The Complete Dangerous Visions

by Anthology

  “I’m afraid to ask it for anything, today,” she said. “It keeps drugging me—James, Porter was put away a month ago, and I haven’t been able to paint since. Do you think I’m crazy? The Machine thinks so.”

  “The Machine,” he said, tearing off the end of the cigar with his teeth, “is always right.”

  Seeing Helena had wandered away to sit on Marya’s Chinese sofa, he excused himself with a nod and followed.

  Wattleigh still sat brooding over the Fool’s Mate. “I don’t understand. I just can’t understand,” he said.

  “—it’s like the hare and the tortoise,” boomed the mathematician. Lloyd nodded solemnly. “The slow one can’t ever catch up, see?”

  Lloyd spoke. “Well, you got a point. You got a point. Only I thought the slow one was the winner.”

  “Oh.” Dewes (or Clewes) lapsed into thoughtful silence.

  Marya wandered about the room, touching faces as if she were a blind person looking for someone she knew.

  “But I don’t understand!” said Wattleigh.

  “I do,” James mumbled about the cigar. The bittersweet smoke was thick as liquid in his mouth. He understood, all right. He looked at them, one by one: an ex-mathematician now having trouble with the difference between arithmetic and geometry; an ex-engineer, ditto; a painter not allowed to paint, not even to feel; a former chess “champion” who could not play. And that left Helena Hershee, mistress to poor, dumb Wattleigh.

  “Before the Machines—?” he began.

  “—I was a judge,” she said, running her fingertips over the back of his neck provocatively. “And you? What kind of doctor were you?”

  A.D. 1988

  “It was during the Second World War,” Jim Fairchild said. He lay on his back on the long, tiger-striped sofa, with a copy of Hot Rod Komiks over his eyes.

  “I thought it only started in the sixties,” said Marya.

  “Yeah, but the name ‘Mussulman’—that started in the Nazi death camps. There were some people in them who couldn’t—you know—get with it. They stopped eating and seeing and hearing. Everybody called them ‘Mussulmen,’ because they seemed like Moslems, mystics . . .”

  His voice trailed off, for he was thinking of the Second World War. The good old days, when a man made his own rules. No Machines to tell you what to do.

  He had been living with Marya for several months now. She was his girl, just as the other Marya, in Hot Rod Komiks, was the girl of the other Jim, Jim (Hell-on-Wheels) White. It was a funny thing about Komiks. They were real life, and at the same time they were better than life.

  Marya—his Marya—was no intellectual. She didn’t like to read and think, like Jim, but that was okay, because men were supposed to do all the reading and thinking and fighting and killing. Marya sat in a lavender bucket seat in the corner, drawing with her crayons. Easing his lanky, lean body up off the sofa, Jim walked around behind her and looked at the sketch.

  “Her nose is crooked,” he said.

  “That doesn’t matter, silly. This is a fashion design. It’s only the dress that counts.”

  “Well, how come she’s got yellow hair? People don’t have yellow hair.”

  “Helena Hershee has.”

  “No, she hasn’t!”

  “She has so!”

  “No, it ain’t yellow, it’s—it ain’t yellow.”

  Then they both paused, because Muzik was playing their favorite song. Each had a favorite of his own—Jim’s was “Blap,” and Marya’s was “Yes, I Know I Rilly Care for You”—but they had one favorite together. Called “Kustomized Tragedy,” it was one of the songs in which the Muzik imitated their voices, singing close harmony:

  Jim Gunn had a neat little kustom job,

  And Marya was his girl.

  They loved each other with a love so true,

  The truest in the worl’.

  But Jim weren’t allowed to drive his kar,

  And Marya could not see;

  Kust’mized Traju-dee-ee-ee.

  The song went on to articulate how Jim Gunn wanted more than anything in the worl’ to buy an eye operation for his girl, who wished to admire his kustom kar. So he drove to a store and held it up, but someone recognized his kar. The police shot him, but:

  He kissed his Marya one last time;

  The policeman shot her too.

  But she said, “I can see your kustom, Jim!

  It’s pretty gold and bloo!”

  He smiled and died embracing her,

  Happy that she could see.

  Kust’mized Traju-dee.

