“Oh Christ, how am I supposed to come and go and go eat? How do I get into the store in the first place? Through the wall?”
“You can come and go,” Fergesson decided, “but you can’t loiter.”
Glaring after him dolefully, Stuart McConchie protested, “Aw cripes!”
Fergesson however paid no attention to his TV salesman; he began turning on displays and signs, preparing for the day ahead.
II
The phocomelus Hoppy Harrington generally wheeled up to Modern TV Sales & Service about eleven each morning. He generally glided into the shop, stopping his cart by the counter, and if Jim Fergesson was around he asked to be allowed to go downstairs to watch the two TV repairmen at work. However, if Fergesson was not around, Hoppy gave up and after a while wheeled off, because he knew that the salesmen would not let him go downstairs; they merely ribbed him, gave him the run-around. He did not mind. Or at least as far as Stuart McConchie could tell, he did not mind.
But actually, Stuart realized; he did not understand Hoppy, who had a sharp face with bright eyes and a quick, nervous manner of speech which often became jumbled into a stammer. He did not understand him psychologically. Why did Hoppy want to repair TV sets? What was so great about that? The way the phoce hung around, one would think it was the most exalted calling of all. Actually, repair work was hard, dirty, and did not pay too well. But Hoppy was passionately determined to become a TV repairman, and now he had succeeded, because Fergesson was determined to do right by all the minority groups in the world. Fergesson was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP and the Help for the Handicapped League—the latter being, as far as Stuart could tell, nothing but a lobby group on an international scale, set up to promote soft berths for all the victims of modern medicine and science, such as the multitude from the Bluthgeld Catastrophe of 1972.
And what does that make me? Stuart asked himself as he sat upstairs in the store’s office, going over his sales book. I mean, he thought, with a phoce working here … that practically makes me a radiation freak, too, as if being colored was a sort of early form of radiation burn. He felt gloomy thinking about it.
Once upon a time, he thought, all the people on Earth were white, and then some horse’s ass set off a high-altitude bomb back say around ten thousand years ago, and some of us got seared and it was permanent; it affected our genes. So here we are today.
Another salesman, Jack Lightheiser, came and sat down at the desk across from him and lit a Corina cigar. “I hear Jim’s hired that kid on the cart,” Lightheiser said. “You know why he did it, don’t you? For publicity. The S.F. newspapers’ll write it up. Jim loves getting his name in the paper. It’s a smart move, when you get down to it. The first retail dealer in the East Bay to hire a phoce.”
Stuart grunted.
“Jim’s got an idealized image of himself,” Lightheiser said. “He isn’t just a merchant; he’s a modern Roman, he’s civic-minded. After all, he’s an educated man—he’s got a master’s degree from Stanford.”
“That doesn’t mean anything any more,” Stuart said. He himself had gotten a master’s degree from Cal, back in 1975, and look where it had got him.
“It did when he got it,” Lightheiser said. “After all, he graduated back in 1947; he was on that GI Bill they had.”
Below them, at the front door of Modern TV, a cart appeared, in the center of which, at a bank of controls, sat a slender figure. Stuart groaned and Lightheiser glanced at him.
“He’s a pest,” Stuart said.
“He won’t be when he gets started working,” Lightheiser said. “The kid is all brain, no body at all, hardly. That’s a powerful mind he’s got, and he also has ambition. God, he’s only seventeen years old and what he wants to do is work, get out of school and work. That’s admirable.”
The two of them watched Hoppy on his cart; Hoppy was wheeling toward the stairs which descended to the TV repair department.
“Do the guys downstairs know, yet?” Stuart asked.
“Oh sure, Jim told them last night. They’re philosophical; you know how TV repairmen are—they griped about it but it doesn’t mean anything; they gripe all the time anyhow.”
Hearing the salesman’s voice, Hoppy glanced sharply up. His thin, bleak face confronted them; his eyes blazed and he said stammeringly, “Hey, is Mr. Fergesson in right now?”
“Naw,” Stuart said.
