The Steam-Driven Boy

by Sladek, John

  Carl scratched his head. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘So that you might benefit by it. Using your disguise kit, you can pose as Wilbur Grafton yourself. I realize a time-patrolman’s salary is small – especially when one has to do quintuple shifts for the same money. Meanwhile I have a gloriously full life. You could slip back in time and replace me.’ The robot handed him an envelope. ‘Here are instructions for dismantling me – and for making the rejuvenator, should you ever feel the need for it. This is a recorded message. Goodbye.’

  Why not, Carl thought. Here was the blue swimming pool, the ‘stereo’, the whole magnificent house. James, his father, stood discreetly by, ready to pour champagne. And the upstairs maid was uncommonly pretty. It could be a long, long life, rejuvenated from time to time …

  Ernie sprawled in a giant chair, watching himself on television. When a guard brought in the dog, it bit him. He was just about to call the vexecutioner, to teach Ralphie a lesson, when something in the animal’s eyes caught his attention.

  ‘So it’s you, is it?’ He laughed. ‘Or should I say, so it’s me. Well, don’t bite me again, understand? If you do, I’ll leave you inside that thing. And make you eat nasty food, while I sing about it on TV.’

  ‘Poop,’ the child was thinking, Ernie knew.

  ‘I can do it, kid. I’m the President, and I can do anything I like. That’s why I’m so fat.’ He stood up and began to pace the throne room, his stomach preceding him like a front wheel.

  ‘Poopy poop,’ thought the boy. ‘If you can do anything, why don’t you make everybody go to bed early, and wash their mouths out if they say –’

  ‘I do, I do. But there’s a little problem there. You’re too young to understand this – I don’t understand it all myself, yet – but “everybody” is you, and you’re me. I’m all the people that ever were and ever will be. All the men, anyway. All the women are the girl who used to be upstairs maid at Wilbur Grafton’s.’

  He began explaining time travel to little Ernie, knowing the kid wasn’t getting half of it, but going on the way big Ernie had explained it to him: Carl Conn, posing as Wilbur, had grown old. Finally he’d decided it was time to rejuvenate and go back in time. Fierce old Ralphie, still lurking in the corridors of time, had attacked him, and there’d been quite an accident. One part of Carl had returned to 1905, to become Orville Grafton. Another part of him got rejuved, along with the dog, and had fallen out in 1937.

  ‘That Carl-part, my boy, was you. The rejuvenator wiped out most of your memory – except for dreams – and it made you look all ugly and fat.

  ‘You see, your job and mine, everybody’s job, is to weave back and forth in time –’ he wove his clumsy hands in the air, ‘– being people. My next job is to be a butler, and yours is to pretend to be a robot pretending to be you. Then probably you’ll be my dad, and I’ll be his dad, and then you’ll be me. Get it?’

  He moved the dog’s tail like a lever, and the casing opened. ‘Would you like some ice-cream? It’s okay with me, only nobody else gets none.’

  The boy nodded. The upstairs maid, pretty as ever, came in with a Presidential sundae. The boy looked at her and his scowl almost turned to a smile.

  ‘Mom?’

  The Parodies

  THE PURLOINED BUTTER

  A STORY BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

  REVISED AND ABRIDGED BY JOHN SLADEK

  At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18–, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library. The door was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G–, the Prefect of the Parisian police.

  ‘And what, after all, is the matter on hand?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, I will tell you,’ replied the Prefect. ‘I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain condiment of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it is known. It still remains in his possession, which can be inferred by the nature of the condiment and the non-appearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber’s possession.’

  ‘Then,’ I observed, ‘the butter is clearly upon the premises. As for being on his person, I suppose that is out of the question.’

  ‘Entirely,’ said the Prefect. ‘He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my own inspection.’

  ‘And his hotel?’

  ‘Why the fact is, we took our time and searched everywhere. I took the whole building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined first, the furniture in each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. We have accurate rules; the fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. The chair cushions we probed with the long fine needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops, to examine the possibility of excavated legs; likewise the bedposts.’

  ‘You did not take to pieces all the chairs?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly not; but we did better – we examined the rungs of every chair in the house, and indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been traces of recent disturbance, we should not have failed to detect it, instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple.’

  ‘I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and plates, and you probed the beds, as well as the curtains and carpets?’

  ‘That of course; and when we had completed the furniture, we then examined the house itself. We scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before. The grounds were paved with brick; examination of the moss between stones by the microscope revealed no disturbances.’

  Dupin spoke for the first time. ‘I assume the hotel is at least fifty feet on a side,’ he said. The Prefect nodded. ‘And it has at least three stories, each twenty feet high. And there are at least four rooms on each floor. If you had but a week to examine a room (assuming six hours per night available), you would have to cover’ – he paused, performing lightning mental calculation – ‘sixteen and one-fifth square inches per second. The grain of gimlet dust you spoke of must be four or five thousandths of an inch in diameter, or one-thousandth as broad as an apple. If, therefore, one of your men were to examine one “applesworth” of visible area per second, he would require four hundred seconds, or eighteen and two-thirds minutes to cover a square inch.

