The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  “Then how do you do it?”

  “By utilizing our understanding of science and the human mind.”

  To Simon, this sounded like double-talk. He moved toward the door.

  “Tell me something,” Mr. Tate said. “You’re a bright looking young fellow. Don’t you think you could tell real love from a counterfeit item?”

  “Certainly.”

  “There’s your safeguard! You must be satisfied, or don’t pay us a cent.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Simon said.

  “Why delay? Leading psychologists say that real love is a fortifier and a restorer of sanity, a balm for damaged egos, a restorer of hormone balance, and an improver of the complexion. The love we supply you has everything: deep and abiding affection, unrestrained passion, complete faithfulness, an almost mystic affection for your defects as well as your virtues, a pitiful desire to please, and, as a plus that only Love, Inc., can supply: that uncontrollable first spark, that blinding moment of love at first sight!”

  Mr. Tate pressed a button. Simon frowned indecisively. The door opened, a girl stepped in, and Simon stopped thinking.

  She was tall and slender, and her hair was brown with a sheen of red. Simon could have told you nothing about her face, except that it brought tears to his eyes. And if you asked him about her figure, he might have killed you.

  “Miss Penny Bright,” said Tate, “meet Mr. Alfred Simon.”

  The girl tried to speak but no words came, and Simon was equally dumb-struck. He looked at her and knew. Nothing else mattered. To the depths of his heart he knew that he was truly and completely loved.

  They left at once, hand in hand, and were taken by jet to a small white cottage in a pine grove, overlooking the sea, and there they talked and laughed and loved, and later Simon saw his beloved wrapped in the sunset flame like a goddess of fire. And in blue twilight she looked at him with eyes enormous and dark, her known body mysterious again. The moon came up, bright and lunatic, changing flesh to shadow, and she wept and beat his chest with her small fists, and Simon wept too, although he did not know why. And at last dawn came, faint and disturbed, glimmering upon their parched lips and locked bodies, and nearby the booming surf deafened, inflamed, and maddened them.

  ~ * ~

  At noon they were back in the offices of Love, Inc. Penny clutched his hand for a moment, then disappeared through an inner door.

  “Was it real love?” Mr. Tate asked.

  “Yes!”

  “And was everything satisfactory?”

  “Yes! It was love, it was the real thing! But why did she insist on returning?”

  “Post-hypnotic command,” Mr. Tate said.

  “What?”

  “What did you expect? Everyone wants love, but few wish to pay for it. Here is your bill, sir.”

  Simon paid, fuming. “This wasn’t necessary,” he said. “Of course I would pay you for bringing us together. Where is she now? What have you done with her?”

  “Please,” Mr. Tate said soothingly. “Try to calm yourself.”

  “I don’t want to be calm!” Simon shouted. “I want Penny!”

  “That will be impossible,” Mr. Tate said, with the barest hint of frost in his voice. “Kindly stop making a spectacle of yourself.”

  “Are you trying to get more money out of me?” Simon shrieked. “All right, I’ll pay. How much do I have to pay to get her out of your clutches?” And Simon yanked out his wallet and slammed it on the desk.

  Mr. Tate poked the wallet with a stiffened forefinger. “Put that back in your pocket,” he said. “We are an old and respectable firm. If you raise your voice again, I shall be forced to have you ejected.”

  Simon calmed himself with an effort, put the wallet back in his pocket and sat down. He took a deep breath and said, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s better,” Mr. Tate said. “I will not be shouted at. However, if you are reasonable, I can be reasonable too. Now, what’s the trouble?”

  “The trouble?” Simon’s voice started to lift. He controlled it and said, “She loves me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how can you separate us?”

  “What has the one thing got to do with the other?” Mr. Tate asked. “Love is a delightful interlude, a relaxation, good for the intellect, for the ego, for the hormone balance, and for the skin tone. But one would hardly wish to continue loving, would one?”

  “I would,” Simon said. “This love was special, unique---”

  “They all are,” Mr. Tate said. “But as you know, they are all produced in the same way.”

  “What?”

  “Surely you know something about the mechanics of love production?”

  “No,” Simon said. “I thought it was—natural.”

  Mr. Tate shook his head. “We gave up natural selection centuries ago, shortly after the Mechanical Revolution. It was too slow, and commercially unfeasable. Why bother with it, when we can produce any feeling at will by conditioning and proper stimulation of certain brain centers? The result? Penny, completely in love with you! Your own bias, which we calculated, in favor of her particular somatotype, made it complete. We always throw in the dark sea-beach, the lunatic moon, the pallid dawn-”

  “Then she could have been made to love anyone,” Simon said slowly.

  “Could have been brought to love anyone,” Mr. Tate corrected.

  “Oh, lord, how did she get into this horrible work?” Simon asked.

  “She came in and signed a contract in the usual way,” Tate said. “It pays very well. And at the termination of the lease, we return her original personality—untouched! But why do you call the work horrible? There’s nothing reprehensible about love.”

