by John Sladek
THE MÜLLER-FOKKER EFFECT
John Sladek
www.sf-gateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
ANA*O*Y
Editor’s Note
Preliminary
Part 1: An Experiment
One
Two
Three
Part 2: Noun’ Man’
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Part 3: Cement Socks
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Part 4: Haunted Benefactor
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Part 5: Announcement: Haunted Experiment ‘Man’ Socks Benefactor
Twenty-Six
Aftermath
Appendix I: Table of Persons, Objects, etc., Which Have Not Fallen Back to Earth, With Explanations
Appendix II: The 128 Ways
Appendix III: The Hines Family
Website
Also by John Sladek
Dedication
Author Bio
Copyright
ANA*O*Y
Time is like an arrow’s h***,
Pointing only one way,
Like one 1** of a compass
You might be using, to go, on f***,
Another 1** of this journey
Down a one-way street
Full of factory h***s in cars
Whose cylinder h***s
All h*** the same way,
Towards the a**s factory,
Whose h*** is a friend
With whom you might play a h*** of cards,
Not noticing there is a f*** card in your h***,
A h****; oh, and maybe writing IOU’s,
In an elegant h***,
To be h***ed to whoever f***s the bill,
But now you take h****,
You s******* your c**** up life’s gangplank,
Never mind if it goes down with all h***s,
With you on watch, or if your plane n***s down
Off the isle of B**** with no one watching.
At the f*** of the steps you get ready
To f*** the next minute or two,
As depicted on your left h*** by a watch
Whose f*** has h***s like arrows.
Editor’s Note
The following extract is reprinted here as it appeared on the title page of B. Shairp, THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD (4 vols., 8vo, Univ. of Practical Mysticism Press, 19—). Other extracts from the four volumes (The Ox, The House, The Camel, The Door) appear as chapters three, eight, eighteen and twenty-five below.
Suspect any coincidence, any fascinating banality. Suspect ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, ‘there’s never a cop around when you need one’, and ‘everything that goes up must come down’. * The planet Uranus is 1782 miles from the sun. Subtract 1 from 1782 and you get 1781, the year when Uranus was discovered. Meaning?
Or take the word in Cockney ryhming slang for testicles, ‘orchestras’ ( = orchestra seats, or stalls, to rhyme with balls). ‘Orchestra’, a Greek word meaning the space in front of the stage where the dancers dance. ‘Orches–’ means having to do with the dance. ‘Orches–’. Change one letter and you make this root into a tuber, i.e. the Greek ‘orchis’, our orchid, so-called because it looked to the Greeks like a set of testicles. There is a dance of meanings, a dance of word orgins—and dances are still balls.
—God, to a military adviser
Preliminary
Glen Dale, publisher of Stagman magazine and ‘last of the old-time eligible bachelors’ (ibid.), was having another of his parties. He and his friends and a few hundred of their friends had gathered in the penthouse atop the Stagman Building to celebrate his fortieth—or thirty-ninth—birthday. The place overflowed with not-quite-young people in odd costumes: Aztec feather robes, copper shirts, bright ceramic shoes and shingle jackets; masks, body paint and glowlamp jewelry; suits of paper, steel and glass; whatever was loud without being vulgarly inexpensive.
On the mezzanine a pop group plugged in their amplified instruments and tried to make themselves heard above the talk of I, Thou and Other Celebrities. The group’s name was Direct from Las Vegas. The sounds of guitar, organ, English horn and carillon were audible through underwater speakers to those swimming in Glen’s pool, but to no one else.
Two musicologists in modified zoot suits began an argument about some old Deef John Holler blues. A girl in bead mail spoke to a friend of hers who happened to be a famous astronaut. Someone dropped the name General Weimarauner, and someone countered with the name of Mr Bradd.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Mr Bradd? Just head of National Arsenamid’s Marketing Division, that’s all.’
‘Mr Bradd. Hmm, sounds like the name of a hairdresser I used to know…’
Across the room a macrobiotics disciple explained that Christ would have lived longer if the Last Supper had consisted of boiled brown rice. ‘Instead of all that Yang bread…’
A man looking trapped inside his glasses leant against the mantel and sipped ginger ale. He wore a plain business suit dating from the sixties’ ‘Kennedy look’, enormous French cuffs, and a false smile of nonchalance. The girl in bead mail introduced herself to him, and he murmured his name.
‘Donagon?’ she echoed. ‘You look like Truman Capote.…What is your thing?’
‘Biophysics. I, um, thought they didn’t say that any more: “What’s your thing.” I thought they stopped, um, saying that.’
‘They did. Only now they’re saying it again. Are you a friend of Glen’s?’
