Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

  He was sometimes rather awkward and often completely graceful, as a child is graceful. He would move swiftly and surely through a room and then trip over a wastebasket, catching his foot inside it as he tried to go through a door. Sometimes when he did things like that he wanted to cry. Controlling tears was one of the most difficult things he had to do. So many small sadnesses, so many frustrations. Yet, because of his beauty and charm, and most of all because of his wealth and position, no one was really ever unkind to him.

  His office was on the thirty-eighth floor of a glass and steel building. When he got off the elevator there was a long, mirrored wall and a woman sitting at a desk, who said, “Good morning, Mr. Sim,” and he always sang back, “Good morning,” which the receptionist appreciated very much and told her co-workers that you didn’t find many executives who took the time to be personal with people.

  His office was furnished with chairs and carpets and pictures, but there were no bookshelves or books. This was considered one of his eccentricities. When Forbes Magazine wrote him up they said, ‘It’s all there in his head; he won’t rely on what somebody else has written.” There was a refrigerator in the office, concealed behind a row of statues. It contained milk and butter and soft drinks. He did not drink alcohol and he did not smoke; his directors and officers passed down the word: no one connected with the Sun Stores drank or smoked in public, which is to say, with each other, for each man had the well-based conviction that his long-time associate would be all too ready to report the matter.

  He didn’t care much for conferences because they went on too long. He tried to shorten them as much as possible, which strengthened the image of a fine-honed, waste-cutting mentality. The conference room was big and bare, with a long table and eleven chairs—there had to be an odd number, he’d been told, because otherwise there could be six on one side and six on the other if they voted. Today they were going to talk about a stock split. It was one of the phrases he learned to accept-and-ignore.

  The treasurer was a gray-haired stout man in his forties named Augustus Wanger. He mistrusted everyone, particularly John Sun, because he felt more at home with people who spoke interminably and who were full of malice.

  When the meeting was brought to order, Wanger said, “Now I think you all know what the plan is ... we want to split the stock three for one.” Wanger was also a director, and he held stock options.

  “Three and one make four,” said John suddenly, coming out of a daydream of being on a boat on a river with laughing people.

  Wanger couldn’t help uttering a grudging little “hmph.” Goddamn it, the man had a way of being sarcastic, of ridiculing the average stockholder. How did the little guy with ten shares have any idea that a three-for-one split didn’t mean three extra shares? Three for one meant, of course, two extra shares for each one held at present; instead of one share the stockholder will have three.

  “Good point,” he said. “John, you see through things.”

  “Yes,” said John, trying to return to the river.

  “Why split at all?” asked the merchandise manager. “What’s in it for us?”

  Wanger pointed a finger at him. Wanger always pointed a finger at anybody he was talking to, until one day when John had pushed Wanger’s finger aside. Wanger got the message. John was the boss; Wanger wasn’t to treat him like an underling. But it was safe enough to stick out his index finger at the merchandise manager who lived in Garden City and had a fat, shrill wife.

  “For the same reason,” Wanger said, jabbing the finger hard, “that we did it ten years ago. We have that many more shares held by the public, wider distribution of shares at that price—and—* winking at John, who stared for a second and then carefully winked back-less earnings per share when we talk with union leaders!”

  The evening before John had seen a western on television, and a man with a beard had said, “In union there is str—” Str— something. What?

  “In union there is strength,” John said now, clearly.

  Wanger grinned. “You bet. That’s their thing. They’re damned strong.”

  “Union,” said John.

  “Sure,” said Wanger. “We have to keep fighting them so much I’m afraid we’ll have to close our warehouse in the city. If they struck that we couldn’t move a thing to the stores.”

  “But they’re strong,” said John, with an image of strong men moving large toys to stores, and chairs and tables and beds and things.

  “That’s the point,” said Wanger.

  They all voted to split the stock.

  “What about increasing the dividend?” asked another director.

  “That sounds good,” said John, “but what does that really mean?”

  “It means we*re increasing the dividend by twenty-five cents ” said Wanger.

