by Carol
"Will you stop following me around?” Tamara said to Spot. “Just tell me where the bus depot is. That’s all I want from you. If you don’t leave me alone, 111 call a bobby.”
Billy bumped the rail once too often. The meathook had been driving inward through his ribs with each movement, but now it slipped the other way, back and up, and after removing a few inches of his back, it left him altogether and he dropped on his feet. He began to waltz, airily and gracefully. At the same time his hands probed space until they found Buck, gripped, sought to take the fireman in his arms for one last dance. Buck repeated the last conscious movement of his life, took the burning beam in his two hands, lifted it from his shoulder where it had fallen and heaved it away. Billy stumbled backward but instead of falling he raised into the air and sailed toward the ceiling. He bumped it hard and descended to the floor. Again he danced and this time his probing hands found Miss Sonia.
“Oh, God, no,” she said. Her arms slipped around his neck and she kissed him. Together they waltzed and kissed.
Tamara: “Mother, I don’t care whether you like it or not, I don’t care if the world hates the idea of a female football player. What the hell am I supposed to do, sit around and wait for some boy to ask me to the prom? You know damned well nobody’s going to do that. It’s your fault. Why did you make me look like dad? He’s ugly and so am I. Notice how my legs bow the same way his do? Hell, I’m even hairy like him. I’m not crying. I haven’t since I was twelve. I’m simply going to find something interesting to do with my life.”
Huston slept badly, forgot to dream, worked too hard, absorbed himself in unreality.
Spot barked, urinated on Buck’s leg, Buck paced back and forth, Billy waltzed with Miss Sonia, Tamara stopped a pedestrian and asked him the way to the egress, Spot raised his leg and sprayed a fireplug, Buck walked through the burning building and listened while the flesh of his left thigh made sounds like bacon in a frying pan, Billy tried out his artificial legs for the first time by doing a slow waltz around the living room with his wife in his arms, Miss Sonia gave herself over to sensation because that was all there was in her life, just as it was all there was in anyone’s life when they happened to be a dimwit who couldn’t think their way out of a cloakroom without a machine in their brain to do most of the work. Huston slept badly, forgot to dream, worked too hard and absorbed himself in unreality. He had power over death and power always meant life.
Tamara: “If you really want to know what I think about women’s lib, well, it’s okay for women who can get a little action. Sure. Why not? It’s like eating. You have to, but you prefer to pick and choose. Me? I just want a guy. What’s wrong with that? Listen, when I was in my teens and twenties I nearly died. The sex urge is the most important thing in the world then. I mean, it really pushes you. So what did I do? I loned it while my friends took their fellows whenever they pleased. Don’t tell me this is an equal world. Youth, looks and money are what count and people who don’t have them are at the poverty level.”
Miss Sonia: “What do you know about suffering? I was bom a pretty dummy. Not only that, my pancreas and pituitary were defective. They put that dingus in my dingus so I could enjoy life. They gave me hell.”
Tamara: “Did you ever have a guy flinch when you touched him? Don’t tell me your troubles, tramp.”
The machines were God, for a little while. No, the manipulator was God. So many motors to be sparked and guided, so much power over life, a wire here, a button there—walk, little puppet, talk like a man, show me what I think you would have said, behave for me, dance, prance. I’m doing it. No, they’re doing it. So tired, eyes sore, mouth dry, can’t think straight, if only I could sleep.
Buck laid a red and black and blistered hand on Tamara’s shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
He touched a finger to her cheek.
“Please, don’t,” she said softly.
He kept stroking her.
“You’re supposed to go away now,” she said. “It happens that way every time. Look at me. Do you know what you’re doing?”
He stood very close to her.
“But I’m ugly. I’m so damned ugly. I’m built like a meatball, my hair is stringy and I’ve never been able to make it look right. I’ll bet I’ve used every kind of shampoo there is. Why are you looking at me that way? Are you blind? See my face? Tell me about my mustache. At fourteen I grew a mustache, at sixteen my shoulders were broader than my dad’s. I look like him, except I’m uglier.”
Buck leaned down, kissed the pouting lips.
“You make me sick,” she said, as he straightened up. “I don’t want your pity. That’s all this is. I once knew a boy like you. He wanted my bicycle so he pretended to care for me. Then one day I kissed him. Do you know what he did? He hit me. And he screamed at me. And he ran away. I parked the bike in front of his house and I left a note on it that said, I love you.’ ”
“Look, just fifty cents,” said Miss Sonia to Billy. “You can spare that much.”
Billy shook his head.
“What are you, some kind of frigid man? Maybe you don’t like girls? Maybe you’re dead broke? Then I’ll give you fifty cents, okay? Come on over here to the couch. I’ll turn the lights down low and put on some music.”
Huston found a fifth of bourbon in a desk drawer.
A third of it was gone before he fell asleep in his chair. He needed the rest. He woke up with a stiff neck.
“Stop it,” he said to Billy and Miss Sonia. “Stop it,” he said to Tamara and Buck.
They kept it up, kept it up, and soon he began to scream at them. He hadn’t meant to go this far. But he wasn’t really doing it to them. They were doing it to him.
