Connoisseur's SF

by Tom Boardman

  “Mom and Pop had it that long once, I guess.”

  “When is he going to leave, Lou?” said Emerald.

  “Well, he’s talking about giving up anti-gerasone right after the 500-mile Speedway Race.”

  “Yes—and before that it was the Olympics, and before that the World’s Series, and before that the Presidential Elections, and before that I-don’t-know-what, It’s been just one excuse after another for fifty years now. I don’t think we’re ever going to get a room to ourselves or an egg or anything.”

  “AH right—call me a failure!” said Lou. “What can I do? I work hard and make good money, but the whole thing practically is taxed away for defence and old age pensions. And if it wasn’t taxed away, where you think we’d find a vacant room to rent? Iowa, maybe? Well, who wants to live on the outskirts of Chicago?”

  Em put her arms around his neck. “Lou, hon, I’m not calling you a failure. The Lord knows you’re not. You just haven’t had a chance to be anything or have anything because Gramps and the rest of his generation won’t leave and let somebody else take over.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Lou gloomily. “You can’t exactly blame ’em, though, can you? I mean, I wonder how quick we’ll knock off the anti-gerasone when we get Gramps’ age.”

  “Sometimes I wish there wasn’t any such thing as anti-gerasone!” said Emerald passionately. “Or I wish it was made out of something real expensive and hard-to-get instead of mud and dandelions. Sometimes I wish folks just up and died regular as clockwork, without anything to say about it, instead of deciding themselves how long they’re going to stay around. There ought to be a law against selling the stuff to anybody over 150.”

  “Fat chance of that,” said Lou, “with all the money and votes the old people’ve got,” He looked at her closely. “You ready to up and die, Em?”

  “Well, for heaven’s sakes, what a thing to say to your wife. Hon! I’m not even 100 yet.” She ran her hands lightly over her firm, youthful figure, as though for confirmation. “The best years of my life are still ahead of me. But you can bet that when 150 rolls around, old Em’s going to pour her anti-gerasone down the sink, and quit taking up room, and she’ll do it smiling.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Lou, “you bet. That’s what they all say. How many you heard of doing it?”

  “There was that man in Delaware.”

  “Aren’t you getting kind of tired of talking about him, Em? That was five months ago.”

  “All right, then—Gramma Winkler, right here in the same building.”

  “She got smeared by a subway.”

  “That’s just the way she picked to go,” said Em.

  “Then what was she doing carrying a carton of anti-gerasone when she got it?”

  Emerald shook her head wearily and covered her eyes, “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno. All I know is, something’s just got to be done.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wish they’d left a couple of diseases kicking around somewhere, so I could get one and go to bed for a little while. Too many people!” she cried, and her words cackled and gabbled and died in a thousand asphalt-paved, skyscraper-walled courtyards.

  Lou laid his hand on her shoulder tenderly. “Aw, hon, I hate to see you down in the dumps like this.”

  “If we just had a car, like the folks used to in the old days,” said Em, “we could go for a drive, and get away from people for a little while. Gee—if those weren’t the days!”

  “Yeah,” said Lou, “before they’d used up all the metal.”

  “We’d hop in, and Pop’d drive up to a filling station and say, ‘Fillerup!’ ”

  “That was the nuts, wasn’t it—before they’d used up all the gasoline.”

  “And we’d go for a carefree ride in the country.”

  “Yeah—all seems like a fairyland now, doesn’t it, Em? Hard to believe there really used to be all that space between cities,” “And when we got hungry,” said Em, “we’d find ourselves a restaurant, and walk in, big as you please and say, ‘I’ll have a steak and French-fries, I believe,’ or, ‘How are the pork chops today?’ ” She licked her lips, and her eyes glistened.

  “Yeah man!” growled Lou. “How’d you like a hamburger with the works, Em?”

  “Mmmmmmmm.”

  “If anybody’d offered us processed seaweed in those days, we would have spit right in his eye, huh, Em?”

  “Or processed sawdust,” said Em.

  Doggedly, Lou tried to find the cheery side of the situation. “Well, anyway, they’ve got the stuff so it tastes a lot less like seaweed and sawdust than it did at first; and they say it’s actually better for us than what we used to eat.”

  “I felt fine!” said Em fiercely.

  Lou shrugged, “Well, you’ve got to realize the world wouldn’t be able to support twelve billion people if it wasn’t for processed seaweed and sawdust, I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, really. I guess. That’s what they say.”

  “They say the first thing that pops into their heads,” said Em. She closed her eyes. “Golly—remember shopping, Lou? Remember how the stores used to fight to get our folks to buy something? You didn’t have to wait for somebody to die to get a bed or chairs or a stove or anything like that. Just went in—bing!—and bought whatever you wanted. Gee whiz that was nice, before they used up all the raw materials. I was just a little kid then, but I can remember so plain.”

  Depressed, Lou walked listlessly to the balcony’s edge, and looked at the clean, cold, bright stars against the black velvet of infinity. “Remember when we used to be bugs on science fiction, Em? Flight seventeen, leaving for Mare, launching ramp twelve. ‘Board! All non-technical personnel kindly remain in bunkers. Ten seconds, nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one! Main Stage!’ Barrrrrroooom!”

  “Why worry about what was going on on Earth?” said Em, looking up at the stars with him. “In another few years, we’d all be shooting through space to start life all over again on a new planet.”

  Lou sighed. “Only it turns out you need something about twice the size of the Empire State Building to get one lousy colonist to Mars. And for another couple of trillion bucks he could take his wife and dog. That’s the way to lick overpopulation—emigrate!”