  Of course, in real life, Marya could see very well, Jim had no kar, and there were no policemen. But it was true for them, nevertheless. In some sense they could not express, they felt their love was a tragedy.

  Knowing Jim felt lonesome and bloo, Marya walked over and kissed his ear. She lay down beside him, and at once they were asleep.

  MEDCENTRAL’s audit showed a population of 250,000,000 in NORTHAMER, stabilized. Other than a few incubator failures, and one vat of accidentally infected embryos, progress was as predicted, with birth and death rates equal. The norm had shifted once more toward the asocial, and UTERINE CONTROL showed 90.2 per cent adult admissions at both major hospitals.

  Trenchant abnormals were being regressed through adolescence, there being no other completely satisfactory method of normalizing them without shock therapy, with its attendant contraindications.

  Lloyd pulled his pocket watch from the bib of his plaid overalls. The hands of Chicken Licken pointed straight up, meaning there was just time to fetch the mail before Farm Kartoons on TV. On Impulse, Lloyd popped the watch into his mouth and chewed. It was delicious, but it gave him little pleasure. Everything was too easy, too soft. He wanted exciting things to happen to him, like the time on Farm Kartoons when Black Angus tried to kill the hero, Lloyd White, by breaking up his Machine, and Lloyd White had stabbed him with a pitchfork syringe and sent him off to the hospital.

  Mechanical Joe, knowing it was time to fetch the mail, came running out of the house. He wagged his tail and whined impatiently. It didn’t make any difference that he wasn’t a real dog, Lloyd thought as they strolled toward the mailbox. Joe still liked it when you scratched his ears. You could tell, just by the look in his eyes. He was livelier and a lot more fun than the first Joe.

  Lloyd paused a moment, remembering how sad he’d been when Joe died. It was a pleasantly melancholy thought, but now mechanical Joe was dancing around him and barking anxiously. They continued.

  The mailbox was chock-full of mail. There was a new komik, called Lloyd Farmer and Joe, and a whole big box of new toys.

  Yet later, when Lloyd had read the komik and watched Farm Kartoon and played awhile with his building set, he still felt somehow heavy, depressed. It was no good being alone all the time, he decided. Maybe he should go to New York and see Jim and Marya. Maybe the Machines there were different, not so bossy.

  For the first time another, stranger thought came to him. Maybe he should go live in New York.

  DEAR DELPHINIA, [Dave printed.] THIS IS GOING TO BE MY LAST LETTER TO YOU, AS I DONT LOVE YOU ANY MORE. I KNOW NOW WHAT HAS BEEN MAKING ME FEEL BAD, AND IT IS YOU. YOU ARE REALLY MY MASHINE, ARENT YOU HA HA I’LL BET YOU DIDNT THINK I NEW.

  NOW I LOVE HELENA MORE THAN YOU AND WE ARE GOING AWAY TO NEW YORK AND SEE LOTS OF FRIENDS AND GO TO LOTS OF PARTYS AND HAVE LOTS OF FUN AND I DONT CARE IF I DONT SEE YOU NO MORE.

  LOVE, AND BEST OF LUCK TO A SWELL KID,

  DAVE W.

  After an earthquake destroyed seventeen million occupants of the Western hospital, MEDCENTRAL ordered the rest moved at once to the East. All abnormals not living near the East hospital were also persuaded to evacuate to New York. Persuasion was as follows:

  Gradually, humidity and pressure were increased to .9 discomfort while, subliminally, pictures of New York were flashed on all surfaces around each patient.

  Dave and Helena had come by subway from L.A., and they were tired an
d cross. The subway trip itself took only two or three hours, but they had spent an additional hour in the taxi to Jim’s and Marya’s.

  “It’s an electric taxi,” Dave explained, “and it only goes about a mile an hour. I’ll sure never make that trip again.”

  “I’m glad you came,” said Marya. “We’ve been feeling terrible lonesome and bloo.”

  “Yes,” Jim added, “and I got an idea. We can form a club, see, against the Machines. I got it all figured out. We—”

  “Babay, tell them about the zombies—I mean, the Mussulmen,” said Helena.

  Dave spoke with an excited, wild look about him. “Jeez, yeah, they had about a million cars of them on the train, all packed in glass bottles. I wasn’t sure what the hell they were at first, see, so I went up and looked at one. It was a skinny, hairless man, all folded up in a bottle inside another bottle. Weird-looking.”

