The Steam-Driven Boy

by Sladek, John

  ‘Well – actually there isn’t any, Roger. We haven’t kept one here for years. There’s just the one each new man wears, which the old man wears when he leaves again.’

  ‘Damn!’ He thought for a moment. ‘I could probably get by with just an air filter, for a little while. I’ll try that.’

  The machine had begun baking cookies, and the tent was filled with the fresh smell. ‘You’ll have to get an early start, then,’ she said. ‘The wind gets too high later on.’

  But he slept late the next morning, and when he awoke, it was with the luxurious feeling of playing hookey. This wasn’t going to be so bad at all, he reasoned. There were a million worthwhile things he could fill his time with: there was his study of logical empiricism, which he could really get into, maybe even write a paper or two. There was his journal. All right, it wouldn’t be a chronicle of adventure, but a record of his thoughts and impressions from the centre of a sandstorm. He could write a novel. Finally, he could meditate. In fact, he could begin right now.

  But first, breakfast in bed. She lingered in the doorway, asking him what he’d dreamed, commenting on the way he’d arranged the room. ‘Is that your girl? “All my love, Jane.” Isn’t that sweet? Nice-looking girl, too. What they call photogenic. Some people never come out right in pictures, and others look much better than they really look, you know? I’ll bet Jane is that type.’

  ‘What about you, Rita-Mom? I’ll bet you photograph just exactly the way you look in life, eh?’ He chuckled, seeing the remark had hit home.

  He tried to do some philosophy with what was left of the morning, but she interrupted him first to clean the room (‘It’s in the general regulations’), and again to ask him what he preferred for lunch.

  Lunch was excellent, but the home-brewed beer that went with it made him sleepy. He dreamed of Jane, but the machine kept wandering into the dream at awkward moments. Then, Jane, too, became a machine, and he discovered that, from the waist down, she consisted of nothing but a coaxial cable.

  He awoke late in the afternoon, with a headache and an unpleasant taste in his mouth. Mom was there with the aspirin and lemon tea.

  ‘I’ve wasted the whole day,’ he said. ‘It’s getting dark.’

  ‘You just aren’t adjusted,’ she said soothingly. ‘The day only has twenty hours here, you know. I’ve never figured out why they stuck to the same old clock, instead of shortening the hours, and having twenty-four again. As it is, they have a fraction left over every day, so we gain a day every so many months. Or is it lose a day? I never can remember whether you set the clock ahead or behind, can you? It’s the same with Daylight Savings Time …’ And she was off, discoursing ignorantly on time for nearly one (normal) hour. It was only a machine, he told himself. He could turn it off any time.

  He sat over his journal for four hours after dinner, but all he could write was:

  ‘Sand. Sand. Sand.’

  The following days were more of the same. His study of philosophy bogged down the day she showed him she could reel off pages and pages of Wittgenstein in German or English – and considered Wittgenstein a waste of time. He noticed he was putting on weight, then stopped noticing. Finally he hung a dirty undershirt over the mirror in his room, and forbade her to touch it.

  She interrupted his meditations so often that he found them impossible even when she didn’t interrupt. He stopped shaving, at first to annoy her, then for no reason at all. In her cleaning, one day, she knocked Jane’s picture down and cracked the glass. He forbade her to clean his room any more, regulations or no.

  He found her supply of home brew and got drunk, sitting at the kitchen table and listening to her endless chattering.

  ‘Shut up!’ he screamed. Seizing her by the shoulders, he shook her. ‘Shut up, for God’s sake!’ And stopped her moving, plastic mouth with his own mouth. ‘I want a woman,’ he murmured.

  Slowly but firmly, the steel rods in her arms pushed him away. As always, her expression was calm. ‘Unfortunately, my manufacturers didn’t foresee your need,’ she said drily.

  ‘What?’ he grunted it, his flushed, uncomprehending face hanging over her. He had begun to list, slightly.

  ‘I’m not a woman,’ she said, pronouncing the words slowly and distinctly. ‘I’m a Kewpie doll, Roger.’

  He was on his knees, vomiting, and then he lay flat in it and went to sleep.

  In the morning he wrote a second entry in his journal:

  ‘We are all machines, or’

  He lay the fibre pen down without capping it. The ink in it dried, and the page with the unfinished entry became dusty.

