by John Sladek
‘I don’t know much about this stuff myself,’ Grandison candidly admitted. ‘I leave all the heavy think-work to my boys here, Kurt, Karl and Cal. They know all about Endymions and revanchist doctrines, all that stuff.’
With savage glee, the general spoke to one of his WAF’s. ‘Amy, make a note. I think this one is a commy,’ he spat with disgust, ‘as well as a fairy.’
‘Let me hit him, Pop !’ bawled Louie. ‘Let me use Origami on him.’
Kurt and Karl went on explaining the system, as though they had not been interrupted.
‘It is “ergetropic”,’ Karl explained. ‘That is, it can seek and use nearly any kind of power.’ He gestured to his brother as one vaudeville partner to another.
‘It is metallotropic,’ Kurt added. ‘Some cells are oriented
more towards metal, some towards energy. May we demonstrate?’
The twins each picked up one box gently. They were the size of fat attaché cases. ‘This is a power-seeking cell,’ Karl explained. ‘That one is metal-seeking.’
The wheels of the two machines whined as they set them on the floor. One spun around and headed straight for the light socket. The other dashed about the room, sampling the legs of metal furniture, pausing to nibble at the corner of a filing cabinet. Cal shooed it away and it scooted behind a lab table, out of his reach. Between the table and the wall, he could see the box working its way along towards the far corner, towards the oyster tank.
‘Kinda cute at that,’ said the general.
One of its legs eaten through, the oyster tank collapsed. As water from it spread across the floor, the fat box outran it, heading for the door. It carried a metal wastebasket, holding it aloft in crab-claws, a hard-won trophy.
‘Stop it !’ Cal shouted. The general began to laugh.
‘Halt !’ shouted the marine guard. He fired a warning shot but the attaché case kept coming. He lowered his gun and fired directly at the little box. Bullets rang on the wastebasket. The marine emptied his gun, just as the box dashed between his polished boots and out of the door.
‘All you had to do,’ said Karl, ‘was pick it up.’
The general leaned on the table, doubled up with coarse laughter. The twins and Cal were trying to trap the other box. Excited by the gun-flashes, it scooted in circles all over the room.
‘I’ll be goddamned,’ the general kept saying. ‘Funniest thing I seen since the war.’ His weight was tipping the table, and as the boxes rushed towards him it tipped even further.
Cal cornered the energy-seeking box and bent to turn it off. He saw that the toggle switch had been damaged, apparently by a welding arc. It was a fused lump of metal on top of the box. Something else occurred to him then : there had been a lot of cells running around on the table with broken or missing switches. Odd. He would have to ask someone about that.
But just now there was nothing to do but pick this one up off the floor. Cal was frightened of it, but he was even more frightened of letting it go free.
‘Careful !’ someone shouted. ‘You’re standing in brine !’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Cal. He looked up to see the table overturn on General Grawk, the boxes sliding off …
But then the scene froze, like a film hung up in the projector. And, like a stuck film, everything shrivelled and vanished, leaving only bright white emptiness.
CHAPTER V
MIT
‘O goodly usage of those ancient times,
In which the sword was servant unto right.’
SPENSER
Cal was brought up on a farm in Minnesota. His father Codman Codman Potter, was taciturn, even for a farmer. In fact, Cal could only recall his father’s speaking to him twice in all his life. Codman seemed a bottomless reservoir of wisdom; whenever he spoke, the family went into a panic.
The awful voice sounded when Cal was eight. His mother had given him a book of Aesop’s fables, and one evening he lay on the living room floor, reading of the frogs who wanted a king. His father looked at him and said loudly :
‘There’s plenty of things you don’t learn from books. Books only ruin your eyes. It’s life that’s important, not god damned books !’
Alarmed, Cal’s mother took the book from him and burned it. He never dreamed of objecting. From then on, he merely skimmed his lessons and school, and avoided bringing home any of the hated books. At home his only lapse was glancing at the back of the cereal box: ‘Niacin, Thiamine, Riboflavin …’ Surely, he reasoned, it was all right to read, as long as he did not understand.
This idea of reading only the unreadable stayed with him until he asked his father for permission to study Latin and Greek.
‘What? If you want to go to college at all, you’ll by god become an engineer. Or else I’ll Latin you, god damn it !’
Cal went off to the Miami Institute of Technocracy, then, to become an engineer. At the station, Codman nodded goodbye.
MIT was small. There were just twenty students and one professor altogether, and in Cal’s class there were but three other students. The entire school occupied one large room above a dry-cleaning plant. In after years, Cal would always associate the smell of chemicals and the hiss of steam with Dr. Elwood Trivian.