  ‘It follows therefore, that it must take nine hundred sixty minutes, or sixteen hours, for one man to examine one square foot of area. A room twenty-five feet square and twenty in height must have a total inside area of three thousand, two hundred fifty square feet; one man would require a great deal of time to examine it.’

  ‘Naturally, I employed –’

  ‘More than one man? Indeed, I have calculated that, if your men examined these rooms as you say, you would have required the services of one thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight men, all working away with their microscopes at the same time, in the same smallish room! And working, as you implied, noiselessly! Come, come, my dear Prefect!’

  I was astonished. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some moments he remained speechless and motionless, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets.

  ‘You know very well what I mean, Monsieur G–’ said Dupin.

  The Prefect blushed. Then, to my utter amazement, he reached into his pocket and drew out the butter. Dupin satisfied himself that this butter was indeed the one in question, then locked it away.

  ‘You may go,’ he said coldly to the Prefect. This functionary seized his hat and stick in a perfect agony of joy, and then scrambling and struggling to the d
oor, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house.

  When the Prefect had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

  PEMBERLY’S START-AFRESH CALLIOPE

  OR, THE NEW PROTEUS

  BY H. G. W*LLS

  I hope to set down this story exactly as the surgeon told it to me, at the club. There were three of us in the smoking-room: Lord Suffield; the surgeon, whose name I did not know; myself.

  As soon as he sank into his chair, Lord Suffield began an anecdote about India, and, as soon as he had our attention, he fell asleep in mid-sentence. The surgeon and I traded cigars and talked of nothing in particular. At length I made some chance remark about a new cigar’s giving a man a new outlook on life. The surgeon gave me a peculiar look, and then began the astonishing story of the inventor, Pemberly.

  One October afternoon in 1889 [said the surgeon] I espied Gabriel Pemberly among the crowds in Atlas Street. He had aged considerably in the seven years since I’d seen him last, but I knew it was he by the odd stiffness of his stride, which told me he wore Pemberly’s Step-Saver Truss. This clockwork contraption is designed to add years to the Wearer’s lifetime, by increasing the length and rapidity of his step without increasing the energy required. To my knowledge, no one but Pemberly has ever worn one of these.

  ‘Aged’ is not putting it strongly enough: Pemberly had decayed, and to a bent, shrivelled, diseased old man. His clothes were food-stained and ragged, his hair and beard thinning, and I thought I detected a slackness of jaw that signified stupidity.

  I hailed him, but he did not see me, perhaps because he persisted in looking another way – back over his shoulder. As luck would have it, I was just then on my way to the hospital (a certain leg needed its earl amputated) and so could not stop. Pemberly truss-strode away, and the crowd soon amputated him from my sight.

  Not from my mind, however. I began to muse upon the misfortunes of my inventor friend, so quick and able at devising everything but his own peace of mind. I had not seen him since his last folly, the Steam Barber affair of 1882.

  He intended this device to provide skilful, gentle, efficient shaving at the touch of a lever. It would mix its own lather, sharpen its own razors and even make a kind of parrotty small-talk. A day in June was set for the first test, Pemberly was to be the ‘customer’, while I was asked to observe, rendering medical assistance if necessary.

  The night before the test, Pemberly became violently ill, a result of overwork, anxiety, and I believe a diet of special nutrient pills of his own devising, which he took in lieu of eating. We left his mechanic, a young man named Groon, in charge of the machine, with orders to perform a few adjustments, and I took Pemberly home and gave him a sedative.

  Next morning Pemberly and I entered the shop to find Groon seated in the chair. A towel was wrapped around his throat, which had been slashed. The entire room was bespattered with blood and lather, as if from frenzied activity. As we came in, the machine was stropping a razor, and asking the dead man in a creaky voice if the day were warm enough for him.

  At the inquest, I testified that Pemberly was not on the premises, that he had nothing against Groon, and that he was certainly not a malicious person or Criminal Type. He was cleared of the death, but only legally. Many of his friends cut him cruelly, the Inventions Club dropped him, and finally poor Pemberly stopped going out in public altogether. Until now.

  Now that I’d seen him once, I began to fancy I was seeing him everywhere: a blind beggar in Mapp Road, a navvy in North Street, a clerk in the City – all resembled Pemberly at various ages, enough so to make me stare rudely. Once, at night, I heard a cabman say something like ‘rice-steel’ in Pemberly’s exact tone, and I knew that the sight of my old friend sunken low had begun to obsess me.

  Finally I saw him again in the street, and this time there could be no mistake. I walked straight over and offered him my hand.

  ‘Good God!’ He started, trembling. ‘Fatheringale! Is it you?’ He seized my hand and, to my horror, began to weep.

  ‘Here now, this won’t do at all,’ I said. ‘You’d better come along to my surgery for a whiskey and a chat.’