  With a fine irony, he began to call her ‘Mom’. It became a meaningless, habitual form of address.

  He wanted to go out, into the sandstorm, just once before his replacement arrived. But he was afraid.

  Mom was talking about Jane’s photograph. ‘I mean, since the glass is cracked anyway, and it really is silly to try to remember people from photographs, either you remember them anyway, or –’

  He touched the switch at the lobe of her ear, and she became a statue. In the silence, he could hear her watch.

  Tying a cloth over his face, he hurried out.

  It was inhumanly cold. The faceless landscape around him lay dormant. It was the floor of some lifeless sea, cold, empty, frightening. With effort, Roger pushed himself away from the door and waded out a few steps.

  Then the bleak wastes came to life, at the touch of the morning wind. Dunes began to blur and shift, and the light of the sun was dimmed. Roger’s breath came harder.

  What was he doing here? The wind was furious, now, trying to bury his legs, flinging sand at his eyes. A man could die here like a scream, unnoticed amid the senseless movement of the sand. Roger felt himself smothering. The door, only a dozen steps away, seemed now unreachable. He saw himself choking, dying, his lungs filling up with sand, flesh torn from his bones, the bones themselves rubbed to sand …

  Roger stumbled inside and fell across his bed, coughing and cursing, the tears pouring from his sore eyes. It was some time before he realized with a shock, that he was having hysterics.

  ‘They told me an explorer needs guts and imagination,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘It was a lie. An explorer must be a coward, afraid to do anything beyond strictly following orders. He must not be able to care about a woman, a set of ideas, or a way of thinking or feeling. He must deal only with the mundane, the day-to-day, the “given reality”, as the interviewer said.

  ‘I think GX was ingenious to think of using a Mom for each explorer, to help break him down to an efficient tool. He who lives with machines becomes machine-like, and now I see the title Mom is more than honorific. She is truly the mother of the mechanism Roger Sewell.’

  It was clever of GX to provide her with a switch, he thought. As if he were able to switch her off for good.

  ‘– else you don’t. Well, I see you’ve turned me off long enough to go outside and come back in tracking up the whole place, as if I didn’t have enough to do. You men! If there weren’t any dirt, you’d invent it, I swear. Now what are you doing, burning your journal? What in the world for? We could have used the paper. I was just thinking the other day, if I had some paper, I could write down alternate menus for each meal, and you could just check off what you liked, instead of my having to bother you with a lot of questions. And have you accuse me of talking too much, I know that’s what you think. At least I don’t brood, my mind’s an open book …’

  1937 A.D.!

  Picture, if you will, an inventor, working in his bicycle shop in 1878. His long hair occasionally falls in his eyes; he shakes it aside impatiently, flexes sinewy arms against the pull of a wrench, biting his lip with preoccupation. Now and then he may pause to sip some of the cool lemonade his widowed Mom has brought to him, sip and glance up at the picture of Sam Franklin on the whitewashed plank wall. Early to bed and early to rise … he thinks. A penny saved is a penny earned. His serious brows knit, as he ferrets the last
bit of truth from these proverbs.

  Such an inventor was Emil Hart. He and his mother shared a small cottage exactly in the centre of the state of Kiowa. Their modest home was otherwise undistinguished except for a heavy mortgage, which the good widow hoped to reduce. Toward that end she knitted clever antimacmillans (lacy affairs designed to protect the tops of sofas and chairs from a then-popular hair grease called MacMillan’s) and sold peafowl eggs. Emil augmented this meagre income by repairing bicycles and selling the FRIDAY EVENING POST (founded by Sam Franklin). Yet he knew fate intended for him a greater calling – inventor of the Time Engine!

  One day Fenton Morbes, the town bully, stopped by. Seeing the great engine spread over the entire shop, he whistled with amazement.

  ‘What’cher doing?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m only filing a bit of isinglass,’ said Emil, shaking the hair from his eyes. He had no time to waste speaking to Morbes.

  ‘I mean, what’cher building?’ Morbes removed his bicycle clips and tossed them carelessly into a corner. They were made of costly aluminium, for he was rich.

