Grave predictions : tales of mankind’s post-apocalyptic, dystopian and disastrous destiny

by Drew Ford

  Here’s what I will do:

  I’ll go see a girl in purple,

  Kiss this sad world toodleoo.

  If you don’t want my lovin’,

  Why should I take up all this space?

  I’ll get off this old planet,

  Let some sweet baby have my place.

  The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. “Looks so real,” he said, “I can practically imagine I’m standing in the middle of it.”

  “What makes you think you’re not in it?” said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. “It’s called ‘The Happy Garden of Life,’ you know.”

  “That’s good of Dr. Hitz,” said the orderly.

  He was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital’s Chief Obstetrician. Hitz was a blindingly handsome man.

  “Lot of faces still to fill in,” said the orderly. He meant that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blanks were to be filled with portraits of important people on either the hospital staff or from the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

  “Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something,” said the orderly.

  The painter’s face curdled with scorn. “You think I’m proud of this daub?” he said. “You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?”

  “What’s your idea of what life looks like?” said the orderly.

  The painter gestured at a foul dropcloth. “There’s a good picture of it,” he said. “Frame that, and you’ll have a picture a damn sight more honest than this one.”

  “You’re a gloomy old duck, aren’t you?” said the orderly.

  “Is that a crime?” said the painter.

  The orderly shrugged. “If you don’t like it here, Grandpa—” he said, and he finished the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn’t want to live any more were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced “naught.”

  The number was: “2 B R 0 2 B.”

  It was the telephone number of an institution whose fanciful sobriquets included: “Automat,” “Birdland,” “Cannery,” “Catbox,” “De-louser,” “Easy-go,” “Good-by, Mother,” “Happy Hooligan,” “Kiss-me-quick,” “Lucky Pierre,” “Sheepdip,” “Waring Blendor,” “Weep-no-more” and “Why Worry?”

  “To be or not to be” was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

  The painter thumbed his nose at the orderly. “When I decide it’s time to go,” he said, “it won’t be at the Sheepdip.”

  “A do-it-yourselfer, eh?” said the orderly. “Messy business, Grandpa. Why don’t you have a little consideration for the people who have to clean up after you?”

  The painter expressed with an obscenity his lack of concern for the tribulations of his survivors. “The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me,” he said.

  The orderly laughed and moved on.

  Wehling, the waiting father, mumbled something without raising his head. And then he fell silent again.

  A coarse, formidable woman strode into the waiting room on spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag and overseas cap were all purple, the purple the painter called “the color of grapes on Judgment Day.”

  The medallion on her purple musette bag was the seal of the Service Division of the Federal Bureau of Termination, an eagle perched on a turnstile.

  The woman had a lot of facial hair—an unmistakable mustache, in fact. A curious thing about gas-chamber hostesses was that, no matter how lovely and feminine they were when recruited, they all sprouted mustaches within five years or so.

  “Is this where I’m supposed to come?” she said to the painter.

  “A lot would depend on what your business was,” he said. “You aren’t about to have a baby, are you?”

  “They told me I was supposed to pose for some picture,” she said. “My name’s Leora Duncan.” She waited.

  “And you dunk people,” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Skip it,” he said.

  “That sure is a beautiful picture,” she said. “Looks just like heaven or something.”

  “Or something,” said the painter. He took a list of names from his smock pocket. “Duncan, Duncan, Duncan,” he said, scanning the list. “Yes—here you are. You’re entitled to be immortalized. See any faceless body here you’d like me to stick your head on? We’ve got a few choice ones left.”

  She studied the mural bleakly. “Gee,” she said, “they’re all the same to me. I don’t know anything about art.”

  “A body’s a body, eh?” he said “All righty. As a master of fine art, I recommend this body here.” He indicated a faceless figure of a woman who was carrying dried stalks to a trash-burner.

  “Well,” said Leora Duncan, “that’s more the disposal people, isn’t it? I mean, I’m in service. I don’t do any disposing.”

