“When you hit the floor now,” Jessica said, “you bounce.”
“I remember,” he said. “I remember.”
Yes, when you hit the floor, you bounce. Falling slowly, gracefully in the thick air exhaled by all of the government people, Thompson felt the first thrust of an emotion he had not known for many years; and reaching for the floor, pushing off the floor, bouncing, he gave a cry of release.
“You see, Daddy?” Jessica said, springing above him, her arms extended, paddling. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
“Yes,” Thompson said, positioning himself awkwardly to follow her. “Yes, I forgot that. I really did.”
Oblivious of their newly entranced audience, the two swimmers swept on.
Rocket City
MARGE AND ME, WE TOOK DINK AND WENT DOWN to Rocket City. Dink, he got into one of those retrograde simulators, and we didn’t see him for o-three-hundred hours. He be flying to Phobos oldstyle, I guess, with the field monitor pouring in his head and all the music of the spheres; but Marge and me, we did walking. We walked through the turbofire and the second-stage exhibits. We walked by old three-level jobs and the actual pieces of craft that blew up on Ceres. It was a slow time in Rocket City, and I was able to get into conversation with one of the guides. “Listen to this, Marge,” I said. “He be telling you things about this you never knew. How we flew the planets and dropped on Pluto; how we perched on the edge of the stars and now no more. He primed and full of tapes and stuff: he give the true story of the human destiny and condition and why we no turn outward but inward instead.”
“I got no interest in that,” Marge said. “What he be telling I be not wanting.” But when the tour guide began to speak, she stood in place anyway, partnership being a matter of bearing up. Or under.
“The program was abandoned in the early twenty-fours,” the tour guide said. He be a young fellow who know nothing about history, but those mnemonic devices mean they can tell you everything, just like the simulators can take Dink to Phobos. “The utter inhospitability of the environment to stellar exploration was confirmed by the findings of Vieter and Loeb, whose bio-mechanical researches did confirm that the organism could not stand the period of time necessary to reach even the Centauris. Faced with the prospect of becoming a race of planet-hoppers and dilettantes eternally confined to our solar system, authorities made the decision instead to dismantle the program except for the transfer voyages among the settlements. Hence the establishment of Rocket City so that replications and originals of the real devices of travel could be preserved for all time.”
“It all sounds very sad to me,” Marge said. “Why give up planet-hopping?”
“The stars they be a suicide mission,” I said. “This very discouraging in terms of high expectations; continued flight within the solar system then be perceived as decadent, am I right?”
“Right,” the guide said. “Psychotronic control’s perception was that the non-abandonment of rocketry in the context of limitation to the solar system would have led to deadly warfare by the middle of the twenty-fours. Hence the devices were dismantled except for Rocket City, which was established in San Diego in 2453 so that our heritage should not be forgotten.” The guide stared past us. “I got that right,” he said.
“You,” Marge said to me, “let us be looking for Dink. O-two-hundred hours in that simulator be addling his brain; he come out and not know he be Dink himself.”
“In just a moment,” I say. “This is very interesting.” We only go down to Rocket City once a year, and Marge, she be hurrying to leave from the moment we hit the gate; but I think these visits an important part of preserving our human history and try to get as much from them as possible. With Dink scrambling off to the simulators since he be ten years old already, it be difficult for him to learn anything, and Marge has no interest in rocketry. “Talk about the stars as a suicide mission,” I said.
“That’s what they were. Certain aspects of the radiation that could not be kept out of the craft, no system being utterly self-enclosed, would have driven the crews insane and have caused them to destroy the mission. Vieter and Loeb proved this, and it was decided that it would be the most humane decision not to subject their theories to proof.”
“I think that’s a pretty good thing,” Marge said. “It would have been cruel. They were pioneers and heroes.”
