The Age of the Pussyfoot

by Pohl Frederik

  “Then wait awhile.” He was aware he didn’t know how long it had been going on—that a distant wind instrument was hooting faintly. Pleasant but strange. Spiced cool breezes blew from the paneled walls, also pleasant but strange.

  He said hesitantly, “Joymaker, answer me a question. Why did what’s-his-name, Heinzie, beat me up?”

  “I cannot identify the individual, Man Forrester. You were beaten up by four persons in the one recorded incident of attack. Their names were Shlomo Cassavetes, Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, Edwardino-”

  “That one. Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major. Or, for that matter, all of them—why did they rumble me?”

  “I have a priority message regarding Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, Man Forrester. Perhaps it will be informative. May I give it to you?”

  “Oh, hell. Why not?”

  “Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major is protesting enforcement of guaranties and has enjoined disbursements under his bond. You are notified, Man Forrester.”

  Forrester said hotly, ‘That’s what you call informative? Look, skip the damned messages and answer the question. What was that scene all about?”

  “You have asked three questions, Man Forrester. May I offer a synoptic reply?”

  “Please do, old friend.”

  “Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, a guest in the rep-rooms utilized by Alin Hara, conceived a grievance against you, cause unstated. He called into association Shlomo Cassavetes, Edwardino Wry, and Edwardeto Wry; they formed an ad hoc club and filed appropriate conformance in regard to bonds and guaranties. The intention was stated as murder, first phase, ad lib. The motivation was stated as grievance as to De Syrtis Major, practical joke as to the others. Conformances were recorded, and the subject—that is, yourself, Man Forrester—was notified. Does that answer your three questions, Man Forrester?”

  “What do you think?” Forrester snapped. “Well, maybe it does. Sort of. You mean those other three finks lumped me for a joke?”

  “They so stated, yes, Man Forrester.”

  “And they’re still running around loose?”

  “Do you wish me to ascertain their present whereabouts, Man Forrester?”

  “No—I mean, aren’t they in jail or something?”

  “No, Man Forrester.”

  Forrester said, “Joymaker, leave me alone for awhile. I better get back to my orientation book. I see I don’t know as much as I thought I did.”

  Forrester drank the rest of his tea, ate the rest of his cakes, and plowed back into his book.

  To use your joymaker as telephone: You must know the ortho-name and identification spectrum of the person you wish to reach. Once you have given this information to the joymaker it will be remembered, and you can then refer to the person in later calls by a reciprocal name or any other personal identification programmed into your joymaker. If you have been called by any person, the joymaker will have recorded the necessary ortho-name and identification spectrum. Simply ask the joymaker to call the person you wish to speak to. If you wish to establish a priority rating with any person, that person must so inform his joymaker. Otherwise your calls may be deferred or canceled as directed by the called person.

  To use your joymaker as credit card: You must know the institutional designation and account spectrum . . .

  A belated thought percolated to the surface of Forrester’s mind. Messages. Financial institutions. One of the messages had been from something that sounded like that.

  He sighed and looked around the room. Most of the tables were empty. But it was a large room, and there were perhaps fifty other people in it, all of them seated at tables in twos and threes and larger groups. Through some effect of the sound-conditioning, he could not hear their voices, only the distant hooting flute and a faint splashing from the giant fish in the reflecting pools.

  He wondered if any of these fifty people would mind if he got up and walked over to them.

  Touching the faintly sore spots on his shoulders and neck, he decided against trying it. But it gave him an idea, and he turned to the section of the book called MAKING FRIENDS.

  “I have an urgent notice of personal visit, Man Forrester,” grumbled the joymaker from his waist.

  “Just save it,” said Forrester, preoccupied. He was startled at the length of the list of ways of making friends. Above all, there were clubs. Clubs in such profusion that he wondered that even seventeen billion people could fill their rolls. Social clubs, gymnastic clubs, professional clubs. Political groups, religious groups, therapeutic groups. There was a Society of First Families of Mars, and a Loyal Order of Descendants of Barsoom Fans. There were forty-eight bird-watching groups in Shoggo alone. There were stamp collectors and coin collectors and tax-token collectors and jet-car-transfer collectors.

