The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Edited by The Playboy Editors

  EXAMINATION DAY

  BY HENRY SLESAR

  There is a kind of story one does not exactly “enjoy.” It cannot, with accuracy, be called “entertaining.” Its purpose is to provoke thought, and it does so relentlessly, without frills, stunning the reader with the force of a karate chop to the base of the skull. “Examination Day” is such a story. It is also a story that would be vitiated by prolonged prefatory comment. So we will say only that it is a picture of what education may become in the future, if censorship and thought control go unchecked.

  ~ * ~

  THE JORDANS never spoke of the exam, not until their son, Dickie, was 12 years old. It was on his birthday that Mrs. Jordan first mentioned the subject in his presence, and the anxious manner of her speech caused her husband to answer sharply.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “He’ll do all right.”

  They were at the breakfast table, and the boy looked up from his plate curiously. He was an alert-eyed youngster, with flat blond hair and a quick, nervous manner. He didn’t understand what the sudden tension was about, but he did know that today was his birthday, and he wanted harmony above all. Somewhere in the little apartment there were wrapped, beribboned packages waiting to be opened, and in the tiny wall-kitchen, something warm and sweet was being prepared in the automatic stove. He wanted the day to be happy, and the moistness of his mother’s eyes, the scowl on his father’s face, spoiled the mood of fluttering expectation with which he had greeted the morning.

  “What exam?” he asked.

  His mother looked at the tablecloth. “It’s just a sort of Government intelligence test they give children at the age of twelve. You’ll be getting it next week. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “You mean a test like in school?”

  “Something like that,” his father said, getting up from the table. “Go read your comic books, Dickie.”

  The boy rose and wandered toward that part of the living room which had been “his” corner since infancy. He fingered the topmost comic of the stack, but seemed uninterested in the colorful squares of fast-paced action. He wandered toward the window, and peered gloomily at the veil of mist that shrouded the glass.

  “Why did it have to rain today ?” he said. “Why couldn’t it rain tomorrow?”

  His father, now slumped into an armchair with the Government newspaper, rattled the sheets in vexation. “Because it just did, that’s all. Rain makes the grass grow.”

  “Why, Dad?”

  “Because it does, that’s all.”

  Dickie puckered his brow. “What makes it green, though? The grass?”

  “Nobody knows,” his father snapped, then immediately regretted his abruptness.

  Later in the day, it was birthday time again. His mother beamed as she handed over the gaily-colored packages, and even his father managed a grin and a rumple-of-the-hair. He kissed his mother and shook hands gravely with his father. Then the birthday cake was brought forth, and the ceremonies concluded.

  An hour later, seated by the window, he watched the sun force its way between the clouds.

  “Dad,” he said, “how far away is the sun?”

  “Five thousand miles,” his father said.

  ~ * ~

  Dick sat at the breakfast table and again saw moisture in his mother’s eyes. He didn’t connect her tears with the exam until his father suddenly brought the subject to light again.

  “Well, Dickie,” he said, with a manly frown, “you’ve got an appointment today.”

  “I know, Dad. I hope-”

  “Now it’s nothing to worry about. Thousands of children take this test every day. The Government wants to know how smart you are, Dickie. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I get good marks in school,” he said hesitantly.

  “This is different. This is a—special kind of test. They give you this stuff to drink, you see, and then you go into a room where there’s a sort of machine-”

  “What stuff to drink?” Dickie said.

  “It’s nothing. It tastes like peppermint. It’s just to make sure you answer the questions truthfully. Not that the Government thinks you won’t tell the truth, but this stuff makes sure.”

  Dickie’s face showed puzzlement, and a touch of fright. He looked at his mother, and she composed her face into a misty smile.

  “Everything will be all right,” she said.

  “Of course it will,” his father agreed. “You’re a good boy, Dickie; you’ll make out fine. Then we’ll come home and celebrate. All right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dickie said.

  ~ * ~

  They entered the Government Educational Building 15 minutes before the appointed hour. They crossed the marble floors of the great pillared lobby, passed beneath an archway and entered an automatic elevator that brought them to the fourth floor.

  There was a young man wearing an insignia-less tunic, seated at a polished desk in front of Room 404. He held a clipboard in his hand, and he checked the list down to the Js and permitted the Jordans to enter.

  The room was as cold and official as a courtroom, with long benches flanking metal tables. There were several fathers and sons already there, and a thin-lipped woman with cropped black hair was passing out sheets of paper.

  Mr. Jordan filled out the form, and returned it to the clerk. Then he told Dickie: “It won’t be long now. When they call your name, you just go through the doorway at that end of the room.” He indicated the portal with his finger.