“That is true,” the guide said and went into a long speech on the background, but I be thinking of Dink again. Pioneer and hero, that what he wanted to be; that is why he crawls off to the simulators and dreams of stars every time in Rocket City. He would have been very good if it had not been for Vieter and Loeb. But then I can be telling from the look on Marge’s face that she not want to listen anymore, and I cannot say that I blame her. Maybe she be thinking of Dink too. I nod at the guide, and we walk away. There is not to worry about hurting feelings, because the guides be close to simulators themselves, filled with penalyazyne and other concoctions from an early age to make good passageway for the mnemonics: obliteration and suppression of the personality from an early age, in other words. When they off duty, they swim in the tanks or lie in the barrows.
Marge and me, we walk through the gate and into the section where the thrust chambers and multi-leveled rockets be poised in rows against the dome. The arena be almost empty on this slow afternoon, and I look at the steel and circuitry and think how sad it is that most of us, we are now so uninterested in our heritage that this place be almost empty. Year by year there are fewer at Rocket City, and I am pretty sure that by the end of the twenty-fives it will be closed, leveled for more occupation. But while it be still around, it is important to pay our heritage respect.
I stare at the multi-levels and think of the men who centuries ago locked themselves into steel, surrounded themselves with filters, and hurled themselves toward Ganymede. They must have been strange and courageous, informed by the knowledge that they were going to the stars; even though that did not quite work, one can respect their dedication. Dink be the same way.
Marge had had enough. “We be getting that boy and out of here,” she said. “O-three-hundred hours now in the simulators, and you know what it was like the last time.”
I know what it was like. We begin to walk that way. “This an impressive place, though, Marge,” I said. “This a memorial to the time when we be spacebound.”
“We not spacebound,” Marge said. “That be put away.”
I do not argue. What is there to argue? She is right, and I have had enough of Rocket City myself; every time the crowds be less and the space between the ships greater. We stroll in our usual way to the simulator barn and pipe in the message for Dink. We wait and we wait. Finally he be coming out in that stunned way they emerge from the simulators, his eyes looking like the guide’s. “Who be you?” he said. Disorientation on release be common. “The engines be shutting down; we ready for Ganymede contact.”
“Come along,” Marge said, taking his hand. “Ganymede takedown come next time.” He stumbled along with her, still weak and confused. The simulators, they do one good job.
“Ganymede touchdown,” Dink say. “Big Jovian landscape. Moons as big as worlds. Oh, the darkness.” They talk like that for some hundred hours after release, even longer before they throttle down. “Oh, the darkness,” Dink, he say again, and Marge look at me over his little round head. I shrug, I be taking his other hand. We walk quick and fast out of Rocket City then, the night hard over San Diego outside the dome and the lights winking on the tastehouses and the slaughtering bins as clutching his strong spaceman’s hands.
Marge and me, we take our twenty-eight-year-old son all the way, all the way, all the way home. His round head a spacer’s. His cold eyes the stars.
The Shores of Suitability
COMMON EXEGESIS OF KILLERS OF THE RULERS portends the interrelationship of post-Joycean rhetoric with post-Shavian political pluralism. Relate this confluence. Elaborate and discuss. Exemplify.
The Old Hack is havin
g a nightmare. In it, he has returned to academia and is seeking a master’s degree at Extension U., which, he hopes, will enable him to find work as an assistant instructor of English. All right, it is a long shot, but he is almost out of ideas. The markets are really hell, and foreign sales have dried up. And he is having big trouble delivering on the one outline he has sold. So the Old Hack has enrolled in English 353A: Science Fiction and the Archetype, because in the catalog it seemed to be an easy three points (no paper required). If he knows anything, he knows science fiction. Right? Well, doesn’t he? Now he is taking the final examination in this graduate-level course, which appears to focus on an old Ace Double, Killers of the Rulers. He is especially qualified to deal with this book. He wrote it back in 1957 between wives at the old place on West 89th Street. Even so, the exam is giving him trouble. Big trouble.
* * *
The subtheme of colonic usurpation in its Jungian relevance creates a multileveled tension in Killers of the Rulers, which points toward the induction of three distinct archetypes. Name these archetypes. Elaborate and discuss. Discuss further how a Freudian approach would defeat consummation of the Blue Alien Incursion.
