by Bob Shaw
The fall did not kill Maggie, but the damage to her lower spine was such that she was confined to a wheelchair for life. As the Trymbles’ house was tall and narrow—with a steep flight of steps at the door—Ted felt that his wife was as good as dead. She could not, at any rate, get to the expensive stores in which she would be tempted to further acts of infidelity.
With a mimimum of prompting from him she sold the car and the coat at a relatively small loss, but insisted on retaining the bracelet of green-veined Venusian gold.
“What’s the point of keeping it?” he pleaded. “I mean, you don’t even go out now.”
“It’s company for me. Something I can look at.”
‘But there must be more interesting things to look at—how about a television set?”
To Ted’s surprise, his wife showed interest in the suggestion. “If I sell the bracelet will you get me a set?”
“Of course, sweetie.”
“Any kind of a television set?”
He sensed the trap immediately, but in his mind’s eye he could see the big nuclear-powered ships speeding towards Earth with cargoes of cheaper Venusian gold, and he decided to play along. “Any kind of set you want, Maggie. You know how bad I feel about you being tied to that chair all the time.”
“That’s nice of you, honey. I’d like a Telemart Three.”
Ted swallowed unhappily. He detested television as an opiate which sapped a man’s strength of body and mind, and he even had an aversion to reading about the bewildering technical developments in the field. But he knew about the Telemart Three.
The set was ordered that day and Ted’s unhappiness increased as he watched the technicians position the eight-foot proscenium and arch at one end of the lounge. Working with blunt efficiency they ripped out the floor below the proscenium and ran a mass of cables, conduits and wave guides down to the raw materials tank they were installing in the basement. Four hours later the job was completed, and a Telemart sales exec. formally presented Maggie with a white-and-gold brochure. He then placed the remote control set in her hand with the air of an English archbishop conferring the orb and sceptre of his sovereign.
“This is your on-off switch and channel selector,” he said, addressing himself intensely to Maggie and ignoring Ted. He moved the switch and a pretty girl in a silver dress appeared on the proscenium, singing in the low voice of a French diseuse. The only way in which she could be distinguished from real flesh-and-blood was a slight tendency to glow, which made her brighter than the other people in the room.
“Oops,” the sales exec. said. “If the image is too bright you do this.” He moved a knob and the girl dimmed to normality.
“It’s wonderful,” Maggie breathed. “When do we get the commercials?”
“You shouldn’t have long to wait,” the exec. said benignly, his eyes gleaming behind their old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. A few seconds later the silver girl finished her song and vanished, to be replaced by a handsome, tanned man in beachwear. He was reclining on a sun chair on a shockingly real area of honey-coloured sand, and in his hand was a dewy-cold bottle of Tingle-lime. Ted started involuntarily—he could actually smell sea air mingled with the keen tang of the soft drink. He examined the small orifices in the edge of the proscenium, looking for visible signs of gas being emitted, but saw nothing.
‘… why don’t you join me?” the image was saying. “Join me now!”
“Shall I?” Maggie asked excitedly.
“Only if you can use some Tingle-lime,” the exec. replied. “We urge all our clients to buy only what they really need.”
“We drink lots of Tingle-lime.”
“No we don’t,” Ted put in, but he was too late. Maggie had pressed the ‘accept’ button on her handset and a crate of a dozen king-size Tingle-limes appeared, amid a faint ozonic crackling, on the vestigial catwalk attached to the front of the proscenium. The exec. lifted the crate, carried it to Maggie’s chair and with a flourish opened one of the plastic bottles.
Maggie took it and sipped the green liquid eagerly. “It’s perfect—even better than the stuff we get at the store.”
“It ought to be. Anything you buy in a store is bound to have been on the shelves for some time, possibly months, but goods you buy through Telemart Three are created specially for you on the instant of purchase.”
“How can that be?” Ted felt he had been silent too long. “As I understand it, there has to be a crate of Tingle-lime at the broadcasting station. It gets scanned with Röntgen rays and the details of its molecular structure are broadcast on a separate channel from the one which carries the programmes and commercials. Right?”
“That’s true, but …’
“If someone presses the ‘accept’ button, the molecular blueprint coming through at that time is used to build up a replica of the transmitted object from the raw materials bank in the basement. Right?”
“Right again, but …’
“So how do we know the original crate of pop hasn’t been lying on a shelf at the station, possibly for months?”
“You know because the Telemart Corporation stands over its word as given in this brochure,” the exec. said in a hurt voice. He turned to Maggie. “I’m pleased that a Tingle-lime commercial was on when you made your first purchase because it demonstrates the superiority of the Telemart Three over all other models. Believe it or not, a carbonated drink is not an easy object to transmit. With older systems there was an appreciable loss of carbon dioxide pressure before the container was completely formed.