All the bourbon was gone, He would have to find another bottle somewhere. He might even go outside to a store. He hadn’t been out once, not once.
“No more of that sex junk,” he said. They sat around him, quietly, attentively, demurely, innocently, intelligently.
“Tamara, why did you do what you did?”
“Buck asked me. Nobody ever asked me. Don’t you understand?”
“Yes, but it mustn’t happen again.”
“We’ll see.”
“Miss Sonia, you’re not to do anything like that with Billy again.”
“Sure. I didn’t enjoy it anyway. Billy’s an old man. Which gives me an idea. You’re a nice looking young—”
“Don’t ever, ever, ever say—”
“I’ll give you fifty cents.”
He stumbled away to hunt for another bottle.
The next day, he had them again sit around him in a circle. “I’m going to kill you,” he said. “That’s why we’re in this laboratory. My job is to turn you off and once I do that you’ll be dead and your miserable problems will die with you.”
He smiled at Buck. “You look like a big slab of scorched hamburger. How can you sit there as if you deserved a place in the world? For God’s sake, hide your hideousness. Looking at you makes me want to vomit.”
Buck staggered away to a closet, concealed himself in it.
“And you, Billy Ford,” said Huston. “A human name for Frankenstein. All you are is head, thorax and can. They should have let you die. You’re an abomination. When I think of how you had the gall to pretend to be a normal man. No arms, no legs, just a can with a lid. You lived with your wife, ate with her, slept with her, slept with her!”
Billy floated away and quietly beat his head against a wall.
“Don’t hide your face, Tamara,” said Huston. “Ugly little Tamara. Or I should say, ugly big Tamara. Do you know that a man wants his women to look like women? We don’t want muscles and mustaches, cant abide the damned things.” As Tamara hid her face and sobbed, Huston turned to the next member of the group.
“And last and definitely least, here sits Miss Sonia, the walking dingus—”
“Which you can enjoy for fifty cents right this minute.”
He leaped to his feet, face livid,
body rigid. Foam from his mouth sprayed the air. “Don’t speak to me like that! Bitch! I’ll kill you!”
He forgot about dividing lines, reality, sanity.
“Play your damned cards and stop watching the girls,” he said to Buck. They played poker in the living room of his quarters.
“Stop flirting!” he roared at Miss Sonia. She kibitzed nearby.
“Go neck with Billy,” he said to Tamara. “And get your feet off my stereo.” To Miss Sonia, he said, “Go wash your face in the bathroom.” He said to Buck, “I don’t want to catch you smoking my cigars.” Or, “Tamara, why don’t you give up being a tourist and settle down with one of these fellows? Either one of them will have you. Spot, quit wetting on the furniture.”
They made a mess of his apartment so he herded them back into the lab. “You’re not fit to live in a decent place,” he said to them.
With a yawn, Billy grabbed Miss Sonia by the arm. “What say we relax on the couch, kiddo?”
“Get your lousy hands off my property,” said Huston.
Too much of the company building was made of plastic. A shortcircuit in a dehumidifier on the fifth floor caused some sparks and a plastic cup dispenser caught fire. A wall thermometer caught fire. Curtains took the flames and tossed them to plastic light fixtures. The fire became a conflagration that rapidly spread.
Huston smelled smoke. He couldn’t get the lab door open. It had been locked from the inside to prevent Miss Sonia from going outside to solicit. He couldn’t find the key.
The last thing he remembered was holding onto the back of a straight chair to keep from falling. The room became dim with smoke. His chest hurt. He coughed, fell across the back of the chair, remained draped in that position.
A long while later, an ax smashed against the door and splintered it. A few more blows made an opening big enough for five men in heavy suits to follow one another inside. They were in a hurry.
Unnoticed through the smoke, Buck walked out of the room and down the hall to pause beside a burning door. His motors momentarily faltered and he sat on the floor, laid his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands.
The firemen exchanged ideas through the walkie-talkies built into their helmets.
“This guy looks pretty far gone,” said one. He lifted 7 43
Billy onto his shoulder. I'm taking him out to the ambulance.”
“I can’t help myself!” cried Miss Sonia. She stood in the middle of the room, dazed-looking and disheveled.
A fireman took her by the arms. ‘I'm taking this one,” he yelled to the others, and hauling Miss Sonia across his shoulder, he took her away.
Tamara sat in a chair and said, over and over again, “Please, please, please—” She kept saying it as a fireman picked her up and hurried toward the broken door. Behind them walked a little barking dog. Spot followed them onto a ramp outside a window, descended to the ground with them, wandered across a yard to a driveway, paused beside a lamppost and raised his leg. A boy who had come to watch the fire heard the barking, scooped Spot up and took him home.
Inside the lab, the last two firemen came across Huston.
“The ceiling is getting hot! Let’s get out of here.” “What about this guy?”
Huston looked so odd, lying across the back of the chair, so unnatural, and they knew there were experimental corpses in the building. Still...
“Let’s take a minute to check him out.”