“Mr. Fergesson hired me,” the phoce said.
“Yeah,” Stuart said. Neither he nor Lightheiser moved; they remained seated at the desk, gazing down at the phoce.
“Can I go downstairs?” Hoppy asked.
Lightheiser shrugged.
“I’m going out for a cup of coffee,” Stuart said, rising to his feet. “I’ll be back in ten minutes; watch the floor for me, okay?”
“Sure,” Lightheiser said, nodding as he smoked his cigar.
When Stuart reached the main floor he found the phoce still there; he had not begun the difficult descent down to the basement.
“Spirit of 1972,” Stuart said as he passed the cart.
The phoce flushed and stammered, “I was born in 1964; it had nothing to do with that blast.” As Stuart went out the door onto the sidewalk the phoce called after him anxiously, “It was that drug, that thalidomide. Everybody knows that.”
Stuart said nothing; he continued on toward the coffee shop.
It was difficult for the phocomelus to maneuver his cart down the stairs to the basement where the TV repairmen worked at their benches, but after a time he managed to do so, gripping the handrail with the manual extensors which the U.S. Government had thoughtfully provided. The extensors were really not much good; they had been fitted years ago, and were not only partly worn out but were—as he knew from reading the current literature on the topic—obsolete. In theory, the Government was bound to replace his equipment with the more recent models; the Remington Act specified that, and he had written the senior California senator, Alf M. Partland, about it. As yet, however, he had received no answer. But he was patient. Many times he had written letters to U.S. Congressmen, on a variety of topics, and often the answers were tardy or merely mimeographed and sometimes there was no answer at all.
In this. case, however, Hoppy Harrington had, the law on his side, and it was only a matter of time before he compelled someone in authority to give him that which he was entitled to. He felt grim about it, patient and grim. They had to help him, whether they wanted to or not. His father, a sheep rancher in the Sonoma Valley, had taught him that: taught him always to demand what he was entitled to.
Sound blared. The repairmen at work; Hoppy paused, opened the door and faced the two men at the long, littered bench with its instruments and meters, its dials and tools and television sets in all stages of decomposition. Neither repairman noticed him.
“Listen,” one of the repairmen said all at once, startling him. “Manual jobs are looked down on. Why don’t you go into something mental, why don’t you go back to school and get a degree?” The repairman turned to stare at him questioningly.
No, Hoppy thought. I want to work with—my hands.
“You could be a scientist,” the other repairman said, not ceasing his work; he was tracing a circuit, studying his voltmeter.
“Like Bluthgeld,” Hoppy said.
The repairman laughed at that, with sympathetic understanding.
“Mr. Fergesson said you’d give me something to work on,” Hoppy said. “Some easy set to fix, to start with. Okay?” He waited, afraid that they were not going to respond, and then one of them pointed to a record changer. “What’s the matter with it?” Hoppy said, examining the repair tag. “I know I can fix it.”
“Broken spring,” one of the repairmen said. “It won’t shut off after the last record.”
“I see,” Hoppy said. He picked up the record changer with his two manual extensors and rolled to the far end of the bench, where there was a cleared space. “I’ll work here.” The repairm
en did not protest, so he picked up pliers. This is easy, he thought to himself. I’ve practiced at home; he concentrated on the record changer but also watching the two repairmen out of the corner of his eye. I’ve practiced many times; it nearly always works, and all the time it’s better, more accurate. More predictable. A spring is a little object, he thought, as little as they come. So light it almost blows away. I see the break in you, he thought. Molecules of metal not touching, like before. He concentrated on that spot, holding the pliers so that the repairman nearest him could not see; he pretended to tug at the spring, as if trying to remove it.
As he finished the job he realized that someone was standing behind him, had come up to watch; he turned, and it was Jim Fergesson, his employer, saying nothing but just standing there with a peculiar expression on his face, his hands stuck in his pockets.
“All done,” Hoppy said nervously.
Fergesson said, “Let’s see.” He took hold of the changer, lifted it up into the overhead fluorescent light’s glare.