  “That's a lot of money,” said John.

  The ten men at his right and left nodded and felt refreshed. Most of them, dining these meetings, always wanted to be someplace else, but there was no getting away from the fact that Sim always put his finger right on the heart of the matter. Twenty-five cents was a lot of money for a dividend increase.

  Whenever there was a meeting at which this kind of increase was approved, no one was allowed to leave the room until the secretary of the company telephoned the New York Stock Exchange, so no one could be accused of rushing out to buy new shares under the new plan.

  John had once been gravely curious about why no one was allowed to leave the room (suppose they had to go to the bathroom?) and had been told that stocks often tend to increase in price because of such action.

  “Why do stocks increase in price?” John had asked. They had all laughed, convinced that this was another example of making each director search his own dreary middleaged soul to determine what he had done to make the stock go up.

  “Avoid taking advantage of inside information” John said now, and the others nodded. That was the nub of the matter.

  His financial acumen had also been widely appreciated by the various social clubs to which he belonged. When one of the oldest and most respectable in the city had a problem about whether or not they should admit several wealthy South American families, John had said to the club president, “Well, they pay, don't they?” and the president went around quoting that epigram to everyone he talked to, not a long list.

  At the office, the secretaries had been amused by John’s signature. His personal secretary, Miss Stanch, said, “You can always tell how smart a man is by his signature. Like doctors. You cant read their hand-writing."

  John’s signature was this: and was generally admired and imitated by lesser lights of the corporation who wrote too clearly.

  John did not know of these opinions. He really could write only simple block letters. When a well-known writer met him once at a party, where John was carrying the well-known glass of milk that had become a trademark, the writer had cornered him. The writer was losing his hair but had had it teased and dressed into a horizontal thicket. His name was Taylor and he was rather fat and ugly and his mind, usually dominated by visions of himself in glory, was occupied with envious admiration of John’s youth and beauty.

  “What do you think of contemporary writing,” asked Taylor. “For example, do you know my stuff?”

  John thought a minute, took a sip of milk and nodded. He knew Taylor’s writing because he had just seen Taylor write a note on the back of an envelope. Taylor had written it in a hasty, illegible scribble.

  “I know about your writing,” said John, in his deep, pleasant, serious voice. Taylor snapped to attention. The words “your writing” to him were like “Ten-shim!” to an army private. Taylor put his fat head to one side and tried to look patient.

  “The thing is,” said John, “it’s not good.”

  Taylor couldn’t believe his ears. “Not good,” he mumbled.

  John smiled his sweet smile. “Because nobody can understand it,” he said.

  Taylor had had just enough to drink to put him i
n a blurry state of almost-contentment, but this got to him. Nobody can understand it. God, that’s exactly what the book editor of a New York paper had said the year before, and that’s what a professor of English literature had told him during a pot party a few weeks ago ,.. Taylor, you’re overdoing the mythic-obfuscation-shtick. You’re writing yourself into a corner. Nobody is going to be able to understand you if you don’t watch out...

  Taylor had been accused of being homosexual, bisexual, ambisexual, antesexual, antisexual and post-sexual. At the moment all he knew was that he cared very much about what this gorgeous creature had to say.

  “Do you understand my writing,” he mumbled, looking up at John’s golden head.

  “No,” said John. “I don’t. Make it plainer.”

  When Taylor got home that night he punched his wife and tore up 30 pages of manuscript that had been lying on the typewriter table. It was late, but he turned on all the lights and stuck a new piece of paper into the machine. He began to type: “It was a pleasant day. The sun was shining. The children were ...” And there came over him a newfound sense of peace and fulfillment.

  There was another writer who was influenced by John Sun. She was a brisk, tall woman named Alice Bloover who was in charge of Public Relations at the Sun Stores New York office.