  The painter clapped his hands in mock delight. “You say you don’t know anything about art, and then you prove in the next breath that you know more about it than I do! Of course the sheave-carrier is wrong for a hostess! A snipper, a pruner—that’s more your line.” He pointed to a figure in purple who was sawing a dead branch from an apple tree. “How about her?” he said. “You like her at all?”

  “Gosh—” she said, and she blushed and became humble—“that—that puts me right next to Dr. Hitz.”

  “That upsets you?” he said.

  “Good gravy, no!” she said. “It’s—it’s just such an honor.”

  “Ah, you admire him, eh?” he said.

  “Who doesn’t admire him?” she said, worshiping the portrait of Hitz. It was the portrait of a tanned, white-haired, omnipotent Zeus, two hundred and forty years old. “Who doesn’t admire him?” she said again. “He was responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago.”

  “Nothing would please me more,” said the painter, “than to put you next to him for all time. Sawing off a limb—that strikes you as appropriate?”

  “That is kind of like what I do,” she said. She was demure about what she did. What she did was make people comfortable while she killed them.

  And, while Leora Duncan was posing for her portrait, into the waitingroom bounded Dr. Hitz himself. He was seven feet tall, and he boomed with importance, accomplishments, and the joy of living. “Well, Miss Duncan! Miss Duncan!” he said, and he made a joke. “What are you doing here?” he said. “This isn’t where the people leave. This is where they come in!”

  “We’re going to be in the same picture together,” she said shyly.

  “Good!” said Dr. Hitz heartily. “And, say, isn’t that some picture?”

  “I sure am honored to be in it with you,” she said.

  “Let me tell you,” he said, ‘“I’m honored to be in it with you. Without women like you, this wonderful world we’ve got wouldn’t be possible.”

  He saluted her and moved toward the door that led to the delivery rooms. “Guess what was just born,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Triplets!” he said.

  “Triplets!” she said. She was exclaiming over the legal implications of triplets.

  The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die. Triplets, if they were all to live, called for three volunteers.

  “Do the parents have three volunteers?” said Leora Duncan.

  “Last I heard,” said Dr. Hitz, “they had one, and were trying to scrape another two up.”

  “I don’t think they made it,” she said. “Nobody made three appointments with us. Nothing but singles going through today, unless somebody called in after I left. What’s the name?”

  “Wehling,” said the waiting father, sitting up, red-eyed and frowzy. “Edward K. Wehling, Jr., is the name of the happy father-to-be.�
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  He raised his right hand, looked at a spot on the wall, gave a hoarsely wretched chuckle. “Present,” he said.

  “Oh, Mr. Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz, “I didn’t see you.”

  “The invisible man,” said Wehling.

  “They just phoned me that your triplets have been born,” said Dr. Hitz. “They’re all fine, and so is the mother. I’m on my way in to see them now.”

  “Hooray,” said Wehling emptily.

  “You don’t sound very happy,” said Dr. Hitz.

  “What man in my shoes wouldn’t be happy?” said Wehling. He gestured with his hands to symbolize carefree simplicity. “All I have to do is pick out which one of the triplets is going to live, then deliver my maternal grandfather to the Happy Hooligan, and come back here with a receipt.”

  Dr. Hitz became rather severe with Wehling, towered over him. “You don’t believe in population control, Mr. Wehling?” he said.

  “I think it’s perfectly keen,” said Wehling tautly.

  “Would you like to go back to the good old days, when the population of the Earth was twenty billion—about to become forty billion, then eighty billion, then one hundred and sixty billion? Do you know what a drupelet is, Mr. Wehling?” said Hitz.

  “Nope,” said Wehling sulkily.

  “A drupelet, Mr. Wehling, is one of the little knobs, one of the little pulpy grains of a blackberry,” said Dr. Hitz. “Without population control, human beings would now be packed on this surface of this old planet like drupelets on a blackberry! Think of it!”

  Wehling continued to stare at the same spot on the wall.

  “In the year 2000,”‘ said Dr. Hitz, “before scientists stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn’t even enough drinking water to go around, and nothing to eat but seaweed—and still people insisted on their right to reproduce like jackrabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever.”