Did he see me? Hoppy wondered. Did he understand, and if so, what does he think? Does he mind, does he really care? Is he—horrified?
There was silence as Fergesson inspected the changer.
“Where’d you get the new spring?” he asked suddenly.
“I found it lying around,” Hoppy said, at once.
It was okay. Fergesson, if he had seen, had not understood. The phocomelus relaxed and felt glee, felt a superior pleasure take the place of his anxiety; he grinned at the two repairmen, looked about for the next job expected of him.
Fergesson said, “Does it make you nervous to have people watch you?”
“No,” Hoppy said. “People can stare at me all they want; I know I’m different. I’ve been stared at since I was born.”
“I mean when you work.”
“No,” he said, and his voice sounded loud—perhaps too loud—in his ears. “Before I had a cart,” he said, “before the Government provided me anything, my dad used to carry me around on his back, in a sort of knapsack. Like a papoose.” He laughed uncertainly.
“I see,” Fergesson said.
“That was up around Sonoma,” Hoppy said. “Where I grew up. We had sheep. One time a ram butted me and I flew through the air. Like a ball.” Again he laughed; the two repairmen regarded him silently, both of them pausing in their work.
“I’ll bet,” one of them said after a moment, “that you rolled when you hit the ground.”
“Yes,” Hoppy said, laughing. They all laughed, now, himself and Fergesson and the two repairmen; they imagined how it looked, Hoppy Harrington, seven years old, with no arms or legs, only a torso and head, rolling over the ground, howling with fright and pain—but it was funny; he knew it. He told it so it would be funny; he made it become that way.
“You’re a lot better set up now, with your cart,” Fergesson said.
“Oh yes,” he said. “And I’m designing a new one, my own design; all electronic—I read an article on brain-wiring, they’re using it in Switzerland and Germany. You’re wired directly to the motor centers of the brain so there’s no lag; you can move even quicker than—a regular physiological structure.” He started to say, than a human. “I’ll have it perfected in a couple of years,” he said, “and it’ll be an improvement even on the Swiss models. And then I can throw away this Government junk.”
Fergesson said in a solemn, formal voice, “I admire your spirit.”
Laughing, Hoppy said with a stammer, “Th-thanks, Mr. Fergesson.”
One of the repairmen handed him a multiplex FM tuner. “It drifts. See what you can do for the alignment.”
“Okay,” Hoppy said, taking it in his metal extensors. “I sure will. I’ve done a lot of aligning, at home; I’m experienced with that.” He had found such work easiest of all: he barely had to concentrate on the set. It was as if the task were made to order for him and his abilities.
Reading the calendar on her kitchen wall, Bonny Keller saw that this was the day her friend Bruno Bluthgeld saw her psychiatrist Doctor Stockstill at his office in Berkeley. In fact, he had already seen Stockstill, had had his first hour of therapy and had left. Now he no doubt was driving back to Livermore and his own office at the Radiation Lab, the lab at which she had worked years ago before she had gotten pregnant: she had met Doctor Bluthgeld, there, back in 1975. Now she was thirty-one years old and living in West Marin; her husband George was now vice-principal of the local grammar school, and she was very happy.
Well, not very happy. Just moderately—tolerably—happy. She still took analysis herself—once a week now instead of three times—and in many respects she understood herself, her unconscious drives and paratactic systematic distortions of the reality situation. Analysis, six years of it, had done a great deal for her, but she was not cured. There was really no such thing as being cured; the “illness” was life itself, and a constant growth (or rather a viable growing adaptation) had to continue, or psychic stagnation would result.
She was determined not to become stagnant. Right now she was in the process of reading The Decline of the West in the original German; she had gotten fifty pages read, and it was well worth it. And who else that she knew had read it, even in the English?
Her interest in German culture, in its literary and philosophical works, had begun years ago through her contact with Doctor Bluthgeld. Although she had taken three years of German in college, she had not seen it as a vital part of her adult life; like so much that she had carefully learned, it had fallen into the unconscious, once she had graduated and gotten a job. Bluthgeld’s magnetic presence had reactivated and enlarged many of her academic interests, her love of music and art … she owed a great deal to Bluthgeld, and she was grateful.