  “Lou—?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “When’s the 500-mile Speedway Race?”

  “Uh—Memorial Day, 30 May.”

  She bit her lip. “Was that awful of me to ask?”

  “Not very, I guess, Everybody in the apartment’s looked it up to make sure.”

  “I don’t want to be awful,” said Em, “but you’ve just got to talk over these things now and then, and get them out of your system.”

  “Sure you do. Feel better?”

  “Yes—and I’m not going to lose my temper any more, and I’m going to be just as nice to him as I know how.”

  “That’s my Em.”

  They squared their shoulders, smiled bravely, and went back inside.

  Gramps Schwartz, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day’s happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, “Hell! We did that a hundred years ago!”

  Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou’s father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife, and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. AH, save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age—to be somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties.

  “Meanwhile,” the commentator was saying, “Council Bluffs, Iowa was still threatened by stark tragedy. But 200 weary rescue workers have refused to gi
ve up hope, and continue to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, 183, who has been wedged for two days in a…”

  “I wish he’d get something more cheerful,” Emerald whispered to Lou.

  “Silence!” cried Gramps. “Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV’s on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar—” and here his voice suddenly softened and sweetened—“when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder,” He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat by its having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.

  “Dr Brainard Keyes Bullard,” said the commentator, “President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world’s ills can be traced to the fact that Man’s knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world.”

  “Hell!” said Gramps. “We said that a hundred years ago!”

  “In Chicago tonight,” said the commentator, “a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honour is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five millionth child to be born in the hospital.” The commentator faded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously.

  “Hell,” whispered Lou to Emerald, “we said that a hundred years ago.”

  “I heard that!” shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set, and his petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. “You, there, boy—”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it, sir,” said Lou.

  “Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!”

  Lou nodded dully, and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over bedding to Gramps’ room, the only private room in the Schwartz apartment, The other rooms were the bathroom, the living-room, and the wide, windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living-room, and the daybed, in the living-room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favourites of the moment.

  On Gramps’ bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated, and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice, and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets—a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behaviour to regain the promise of a share in the estate.

  “Boy!” called Gramps.

  “Coming, sir.” Lou hurried back into the living-room, and handed Gramps the will.

  “Pen!” said Gramps.

  He was instantly offered eleven pens, one from each couple.

  “Not that leaky thing,” he said, brushing Lou’s pen aside. “Ah, There’s a nice one. Good boy, Willy.” He accepted Willy’s pen. That was the tip they’d all been waiting for. Willy, then, Lou’s father, was the new favourite.

  Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though 142, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.

  Gramps missed none of the high drama he’d authored, and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep, portentous monotone, like a bass tone on a cathedral organ:

  “I, Harold D. Schwartz, residing in Building 257 of Aiden Village, New York City, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made,” He blew his nose importantly, and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis—repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.

  At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might forget why he’d gotten out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control, and, after erasing for a full minute, he began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he’d heard them so often.

  “I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land,” Gramps said and wrote. “But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by—” He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was.

  Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.

  Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence: “my great-grandson, Louis J. Schwartz.”

  “Grandson, sir,” said Lou.

  “Don’t quibble. You’re in deep enough now, young man,” said Gramps, but he changed the trifle. And from there he went without a mis-step through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.

  In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room, at one time or another, Lou’s name was scratched out and Willy’s substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom. “So!” said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will, and substituted a new one, including the time of day. “Well—time to watch the McGarvey Family.” The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was 60, or for 112 years. “I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next,” he said.

  Lou detached himself from the group, and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom, door. He wished Em would join him, and he wondered where she was.

  He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone’s stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, and that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps.

  “Em—?” he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward.

  “Morty!” gasped Lou.

  Lou’s great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Schwartz ménage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand—Gramps’ enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had been half-emptied, and which Morty was refilling to the top with tap water.

  A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou, and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride.

  Shocked, Lou didn’t know what on earth to do. He couldn’t let Gramps take the mouse-trapped anti-gerasone; but if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.

  Lou glanced into the living-room, and saw that the Schwartzes, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could, and began to pour the contents of Gramps’ bottle down the drain. Lie was going to refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the shelf. The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take for ever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment through the keyhole and under the door.

  “Gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog,” went the bottle monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living-room, and there were murmurs and the scraping of chairlegs on the
floor. “Thus ends,” said the television announcer, “the 29,121st chapter in the life of your neighbours and mine, the McGarveys.” Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Just a sec,” called Lou cheerily. Desperately, he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed to splinters on the tile floor.

  The door sprung open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at the incriminating mess.

  Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the-back of his neck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea, and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, he waited for Gramps to speak.

  “Well, boy,” said Gramps at last, “looks like you’ve got a little tidying up to do.”

  And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd, and locked himself in his bedroom.

  The Schwartzes contemplated Lou in incredulous silence for a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living-room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long, Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he, too, went into the living-room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.

  Tears streamed over her cheeks. “Oh, you poor Iamb—please don’t look so awful. It was my fault, I put you up to this.”

  “No,” said Lou, finding his voice, “really you didn’t. Honest, Em, I was just—”

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me, lion. I’m on your side no matter what.” She kissed him on his cheek, and whispered in his ear. “It wouldn’t have been murder, hon. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he’d be able to go any time God decided He wanted him.”

  “What’s gonna happen next, Em?” said Lou hollowly. “What’s he gonna do?”

  Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. At two hours before dawn, the pair dropped off to sleep.