  There was something called the Society of Ancients that looked interesting, as it appeared to be an organization of persons like Forrester himself, revived from the dead heart of the freezers. Yet it was listed along with such curiosities as the B.P.O.E. and the Industrial Workers of the World (Memorial Association) in small type at the end of the section.

  Puzzling. If it existed at all, should it not have a membership in the billions?

  Evidently it did not, but . . .

  “Man Forrester,” shrilled the joymaker. “I must inform you of a personal visitation by—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Forrester, suddenly looking up, startled.

  There was a hint of perfume in the air.

  Forrester put down his book, frowning. The scent was familiar. What was it. Another tactile-tape message from Adne Bensen, whoever she might be?

  He felt a touch on his shoulder, then warm arms around him, a hug.

  These tactile tapes were certainly convincing, he thought momentarily, then realized this was not a tape. He was not merely feeling and smelling the presence of the embracing arms. He saw them, from the corner of his eye and, awkwardly, like a wrestler struggling to break a hold, he turned inside them.

  He saw the face of the girl from the party, very near to his.

  “Tip!” he cried. “My God, I’m glad to see you!”

  When you came right down to it, Forrester hardly knew the girl, barring a little friendly kissing at a party, but at this moment she was very dear to him. It was like a chance meeting in Taiwan with somebody who had sat at the far end of the same commuter train for years. Not a friend, hardly even an acquaintance; but promoted by the accident of unexpected meeting to the status of near and dear. Half rising from his seat, he hugged her tight. She laughed breathlessly and shook free. “Dear Charles,” she gasped, “not so hard.”

  “I’m sorry.” She sat down opposite him, and he sank back in his chair, admiring her dark hair and pale skin, her cheerful, pretty face, and her figure. The others in the tea room, some of whom had turned to look at them, were losing interest and returning to their own affairs. Forrester said, “It’s just that I’m so glad to see you, Tip.”

  She looked startled, then faintly reproving. “My name is Adne Bensen, dear Charles. Call me Adne.”

  “But last night Hara called you—oh!” he said, remembering. “Then you’re the girl who has been sending me the messages.”

  She nodded.

  “Very nice messages they were,” he said. “Would you like some tea?”

  She said, “Oh, I think not. I mean, not here, anyway. I came to see if you’d like to come to my place for dinner.”

  “Yes!”

  She laughed. “You are such an impetuous man, Charles. Is that why they call you the kamikaze people? I mean, your century and all.”

  “As to that, Adne, I don’t know,” he said. “Because, when you come right down to it, I don’t know who calls me what. I am, you might say, confused. One of the many reasons why I am pleased to see you is that I need somebody to talk to.”

  She leaned back in her chair, smiling, and said she would take some tea, after all. It came without being asked for; apparently the joymaker had monitored t
heir conversation and drawn the inferences any good waiter would draw. She threw back her filmy, puffy wrap—it had floated around her shoulders like a cloud, but now it lay back against the chair quite inconspicuously, Forrester noticed—to reveal a deep-cut, tight-fitting, flesh-colored vest or jerkin of some sort, which was startling at first glance.

  At the second, it was still startling.

  She said, “Dear Charles. Don’t you ask your joymaker things?”

  “I would, except I don’t know what to ask.”

  “Oh, anything! What do you want? Have you filed an interests profile?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, do! Then it will tell you what programs are on, what parties you will be welcomed at, who you would wish to know. It’s terrible to go on impulse, Charles,” she said earnestly. “Let the joymaker help you.’’

  He discovered that his own teacup had been replenished and he took a sip. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You mean I should let the joymaker decide what I’m going to do for fun?”