  Until fairly recently, Alice would have sworn that her job was difficult, that she had to put up with a lot of nonsense, and that she was sick of writing speeches that high-salaried men couldn’t pronounce properly. Then her work seemed to become easier. Any information she needed about the stores, the merchandise or the personnel seemed to be close at hand. Part of her job was writing newsy items for the Sun Stores In-the-Sun Journal; these began to seem readymade as she approached her typewriter, particularly items about John Sun. No one, if interrogated by Communists or government agencies, could have said exactly when it was that John Sun became chairman of the board and president.

  She decided to get a new line on John, apart from his tremendous beauty, charm, brilliance and integrity (none of which sold hard-or-soft goods), and she asked him after the directors’ meeting what it was he liked to do best.

  “Sing,” said John.

  “Do you like to sing? Did you ever take voice lessons? Are you tenor? Baritone? Bass? Do you sing at—?”

  “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, to brighten up the day,” sang John suddenly in a clear, surprisingly high sweet voice, a choirboy’s voice.

  “Well, that has a nice lilt to it,” said Alice Bloover, frowning. She didn’t want to get into any religious stuff.

  “I like that song,” said John. By three in the afternoon word got around. Several VP’s bought pitchpipes and it was decided informally to conduct simple services each morning. Start the day with a double-meaning hymn! Then, in an hour, there would be the usual milk and cookie break.

  At noon John lunched with his directors, or his buyers, or sometimes a merchandise man. They always went to the same restaurant, the dining room of a big, unfriendly hotel with call girls tapping their clog-shod feet against the plastic lobby floor. John learned that his colleagues were very fond of bouillon. They would wink at the waitress, and the soup would be brought in the thick cup with handles on each side. At first the men would use their spoons to sip it, and then they would lift the cup by both handles and drink it down. Sometimes they had two or three cups of soup. John was glad to see how talkative it made them, because they stopped looking at him all the time after the soup. He hated to be stared at, but it didn’t make him cry.

  “Hello, there, Sunbeam,” said the elderly waitress with sprayed, teased, ecru cotton-candy for hair. “No soup for you today?”

  John liked juice, and had two or three glasses of orange or tomato to keep his friends company.

  “You ought to try some soup some time,” said the waitress, giggling at Mr. Wanger. Mr Wanger waggled his pointing finger at her. “Now, now,” he said. “Soup isn’t good for everybody.”

  John smiled. He had just recalled something else heard on the television. “Problem drinkers are dead?” He put it as a question because he wasn’t sure that was exactly the way he’d heard it. It seemed to be a good thing to say because of the way he said it; everybody put down his soup.

  “What do you mean, John,” asked the merchandise manager, frowning.

  “Problem drinkers are a problem,” said John.

  Later that afternoon the directors and officers got together while John was on siesta-time and decided to lay off the soup for a bit.

  It wasn’t only Miss Bloover whose job had become easier. Everyone in the company was aware, or, probably, dimly conscious of John having been placed there, but not of the actual means of his arrival. It was taken for granted that he was the son of the founder; no one had any reason to question this. There was an all-over sense of improvement at the store offices. John seemed to have made very successful speeches, so fine that the President of the United States had sent him a citation naming John as America’s ideal businessman because of his simplicity. The President indicated that John was very much after his own heart—stating the facts clearly and virtually unblurred.

  John’s office communications were necessarily dictated (he loved to dictate, and the girls loved to take down his sweet statements) in the way that other everyday routine matters adjusted well to his limited capacities. He knew how to ride in taxicabs but was a little put off by the final exchange of money—like most rich men he carried very little cash and preferred to walk, even for six or seven miles. His financial economies became legendary (here again no one could say precisely when it all began); he loved to turn out lights. Interviewers put this down as a welcome return to traditional American values—the prudence of Benjamin Franklin, the ingenuity of Jefferson, but it was really because John enjoyed moving the switches.