  “I want those kids,” said Wehling quietly. “I want all three of them.”

  “Of course you do,” said Dr. Hitz. “That’s only human.”

  “I don’t want my grandfather to die, either,” said Wehling.

  “Nobody’s really happy about taking a close relative to the Catbox,” said Dr. Hitz gently, sympathetically.

  “I wish people wouldn’t call it that,” said Leora Duncan.

  “What?” said Dr. Hitz.

  “I wish people wouldn’t call it ‘the Catbox,’ and things like that,” she said. “It gives people the wrong impression.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Dr. Hitz. “Forgive me.” He corrected himself, gave the municipal gas chambers their official title, a title no one ever used in conversation. “I should have said, ‘Ethical Suicide Studios,’” he said.

  “That sounds so much better,” said Leora Duncan.

  “This child of yours—whichever one you decide to keep, Mr. Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz. “He or she is going to live on a happy, roomy, clean, rich planet, thanks to population control. In a garden like that mural there.” He shook his head. “Two centuries ago, when I was a young man, it was a hell that nobody thought could last another twenty years. Now centuries of peace and plenty stretch before us as far as the imagination cares to travel.”

  He smiled luminously.

  The smile faded as he saw that Wehling had just drawn a revolver.

  Wehling shot Dr. Hitz dead. “There’s room for one—a great big one,” he said.

  And then he shot Leora Duncan. “It’s only death,” he said to her as she fell. “There! Room for two.”

  And then he shot himself, making room for all three of his children.

  Nobody came running. Nobody, seemingly, heard the shots.

  The painter sat on the top of his stepladder, looking down reflectively on the sorry scene.

  The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful . . . to multiply and to live as long as possible—to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.

  All the answers that the painter could think of were grim. Even grimmer, surely, than a Catbox, a Happy Hooligan, an Easy Go. He thought of war. He thought of plague. He thought of starvation.

  He knew that he would never paint again. He let his paintbrush fall to the dropcloths below. And then he decided he had had about enough of life in the Happy Garden of Life, too, and he came slowly down from the ladder.

  He took Wehling’s pistol, really intending to shoot himself.

  But he didn’t have the nerve.

  And then he saw the telephone booth in the corner of the room. He went to it, dialed the well-remembered number: “2 B R 0 2 B.”

  “Federal Bureau of Termination,” said the very warm voice of a hostess.

  “How soon could I get an appointment ?” he asked, speaking very carefully,

  “We could probably fit you in late this afternoon, sir,” she said. “It might even be earlier, if we get a cancellation.”

  “All right,” said the painter, “fit me in, if you please.” And he gave her his name, spelling it out.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the hostess. “Your city thanks you; your country thanks you; your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from future generations.”

  I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM

  HARLAN ELLISON

  LIMP, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

  When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. All three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.

  Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon and was afraid for the future. “Oh, God,” he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over with. Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”

  It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.

  He was speaking for all of us.

  Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because it amused itself with strange sounds) had hallucinated that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddamn frozen elephant it sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrefied or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

  Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

  Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn’t be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn’t matter much. Hot, cold, raining, lava, boils or locust—it never mattered: we had to take it or die.

  Ellen decided us. “I’ve got to have something, Ted. Maybe there’ll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let’s try it.”

  I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. The machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us. And she never climaxed, so why bother.

  We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us aware of the date. The passage of time was impor
tant; not to us sure as hell, but to it. Thursday. Thanks.

  Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own, and each other’s wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that if anything happened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn’t matter.

  It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing it had materialized, it sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.

  On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with his own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: he strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him—now long-since gone to dust—could ever have hoped.

  There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But we didn’t try to crawl up to see. There was nothing out there; had been nothing for over a hundred years, but the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were only the five of us, down here inside, alone with AM.

  I heard Ellen saying, frantically, “No, Benny! Don’t, come on, Benny, don’t please!”

  And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. He was saying, “I’m gonna get out, I’m gonna get out, I’m gonna get out . . .” over and over. His monkeylike face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given him during the “festival” were drawn down into a mass of pink-white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.

  But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt-out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted components. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble.