“Don’t tell me he slept here too.”
A seedy-looking devotee of free enterprise saw them come from the store. “Hey!” he called softly. They paused. “See them?” He pointed to the plasticizer display. “Avoid the middleman. Fourteen ninety-five.”
He opened his coat and Mr. Jenkins observed that the fourteen ninety-five model featured a clip to keep it from falling out of a shirt pocket. Simpson’s eyes were becoming glassy.
They arrived home late that night but Mr. Jenkins’ children waited up to show off their new toys. “How much did you pay for it?” Jenkins asked.
“A dollar,” Oliver Junior answered.
Simpson sat down heavily.
“Heck,” Olivia volunteered, “I only paid forty-nine cents for mine. Look daddy.” She offered two crudely fashioned coffee cups.
“How did you make those?” Mr. Jenkins asked.
“It’s easy, look.” Olivia, important in the knowledge that she would be eight next week, gathered a handful of lead soldiers, model railway track, erector set parts, and a tomato can. She played the tool on the mess and kneaded it into a ball. After a minute’s work with rolling pin and fingers she offered Simpson an ash tray for his forgotten cigarette.
Horace Crannach was unhappy. He poured another cup of coffee and sat looking morosely at the rollaway where his body and fender tools were gathering an even patina of rust. His eye lit on a plasticizer. “Ninety-six dollars I paid for that,” he moaned. “Two weeks later they’re down to ten cents and every woman in town bumps out her own fenders. I shoulda been a carpenter.”
From the other side of the half wall his partner volunteered an obbligato. “You should gripe. I ain’t worked on an engine for a month. I was just gettin’ ready to start the last job when the wiseacre trots in and says, ‘Hold it, I’ll do it myself.’ ”
“And did he?”
“He did. Softened up the block and pushed the pistons through the holes a couple of times. That handled the rebore. He seated the valves by hand and took up the rods and mains with two fingers. I sold him a water pump seal. That’s not made of metal.”
“Gentlemen,” William J. Volante said impressively, “the presses are obsolete. The forges can go. We need no longer haggle with tool and die makers. We’ll put a crew of girls to hand-forming parts directly over the plaster mockups. No reason why we shouldn’t produce a new model every six months. Mr. Archer of Accounting informs me that tooling-up should cost approximately two per cent of our previous estimates. In view of this it seems practical to announce a two percent across the board price reduction for all models—”
Mr. Mardsell cleared his throat delicately. “Ummm, I’m afraid not, Mr. Volante. Have you seen our latest sales figures? No? I thought not. The big four are offering superdeluxe models with radio, heater, foglites, window lifts, power brakes, power steering, airconditioning, folding beds, engines—the works for eleven hundred.”
Volante seemed suddenly older than his sixty-eight years. His mouth opened and closed like a grounded flounder and he sat down weakly. Mr. Archer poured him a glass of water.
“Don’t worry,” Mardsell continued, “they aren’t selling any better than we are. It seems the do-it-yourself bug has hit the automotive industry too.”
FLASH! PRANKSTERS STRIKE AGAIN.
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 (AP)
Pranksters last night softened cables on the main span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Cars backed up for seven miles as commuters waited for low tide. Four hundred yards of the center span are now awash at high tide. City officials are issuing emergency calls to neighboring coastal cities for ferries to replace the unsafe bridge.
The truck driver wiped perspiration from his forehead with a hairy forearm. “I don’t care what the old man says,” he addressed his swamper and two squirrels who gazed curiously at the semi rig from an overhanging pine tree. “I’m walking the rest of the way.” His swamper nodded emphatic agreement. “It’s disconcerting,” the driver continued, “to be barreling down the hill and have your engine turn into putty. One of these days some brat’s going to hit a front axle or a wheel and I don’t want to be driving when he does.”
“You see in this morning’s paper what happened to the Twentieth Century Limited?” his swamper asked.
“Oh no!” the driver groaned.
“Oh yes. Some kid needed eight or ten feet of track.”
“How do you like them apples?” the CIA man asked.
“Go cry on somebody else’s shoulder,” Mr. Jenkins replied. “I cooperated. You’ve still got all seven hundred thirty-eight of mine.” They walked out of the building. The government limousine had been converted to a small pile of slush during their absence. “By the way, what happened to that Russian who claimed to have invented these things?”
“I understand they have their troubles too,” the CIA man smiled grimly. “Somebody discovered soft tommy guns don’t shoot very straight so now all the comrades are kneading their plowshares into swords.”
Tuchi buzzed and clicked for several minutes. Since no humans were listening the voice did not come from his belt buckle. If it had the conversation might have ended something like this:
“You did all the talking; now talk yourself out of this.”
“What do you mean, talk myself out of this?” Chorl was indignant. “You talk as if it were my fault.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“How should I know?” He stopped abruptly as another band of natives approached the opposite creek bank. The leader of the band threw a stone ax and the ETs ducked barely in time.
“Maybe they have a different growth rate. It took us maybe a hundred and ten of their revolutions to make the trip home and back. I’ll admit it’s rather swift but civilizations do break up, especially primitive ones.”
“So what are we going to do with a hundred million plasticizers?”
“Tell me what you’re going to do about the delay penalty clause in that caviar contract and I’ll tell you what to do with the plasticizers.”
“I just don’t understand it,” Chorl said.
Across the creek a group of natives were gathering stones for a catapult. Their leader wore a gold chain about his neck. There dangled from it the molar of a local herbivore and another talisman glowing bright red.
1957
The Inferlab Project
G.C. Edmondson has a dry, terse, individual manner—sometimes so dry, indeed, as to seem virtually dehydrated. For what he drily offers us here as a short story is, in plot, incidents and action, a complete science fiction adventure novel condensed into a few pages of breathless breakneck movement.
THE LIGHT TURNED ON AS I OPENED the door of my apartment. The TV started up in the middle of a weather report. “There will be point zero five inches of rain in all urban areas between eleven thirty and midnight.” I turned it off and the screen became a landscape. I dialed a drink and a meal.
The martini was dry and dinner wasn’t bad. People had gotten pretty tired of yeast when meat production went down. The sterility plague hadn’t affected cattle and swine as much as it had humans but it was bad enough. Things had improved when a Hawaiian named Yoshita learned to force-feed abalones in a high nutrient salt water bath. They grew so fast and tender they didn’t need pounding.
I turned on the TV again. Wrestling. I gave up and punched the bed button. It opened and the kitchen started folding up in the wall. I was standing in the middle of the apartment, trying not to get snagged, when the door buzzed. I opened it to a couple of characters I immediately christened Mutt and Jeff.
“Doctor Stillman sent us,” Mutt said.
Jeff didn’t say anything.
I grabbed a hat and went with them. It was clouding up for the eleven thirty rain and I stumbled in the dark. Each one grabbed an elbow and helped me into the car.
The tall one drove. Just a job so far as he was concerned. They both must have thought so or I’d have been in the middle instead of next to the door.
&n
bsp; “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Stillman’s house,” Mutt said.
“This isn’t the way to Stillman’s house.”
“Shut up.” Jeff spoke for the first time.
I didn’t like his tone of voice. I eased my elbow over the latch. The limousine slowed down for a left turn and I rolled out into the gutter. I was on my feet, flagtailing up an alley before it could start hurting.
The car slammed into reverse and one of them sprayed a few shots after me. He didn’t have much chance of hitting me in the dark. Still, I’d never been shot at before. It’s uncomfortable. I stumbled into some kind of basement doorway and dived in. The driver turned into the alley. I could see a spotlight busily turning night into day as I shut the door.
“In kind of a hurry, aren’t you?” somebody said mildly.