  Emil sighed. ‘I’m building a temporal extrapolator,’ he said. ‘It will enable me to go into the future.’

  The bully guffawed. ‘Stuff!’ he said. ‘Nobody kin go into the future!’

  With a knowing smile, Emil bent over his work. After fitting the piece of isinglass into a gear of peculiar shape, he set about attaching a pair of wires to a telegraph key.

  Morbes flushed red about the nostrils of his broad, saddle-like nose. He was not used to being ignored. ‘Stuff!’ he exclaimed once more. ‘Even if it works, this here engine won’t bring in enough to feed your peafowls, let alone pay the mortgage when my Paw comes around to foreclose.’

  ‘Foreclose!’ said the young inventor, growing pale.

  ‘Yep. You’d better have a hundred dollars ready by next Monday,’ said Morbes with a grin. ‘Tell you what. If you’ll wash my bicycle, I’ll give you a whole dollar. Get it spanking clean now, for I’m to go on a picnic today, with Miss Maud Peed.’

  At this news, Emil grew even paler, and staggered back as tough he’d been stuck.

  ‘Oh, I know you been kinda sweet on her,’ smirked the bully. ‘But she ain’t got no time for a crazy feller what putters around his bicycle shop with time engines. Hah!’

  No time for him! As the colour continued to ebb from Emil’s face, and into the coarser features of his rival, he wondered what strange fate it was that had made them both suitors for the hand of the lovely Maud Peed. So be it. He raised his tear-filled eyes once more to the portrait of Sam Franklin. He seemed to draw strength from the homely features, the rheumy eyes. What was the right thing to do, the truly Columbian thing? To try to stay and win Maud back from Fenton Morbes – a hopeless task? Or to escape into the bright future, and there seek his fortune?

  In a moment he had made his decision. He would go into tomorrow! He would see 1937 A.D., that promised land – the very system of numbering our years promised it! He would drink in its wonders: flying machines, the bridge across the English Channel, immortality through mesmerism, electric cannon, a world at peace, where the sun never set on the flag of the United States of Columbia!

  ‘Are you gonna stand gawking at that pitcher or are you gonna wash my wheel?’ demanded Morbes.

  ‘Neither. You may take yourself off my property at once,’ replied Emil. Raising his clenched fists, he added, ‘Go to Maud Peed. And tell her – tell her –’

  His hands dropped to his sides, and as his head bowed, the unruly lock of hair fell over his eyes. He looked not unlike the young Abner Lincoln, thought Morbes idly.

  ‘– tell her,’ Emil said quietly, ‘that the best man has won. I wish you both a – haha – a happy future!’ With a strangled sob he turned away.

  Morbes was so startled by this outburst that he was unable to summon a bluster to his lips. He turned and walked out.

  Emil knew he had done the right thing. Without another regret, he filled his pockets with his Mom’s home-baked cookies, took a last sip of lemonade, and began to pedal the great generator that powered his engine. He had mounted a special clock face on the handlebars before him, and when its hands reached 1937, he depressed the telegraph key. ‘Now it is

  1937 A.D.!’ he exclaimed, and looked about him.

  The room had not changed considerably, though it seemed to have become some sort of museum. Emil found himself surrounded by velvet ropes.

  ‘Here, get of there!’ said a man in uniform. He seized Emil’s arm and dragged him away from the time engine. ‘You’re not to touch the exhibits, understand?’

  Before the bewildered inventor could explain, he found himself outside the shop, looking up at a brass plaque which read, ‘The Emil Hart Historical Museum’. He was historical!

  Pausing only a moment to marvel at his fame, Emil strode toward the main street of town, eager to see the changes time had wrought. The streets, he noticed, had a new hard surface, and there was not a trace of manure upon it!

  Then he saw them, lined up at the sidewalk. Great trackless locomotives, just as he had imagined them. As he watched, two men emerged from a store and entered one of them. Through its window he could see one man shovelling coal into the boiler while the other turned valves. In a moment, the great, chuffing engine moved off down the street.