They lifted him and placed him on his back on the floor. They could tell right away when a man was dead, but how did they do it the other way—tell if somebody was alive?
“His heart is beating.”
“Don’t be stupid!”
“Oh, yeah, everyone’s heart beats.”
“Is he breathing?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, never mind that, either. All lungs work automatically.”
“Right.”
“Let’s get out of here. He’s one of those corpses.”
“How can we be sure.”
“Because he looks like one! Wait a minute, there’s somebody.”
They had discovered Buck, gently sizzling in the oven of the doorframe.
“Let’s get him out of here! Leave the other one, he’s done for.”
And so Huston was—permanently. By morning salvagers sifting through the hot coals of the lab could not distinguish his ashes from those of the walls or carpets; but Buck and Sonia, Tamara and Billy and even Spot, they kept on.
Error Hurled
by Babette Rosmond
Babette Rosmond, under another name, is one of the most famous and successful of magazine editors. Under still another name she is the wife of a well-known attorney. As Rosamond Campion she is best known for her nonfiction book, The Invisible Worm, a sensitively written and explosively iconoclastic account of her own ordeal by surgery.
NOTE: The sections of this book about Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle are based on her own journals and are historically accurate; however, the presumptuous surmise made here about the sex life of Thomas and Jane Carlyle was first suggested and then published by Frank Harris. It is likely—at least in this particular instance—that he was telling the truth.
The unexplained, seemingly extraterrestrial events noted here did occur. They were documented first by Charles Fort, an American science-sceptic (1874-1932) who had a large following: among the members of the Fortean Society were Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, Clarence Darrow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Havelock Ellis and Lincoln Steffens. Their basic philosophy was that we know very little about the universe and it is reasonable to suspect that we are wrong about the little we do know.
“Let me have one more chance " urged Dix. “I will concentrate. I will try very hard "
“All right " said the Teacher. “One more chance "
For a while things improved. Then, although the Teacher did not mention it, the project once more began to show lack of care and attention. The creatures fought and starved and the rivers and seas grew foul and the small spark that Dix, hardly a firstrate intelligence, had been able to instill in some of the creatures began to flicker out.
Dix grew so innattentive that his small brother worried. Little Brother was not yet ready for school, but he had watched Dix caring for his pets, watering them, heating them, cooling them; he had also watched with interest the way Dix made new creatures from less new ones. His spirit was kind as he determined to help his brother, for it would be a disgrace if Dix failed in his project. Dix was clearly at the mercy of his own tiny attention-span. Too many times he became bored, as all children do, with his pets. Little Brother decided to help. He knew the way to put the creatures together, and there were many pretty designs and textures in Dix's equipment box. Little Brother began to build two glorious persons who would impress Dix's Teacher with their beauty and intelligence and spirit and of course their “love," the word that was so often picked up on Dix's receiver. Little Brother was in stage Pi, but he was small for his age and not as gifted as many of the other children.
Part I
It was easier not to think much at all. People were usually kind, but John guessed that this was so because he was so pretty and so clever and so rich. Sometimes he heard the same people who were so nice to him being very rude to each other as well as to uglier, poorer people. He was about thirty years old.
He was six feet four inches tall, with golden hair and blue eyes and long eyelashes; his body was strong and lean and of a shade somewhat bronzer than his hair.
He did not remember his parents, only that they were dead and that he had a great deal of money and was now the president of a large American chain of retail stores. He was an unusually beautiful creature and a highly respected one, but he had necessarily the intellectual capacities of a child of six, which would have been the earth-age of his creator. It did not make much difference. It was easy to run a huge industrial complex and to control the destinies of thousands of workers; certainly there had been very little ti
me for mischief or evil to descend upon him, and at the age of six there is a boundless amount of energy available providing one gets the sleep to balance it.
That was one reason why it had become so chic in America to copy the continental custom of after-lunch siestas. He had started it, simply by falling asleep in his huge leather chair after lunch; his directors had picked it up, and then their associates, and some newspaper columnists had got hold of it. Suddenly everyone who followed trends was napping after lunch. In the same way, his straightforward opinions of art, books, plays, music and particularly matters of business were widely quoted. “No” and “Yes” took on many shades of meaning. One metropolitan magazine ran a black-bordered box each month containing his current opinions of what was going on in the city, and people read them, exclaimed over them and copied them. “If we didn't know that John Sun had a perpetual tongue in that damask cheek, he would seem somewhat like the truth-spouting child in ‘The Emperors New Clothes!” wrote an interviewer in The New York Times, after John had said, “That is rubbish,” about a new book by a popular novelist. (He really thought most novelists, playwrights, TV writers and critics were the same person; he didn’t care for the person.)
He lived in a penthouse in a big apartment building. There was a huge garden, tended by two men who at his request put in daisies and buttercups and primroses, and his garden was written up in Vogue and Fortune. There were also some odd flowers no one had ever seen. These seeds had been in a little box that had been there the first morning he woke up, along with some memories, scattered and inchoate. The closest he came to knowing anything true about himself was when he heard something on a news broadcast about Brigitte Bardot. “Suis b£b6,” he had whispered. That was all.