  In honor of their arrival, the Muzik played the favorite songs of all four: “Zonk,” “Yes, I Know I Rilly Care for You,” “Blap,” and “That’s My Babay,” while the walls went transparent for a moment, showing a breath-taking view of the gold towers of New York. Lloyd, who spoke to no one, sat in the corner keeping time to the music. He had no favorite song.

  “I want to call this the Jim Fairchild Club,” said Jim. “The purpose of this here club is to get rid of the Machines. Kick ‘em out!”

  Marya and Dave sat down to a game of chess.

  “I know how we can do it, too,” Jim went on. “Here’s my plan: Who put the Machines in, in the first place? The U.S. Government. Well, there ain’t any U.S. Government any more. So the Machines are illegal. Right?”

  “Right,” said Helena. Lloyd continued to tap his foot, though no Muzik was playing.

  “They’re outlaws,” said Jim. “We oughta kill them!”

  “But how?” asked Helena.

  “I ain’t got all the details worked out yet. Give me time. Because, you know, the Machines done us wrong.”

  “How’s that?” asked Lloyd, as if from far away.

  “We all had good jobs, and we were smart. A long time ago. Now we’re all getting dumb. You know?”

  “That’s right,” Helena agreed. She opened a tiny bottle and began painting her toenails.

  “I think,” said Jim, glaring about him, “the Machines are trying to make us all into Mussulmen. Any of you want to get stuffed into a bottle? Huh?”

  “A bottle inside a bottle,” Dave corrected, without looking up from his game.

  Jim continued, “I think the Machines are drugging us into Mussulmen. Or else they got some kind of ray, maybe, that makes us stupider. An X ray, maybe.”

  “We gotta do something,” said Helena, admiring her foot.

  Marya and Dave began to quarrel about how the pawn moves.

  Lloyd continued to tap his foot, marking time.

  A.D. 1989

  Jimmy had a good idea, but nobody wanted to listen. He remembered, once when he was an itsy boy, a Egg Machine that tooked the eggs out of their shells and putted them into plastic—things. It was funny, the way the Machine did that. Jimmy didn’t know why it was so funny, but he laughed and laughed, just thinking about it. Silly, silly, silly eggs.

  Mary had a idea, a real good one. Only she didn’t know how to say it so she got a crayon and drew a great Big! picture of the Machines: Mommy Machine and Daddy Machine and all the little Tiny Tot Machines.

  Loy-Loy was talking. He was building a block house. “Now I’m putting the door,” he said. “Now I’m putting the lit-tle window. Now the—why is the window littler than the house? I don’t know. This is the chimney and this is the steeple and open the door and where’s all the peo-ple? I don’t know.”

  Helena had a wooden hammer, and she was driving all the pegs. Bang! Bang! Bang! “One, two, three!” she said. “Banga-banga-bang!”

  Davie had the chessmen out, lined up in rows, two by two. He wanted to line them all up three by three, only somehow he couldn’t. It made him mad and he began to cry.

  Then one of the Machines came and stuck something in his mouth, and everybody else wanted one and somebody was screaming and more Machines came and . . .

  The coded message came to MEDCENTRAL. The last five abnormals had been cured, and all physical and mental functions reduced to the norm. All pertinent data on them were switched over to UTERINE SUPPLY, which clocked them in at 400 hrs GMT, day 1, yr 1989. MEDCENTRAL agreed on the time check, then switched itself off.

  Afterword

  “The Happy Breed” demonstrates one version of what I like to think of as the Horrible Utopia. Ionesco’s play, The Bald Soprano, had already shown a world without evil. In a sense, this was my model; I tried to show a world without pain. In both instances, the same phenomena obtain: without evil or pain, preference and choice are meaningless; personality blurs; figures merge with their backgrounds, and thinking becomes superfluous and disappears. I believe these are the inevitable results of achieving Utopia, if we make the mistake of assuming that Utopia equals perfect happiness. There is, after all, a pleasure center in everyone’s head. Plant an electrode there, and presumably we could be constantly, perfectly happy on a dime’s worth of electricity a day.