  “Of course. There’s so much. How could you know what you would like?”

  He shook his head. . . .

  But that was all of that conversation, all for then. His joymaker said suddenly, its voice curiously tinny, “Priority urgent! This is a drill! Take cover! Take cover! Take cover!”

  “Oh, dear,” said Adne, pouting. “Well, let’s go.”

  “Take cover!” blared the joymaker again, and Forrester discovered the reason for its metallic sound. Not only his but the girl’s, those of patrons at other tables, all the joymakers at once were repeating the same message. “Take cover! Countdown starts now! One hundred seconds. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.”

  “Where are you going?” Forrester asked, rising with her.

  “To the shelter, of course! Hurry it up, Charles, will you? I hate it when I’m out in a public place in one of these things.”

  “. . . Ninety-one. Ninety. Eighty-nine. . . .”

  He asked, swallowing hard. “Air raid? A war?”

  She held his hand and was tugging him along toward an exit at the rear of the tea room, through which the other patrons were already beginning to stream out. “Not exactly, Charles dear. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Then what?”

  “Aliens. Monsters. That’s all. Now, hurry, or we’ll never get a seat.”

  Five

  A walk, an elevator ride, a short stretch through a light-walled corridor, and they came out into a great shadowy auditorium. There was just enough light to find their way to seats. It was filling rapidly, and behind them Forrester heard heavy doors slamming.

  When about three quarters of the seats were filled, a man in black climbed onto the stage and said, “Thank you all for your cooperation. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that this building has achieved four-nines compliance in exactly one hundred and forty-one seconds.”

  There was a stir of interest from the audience. Forrester craned his neck to find the source of the PA system—it seemed to murmur from all over the hall—and located it at last as the man spoke again. It was his joymaker, and all the joymakers, repeating what the man said.

  “This is one of the best showings we’ve ever had,” he said warmly, “and I appreciate it. You may leave.”

  “You mean that’s all there is to it?” Forrester asked the girl.

  “That’s all. Are you coming up to my place?”

  “But,” he went on, “if there’s going to be a raid, or any chance of one, shouldn’t we wait and see—”

  “See what, Charles dear? There’s no need to grovel in the ground like moles. It’s just a test.”

  “Yes, but—” He hesitated, and then followed her out of the auditorium thoughtfully.

  It was confusing. No one had mentioned war to him.

  But when he said as much to Adne, she laughed. “War? Oh, Charles! You’re so funny, you kamikazes! Now, we’ve wasted enough time—are you coming to my place for dinner or not?”

  He sighed.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. As brightly as he could.

  In the life that had begun with his birth in 1932 and ended with the inhalation of a lungful of flame thirty-seven years later, Forrester had been a successful, self-sufficient, and substantial man.

  He had had a wife—her name was Dorothy—small, blonde, a little younger than himself. He had had three sons, and a job as copy chief of a technical writing service, and a reputation among his friends as a fine poker player and useful companion.

  Although he had missed combat participation in a war, he had been a Boy Scout during World War Two, participating in scrap-metal drives and Slap the Jap waste-fat collections. As a young adult he had lived through the H-bomb hysteria of the early fifties, when every city street blossomed out with signs directing the nearest way to a bomb shelter. He had seen enough movies and television shows to know what air raid drills meant.

  He was not very satisfied with the one he had just seen. He tried to phrase his dissatisfaction to Adne as she changed clothes behind a screen, but she was not very interested. Drills were an annoyance to her, it was clear, but not a very serious one.

  She came out from behind the screen, wearing something filmy and pale and not at all practical for cooking dinner. On the other hand, Forrester thought, who knew how these people cooked their dinners? She rustled over to him, lifted his hand, kissed his fingers, and sat down beside him, pulling her joymaker from the place by the arm of the chair where she had left it. “Excuse me, Charles dear,” she said; and, to the joymaker, “Receiving messages.”