When I dived through the door I’d gotten an impression of an empty basement. Now I could see it wasn’t empty. Fifteen or twenty people were looking at me in not particularly surprised attitudes. One of them bolted the door I’d just come through.
“Thanks,” I said. “Who are you?”
“In all fairness, I believe you should speak first.” He waved at a chair and I sat before a plastic-covered table. He started rolling a brown paper cigarette. A ramshackle bar lined the opposite side of the room. Over the bar a low-wattage fluorescent gleamed, attracting moths, flies, and a sympathetic glow from the bartender’s fine head of skin. My interrogator sat down and the others crowded around. A blowsy woman with a Pekinese in her arms got up from the bar and waddled an invisible chalk line toward us. The others moved aside deferentially and she took the third chair.
“Welcome to the Blue Moon,” she said with an expansive gesture. “We ask no questions. Of course, if you want conversation . . .”
I thought it over for a minute. Could I tell them? One thing was sure. I was going to need help. I decided to level.
The bartender’s scalp flashed as he brought me a shot glass. I swallowed it and subconsciously noted what the higher esters of alcohol were doing to my gastric secretions. A good M.D. never calls them fusel oil. The blowsy woman caressed the pekinese and watched me.
“You look kind of scratched up,” she ventured.
“I’m not used to leaving cars on the fly.”
“What’s the heat on you for?”
“I’m a doctor and I found a cure for sterility.”
“No kidding?” It was the short man who had bolted the door. “You ought to be a hero.”
“That’s what I thought until I found out it isn’t a disease.”
“What is it?” the woman asked.
“Somebody’s doing it. Who or why I don’t know but they’ve wormed their way into the government.” I kept wondering which side my audience was on. “I’ve got to get to somebody higher up,” I concluded.
“Well, doc, the big wheels don’t ever come around to see old Bella any more.” She sighed and patted her pekinese.
I looked around. None of the women were wearing padded fronts to their dresses.
“I hate children,” Bella said flatly. “Hated the little monsters while they were around. Ain’t changed my mind since the last one grew up.”
“Your dog’s getting pretty old,” I said.
“That’s different. I’d give anything for a litter of pups.” She caressed the peke. “Poor old girl, she’s lonely.”
I guess it all started when I got sprung. After three years Uncle decided I’d drunk my share of coffee and prescribed my share of codeine pills. There I stood, honorable discharge in hand, and twenty-seven years of my life already gone. I looked through the Medical Journal and thought of buying a practice somewhere. Then I saw how much they cost. The next step was coming back to earth and taking a job with Infer lab. They ran a blind ad.
There was a lot of writing to a box number and finally, after a month of playing post office, I got invited to drop around and “Meet the gang.”
The head gangster was kindly white-haired old Doctor Stillman. That’s all there was to say about Doc Stillman unless you wanted to add short, fat, puffy, blue-eyed, bushy-eyebrowed old Doctor Stillman. He wasn’t a bad joe though.
A vestal virgin in starched petticoats and white stockings dropped the barrier and he was up like a jackrabbit and around the desk, pumping my hand.
“Good afternoon, sir,” I said.
“Delighted to know you. Delighted. Come along, I’ll show you the plant.” He took an arm and steered me back past the aging vestal. We went through a maze of plumber’s nightmares in glass. I shook fifteen hundred hands and didn’t quite catch fifteen hundred names. Halfway through, we stood watching a girl wearing a dirty white smock over street clothes. The smock hung like a becalmed mains’l. When she turned around I recognized her.
“Well hi!” she said. “I haven’t seen you since pre-med.”
I shook another hand and this time I didn’t have to strain for the name. “What’s new?” I asked.
“Miss Goldfinch is one of our best virologists,” Doctor Stillman volunteered. “Come to think of it, that’s your line, isn’t it, doctor?”
I nodded.
“Well, you and Doctor Goldfinch will have to get together.” He was positively beaming.
We tore ourselves away from Nightmare Alice and finished the tour. Stillman waved me into a low chair.