The Old Hack is not sure exactly how he got into this. It all seemed so simple when he enrolled. The reading list, which included many of his old favorites, indicated this would be a snap, to say nothing of the pleasant surprise of finding Killers of the Rulers right in there between More than Human and The Forever Machine. But he suspected that things had begun to go wrong from the start. In the first session the young instructor had begun by speaking of a Manichean influence in the birth of American science fiction, and how the great Fifties novels were an extension of the Fabian theory of Socialism as propounded by the works of G. B. Shaw. The Old Hack had briefly thought of identifying himself when his book came up in November. “I wrote that one,” he could have said (it had been written, as had all of the Ace Doubles, and too much of his other stuff, under a pseudonym), but by then he was totally confused. It did not seem wise to admit writing Killers of the Rulers, particularly if he could not understand a word the young instructor was saying about it.
* * *
Produce a 1,000-word monograph interrelating the empire building of Killers of the Rulers with the more pacific vision of More Than Human. Be specific. In what way does Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” inform and influence both works as controlling response? Why does Heartbreak House not apply here?
Heartbreak House. That’s what West 89th Street had been. It was there, drunk and up against a deadline, that he wrote Killers of the Rulers on the kitchen table. The Old Hack hadn’t even started it until the weekend before it was due. There had been all that excitement about him and Mabel Sue, and, besides, for a $750 advance (payable in halves) why should he get all upset about churning out this stuff to their convenience rather than his? Even then the book kind of lurched along, what with Betty (wife number one) crying and coming out of the bedroom now and then only to throw another of his paperbacks at him while he sat there typing. Finally he gave up, turned to the Cutty Sark, and took down that 1952 issue of Worlds of If, which he used to bloat up his novelette.
In the end the book was not what he had promised in the outline, but what the hell? Everyone lied and cheated in the small things (he had tried desperately to explain this to Betty); the important commitment was to getting the work done, and to holding on to enough of the advance money to have a good blowout. Despite all the screaming, he had been only three days late, thanks to the Cutty Sark, but then the bastards took a month to deliver the check, by which time he was well embarked on that disastrous series of events that ended with Mabel Sue’s calling him a drunken liar and throwing his typewriter and the carbon of Killers of the Rulers out the third-story window.
* * *
Neologic devices in Killers of the Rulers account for, as in Finnegans Wake, much of its subnarrative power. Present and discuss five such devices. Analyze two of them. Describe how they function as a metaphoric combine of the Blue Aliens.
In his dream, the Old Hack brings his blank essay booklet up to the proctor midway through the three hours. “I can’t stand it,” he says shakily. “I can’t stand it anymore. Just take me away. I’ll be good.” The proctor stares at him mercilessly through goggles of glittering glass. “Help. Help,” the Old Hack whimpers as he tumbles like a stone through various levels of his dream world.
He finds himself awake and fifty-seven in his own bleak room at dawn, his hopes for an assistant instructorship at the college destroyed, the empty pages of Grandsons of the Killers of the Rulers littering the floor beside him, and this novel—his masterpiece, he had told the editor to clinch the contract, the crown of his career—three months overdue today. And counting.
Shiva
“WE’LL TRY PARIS,” SOMEONE SAYS. “Remember Paris.”
Sperber, trusted only for an apprentice assignment but still determined to be hopeful, huddles in the deep spaces of the extradimensional calculator, figuring out his further moves. Sperber has always been a thoughtful type, not impulsive, only reactive. That is one of the primary reasons for his participation in the program. Know your course, pull down vanity, move deliberately toward a kind of fruition. Still he thinks: How long can I remain hopeful doing stuff like this?
Still, he has. Remained hopeful, that is. Choice gleams like knives from the enclosure; shrugging, his life a cosmic shrug he thinks, Sperber is catapulted to Paris, 1923, finds himself with no real transition in a small café on the fringes of the Champs Élysées where he seems to be already engaged in profound conversation with the young Pol Pot and Charles de Gaulle, nationalists both, their expressions set intently toward a future that glows for them, even though Sperber knows better than they how problematic the situation.