‘But the Telemart Three comes so close to instantaneous construction of the transmitted object that it is possible to …’
“Oh, look,” Maggie interrupted. “There’s a commercial for liqueur chocolates. It’s ages since I’ve had a liqueur chocolate.”
Ted hurried into the ground floor room in which his wife had slept since her injury and found the bracelet of Venusian gold. He had a feeling he would need to get the best possible price for it.
In spite of intensive bargaining, and even a certain amount of abject pleading, he dropped over $5,000 on the bracelet. He went to his favourite gymnasium and spent two hours trying to work the tension toxins out of his body, but all the while a gloomy certainty that he had made a major blunder was building up in him. Finally, half-way through a set of deep knee bends, he made a decision—Maggie would have to give him a sacred vow not to use the Telemart for anything beyond normal household shopping. If necessary he would even sit with her at nights until satisfied she was going to play the game.
He showered quickly and drove home in his ageing rotary-engined Pontiac. The tall narrow house was in darkness except for a dim, shifting light in the window of the lounge. Ted sprinted up the stone steps and went into the house, but he had trouble opening the lounge door. There seemed to be something heavy preventing it from moving. He got his head into the room and blinked incredulously at what he saw.
Maggie was sitting close to the proscenium, watching a noisy powerboat race, but she was almost hidden from his view by a pile of cartons and boxes, most of which had been opened. In the first seconds he picked out three new table lamps, a gilt-framed painting which looked like a Renoir, several of the recently developed four-legged turkeys in polythene skins, a salon-type hair drier, numerous hat boxes, and a de luxe Micropedia Britannica complete with reclining chair and ceiling projector.
Ted was unable to suppress a plaintive whimpering sound as he forced his way into the room. “You bitch,” he moaned. “You faithless bitch.”
“What did you say, honey?” Maggie twisted a knob on the handset and the sound of the jockeying speedboats faded away. She wheeled her chair round to face Ted and he saw the Telemart brochure was open on her knees.
“What do you think you’re doing, Maggie? They don’t give this stuff away, you know—our bank account is automatically debited every time you press that button.”
Maggie shrugged. “I’ve been enjoying myself—which makes a nice change. T
ed, honey, you really should look at this brochure. You don’t have to buy just what they show you in the commercials—Telemart offers all kind of services I never dreamed …’ She stopped speaking as he picked up one of the turkeys and hurled it at the vista of boats beyond the proscenium arch. The bird passed through a red boat, hit the wall of the room and bounced back out on to the floor.
“I’m going to kill you,” Ted announced. “I’m a fair-minded man, and I don’t like the idea of killing you, but you give me no choice.”
“You’ve been drinking!”
“I’m cold sober.” He looked around the room, selected one of the new table lamps and removed its ornate shade, leaving himself with a serviceable blunt instrument.
Maggie clutched the Telemart’s handset to her bosom in a strangely protective gesture. “Don’t come near me!”
“In a way I blame myself,” Ted said sadly, hefting the base of the lamp. “I should have known you weren’t ready for the responsibilities of marriage.” He stepped over a cluster of perfume bottles and swung downwards at Maggie’s head. She twisted away from the lamp and it crunched into the back of the wheelchair, tipping it over. Maggie went sprawling among the hat boxes. Breathing heavily, Ted stood over her and raised the base with both hands, noting with one part of his mind that she was still holding the handset and was, in fact, twisting a red knob on it. Poor mindless lump, he thought as he brought the club down.
“Drop it right there, fellow,” a voice said close behind him. Ted spun and saw a hard-faced young man in a grey suit stepping down from the truncated catwalk attached to the proscenium. The stranger was holding an automatic pistol.
“Who … ?”Ted’s voice faltered as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening. “What is this?”
The stranger smiled unpleasantly. “You can’t have studied the section of the Telemart brochure covering our new Three Star Protection Service for clients’ lives and property.”
“Protection?”
“Yes. As soon as we get an emergency signal a trained security man who is on duty at the station is instantaneously transmitted into the home—and in this case I’d say I made it just in time.”
‘But they can’t do that!” Ted had an overpowering sense of outrage. “After a while there’d be hundreds of duplicates of you running about the city. Telemart can’t go around creating extra people—we’re overpopulated as it is.”
A shadow crossed the stranger’s face. “That’s taken care of. They deliberately programme a flaw into the haemoglobin structure of any duplicates they have to transmit. A massive embolism will kill me in a few hours. It’s a hell of a prospect.” The stranger raised his right hand and levelled the pistol.
“Just a minute,” Ted said desperately. “There must be some arrangement we can come to. I’ve got money …’
The stranger regarded him with cold, tortured eyes. “What good is money to a duplicate like me? I’ve got a short life, and all I can do is make it as gay as possible.”
He aimed the pistol right between Ted’s eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Invasion of Privacy
“I saw Granny Cummins again today,” Sammy said through a mouthful of turnip and potato.