  If not of happiness, then, of what material do we construct our Utopia? The avoidance of pain, perhaps? Perfect security from disease, accident, natural disaster? We gain these only at the cost of contact with our environment—ultimately at the cost of our humanity. We become “etherized,” in both of Eliot’s senses of the word: numb and unreal.

  To some, this story might seem itself unreal and hypothetical. I can only point out that dozens of electronic firms are now inventing and developing new diagnostic equipment; in a short time physicians will depend almost entirely upon machines for accurate diagnoses. There is no reason why it must stop there, or at any point short of mechanical doctors.

  If we elect to build machines to heal us, we must be certain we know what power we are giving them and what it is we ask in return. In “The Happy Breed” the agency through which the anesthetic world comes to be is a kind of genie, the Slave of the Pushbutton. It is a peculiarly literal-minded genie, and it will give us exactly what we ask, no more and no less. Norbert Wiener noticed the similarity between the behavior of literal-minded machines and that of magical agents in fairy tales, myths, ghost stories and even modern jokes.

  Semele thought she wanted Jove to make love to her exactly as he would to a goddess—but it turned out to be with lightning. The sorcerer’s apprentice thought he’d give up his work to a magical helper. Wells wrote of a rather dull-witted clerk who stopped the rotation of the earth suddenly. At one end of the spectrum are horror stories like “The Dancing Partner” or “The Monkey’s Paw,” and at the other is Lennie Bruce’s joke about the druggist who left a genie to mind his store. Said the genie’s first customer, “Make me a chocolate malted.”

  If we decide we really want health, security, freedom from pain, we must be willing to exchange our individuality for it. The use of any tool implies a loss of freedom, as Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents. When man started using a hand ax he lost the freedom to climb or walk on four limbs, but more important, he lost the freedom not to use the hand ax. We have now lost the freedom to do without computers, and it is no longer a question of giving them power over us, but of how much power, of what kind, and of how fast we turn it over to them.

  A professor at the University of Minnesota once told me of a term when he was late in making up grades. The department secretary kept calling him, asking if he were ready to turn in his grades yet. Finally a clerk from administration called him. On learning the grades were still not ready, the clerk said exasperatedly, “But, Professor, the machines are waiting!”

  They are indeed.

  ENCOUNTER WITH A HICK

  Introduction

  The first time I saw Jonathan Brand, he was lounging on a grassy knoll in Milford, Pennsylvania, wearing hiking boots on his feet, a knapsack on his
back, a six-blade tracker’s knife on his belt and a badge sewn on his blue shirt indicating he was a member of the American Forestry Association, or somesucb. He was lying there propped on his elbows, a blade of grass in his mouth, watching half a dozen of the older, more sophisticated giants of the science fiction field dousing each other with beer from quart bottles on The Lawn of Damon Knight’s home. Jonathan Brand was amused.

  Kindness forbids my explaining why Jim Blish, Ted Thomas, Damon and Gordy Dickson were cavorting in such an unseemly manner. Kindness and a suspicion that it is this innocence of childhood or nature that supplies the élan for their excellent writings, God forbid.

  Jon was in Milford for the nth Annual Science Fiction Writers Conference, a week of discussions, seminars and workshops in which members of the craft exchanged ideas, market information and wet shirts in the pursuance of greater facility in their chosen profession.

  He made quite an impression on attendees. His ready wit, his familiarity with the genre, and most of all the work he submitted for consideration in the workshops made him a new voice to be listened to. The story he had put in for comment—an act very close to hara-kiri—was read by all the writers present, and the criticism was stiff. It always is. The naked ids and exposed predilections of a blue-ribbon gathering of fantasists is not guaranteed to balm one’s creative soul or convince him he should be anything other than a hod carrier. But Jon and his story came off rather well. The praise was honest and with very few reservations. So well off did he appear that I asked Jon if I might buy the story for this anthology. He did a few minor editing flourishes, and the yarn appears here.

  Jonathan Brand admits he has been a graduate student for altogether too long. Carnegie Tech. He lives alone, walks to school each weekday in semester, hibernates in the summer, has no telephone, cherishes trolley cars, hates to talk or listen, likes to read and write, refuses to state his age, condition of marital servitude, background or any other damned thing that would make this introduction something more meaningful than an announcement that Jonathan Brand has written a very funny, slightly whacky, irreverent and definitely dangerous story for this book.