  I pressed him into the cab, and we set off. Pemberly made no conversation at all, and kept craning about, trying to peer out the rear window. This being a tiny oval of smoked glass set impossibly high in the back wall, I took his futile gesture to be a kind of compulsive tic, akin to the pacing of a caged animal. Could it be that the Steam Barber tragedy had affected his mind? I began to fear it had.

  On our arrival, Pemberly refused to alight.

  ‘You got in first,’ he begged. ‘See if the coast is clear.’

  Astonished, I asked what in the world I should look for.

  ‘Anything unusual. Breakfasts, for instance. Or calliopes.’

  Apprehending the worst for my friend’s mind, I humoured his request and pretended to look inside.

  ‘Not a meal in sight,’ I assured him on my return. ‘Nor any organs, save a few poor pickled specimens.’

  This mild jest set him to laughing so excessively that I was obliged to strike him full in the face – like this!

  With that, the surgeon reached out and slapped the still-unconscious Lord Suffield! I leapt to my feet in astonishment, and asked him the meaning of this action.

  ‘I hope his lordship will forgive me,’ he said, seemingly as astonished as I. ‘I – I’m hardly myself this evening. But let me go on.’

  I acceded, seeing that Lord Suffield did not appear to have felt the blow keenly. Indeed, that personage merely stirred in his chair, murmured ‘three jars of jam and a letter’, and picked up the stitches of his snoring, as did the surgeon those of his tale.

  After manoeuvring Pemberly into the front parlour of my surgery and encouraging him to swallow a glass of whiskey, I asked him point-blank whom he supposed to be following him.

  ‘Not a whom,’ he replied darkly. ‘A what.’

  ‘Surely you, a man of science, do not pretend to tell me you’ve seen a ghost?’ I asked.

  ‘Ghost? I only wish it were.’ He shuddered. ‘My God, Fatheringale! I’m being pursued by – by Tuesday morning!’

  I should mention at this time that Pemberly had always been a man with a peculiar way of speaking. I had always dismissed his odd turns as vaguely eccentric, even marks of his genius. Now it seemed to me that I had been witnessing the effects of a brain lesion, which time and infirmity had worsened to the point of madness. I undertook to treat him, and as the first step, drew out of him the story of the past seven years.

  How had he been living? Oddly enough, he’d let out the Steam Barber. Not as a shaving machine, but to a South American republic which used it for executions. It seems they paid him by piecework, and since this republic was threatened by many real or imagined revolutions to be put down, and rebels to be killed, Pemberly’s rent provided a comfortable income.

  The reason he appeared to be out of pocket was simply that every spare penny and more had been going into his new invention – the Start-Afresh Calliope.

  ‘Ever since the Steam Barber affair,’ he said, ‘I’ve longed to scrub out my life like a slate, and start over, as a new man. I might have been anything – a general, a man of God, a successful barrister – but no. The die, as we are so fond of saying, was cast.

  ‘Or was it? I began to study philosophy, astronomy, logic, monads – and the more I read, the more convinced I became that what is, is not necessarily. I threw myself into my work, and I began building the machine that could do the job!’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Then you’re as stupid as the others!’ he cried. I dared not ask what others. ‘Oh, why do I waste my time talking to imbeciles?’

  I begged him to explain again.

  ‘I have discovered that we can take the Path Untaken,’ he said passionately. ‘Like you, I once thought reality to be some rigid isoceles truth, unchangeable as a spoon. But now, nothing
is easier to change than facts. Life is plural! Reality is not truth, it is a half-truth, a mere epiphany of snort!’

  These extraordinary observations left me as much in the dark as ever, though I dared not show it. ‘I see,’ I said, feigning to catch his meaning. ‘And did your invention succeed?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. The physical machine was easy. But learning to play it has been excruciating torture. My mistakes continue to haunt me, and they are innumerable. Just now, for example, I am here to save your life.’

  With that, he seized me by the shoulder and flung me roughly to the floor. Before I could ask why, a shot rang out! I looked to the window, saw an uncanny, grinning face – then it was gone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Pemberly, helping me to my feet.

  ‘Not at all, old man.’ I glanced to where the bullet had gone. ‘You did indeed save my life.’

  ‘I wasn’t apologizing for pushing you down, you fool! I was apologizing for trying to shoot you!’

  It was at that moment that I began to half-believe in Pemberly’s new invention, and to understand what it was he’d been raving about. Evidently the insidious device allowed him to multiply his body in some manner. Apparently some of his selves were less stable than others – his ‘mistakes’. His real self – if real it was – then had to go about undoing their mischief.

  Just then the police called to inquire about the shot. I had to leave the room to deal with them. When I returned, Pemberly was not there.

  It was an hour or more before I noticed, on my writing-table, a thick MS. addressed to me in Pemberly’s hand.

  ‘My dear Fatheringale –

  ‘How can I ever explain? There is so little time, for in this role, I must soon die. Not that I have regrets about dying, for what regrets could I, of all people, have? I, alone among mortals, have lived life to the full. I have been everywhere, seen and done everything I could possibly desire.