May’s fork clattered into her plate. She turned her head away, and I could see there were tears in her eyes. In my opinion she had always been much too deeply attached to her mother, but this time I could sympathise with her—there was something about the way the kid had said it.
“Listen to me, Sammy.” I leaned across the table and gripped his shoulder. “The next time you make a dumb remark like that I’ll paddle your backside good and hard. It wasn’t funny.”
He gazed at me with all the bland defiance a seven-year-old can muster. “I wasn’t trying to be funny. I saw her.”
“Your granny’s been dead for two weeks,” I snapped, exasperated both at him and at May, who was letting the incident get too far under her skin. Her lips had begun to tremble.
“Two weeks,” Sammy repeated, savouring the words. He had just discovered sarcasm and I could tell by his eyes he was about to try some on. “If she’d only been dead two days it woulda been all right, I suppose. But not two weeks, eh?” He rammed a huge blob of creamed potato into his mouth with a flourish.
“George!” May’s brown eyes were spilling as she looked at me and the copper strands of her hair quivered with anger. “Do something to that child! Make him drop dead.”
“I can’t Smack him for that, hon,” I said reasonably. “The kid was only being logical. Remember in Decline and Fall where a saint got her head chopped off, then was supposed to get up and walk a mile or so to the burial ground, and religious writers made a great fuss about the distance she’d covered, and Gibbon said in a case like that the distance wasn’t the big thing—it was the taking of the first step? Well …’ I broke off as May fled from the table and ran upstairs. The red sunlight of an October evening glowed on her empty chair, and Sammy continued eating.
“See what you’ve done?” I rapped his blond head with my knuckles, but not sharply enough to hurt. I’m letting you off this time—for the last time—but I can’t let you go on upsetting your mother with a stupid joke. Now cut it out.”
Sammy addressed the remains of his dinner. “I wasn’t joking. I … saw … Granny … Cummins.”
“She’s been dead and buried for …’ I almost said two weeks again, but stopped as an expectant look appeared on his face. He was quite capable of reproducing the same sarcasm word for word. “How do you explain that?”
“Me?” A studied look of surprise. “I can’t explain it. I’m just telling you what I seen.”
“All right—where did you see her?”
“In the old Guthrie place, of course.”
Of course, I thought with a thrill of something like nostalgia. Where else? Every town, every district in every city, has its equivalent of the old Guthrie place. To find it, you simply stop any small boy and ask him if he knows of a haunted house where grisly murders are committed on a weekly schedule and vampires issue forth at night. I sometimes think that if no suitable building existed already the community of children would create one to answer a dark longing in their collective mind. But the building is always there—a big, empty, ramshackle place, usually screened by near-black evergreens, never put up for sale, never pulled down, always possessing a “Bal immunity to property developers. And in the small town where I live the old Guthrie house was the one which filled the bill. I hadn’t really thought about it since childhood, but it looked just the same as ever—dark, shabby and forbidding—and I should have known it would have the same associations for another generation of kids. At the mention of the house Sammy had become solemn and I almost laughed aloud as I saw myself, a quarter of a century younger, in his face.
“How could you have seen anything in there?” I decided to play along a little further as long as May was out of earshot. “It’s too far from the road.”
“I climbed through the fence.”
“Who was with you?”
“Nobody.”
“You went in alone?”
“Course I did.” Sammy tilted his head proudly and I recalled that as a seven-year-old nothing in the world would have induced me to approach that house, even in company. I looked at my son with a new respect, and the first illogical stirrings of alarm.
“I don’t want you hanging around that old place, Sammy—it could be dangerous.”
“It isn’t dangerous.” He was scornful. “They just sit there in big chairs, and never move.”
“I meant you could fall or … What?
“The old people just sit there.” Sammy pushed his empty plate away. “They’d never catch me in a hundred years even if they did see me, but I don’t let them see me, ‘cause I just take one quick look through the back window and get out of there.”
“You mean there are people living in the Guthrie place?”
“Old people. Lots of them. They just sit there in big
chairs.”
I hadn’t heard anything about the house being occupied, but I began to guess what had been going on. It was big enough for conversion to a private home for old people—and to a child one silver-haired old lady could look very much like another. Perhaps Sammy preferred to believe his grandmother had moved away rather than accept the idea that she was dead and buried beneath the ground in a box.
“Then you were trespassing as well as risking …’ I lowered my voice to a whisper as May’s footsteps sounded on the stairs again. “You didn’t see your Granny Cummins, you’re not to go near the old Guthrie place again, and you’re not to upset your mother. Got that?”
Sammy nodded, but his lips were moving silently and I knew he was repeating his original statement over and over to himself. Any anger I felt was lost in a tide of affection—my entire life had been one of compromise and equivocation, and it was with gratitude I had discovered that my son had been born with enough will and sheer character for the two of us.