  “It wasn’t love!” Simon cried.

  “But it was! The genuine article! Unbiased scientific firms have made qualitative tests of it, in comparison with the natural thing. In every case, our love tested out to more depth, passion, fervor and scope.”

  Simon shut his eyes tightly, opened them and said, “Listen to me. I don’t care about your scientific tests. I love her, she loves me, that’s all that counts. Let me speak to her! I want to marry her!”

  Mr. Tate wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Come, come, man! You wouldn’t want to marry a girl like that! But if it’s marriage you’re after, we deal in that, too. I can arrange an idyllic and nearly spontaneous love-match for you with a guaranteed government-inspected virgin-”

  “No! I love Penny! At least let me speak to her!”

  “That will be quite impossible,” Mr. Tate said.

  “Why?”

  Mr. Tate pushed a button on his desk. “Why do you think? We’ve wiped out the previous indoctrination. Penny is now in love with someone else.”

  And then Simon understood. He realized that even now Penny was looking at another man with that passion he had known, feeling for another man that complete and bottomless love that unbiased scientific firms had shown to be so much greater than the old-fashioned, commercially unfeasable natural selection, and that upon that same dark sea-beach mentioned in the advertising brochure-

  He lunged for Tate’s throat. Two attendants, who had entered the office a few moments earlier, caught him and led him to the door.

  “Remember!” Tate called. “This in no way invalidates your own experience.”

  Hellishly enough, Simon knew that what Tate said was true.

  And then he found himself on the street.

  At first, all he desired was to escape from Earth, where the commercial impracticalities were more than a normal man could afford. He walked very quickly, and his Penny walked beside him, her face glorified with love for him, and him, and him, and you, and you.

  And of course he came to the shooting gallery.

  “Try your luck?” the manager asked.

  “Set ‘em up,” said Alfred Simon.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  A FOOT IN THE DOOR

  BY BRUCE JAY FRIEDMA
N

  Several years before Bruce Jay Friedman became the laureled author of the novels “A Mother’s Kisses” and “Stem,” he was a keenly appreciated writer of playboy stories in the light fantastic vein. A Friedman fantasy is just that—a friedmanfantasy, a sub-genre in itself, a modern morality play with a unique dry tang and a special humanity. “A Foot in the Door” is a case in point. It is a devil story, but it contains a vital ingredient not found in other devil stories: a little touch of Friedman in the night.

  ~ * ~

  WHEN HE was thirty-four years old and about to buy a house in Short Hills, Mr. Gordon found out he could get anything he wanted in life from an insurance agent named Merz. Merz specialized in small, cheap policies, thousand-dollar endowments, and put his feet in your door. Mr. Gordon had succeeded in putting Merz off and one night shouted at him, “I don’t like people who put their feet in doors. That’s no way to sell me.”

  “It’s something I do and I can’t help it,” said Merz, wedging his foot in Gordon’s apartment door and trying to force it back. “It isn’t important and you’ll soon see why. You’ll see it’s foolish to make anything over my feet in the door.”

  Gordon finally let Merz in, a thin man who got bad shaves and was always out of breath. Merz sold him a quick thousand-dollar endowment and when Mr. Gordon showed him out, said, “I’ve got something else you’ll want. It’s a way for you to have anything in the world. I haven’t figured out whether it’s insurance or not, but I have it for you and we can start it off tonight.”

  “I have plenty,” said Gordon. “Everything I want. I’m going to buy a home in Short Hills next week, something I’ve always wanted.”

  “There’ll be no nonsense and fooling around,” said Merz. “What you want is a home nearby in Tall Hills and one thing you’d better learn is that it’s a waste of time to be coy on this thing. Now I can get you this. What we do is make a bargain. Some of these are going to sound strange, but they’re made up that way and, frankly, I don’t make them up.”

  “I can’t afford Tall Hills,” said Mr. Gordon, “but all right, I’ll admit I’d like to get in there.”

  “All right then, now listen,” said Mr. Merz, blowing his thin nose. “I don’t do any paper work on these so remember it and don’t come around to me and say that isn’t the way it is. Tall Hills is yours, if . . . Let me rephrase that. “When you don’t use paper work, you’ve got to get them straight in the talking. A house in Tall Hills is yours, but your baby will have to be born with a slightly bent nose. I know you, your wife and your little girl have straight ones, but that’s the way these things are made up. Sometimes a real winner comes along, but most are on this order.”

  “I’m not going to ask you for any guarantee, because I can tell from the whole way this has happened that it’s on the level,” said Mr. Gordon. “If you’re wondering why I don’t act astonished, it’s just that I always expected something like this to happen. The only thing is I always thought there would be ethereal music in the background. Let’s see, if it’s a boy it won’t matter so much and would give him character. The odds are slightly in favor of its being a boy. I don’t know.”

  “Can we close?” said Merz. “It isn’t that I go off and sell others when I’m finished with you. There aren’t any others. I’m just tired and I get colds when I’m out late.”