  His momentary elation dissipated at once, when Emil turned to look at the shops. There was not a single new building on Main Street, and though many had installed large plate glass windows, the facades above them were faded, dirty and abused. Delmonico’s Dining Room had become the Eateria, but Carlson’s Peafowl Feed Store had not even changed its sign. Emil examined the contents of a clothing store window, his gorge rising at their dull familiarity. Why weren’t people attired in seminude costumes of gold, with scarlet capes? The mannikins showed only women in the same silly hats and long gowns, men in dark, dull suits. Worse, the one or two pedestrians he glimpsed wore overalls of the same cut and hue as his own.

  He was thoroughly depressed by the time he reached the end of the town’s single street and the Public Library. Despairing of seeing any more wonderful inventions like the trackless locomotive, Emil made his way into the familiar building to the tiny room marked ‘Science and Technology’. Here at last he might find respite from the past. Here he might find the future that seemed to have overlooked his town.

  He opened a volume marked ‘Inventions’. Yes, here they were: Thomas Elva Addison, the electric light; Burgess Venn, the flying machine; Gordon Q. Mott, the televidium – what in the world was that?

  He looked it up in the back of the book, and learned that it was a visual counterpart to the radium. The latter sent verbal messages over long distances by means of electrical ‘waves’ in the aether, while the former did the same for visual messages. He thrilled to the idea of electrical waves moving about everywhere, in this room, passing right through his body. It was only because of the intensity of Emil’s meditation that he failed to notice the figure at his elbow.

  ‘Hullo, Emil.’ It was Morbes.

  ‘You used my machine?’

  ‘Yep. I came back to get my bicycle clips and I seen you was gone. Well, I got to thinking – a feller could make himself a pile of money outa knowing what happens in the future. So here I am. Where do they keep the old newspapers?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Emil leapt to his feet, knocking over a chair. Another reader cleared his throat.

  ‘Read about a few horse races – and some stock market stuff. I’m rich now, Emil Hart, but I’m gonna be richer.’ Morbes’s grin displayed a row of uneven, stained teeth.

  ‘You can’t! It’s dishonest! Think of all the little stockholders who might be ruined by your speculations!’ cried Emil. He followed the bully into the Historical & Periodical room, and seized his arm. Morbes shook his hand away.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ he bellowed. ‘I’ll do as I see fit!’

  ‘Yes, do leave him alone!’ commanded a c
hildish voice. ‘I’m trying to read here, and you’re creating a disturbance.’ Emil looked around to confront a boy of about ten, whose forehead was creased with annoyance beneath the line of his yellow bangs.

  Grinning, Morbes said, ‘Lad, where’s the newspapers? You know, the WAAL STREET JOURNAL?’

  ‘I don’t know. All they have in here is this.’ The boy indicated the volume open before him, in which he had been scribbling with a pen. Emil noticed it was one of a large matched set that seemed to occupy all the shelves of the room. There were thousands of volumes.

  ‘But this will have whatever you’re looking for,’ said the boy. ‘It has a synopsis of everything.’

  The set of books was entitled The Universal Synopsis.

  ‘Say!’ exclaimed Morbes, illuminated by an uncharacteristic flash of intuition. ‘If I get rich like I ought to, there should be something about me in that book.’

  He searched a moment, then came to the table with volume MORAY-MORBID and seated himself opposite the boy.

  ‘Here it is! Morbes, Fenton Jr,’ he read at the top of his lungs.

  ‘Don’t read on!’ said Emil. ‘We’re not meant to know our own futures.’

  ‘Stuff! Who’s to stop me?’

  ‘I am!’ Emil shouted, and snatching up the boy’s pen, dipped it and lined out the passage Morbes was about to read.

  ‘Say, why’d you do that? I –’

  With an audible click, Fenton Morbes vanished.

  ‘How interesting!’said the boy. ‘I was right, then. This is the only extant copy.’

  ‘What?’ Emil stood frozen, gaping at the space his rival had vacated so abruptly.

  ‘You don’t know what happened? That was the “Doppler Effect”, named for myself, Julius Doppler. Sit down, won’t you, and I’ll explain it to you.’

  Emil eased himself into a chair and with effort directed his gaze toward the serious, freckled face.

  ‘You see, I’ve developed a theory that the future influences the past. I was fortunate in finding The Universal Synopsis on which to test it. If this were, as I believed it to be, the only copy of the only book in which many items appeared, why then it follows that I can change the past by merely rewriting it.’