And why should I excite myself for a cause in which I have never believed? When Nature passes a law it cannot be repealed; for her prisoners there is no escape – and we are all her prisoners. So I sit tight and take another drink. There is only one proper way to become extinct: with dignity.
The New Father Christmas
Little old Roberta took the clock down off the shelf and put it on the hotplate; then she picked up the kettle and tried to wind it. The clock was almost boiling before she realised what she had done. Shrieking quietly, so as not to wake old Robin, she snatched up the clock with a dustcloth and dropped it onto the table. It ticked furiously. She looked at it.
Although Roberta wound the clock every morning when she got up, she had neglected to look at it for months. Now she looked and saw it was seven-thirty on Christmas Day, 2388.
‘Oh dear,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s Christmas Day already! It seems to have come very soon after Lent this year.’
She had not even realised it was 2388. She and Robin had lived in the factory so long. The idea of Christmas excited her, for she liked surprises – but it also frightened her, because she thought about the New Father Christmas and that was something she preferred not to think about. The New Father Christmas was reputed to make his rounds on Christmas morning.
‘I must tell Robin,’ she said. But poor Robin had been very touchy lately; it was conceivable that having Christmas suddenly forced upon him would make him cross. Roberta was unable to keep anything to herself, so she would have to go down and tell the tramps. Apart from Robin, there were only the tramps.
Putting the kettle on the stove, she left their living quarters and went into the factory, like a little mouse emerging from its mince-pie-smelling nest. Roberta and Robin lived right at the top of the factory and the tramps had their illegal home right at the bottom. Roberta began tiptoeing down many, many steel stairs.
The factory was full of the sort of sounds Robin called ‘silent noise’. It continued day and night, and the two humans had long ago ceased to hear it; it would continue when they had become incapable of hearing anything. This morning the machines were as busy as ever, and looked not at all Christmassy. Roberta noticed in particular the two machines she hated most: the one with loom-like movements which packed impossibly thin wire into impossibly small boxes, and the one which thrashed about as if it were struggling with an invisible enemy and did not seem to be producing anything.
The old lady walked delicately past them and down into the basement. She came to a grey door and knocked at it. At once she heard the three tramps fling themselves against the inside of the door and press against it, shouting hoarsely to each other.
Roberta was unable to shout, but she waited until they were silent and then called through the door as loudly as she could, ‘It’s only me, boys.’
After a moment’s hush, the door opened a crack. Then it opened wide. Three seedy figures stood there, their faces anguished: Jerry, the ex-writer, and Tony and Dusty, who had never been and never would be anything but tramps. Jerry, the youngest, was forty, and so still had half his life to drowse through, Tony was fifty-five, and Dusty had heat rash.
‘We thought you were the Terrible Sweeper!’ Tony exclaimed.
The Terrible Sweeper swept right through the factory every morning. Every morning, the tramps had to barricade themselves in their room, or the Sweeper would have bundled them and all their tawdry belongings into the disposal chutes.
‘You’d better come in,’ Jerry said. ‘Excuse the mess.’
Roberta entered and sat down on a crate, tired after her journey. The tramps’ room made her uneasy, for she suspected them of bringing women in here occasionally; also, there were pants hanging in one corner.
‘I had something to tell you all,’ she said. They waited politely, expectantly. Jerry cleaned his nails with a tack.
‘I’ve forgotten now just what it is,’ she confessed.
The tramps sighed with relief. They feared anything which threatened to disturb their tranquillity. Tony became communicative.
‘It’s Christmas Day,’ he said, looking around furtively.
‘Is it really!’ Roberta exclaimed. ‘So soon after Lent?’
‘Allow us,’ Jerry said, ‘to wish you a safe Christmas and a persecution-free New Year.’
This courtesy brought Roberta’s latent fears to the surface at once.
‘You – you don’t believe in the New Father Christmas, do you?’ she asked them. They made no answer, but Dusty’s face went the colour of lemon peel and she knew they did believe. So did she.
‘You’d better all come up to the flat and celebrate this happy day,’ Roberta said. ‘After all, there’s safety in numbers.’
‘I can’t go through the factory; the machines bring on my heat rash,’ Dusty said. ‘It’s a sort of allergy.’
‘Nevertheless, we will go,’ Jerry said. ‘Never pass a kind offer by.’
Like heavy mice, the four of them crept up the stairs and through the engrossed factory. The machines pretended to ignore them.
In the flat, they found pandemonium. The kettle was boiling over and Robin was squeaking for help. Officially bed-ridden, Robin could get up in times of crisis; he stood now just inside the bedroom door, and Roberta had to remove the kettle before going to placate him.
‘And why have you brought those creatures up here?’ he demanded in a loud whisper.
‘Because they are our friends, Robin,’ Roberta said, struggling to get him back to bed.
‘They are no friends of mine!’ he said. He thought of something really terrible to say to her; he trembled and wrestled with it and did not say it. The effort left him weak and irritable. How he loathed being in her power! As caretaker of the vast factory, it was his duty to see that no undesirables entered, but as matters were at present he could not evict the tramps while his wife took their side. Life was exasperating.
