations, a feature of the game as they played it. Here and there were corpses, unsuccessful players strangled in the night.

  “We can talk freely, darling,” Gladys smiled. “The Urban Recorder is not sufficiently perfected to sift out a conspiratorial voice in a crowd.” The sun was in her face and her blue eyes were very blue.

  “You think the professor’ll listen to us?”

  “Yes darling, and remember to call him comrade, not professor, Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf.”

  “The professor used to talk of the mystery of human nature,” I said, shaking my head. “You look so innocent now, but a short time ago you were a mermaid. Where was the woman who spoke of a Life Party and a Death Party?”

  “A woman has a right to her moods, comrade inventor.”

  Beyond Red Square, we could see the immense golden dome of the Palace of Peace with its circle of round closed windows painted red, each with a white dove in the center. Behind those windows, in readiness, were the atomic cannon1. A skywriter flew above the walls of the Kremlin, writing:

  HEAVEN ON EARTH IS A CLASSROOM WITH THE PARTY AS A TEACHER2

  And now as if synchronized to the slogan, we heard a voice like a distant plucked wire3:

  “People of Moscow, as you walk to the Palace of Examination, be guided by the great principle of Socialist Pedagogy. Think, reflect, relax, but do not relax too much.”

  “The Secretary of the Party,” Gladys-Ekaterina said. “The Voice4.”

  And as she spoke, the Voice began to report the morning news; which was mainly about the Space Ship Program and its progress.

  We came to the Palace of Peace, its doors guarded by soldiers wearing berets’ made of white dove feathers. We entered a huge waiting room so crowded there wasn’t a seat left. Everywhere the players sat, clutching blueprints or miniature models of inventions. Some were silent, others argumentative, and even on the crackpot side. A man with thick glasses grabbed my arm and shouted. “Comrade, why are our space ships shot down?”

  “Counter-revolutionaries,” I said. “Long live Comrade Ivan Radizl!”

  “They are shot down,” he bellowed as if he hadn’t heard me, “because in the final analysis our space ships are molecular structures. Comrade, I have perfected the modified unified gravitational theory involving the phenomena of amorphous Stardust and space platforms. The mathematics is simple, comrade. Let us reduce molecules into electrons, neutrons, and mesons. Once beyond the Disaster Point, these elements will reassemble themselves molecularly into space ships!”

  I eased away from the madman. Gladys-Ekaterina and I pushed through the crowd of inventors towards a desk where an official sat in a white suit with buttons of gold shaped like doves. All about him the mob called and asked questions while he concentrated on his work panel, pushing in its buttons with thin claw-like fingers. There was something odd about his face, but only when we were close did I see what it was. His eyes were perfectly round, iridescent and inhuman — the eyes of a dove.

  “I am the assistant to the American comrade inventor,” Gladys-Ekaterina said to the official. “I am Comrade Ustipopoff and he is Comrade Ttekcroc1.”

  The dove-eyed official consulted a tiny screen. “The Comrade Judges will see you,” he said. “Proceed Comrades Ustipopoff and Ttekcroc.”

  As we hurried to the flight of marble stairs behind his desk, Gladys-Ekaterina looked meaningfully at me. I understood. Dove Eyes was one of ours, another secret member of the R.T.R.

  It was an impressive place, the Palace of Peace. The entire wall up to the second floor was one ascending mural, showing proletarian inventors since the dawn of time, beginning with the nameless Caveman and his invention, the first crude stone hammer. The next mural showed a collective group of neo-glacial Apemen whose invention was fire. The next skipped tens of thousands of years to feature the first birchbark canoe being made by a group of earnest proletarians, all Red Indians. As we stepped out on the second floor, thirty or forty doves appeared from nowhere and flew down the marble corridor to an immense door of gun-metal blue steel on which they arranged themselves in two words: PEACE, ENTER. Only then did I realize that the doves weren’t real but magnetized artificials.

  To the left of the door there was one last exhibit, a great bowl of small reddish fish and the legend:

  Even in the oceans of the world, the Space Ship Program has attracted its followers. In immense shoals these red herring live their communal life, disclaiming those who claim to have invented them.

  I was staring like a boy at a circus. The immense steel door opened and Gladys-Ekaterina nudged me with her elbow. “Comrade inventor,” she said, and we walked into a white chamber, the judges seated on a red-draped dais. There were five of them, all wearing very full-fashioned gowns of white feathers that fluffed out at their shoulders. They could have been angels except for the masks on their faces. An even more enigmatic note was struck by the huge mural behind the dais. It showed a titanic masked figure, that of Jesus Christ, proclaiming the slogan: PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO MEN.

  The masked judge in the center spoke to me. “Comrades Ttekcroc and Ustipopoff, approach.”

  We obeyed. I guessed that the tallest of the judges could only be Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf whom I had known as Professor Fleischkopf. “Comrades,” the chief judge said, picking up a document from which he read, “Comrade Judges, we have here an invention in the field of psychodynamics. Comrade Ttekcroc, will you outline your invention.”

  I was so excited I couldn’t speak, my eyes on the huge masked figure of the professor, this conscienceless hybrid who was both bloodthirsty and learned. A hunter who lived to kill, and a philosopher who loved to discourse in a gentle voice — and this split man held the fate of the world in his hands. I couldn’t speak, I could only hope, pray.

  “The comrade from America is modest,” Gladys-Ekaterina explained to the judges. “A true son of the proletariat. Modest, humble and dedicated.”

  I gulped and then in a shaky voice began. “Judges, my invention is in the field of psychodynamics. It is a simple invention. Like the common clock it uses the principle of time. And time is the precious material we need in our society. Time against the A-I-D! Why is the A-I-D dangerous? Precisely because it can without a second of warning destroy all human society, including our own great society, the for
emost in the world. As long as there is an A-I-D, death is the secret ruler of all mankind, including socialist mankind. That is why there is no time to adopt five-year plans or even five-day plans. Time is of the essence. Comrade Judges, I have invented what I call a Five Minute Plan. Let every citizen of the world sit down and concentrate for five minutes on the problem of the A-I-D and what should be done to neutralize it. Since the population of the Earth and Moon combined is five billion human beings, we arrive at a figure of twenty-five billion minutes which gives us enough time to perfect all human dreams, including our Space Ship Program!”

  I paused. I was trembling, wondering whether the professor would accept my appeal or not. All the five masked judges could have been dead men, they were so still. Not a single feather of their robes fluttered. I waited and my eyes lifted to the masked Christ on the wall, and numbly I read his message: PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO MEN.

  “Thank you,” the chief judge said.

  We were dismissed. We left the chamber, the gun-metal blue door closed behind us.

  Oh, who can describe the suspense as we sat downstairs with the crowd of inventors. The hours weren’t hours, the minutes weren’t minutes, but at last when all the inventors had been received, the five masked judges walked down the marble stairs.

  I can’t continue calmly. Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf spoke to us in that gentle academic voice of his I remembered so well from Bangani Castle. “Your Five Minute Plan is interesting, comrades, I would like to question you further …”

  Within a half hour we had left Russoplayo and were flying back to Washington — but without the A-I-D. The professor had listened to what we had to say and then smiling he had replied. “The A-I-D isn’t in Russoplayo. Only I know where it is.” He had tapped his temple. “It is safe inside the aqueous membranes of my brain, and I laugh at your Brain-Confessors because I have taken the precaution of having my brain falmemorized.1”

  I forced myself to ask The Question. “Is it set to go off?”