“Excusez-moi,” Sperber Says in his miserable, poorly accented French, tugging on the sleeve of de Gaulle’s brown jacket.
Even at this early stage of his life, de Gaulle seems to have taken on a military righteousness. “Je can stay only a moment. I am here to give you a glimpse of your future s’il vous plait. Comment allez vous? Would you like that portrait of your future?”
He hopes that the translator has done its wondrous work. There is no way that he can express to De Gaulle in this perilous situation without the help of that device. Still, it seems—like so much else in post-technological 2218—something of a cheat. Form has taken function all the way to the grave; the extradimensional calculator has, for instance, subsumed the causes of research or serious speculation.
De Gaulle is unresponsive to Sperber’s question. Perhaps premonitory apprehensions of the Fourth Republic have overtaken him; he seems distant, affixed to some calculation of a future that Sperber himself knows all too well. Saleth Sar (Pol Pot’s birth name or at least the name he employed in his student days) brandishes a teacup, looks at Sperber with a kind of loathing.
“And me?” he says. “What about me? What s’il vous plait are you undertaking to give me? My French is not perfect but I am worthy of your attention, no?
This certainly is true. Saleth Sar is worthy of his attention. In his excitement at finally meeting de Gaulle, Sperber has almost ignored the general’s old companion and rival in student debates.
“Pardon me,” he says. “I meant to give no offense. I am a student, I am in this place to study and to learn. It is not possible for me to know everything.”
“You do not have to know everything,” Pol Pot says reprovingly, “but it is not correct to know nothing at all.” He stares at de Gaulle sourly, takes the teacup from the general’s hand, and places it with a thump on the table. “I think I will ask you to leave this table,” he says. “You were after all not invited.”
“I have to tell you that the Algerian intervention will come to a very bad end,” Sperber says hastily. “Both of you must know this, also that the decision to leave Indo-China will lead in no way toward peace. Your intervention will be supplanted by ignorant Americans, the Am
ericans will get in deeper and deeper, eventually the Americans will ignore the borders of Kampuchea and will commit severe destruction. No good will come of this, none at all. One country will be shamed, another sacrificed. You must begin to make plans now.”
“Plans?” Pol Pot says. “What kind of plans are we supposed to make? You babble of destiny, of destruction. But it is this kind of destruction which must precede the revolution itself. It is vital that the revolution prevail, that is why I have been sent to Paris. To study texts of successful revolutions, to know the Constitution of the United States among other things.”
Pol Pot, the admirer of democratic principles. Sperber had forgotten that.
Paris at this time was filled with future Communists who loved democracy, the United States, American music and sexual habits. It was betrayal, Americans not taking to Asian desires, which had tamed them into revolutionaries, anti-Bolsheviks. But Sperber had, of course, forgotten much else in his various missions; the lapse here was not uncharacteristic; lapses had carried him through all of these expeditions, making matters even more difficult.
De Gaulle shrugs much as Sperber had shrugged just subjective instants ago in the extradimensional calculator. The Frenchman’s face shines with confusion, the same confusion, doubtless, that exists in Sperber’s own. “There is nothing I can do about this,” he says. “Or about anything else for that matter.”
Sperber knows then with sudden and sinking acuity that he has done all that is possible under these circumstances. There is nothing else that he can do. He has used the extradimensional calculator to detour to this crucial place, has warned the future leaders of consequence, has delivered the message as best as he can; now consequence—an extradimensional consequence, of course, one which has been imposed upon the situation rather than developed—will have to engage its own direction. It is a pity that he cannot bring documents, wave them in front of Pol Pot and de Gaulle, but the laws of paradox are implacable and no one may test them by bringing confirmation to the past. The speaker must make his point through fervor, through credibility. There is no supporting data.
Shiva and Other Stories Page 17