‘We came to wish you a safe Christmas, Mr. Proctor,’ Jerry said, sliding into the bedroom with his two companions.
‘Christmas, and I got heat rash!’ Dusty said.
‘It isn’t Christmas,’ Robin whined as Roberta pushed his feet under the sheets. ‘You’re just saying it to annoy me.’ If they could only know or guess the anger that stormed like illness through his veins.
At that moment, the delivery chute pinged and an envelope catapulted into the room. Robin took it from Roberta, opening it with trembling hands. Inside was a Christmas card from the Minister of Automatic Factories.
‘This proves there are other people still alive in the world,’ Robin said. These other fools were not important enough to receive Christmas cards.
His wife peered nearsightedly at the Minister’s signature.
‘This is done by a rubber stamp, Robin,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’
Now he was really enraged. To be contradicted in front of these scum! And Roberta’s cheeks had grown more wrinkled since last Christmas, which also annoyed him. As he was about to flay her, however, his glance fell on the address on the envelope: it read, ‘Robin Proctor, AFX10.’
‘But this factory isn’t X10!’ he protested aloud. ‘It’s SC 541.’
‘Perhaps we’ve been in the wrong factory for thirty-five years,’ Roberta said. ‘Does it matter at all?’
The question was so senseless that the old man pulled the bedclothes out of the bottom of the bed.
‘Well, go and find out, you silly old woman!’ he shrieked. ‘The factory number is engraved over the output exit. Go and see what it says. If it does not say SC 541, we must leave here at once. Quickly!’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Jerry told the old lady.
‘You’ll all go with her,’ Robin said. ‘I’m not having you stay here with me. You’d murder me in my bed!’
Without any particular surprise – although Tony glanced regretfully at the empty teapot as he passed it – they found themselves again in the pregnant layers of factory, making their way down to the o
utput exit. Here, conveyor belts transported the factory’s finished product outside to waiting vehicles.
‘I don’t like it much here,’ Roberta said uneasily. ‘Even a glimpse of outside aggravates my agoraphobia.’
Nevertheless, she looked where Robin had instructed her. Above the exit, a sign said ‘X10’.
‘Robin will never believe me when I tell him,’ she wailed.
‘My guess is that the factory changed its own name,’ Jerry said calmly. ‘Probably it has changed its product as well. After all, there’s nobody in control; it can do what it likes. Has it always been making these eggs?’
They stared silently at the endless, moving line of steel eggs. The eggs were smooth, and as big as ostrich eggs; they sailed into the open, where robots piled them into trucks and drove away with them.
‘Never heard of a factory laying eggs before,’ Dusty laughed, scratching his shoulder. ‘Now we’d better get back before the Terrible Sweeper catches up with us.’
Slowly they made their way back up the many, many steps.
‘I think it used to be television sets the factory made,’ Roberta said once.
‘If there are no more men – there’d be no more need for television sets,’ Jerry said grimly.
‘I can’t remember for sure …’
Robin, when they told him, was ill with irritation, rolling out of bed in his wrath. He threatened to go down and look at the name of the factory himself, only refraining because he had a private theory that the factory itself was merely one of Roberta’s hallucinations.
‘And as for eggs …’ he stuttered.
Jerry dipped into a torn pocket, produced one of the eggs, and laid it on the floor. In the silence that followed, they could all hear the egg ticking.
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Jerry,’ Dusty said hoarsely. ‘That’s … interfering.’ They all stared at Jerry, the more frightened because they did not entirely know what they were frightened about.
‘I brought it because I thought the factory ought to give us a Christmas present,’ Jerry told them dreamily, squatting down to look at the egg. ‘You see, a long time ago, before the machines declared all writers like me redundant, I met an old robot writer. And this old robot writer had been put out to scrap, but he told me a thing or two. He told me that, as machines took over man’s duties, so they took over his myths too. Of course, they adapt the myths to their own beliefs, but I think they’d like the idea of handing out Christmas presents.’
Dusty gave Jerry a kick which sent him sprawling.
‘That’s for your idea!’ he said. ‘You’re mad, Jerry boy! The machines’ll come up here to get that egg back. I don’t know what we ought to do.’
‘I’ll put the tea on for some kettle,’ Roberta said brightly.
The stupid remark made Robin explode.
‘Take the egg back, all of you!’ he shrieked. ‘It’s stealing, that’s what it is, and I won’t be responsible. And then you tramps must leave the factory!’
Dusty and Tony looked at him helplessly, and Tony said, ‘But we’ve got nowhere to go.’
Jerry, who had made himself comfortable on the floor, said without looking up, ‘I don’t want to frighten you, but the New Father Christmas will come for you, Mr. Proctor, if you aren’t careful. That old Christmas myth was one of the ones the machines took over and changed; the New Father Christmas is all metal and glass, and instead of leaving new toys he takes away old people and machines.’
Roberta, listening at the door, went as white as a sheet. ‘Perhaps that’s how the world has grown so depopulated recently,’ she said. ‘I’d better get us some tea.’
Robin had managed to shuffle out of bed, a ghastly irritation goading him on. As he staggered toward Jerry, the egg hatched.