Now, of course, Bluthgeld was sick, as almost everyone at Livermore knew. The man had profound conscience, and he had never ceased to suffer since the error of 1972— which, as they all knew, all those who had been a part of Livermore in those days, was not specifically his fault; it was not his personal burden, but he had chosen to make it so, and because of that he had become ill, and more ill with each passing year.
Many trained people, and the finest apparati, the foremost computers of the day, had been involved in the faulty calculation—not faulty in terms of the body of knowledge available in 1972 but faulty in relationship to the reality situation. The enormous masses of radioactive clouds had not drifted off but had been attracted by the Earth’s gravitational field, and had returned to the atmosphere; no one bad been more surprised than the staff at Livermore. Now, of course, the Jamison-French Layer was more completely understood; even the popular magazines such as Time and US News could lucidly explain what had gone wrong and why. But this was nine years later.
Thinking of the Jamison-French Layer, Bonny remembered the event of the day, which she was missing. She went at once to the TV set in the living room and switched it on. Has it been fired off yet? she wondered, examining her watch. No, not for another half hour. The screen lighted, and sure enough, there was the rocket and its tower, the personnel, trucks, gear; it was decidedly still on the ground, and probably Walter Dangerfield and Mrs. Dangerfield had not even boarded it yet.
The first couple to emigrate to Mars, she said to herself archly, wondering how Lydia Dangerfield felt at this moment … the tall blond woman, knowing that their chances of getting to Mars were computed at only about sixty per cent. Great equipment, vast diggings and constructions, awaited them, but so what if they were incinerated along the way? Anyhow, it would impress the Soviet bloc, which had failed to establish its colony on Luna; the Russians had cheerfully suffocated or starved—no one knew exactly for sure. In any case, the colony was gone. It had passed out of history as it had come in, mysteriously.
The idea of NASA sending just a couple, one man and his wife, instead of a group, appalled her; she felt instinctively that they were courting failure by not randomizing their bets. It should be a few people leaving New York, a few leaving Ca
lifornia, she thought as she watched on the TV screen the technicians giving the rocket last-minute inspections. What do they call that? Hedging your bets? Anyhow, not all the eggs should be in this one basket … and yet this was how NASA had always done it: one astronaut at a time from the beginning, and plenty of publicity. When Henry Chancellor, back in 1967, had burned to particles in his space platform, the entire world had watched on TV—grief-stricken, to be sure, but nonetheless they had been permitted to watch. And the public reaction had set back space exploration in the West five years.
“As you can see now,” the NBC announcer said in a soft but urgent voice, “final preparations are being made. The arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Dangerfield is expected momentarily. Let us review just for the sake of the record the enormous preparations made to insure—”
Blah, Bonny Keller said to herself, and, with a shudder, shut off the TV. I can’t watch, she said to herself.
On the other hand, what was there to do? Merely sit biting her nails for the next six hours—for the next two weeks, in fact? The only answer would have been not to remember that this was the day the First Couple was being fired off. However, it was too late now not to remember.
She like to think of them as that, the first couple … like something out of a sentimental, old-time, science-fiction story. Adam and Eve, once over again, except that in actuality Walt Dangerfield was no Adam; he had more the quality of the last, not the first man, with his wry, mordant wit, his halting, almost cynical manner of speech as he faced the reporters. Bonny admired him; Dangerfield was no punk, no crewcut-haired young blond automaton, hacking away at the Air Forces’ newest task. Walt was a real person, and no doubt that was why NASA had selected him. His genes—they were probably stuffed to overflowing with four thousand years of culture, the heritage of mankind built right in. Walt and Lydia would found a Nova Terra … there would be lots of sophisticated little Dangerfields strolling about Mars, declaiming intellectually and yet with that amusing trace of sheer jazziness that Dangerfield had.
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