  “Even if it were a girl,” said Mr. Gordon, “it might just be the little imperfection that would make her appealing. I once saw a girl who was married to an archaeologist and she had a slight limp and it made her the most fragile and pathetic thing, and I could have eaten her up. Maybe this would be like a limp on her nose. Look, is it bent quite a bit or just slightly? Do I get to know that?”

  “We don’t know how they come out. It’s more the spirit of the thing that counts and if it came out small, there wouldn’t be any objection.”

  “All right then,” said Mr. Gordon. “Get me into Tall Hills.”

  Merz said, “I can’t always let you have this much time,” and disappeared.

  The Gordons’ second child was born a month later, a boy with a cute but slightly bent little nose, and Mr. Gordon did not suddenly inherit a fortune. Nor did he suddenly receive a giant bonus from his firm or win a cash prize in a lottery. What happened is that he received a small inheritance from an uncle of his who had once spent a weekend hunting with Pancho Villa, his agency came through at Christmas with a slightly larger bonus than it had before, and Mrs. Gordon won a motorcycle in a raffle which they cashed in for $400. The total, along with the money Mr. Gordon had set aside for a house in Short Hills, gave them the down payment for one in Tall Hills. And in they went with their new, cute, but bent-nosed little baby.

  A month after the Gordons settled into their home Merz stuck his foot in the door late one night and Mr. Gordon said, “For Christ’s sake, you don’t have to put it in there now, you know.”

  “I just put it in there and don’t really care to change the thing,” said Merz. “Don’t you open the door either. Let me force my way in.”

  Mr. Gordon put his shoulder against the door and finally let Merz, breathing hard, shove his way in. “OK now,” said Merz. “I think you should have another thousand-dollar endowment. Now look, I don’t want that other thing to color your decision. I’m talking straight insurance now, and if I found out you were taking a policy just because of that other thing I do, I’d be sore. Do you want one? Remember, it’s important to keep these things separate.”

  “Then I don’t think so,” said Mr. Gordon. “I’ve got enough coverage for now.”

  “You don’t,” said Merz. “I’m going to keep hounding you until you buy more endowments. You don’t have half enough and ought to be ashamed of yourself for carrying so little. But if you dare buy one because of that other arrangement we have, I’ll kick you in the chops.”

  “I was wondering how often you come around,” said Mr. Gordon. “That other thing really worked out. He’s going to have a certain American Indian appeal and I don’t think it’ll bother him.”

  “I don’t get into whether it’ll bother him or not,” said Merz. “All right then, you want Simms transferred and wall-to-wall carpeting, some of it covering the staircase to the second floor. This is going to make you laugh so you might as well get in the snickers right now. You get a wool or cotton option on the carpeting, any shade.”

  “That is funny,” said Mr. Gordon. “Why do I want Simms transferred?”

  “I told you I wouldn’t settle for any coy stuff!” said Merz, rising in anger. He sat again, regaining his composure.

  “Because we’re neck and neck and because he has a slightly better personality and at one point or another will be quietly eased in as a senior executive, that’s why,” said Mr. Gordon.

  “All right then,” said Merz. “Now I want your Uncle Lester.”

  “What do you mean you want him?” asked Mr. Gordon. “Don’t tell me because I know.”

  “That’s right,” said Merz, “he goes. Don’t pin me down as to how, but I do know it won’t be pretty.”

  “I didn’t know that anyone had to go” said Gordon. “I thought what it would probably be is just doing things to people but not actually having them go. Anyway, it’s amazing the way you work these things out. If you’d said Aunt Clara or Cousin Lars I’d have thrown you out of here. These people are old and beat up and I don’t see them more than once in a blue moon, but when I hug them to me I get a feeling of kinship and camaraderie. I don’t get that at all from Uncle Lester and don’t like the way he smells. He works on those prescriptions twelve hours a day and I never did understand him. He’s seventy-six or something and it won’t be long now for him anyway. All right then, he goes, but it’s amazing how you knew to say Uncle Lester and not Aunt Clara. I’d have fought the hell out of you on her.”

  “They’re made up cleverly all right,” said Merz, blowing his nose, “but I don’t want to stay here and get friendly with you. All I really care about is that you buy m
ore endowments, but purely on an insurance basis, and not because of this other arrangement of ours. Do you want cotton or wool carpeting?”

  “Which do you think?” asked Mr. Gordon.

  “If I was allowed to I’d kick your chops,” said Mr. Merz angrily. “Don’t ask me any idiotic things.”

  “All right then, wool,” said Mr. Gordon. “Beige wool,” and Merz flew out the door.

  Within a week, a love affair between Simms and a bookkeeping girl came out in the open. The agency head called in Simms and said, “I don’t care how creative you are, what you’re doing is Hollywood and is a definite stink.” Simms went to Dubuque, and Mr. Gordon sat back and waited to be told he’d been promoted and given an increase, one that worked out to $1437 a year, the exact amount he’d need for carpeting the downstairs and the steps.