“Well, doctor,” he said, “You’ve looked us over.”
“Very interesting place you have here.”
He opened a folder. “William Cotton, M.D. Born Newark, 1952. That makes you twenty-eight, doesn’t it?”
I nodded again.
“Interned Los Angeles County. Three years Army Med. Corps. Service Baffin Island. Must be nice to see civilization again,” he said.
“We had all the comforts of home.”
“All?” He raised bushy white eyebrows.
“VD incidence in enlisted personnel was comparable with that of stateside duty stations.”
“Times have changed since I was in the army. Well.” He was suddenly businesslike. “Are you familiar with our research?”
“Only what I read in the papers.”
“That’s the whole story. No secrets. No hired assassins breathing down your neck.”
“That’s nice. What are you actually doing?”
“Infertility research. As you know, we operate from voluntary contributions. I might add that contributions have increased nicely this last year.”
I’ll just bet they had! Ten years ago the birth rate began dropping. With the war over and world government a reality we should have been headed for a golden age. There was only one snag. The golden age was tailored for sixteen billions. When the population topped thirty the golden era began turning green around the edges.
When it started, editors went into rhapsodies on page four. That was the first year. The second year it dropped a little lower and toy manufacturers, pediatricians, and a few million others directly dependent on children decided not to put in that swimming pool after all. The third year no child was born. When Doc Stillman set up Inferlab he had no financial troubles.
“I’ll ask Miss Goldfinch to help you get settled,” he was saying. “When you’ve decided what you need give me the list.”
“Will I get it?”
“The sky’s the limit,” Stillman beamed.
Next morning I looked up Doctor Goldfinch. I wondered if her nickname had followed her.
“Hi,” she said with a snaggletoothed smile. “Ready to go?”
I nodded. “Stillman said to look you up.”
“How much room will you need?”
“How long is a piece of string?”
She laughed. “Coffee time. I’ll show you a short cut to the cafeteria.” She got out of the smock.
With marvelous illogicality women’s styles now featured a padded abdomen. As soon as women couldn’t get a bulge in the proper place they all wanted one. On Miss Goldfinch it looked like a marble taped to a soda straw.
She ran a comb through mousy hair and looked at a mirror. “What’s the use?” she said. We both laughed.
In a couple of weeks we were in the habit of lunching together. “Miss Goldfinch,” I asked, “have you ever wondered who pinned that awful name on you in college?”
“I have a pretty good idea. Have you ever wondered who transmuted William Cotton into Flannelmouth Bill?” I stared at her and we both laughed again.
“Alice, I’ve been reading these reports. Doesn’t anybody accomplish anything around here?”
“You know research. It takes just as long to prove you’re wrong as it does to prove you’re right.”
“And you’re wrong a lot oftener,” I finished. “But isn’t there any coordination here? Half the people are working on problems the other half solved years ago.”
I took space next to Alice’s and we knocked out the wall between us. The more I read the more wrong things looked. It didn’t look like a virus at all. It looked a lot simpler. I went around to biology and drew a pair of rhesus monkeys and a dozen hamsters. Three months later I knew what was causing infertility. I went to Doctor Stillman’s office.
When I finished talking Doc Stillman wasn’t beaming.
“Have you told anyone else about this?” he asked.
“It sounded too crazy. I didn’t want to get laughed at.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” he said grimly. “The whole government must be infiltrated. God knows what would have happened if it got to one of them first.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. Enemy agents, of course, but who’s the enemy?”
“Extraterrestrial?” I said hopefully.
“The Martian expedition didn’t even have a ruin to show for all their trouble.”
“The universe is bigger than the Moon and Mars.”
He ran gnarled fingers through bushy hair. “We mustn’t discount the possibility,” he conceded. “But that isn’t our job. The problem is: Whom can we tell?”
“How about letters to every editor in the world?”
“And start a panic? Besides, with their organization it’d be a cinch to stop us. Why, there must be millions of them!”
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 3