‘No, actually…’
‘I met Glen through Bill Banks. You know, the black astronaut?’
‘Yes, I think I’ve hea
rd something…’
‘He’s the one who dropped anthrax on Central America. Poor Bill! He feels so guilty!’ The girl scanned the party as she spoke. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’
‘Well, we all…’
‘I mean it’s stupefying! He tried to kill himself, three times!’
Donagon set down his drink and put his hands behind him, out of sight. ‘Really?’
‘Ank! Aren’t you going to say hello?’ A young man in a crisp paper suit strolled over. ‘Auk, do you know Mr Dunne?’
‘Dr Donagon, actually,’ said Donagon, shaking Ank’s left hand.
‘Nancy, I need a smoke.’ The girl offered her pack of Hashmores, and Ank applied his thin moustache to the girl’s forehead, then took two. ‘I don’t usually smoke this brand,’ he explained. ‘Nothing in them. Are you a medical doctor, Doctor?’
‘No, um, just a biophysicist.’
Someone bumped Donagon from behind, spilling a drink on him. He turned to glare, but the culprit, a man in a wrinkled dinner jacket, was too busy fighting for balance to notice.
‘’S all right,’ he murmured, ‘I’m from Interpol.’ After resting a few seconds against the fireplace, he shoved off again. Some invisible ship was pitching in a stormy sea, and he lurched across its deck and into the crowd.
‘I do the art column for the Sun,’ said Ank. ‘But it’s not my real life. Really I’m a painter.’
A girl in a buckskin bikini and a hat with antlers came past with a tray. Before Donagon could protest, she took away his half-finished ginger ale and left a glass of something stronger.
‘Not that I’ve technically painted anything—yet. But I know exactly what I want to do. All I need is a computer random number generator—or, better still, some of that Müller-Fokker tape.’
Donagon gulped his drink. ‘But how did you hear about that? It’s supposed to be classified!’
Ank coughed. ‘I read Time’s science page. The “miracle tape” and so on. They said only four reels of it exist—and the inventor’s supposed to have defected to Russia or something, so I guess they can’t make any more. And not too many people know how to use it.’
Donagon looked around cautiously. No one was near enough to eavesdrop but the two zoot suits, and they were engaged in a shouting argument.
‘I may be able to help you. My project is making arrangements to use these, uh, tapes. I can’t tell you more about it, but I might be able to fix up something. If you’re still interested in a few months, when the project gets going, drop me a line.’
He gave his address as The Biomedical Research Project, Mud Flats, Nebraska. ‘It may come to nothing, but…’
‘You won’t regret it, Doctor.’ Ank went off to dance with a girl wearing only blue jeans. The other dancers—businessmen in fur wigs, poets in plastic, a senator in a caftan—swirled around them and they were lost to view.
Donagon leaned uneasily against the upholstered wall and tried to look as if he were waiting for a friend. Waves of conversational noise washed up against him, broke, slid back into the great sea of sound.
‘…a fact that it neither tamps, nor is it an ax!’
‘Lichtenstein? I thought you meant the country…’
‘Brown rice and…’
A girl laced into black patent leather from neck to toe (having even pasted on ‘lips’ of the same material) swung past, talking about the works of Thomas M. Disch. ‘Oh yes, I’ve read them all: The Geocides, Mankind under the Lash…’
Across the room, Glen Dale moved towards a lively group of painters. At his approach, they fell silent and looked into their drinks.
‘How’s it going, fellows?’
‘Fine, man.’ ‘Yeah, keen.’
‘Well that’s—fine. Everything okay? Drinks?’
‘Great.’
‘Fine, glad to hear it.’ He stood leaning lightly towards them for another minute, hoping the conversation would resume including him. It did not. ‘Well, I’d better—circulate.’ The man from Interpol tacked past. ‘Yes, well, so long.’
One of the painters called after him, ‘Great party, man!’ then turned to his friend. ‘What’d he want?’
‘Aw Christ, he wants somebody to tell him how good he looks in that stupid tin hat. You know, the one thing I can’t stand about his parties is he’s always at’ em.’
‘Yeah, I wish it was his wake.’
Glen approached a fat little bearded man in a sober suit, standing alone by the bar.
‘Well, Herr Doktor, are you having a good time?’
A pair of blank pince-nez turned up to stare at him, reflecting all the colors of Direct from Las Vegas’s light show. ‘Ah, Mister Dale.’ The little man, whose name Glen could not recall, spoke English with German precision.
‘There is someone here I would like to meet.’
‘Well, just point her out to me…’
‘No, no, this is a gentleman. A biophysicist named Doonigan. I should like it very much if you would introduce me to him.’
‘Doonigan? Doonigan? No, I’m afraid I don’t know him.’
Asking Herr Doktor if his drink was all right, Glen went over to talk to Ank and the girl in blue jeans. As it happened, they were having a good time. And their drinks were fine. But just now they were about to dance, if he would excuse them.
Donagon asked the girl in the foil pinafore who that was over there. ‘The tall skinny guy with the tin hat.’
‘Why, that’s Glen! The host—don’t you know him? Good gouts!’
‘No…I was invited by his secretary, actually.’
‘You’re a friend of Myra’s?’
‘I, um, know her, yes. She doesn’t seem to be here, tonight.’
‘Good gouts! Didn’t you know? She’s in the hospital, having a nose job. I thought everybody knew!’
‘That’s odd!’ Donagon was not aware he’d laughed so loudly until several Aztecs turned round to stare. ‘I met her in the hospital! She was having her acne sanded, and I…I was…’ He hesitated to explain the fresh scars under his outsize French cuffs. One of the false Aztecs looked him over. ‘And you were having a D. and C., were you, darling?’
‘Oh, George, you’re impossible!’ said the girl in the pinafore. She skipped off to dance with George the impossible Aztec.
‘…recorded in 1948, while he was still in prison,’ said one of the zoot suits.
‘Harry, listen—you’re out of your mind. It had to be 1950 because the company that cut the record didn’t even exist in’48.’
In another room the girl in blue jeans asked the tall man with the ax-blade nose what he did for a living.
‘I’m an art critic’
‘You too? I just met one art critic’
‘The one that works for the Sun? Haha, critic? He thinks Lichtenstein is a country, for Christ’s sake. Critic?’
Something bumped their legs. They stood back to let the man in the wrinkled dinner jacket crawl past. ‘’S all right,’ he explained, ‘I’m from Innerpol.’
The Herr Doktor came through next, asking for a geneticist named Doonigan.
‘A what?’ One of the two businessmen in fur wigs who were holding each other upright near the piano turned to stare at him. ‘What does that sawed-off kraut want? A gyneticist?’
‘Geenetics,’ said his companion. ‘Genes.’
The other nudged him. ‘Hey, I wouldn’t mind getting in her jeans, Charlie.’ He leered at the girl.
Elsewhere other happily married men were leering at girls in crinoline, copper sheaths, feather robes and complicated layers of translucency; even at the girl in patent leather, who, hand to mouth, was searching all the rooms for her lost stick-on lips. Somebody went into the toilet to vomit, and somebody else used an overshoe in the closet. One of the zoots was spitting blood in the kitchen sink, while his friend stood by, holding his pork-pie hat for him.
‘Look, Harry, I said I’m sorry. Anybody can lose his temper now and then. Especially when I know that Deef John cut that side in
nineteen…’
A troupe of girls in buckskin bikinis and antler hats moved through, pouring coffee and emptying ashtrays. Ank left with the girl in the foil pinafore. Donagon dozed in a chair.
Direct from Las Vegas packed up and left. The party reduced to those who had passed out, determined drinkers, and those without a sense of time, like the six persons in Egyptian dress squatting in the corner and digging a candle flame.
Glen Dale and Senator Vuje shook Donagon awake.
‘You all right?’
He nodded, and again when Glen asked if he were a scientist named Doonigal.‘…Donagon…’ he said thickly.
‘That must be you. There’s someone who wants to talk to you. Just a minute, I’ll see if I can find him.’
‘I thought you was Truman Whatsisname, the writer,’ said the senator. Somehow in his caftan he looked more like a senator than ever. ‘Here, let’s get you on your feet, fella.’
He did not get Donagon on his feet. Instead the toilet door opened behind him, knocking the senator on top of him.
‘What the hell…?’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Donagon’s glasses had been knocked off. He saw only a blurry, short figure in black, though he could hear the crisp German consonants. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going? Now look, you knocked me down, knocked this poor fella’s glasses off…’
‘I apologize again.’ The blur made a gesture with both arms. ‘But then, where am I going? That is a question. Where are we all going? And how is it best to watch?’
‘Listen, you little heinie, I fought your kind at Anzio…’
‘Ah, forgive me, gentlemen. I most probably am drunk. Good night.’
Donagon retrieved his glasses and got to his feet. The short man in black was disappearing out the hall door when Glen came in from the dining room.
‘I fought his kind at Anzio,’ the senator mumbled. ‘Arrogant little…’
One of the business twins sat down suddenly in the middle of the floor, ‘I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME, I WANT TO GET ME ONE OF THESE LITTLE GIRLIES AND GO UPSTAIRS.’