  A concealed loudspeaker crackled and called off the first name. Dickie saw a boy leave his father’s side reluctantly and walk slowly toward the door.

  At five minutes of 11, they called the name of Jordan.

  “Good luck, son,” his father said, without looking at him. “I’ll call for you when the test is over.”

  Dickie walked to the door and turned the knob. The room inside was dim, and he could barely make out the features of the gray-tunicked attendant who greeted him.

  “Sit down,” the man said softly. He indicated a high stool beside his desk. “Your name’s Richard Jordan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your classification number is 600-115. Drink this, Richard.”

  He lifted a plastic cup from the desk and handed it to the boy. The liquid inside had the consistency of buttermilk, tasted only vaguely of the promised peppermint. Dickie downed it, and handed the man the empty cup.

  He sat in silence, feeling drowsy, while the man wrote busily on a sheet of paper. Then the attendant looked at his watch, and rose to stand only inches from Dickie’s face. He unclipped a pen-like object from the pocket of his tunic, and flashed a tiny light into the boy’s eyes.

  “All right,” he said. “Come with me, Richard.”

  He led Dickie to the end of the room, where a single wooden armchair faced a multi-dialed computing machine. There was a microphone on the left arm of the chair, and when the boy sat down, he found its pinpoint head conveniently at his mouth.

  “Now just relax, Richard. You’ll be asked some questions, and you think them over carefully. Then give your answers into the microphone. The machine will take care of the rest.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll leave you alone now. Whenever you want to start, just say ‘ready’ into the microphone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man squeezed his shoulder, and left.

  Dickie said, “Ready.”

  Lights appeared on the machine, and a mechanism whirred. A voice said:

  “Complete this sequence. One, four, seven, ten…”

  ~ * ~

  Mr. and Mrs. Jordan were in the living room, not speaking, not even speculating.

  It was almost four o’clock when the telephone rang. The woman tried to reach it first, but her husband was quicker.

  “Mr. Jordan?”

  The voice was clipped; a brisk, official voice.

  “Yes, speaking.”

  “This is the Government Educational Service. Yo
ur son, Richard M. Jordan, Classification 600-115, has completed the Government examination. We regret to inform you that his intelligence quotient has exceeded the Government regulation, according to Rule 84, Section 5, of the New Code.”

  Across the room, the woman cried out, knowing nothing except the emotion she read on her husband’s face.

  “You may specify by telephone,” the voice droned on, “whether you wish his body interred by the Government or would you prefer a private burial place? The fee for Government burial is ten dollars.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE MISSION

  BY HUGH NISSENSON

  Hugh Nissenson, who was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, is known to readers of Commentary as the man who perceptively covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for that magazine. For his short stories, collected under the title “A Pile of Stones” he received the 1965 Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award. Of “The Mission” which follows, Nissenson says, “Just about the first story I ever wrote, in the summer of 1946, was about a group of savages in a world devastated by atomic war. ‘The Mission’ (1964) was the first science fiction I’d written since then. I like to believe my technique improved, but my inspiration to write it, a profound horror at the prospects of such devastation, remains the same.”

  ~ * ~

  Sixth day

  INTELLIGENCE WAS RIGHT. DeWitt is to be congratulated. They have a woman here, there’s no doubt of it. For almost a week now, I’ve been afraid that we were making the long march for nothing, but now that we are here, late this afternoon, during a break in the preliminary negotiations with the little brutes, I was permitted to look at her through the cracks in the clapboard walls of the hut where she is kept, the only normal-sized structure of any kind in the whole settlement; just a glimpse as she was being bathed, but reassuring just the same. As I watched, two of their females washed her in a rusty tub of galvanized metal probably scavenged from the ruins of the fair-sized town we passed the day before yesterday, about 30 miles due south of here— leveled by an airburst, from the looks of it, but definitely “cold” according to my counter, and now marked accordingly on my map . . . But the woman; how can I put it? Magnificent is the only word to describe her. What luck for Wilson, damn him! Without so much as a word, a faint smile on her lips, hardly deigning to even glance at the little horrors, she permitted them to dry her off and comb out her long blonde hair which almost reaches the small of her back. She’s young, too, about 16 would be my guess, certainly nubile, with ample breasts and rounded hips, perfectly, absolutely perfectly formed, as far as I could see, and good-looking to boot, with beautiful white teeth and very fair skin, flushed cheeks from the steaming water which they heat up with hot stones. Of course, I must make a much more detailed examination before I can definitely commit myself, but on the evidence so far, I’ve begun to bargain with the “mayor” here, as he calls himself, who is adamant in his demands for at least eight of our M-1s, plus a hundred rounds of ammunition apiece.