  Forrester could not hear what the joymaker said to her, because she was holding it close to her ear and had evidently somehow turned the volume down—which he resolved to learn how to do. But he heard what she said to it, although the words were mostly incomprehensible. “Cancel. Hold Three. Commissary four, two as programmed, two A-varied.” And, “That takes care of that,” she said to him. “Would you like a drink?”

  “All right.” She lifted glasses out of the well of the— Forrester would have called it a cocktail table, and perhaps it was. He noticed her eyes were on a stack of parcels on a low table across the room. “Excuse me,” she said, pouring a glass of minty liquid for him and one for herself. “I just have to look at these things.” She took a small sip of her drink, rose, walked over to the table.

  Forrester decided he liked his drink, which was not sweet and made his nose tingle. He stood up and crossed over to her. “Been shopping?” he asked. Adne was taking out clothes, small packets that might have been cosmetics, some things like appliances.

  “Oh, no, Charles dear. It’s my job.” She was preoccupied with a soft, billowy green thing, stroking it against her cheek thoughtfully. With a twist of her arms she threw it around her shoulders and it became a sort of Elizabethan ruff. “Like it, dear?”

  “Sure. I mean, I guess I do.”

  “It’s soft. Feel.” She drew it over his face. It felt like fur, although its points thrust out again the moment they left his skin, looking starched and thorny. “Or this,” she said, taking it off and replacing it with something that had looked like oiled silk in the box it came in, but which, on her shoulders, disappeared entirely, except that it gave luster and color to her skin. “Or—”

  “They’re all beautiful,” he said. “What do you mean, it’s your job?”

  “I’m a reacter,” she said proudly. “Weighted at nearly fifty million, with two-nines reliability.”

  “Which means?”

  “Oh, you know. If I like a thing, chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that the others will, too.”

  “Fifty million others?”

  She nodded, flushed and pleased.

  “And this is how you make your living?”

  “It’s how I get rich,” she corrected him. “Say!” She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wonder. Do you have any idea how many others like you have come out of the dormers? Maybe you could get a job doing the same thing. I could ask
—”

  He patted her hand indulgently, amused. “No, thanks,” he said, careful not to mention the fact that he was rich—although, he remembered dimly, he had been far less reticent about it at the party the night before. Well, he had made a lot of mistakes at that party—as witness his troubles with the Martian.

  “I never asked,” said Adne, putting the things away. “How did you die, Charles?”

  “Why,” he said, sitting down again and waiting for her to join him, “I died in a fire. As a matter of fact, I understand I was a hero.”

  “Really!” She was impressed.

  “I was a volunteer fireman, you know, and there was an apartment fire one night—it was January, very cold, if you stood in the puddles of water you’d freeze to the ground in two minutes—and there was a child in the upper part of the building. And I was the nearest one to the ladder.”

  He sipped his drink, admiring its milky golden color. “I forgot my Air-Pak,” he admitted. “The smoke got me. Or the combination did—smoke and heat. And maybe booze, because I’d just come from a party. Hara said I must have inhaled pure flame, because my lungs were burned. My face must have been, too, of course. I mean, you wouldn’t know, but I don’t think I look quite the same as I used to. A little leaner now, and maybe a little younger. And I don’t think my eyes were quite as bright blue.”

  She giggled. “Hara can’t help editing. Most people don’t mind a few improvements.”

  Dinner arrived as his breakfast had that morning, through a serving door in the wall. Adne excused herself for a moment while the table was setting itself up.

  She was gone more than a moment and came back looking amused. “That’s that,” she said without explaining. “Let’s eat.”

  Forrester was able to identify few if any of the foods served him. The textures were sort of Oriental, with crisp things like water chestnuts and gummy things like sukiyaki lending variety to the crunch of lettuce and the plasticity of starches. The flavors were queer but palatable. While they ate he told her about himself—his life as a tech writer, his children, the manner of his death.