It broke cleanly into two halves, revealing a pack of neat machinery. Four tiny, busy mannikins jumped out and leaped into action. In no time, using minute welders, they had forged the shell into a double dome; sounds of hammering came from underneath.
‘They’re going to build another factory right in here, the fresh things!’ Roberta exclaimed. She brought the kettle crashing down on the dome and failed even to dent it. At once a thin chirp filled the room.
‘My heavens, they are broadcasting for help!’ Jerry exclaimed. ‘We’ve got to get out of here at once!’
They got out, Robin twittering with rage, and the New Father Christmas caught them all on the stairs.
Ninian’s Experiences
It was not really seeing, but let’s say I saw the girl come into Ninian’s shop. I received the various radiations from her, which built into the equivalent of those colour, shape, texture, proportion impressions that constitute human seeing. I knew she could be no older than nineteen; I knew she was beautiful; I knew she was bored, that the name NINIAN over the entry meant nothing to her, that she had come in to escape the heat of mid-day.
I was behind the curtain in my humus bed; she could not see me. Instead, she stared at Ninian’s models. She was still bored and only very faintly curious.
The shop was small, decorous, coyly lit, with the models spaced at intervals in their beds round the display table. Unactivated, the models looked dowdy, clayey things.
Ninian’s assistant, Wrybaker, came forward and began speaking politely to the girl.
‘Can I activate any of the models for you, madam?’ he enquired. ‘Their real qualities don’t emerge at all in their present suspended state.’
‘I see,’ she said, sounding bewildered. ‘Well, that – is it a buttercup? – could I see that one activated?’
‘Certainly,’ Wrybaker said. I heard him – well, sensed him to be precise – bring his little psi-tuner from his pocket, switch it on, tune it to the model’s frequency. A high note sank to a growl and died as he did so. The rough, grey model of the buttercup seemed to stir.
For me, there was no change in the model in any way. For the girl, I knew, the model was now becoming more vivid. It would be growing, glowing, moving, turning into a vital thing. Her mind would be full of it, as it revealed itself to be the inner quality of a buttercup, the very essence of a buttercup. She would savour the pappy, brittle greenness of it, the banal goldenness of its petals; she would realise – perhaps for the first time – the nature of its springing gesture between light and gravity. She would know, in short, what it was like to be a buttercup, to live a buttercup existence.
The girl stood there in that rather silly transfixed attitude customers fall into when first confronted by one of Ninian’s models. After a minute, Wrybaker switched off. The thing in the humus bed became once more a stodgy twist of clay-like substance. The girl relaxed.
She blushed slightly and brushed an imaginary wisp of hair from her face. It was a gesture I should see her employing more than once.
‘How very strange!’ she exclaimed. Her voice sounded clear and refreshed. ‘Can you tell me – of what is this buttercup made?’
‘It’s not a buttercup,’ Wrybaker corrected deferentially, ‘so much as the experience of a buttercup. All our models are not the things themselves but the experiences of those things, if you follow me. Mr. Ninian’s experiences, of course. He makes all the models personally. They are built out of the way he feels about things.’
I saw – felt – sensed – her standing there with a little temptation entering her mind, colouring it, giving it that extra octave of interest. She was usually not a very intelligent girl. Her body was warm from the heat outside, nestling in her light clothes, making her feel content and unadventurous. But new ideas floated before her, and their call could not be resisted. It was as if a window opened on the sea; she was compelled to lean out.
‘Perhaps I might see some other models,’ she said, adding casually, ‘and perhaps I might see Mr. Ninian.’
‘That will not be possible, I’m afraid,’ Wrybaker said. ‘Mr. Ninian is a very retiring man who – ’
At that moment his audible vibrations were blotted out to me. One of my limita
tions is that I can only receive from one focal point at a time, and just then a new focus appeared behind me. Ninian had arrived from the workshop.
He came through the room at the back of the shop without looking at me, wiping his hands on a white cloth, blinking. Because of the heat, he wore only a towel knotted round his waist and woven slippers on his feet. He was dark, twenty-six, rather short, thin; his face was heavy as an old sail, his eyes were like smoke. Walking past me, he peered through the curtain into the shop.
‘I should greatly like to meet him,’ the girl was saying to Wrybaker. ‘He is so obviously – well, the expression has frequently been misused, but one can only say he is a great artist. I mean, this buttercup – this experience of a buttercup …’
Her cheeks surprised her by colouring suddenly.
Ninian saw her through the curtain. He began immediately to sweat. I had seen this reaction before in him; he was nervous and maladjusted, a state of affairs inseparable from what he did; he was an outcast. So the sweat perhaps represented a conflict between hope and experience.
Something else happened to him. Perhaps it would only have been apparent to a very perceptive human, although to me it was clear enough. He tensed. His body became more compact and alive, as if it had suddenly found a motive for being a body. His mouth readjusted itself, and by so doing changed entirely the expression of his face, rendering it more alert. He withdrew his eye from the curtain, standing quite motionless for ten seconds.
This is the change that comes over a man when he sees a woman he desires, and begins at once to plan and plan to possess her. Whenever I observe it, it frightens me.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 72