  “Impossible,” I tell him.

  “Ah then, Captain, I am sorry, too, more than I can say,” he shrugs, clapping his hands for one of his females who brings us an earthenware plate heaped with fresh fruit—his daughter, I think, or maybe one of his wives; who can tell for sure? In any case, certainly as hideous as he, and about the same height, not more than 30 inches at the most, with the same kind of head of reddish hair, and almost identical wizened, hairless face, and enormous head and torso in proportion to her stunted limbs. “Yes, it’s too bad,” he repeats in his surprisingly deep voice, biting into a crab apple. Perched on his head and looking so absurd that I have to control myself from laughing in his face, is an ancient battered, black-silk top hat, found who knows where. It is apparently the badge of his “office” which is hereditary, he has confided in me, and passed on through matrilineal descent for three generations now. “Yes, yes, a real shame . . .” He scratches his neck, then his hairless chest covered by a ragged flap of the stinking hide of a wild dog which is slung over one shoulder and tied about the waist with a rawhide strip. The stench is unbelievable. Sergeant Thurmond tells me it’s because the only way they have discovered to tan hides is with a solution of their own feces— huge pots of which he has come across in one of their mud and wattle huts, or rather mounds, I suppose, would be the best way to describe them. There must be over a hundred in the walled compound where we squat, none higher than a human’s chest, and all overgrown with grass and peculiar pale blue flowers with huge fleshy petals and jointed stalks— mutations, too, of some kind or another, unless I miss my guess. They have no odor, but grow everywhere, springing up in the heaps of rubbish that litter the ground, the piles of broken pottery, rags and gnawed bones—I hold one in my hand, the bleached femur of a large dog—all sorts of decaying filth covered with buzzing clouds of flies that rise in the air and settle again as he raises his arm to take another bite of the apple with his yellow teeth.

  “Yes, a terrible shame. What a waste to think that you’ve come all this way for nothing. Still . . . that is to say, at least you ought to have a closer look at her. She’s a virgin, of course, as you can see for yourself any time you want . . .”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I know how impatient you must be. Very soon, I promise.”

  “All right, then, first let me get it all straight. You say her parents are dead, is that right?”

  “Yes. Years ago.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Sad. Very sad indeed. They had no luck. The mother got sick right after the child was born, some kind of a fever, and died within a few days, a week at the very most.”

  “And the father?”

  “Killed.”

  “How?”

  “On a hunt right after that. The wild dogs.”

  “But they were both human.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Both perfectly formed.”

  “Perfectly. You have my word on it.”

  “Where are they buried, do you know?”

  “Ah, now that’s sad, too. Their bodies were burned and the ashes scattered.”

  “Why?”

  “We had no choice, Captain. It’s the same with all of our dead, if you’ll forgive the comparison. No matter how deep we dig the graves, the dogs always dig them up.”

  “In other words, there are no skeletons I can examine.”

  “Not so much as a bone, no, I’m sorry to say.”

  “I see.”

  “But you have my word on it, Captain. Both were absolutely perfectly formed. I swear to it.”

  He kisses the tips of his fingers and rolls his eyes to the sky —which in the past few minutes has become much darker, a deep, purplish blue, streaked with green, red and yellow in the west, over the hills, where the sun has begun to set. Standing guard a few paces away, his gun in his hand, Thurmond nervously sniffs the air, drawing his cloak closer over his shoulders, his face strangely luminous in the fading light, confounded, in spite of himself, I know, by the prospect of another night on the surface, under the open sky.

  “Where did you find them?” I continue.

  “Who?”

  “Her parents, of course.”

  “We didn’t. They found us. It was during a very bad winter, the worst in years, if you remember it, the time of the really big snow from the mountains that came just after the leaves fell and lasted until they were back on the trees. A terrible time. One morning they were here, just like that, outside the wall, a man holding the woman in his arms, and begging to be let in to at least warm themselves by the fire. We hardly had enough food for ourselves, you understand, but what could we do? My mother was alive then. ‘We can’t just let them die,’ she tells me. ‘Hermann, let them in.’ The dogs were after them. We could hear them howling in the woods.”

  “So you saved them out of the kindness of your hearts.”

  “It’s nice of the captain to put it that way.”

  “The man wasn�
��t armed?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a lie. He had a rifle or a revolver and you know it.”

  “No, I swear it.”

  “I want to know the truth.”

  “. . . Yes,” he says, after a pause.

  “Which was it?”

  “He had a rifle.”

  “That’s better. Where is it now?”

  “Ah, broken, I’m sad to say. Broken a long time ago.”

  “Go on . . .”