  Martin Branch, a vice president of the Sun Corporation, was the only person who was not immediately totally programmed into John's regime. To call Branch a visionary would be like calling Jack the Ripper a surgeon, but he was perhaps more in tune with his own unconscious mind than the others. He knew that lately he had been having dreams, and he knew that the dreams were disturbing. One morning at about three o'clock he turned on his bedside lamp and scribbled some notes. During his REM sleep he had become aware that something quite extraordinary was happening to him and to the entire company. He determined to ask questions the following morning, to find out what happened to a nonexistent person once called J. C. Young who was—yes, he was—the president of the company not so long ago.

  Mrs. Branch, a grimly pretty woman who still referred to individuals of her sex as “gal,” had been bothering Martin for a long time (or what seemed to her re-formed memory a long time) to invite John to the Branches' lovely home in Larchhaven, a word not a phrase. The Branches had three children: nine years old, seven years old and three years old. John seldom went out unless people in the company asked him, and Branch said he would take John to his lovely-home in Larchhaven in his automobile, which gave John no reason to refuse.

  Martin Branch kept his eyes on John. Handsome sonofabitch, yes, but now... why... r

  The Branch children (it seemed extremely silly to John that they were called The Twigs by their mother) took to John at once. Most of his conversation was with them.

  “Honey, don’t make him talk shop today,” Mrs. Branch had urged her husband. “Let him see what a wonderful relationship we all have together, and as contributing members of a family unit.”

  After lunch, which was hot dogs roasted on an outdoor grill, the children surrounded John.

  “Are you going to smoke?” asked Sara, the middle child.

  “No,” said John. “I don’t like to smoke.”

  “How do you know?” asked Janet, the older girl. Have you ever tried?” She glanced around to make sure her parents were safely bickering over the dessert. “We have. We had a lot of cigarettes. They taste like much.”

  “They taste like the sidewalk,” said Brett, the
little boy. He was violently attracted to John and was now sitting on his lap, stroking his face and rubbing noses.

  “The only cigarettes I like are the chocolate ones,” said John. “They’re quite good. It’s hard to get the paper off sometimes.”

  “I ate the paper once,” said Brett.

  “You did not,” said both his sisters. Sara added, “You’re not only a baby, you’re a big liar.”

  “I once smoked a chocolate cigar,” said Brett. “That was nice. Did you ever have one of those?”

  “No. Real cigars smell,” said John.

  “They smell like duty,” said Brett. Then he and John sat quietly for a while, staring into the fine blue afternoon air.

  “Mommy was sick last week,” said Janet. “We took care of her. We made her breakfast. We were good to her.”

  “Not that I like sick people,” said Sara. “They get boring.”

  “I was never sick,” said John, trying to remember if he had only heard the word or whether he had ever had anything to do with it.

  '“That's a lie,” said Sara. "All children get sick. I had mumps and my face was like this.” She showed him. John laughed.

  "No, look at me,” yelled Brett. "Mine was like this!” He puffed out his pink cheeks until John stuck his finger into one of them. They both laughed out loud.

  Martin Branch was watching all this from behind the barbeque grill. His first thought was that John seemed extraordinarily fond of children; then he realized that John was very much like his own children. In fact...

  At this moment, fortunately for the project, Little Brother was paying attention. He disposed of the entire day and removed the infected areas of Martin Branch's mind.

  Next morning, at the store, Martin Branch saw John in the corridor and said, “Hi, there, John. Have a good weekend?”

  “I think so,” said John, frowning a little.

  Like most large retail stores, the Sun Company had a perennial problem about shoplifters. Some of them were trained, skillful thieves, some were kids, some were the well-to-do women whose husbands brought lawsuits. John's favorite shoplifter at the New York City Sun Store was Mrs. Messenger. Her compulsion to steal small, unnecessary objects was in conflict with her Dutch Reform Church background. She invariably mailed back the loot, in neatly-wrapped parcels. The difficulty was that she mailed back other stores' merchandise as well (after all, she couldn't remember to a given string of beads just which thing she had lifted from which stores). She seemed to accept as natural law the pleasing concept that whoever received the parcels would remail them to the correct place. John looked forward to receiving Mrs. Messengers packages. The brown paper wrappings were beautifully printed in clear letters he could read without difficulty.