‘You have an interest in the inimicable classics? I laud that, young man. We have, alack, no time to teach them here. They are, you cogitate, useless. I must deplore you to study science, and science alone.
‘I had a thorough grinding in the classics myself, and am today but a humble pedagod. Why, I earn less here in an entire year than I would in a single week on the railroad, steering a train ! And that takes no learning at all !’
Half-way through his course, Cal switched his major from Engrg. Arts to Biophys. Arts. He wrote his father explaining that this had more to do with life. In a sense, he was telling the truth, for it enabled him to sit next to Mary Junes, whom he loved.
Mary did not love him back; she was not likely to love him; she did not even know his name. She seemed to love Harry Stropp, their tall, thickset, swart classmate, who majored in Phys. Ed.
She was a short, chunky, tough-looking girl with a great gob of yellow hair like dirty cotton. As everyday attire she wore borrowed sweatshirts, mixed and matched with dungarees and borrowed sweatpants. She seemed addicted to black cough drops. Her breath smelt of menthol, her hands were always sticky, and her wide, sluttish mouth was stained black. Cal dreamed of pasting a kiss on those gummy lips.
He schemed to sit next to her in every class : Current events (where Dr. Trivian read his morning paper aloud), Phonics Praxis and Appreciation of Thermodynamics. Still, her nights were spent with Harry.
Barthemo Beele, the fourth member of the class and a Journalism student, published the mimeo school paper, The MIT Worker’s Torch. He bitterly complained of seeing Mary and Harry kiss in public, in editorials headed : ‘Is Decency Finished?’
One day Harry came down with a cold. After struggling through morning classes, he gave up and went home. Mary clicked a black cough drop deliciously, and winked at Cal.
‘What’s your name?’
Harry arose from his sickbed in a week, to find he’d lost his girl to Cal.
‘I don’t care,’ he’d say, flexing his big arm and studying it. ‘She’s not the only pebble on the beach. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.’ He remained an absolute recluse, going swimming and fishing alone, and doing lots of road-work on the roof above the schoolroom. Cal felt terribly guilty every time he heard the sound of giant, sad tennis shoes on the roof, running tirelessly.
The MIT Worker’s Torch named Cal valedictorian of the class. On the same day, it announced the engagement of Miss Mary Junes to Barthemo Beele.
‘When did this happen?’ Cal asked her, holding up the mimeo sheet in a trembling hand.
‘Oh, you know that night last week, when you had to study?’
‘But—engaged?’
‘Yup. Right after graduation, me and Barty are going to live somewheres out West,
where he’s got a swell job as a editor already. Isn’t that great?’
Great. The next few days Cal knew not what he did. He wept unashamedly, tore up all her notes (‘Can I borrow your sweatshirt, darling? Thanx, M.’), and took long walks, at times avoiding all meaningful places, at times haunting them. He began to feel he might become a dedicated scientist, a seeker after truth.
Most of the hundred foundations, academies and labs to which he applied for a research grant replied that they had no need for holders of the rather special degree, Bachelor of Biophysics Arts. The Wompler Research Laboratory, however, sent a letter expressing interest and an IBM card to fill out and return. In the tiny box on the card where he was to write the name of his school, there was only room for the abbreviation ‘MIT’. He was hired by return mail.
The MIT Worker’s Torch kept up its morality campaign (now directed against its editor and his fiancée) to the last day. Dr. Trivian gave a stirring Commencement speech to his four new graduates, though most of it was drowned out by the hiss of steam from below, where the shirts lived.
* * *
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Cal said. It seemed to him that he was still trying to pick up the runaway cell, but bright white clouds kept getting in his way. Steam?
All at once he realized the clouds were real; he was looking at the sky. He rolled over and sat up, hands buried in cool grass.
A file drawer marked ‘Secret’ scooted past, pursued by a mob of people in white coats. ‘Stop it ! Catch it !’
How odd, he thought with a tolerant smile. Chasing file drawers. He began to walk around the building. Other boxes, made of garbage cans, cabinets, bent signs, swarmed over the green, pursuing and pursued by human figures. Near the fence a group of marines had set up a light machine gun. Now they were defending it desperately against the slow, blunt, methodical attacks of a kiln and a small safe, in tandem. Finally a fork-lift truck rushed in, seized the gun and apparently digested it.
Chuckling, Cal strode around another corner of the building. The helicopter lay on its side as the swarming boxes picked it clean. It was beginning to look like the skeleton of a beached whale.
The general was no longer laughing; he was screaming at the twin brothers, ‘Somebody is gonna have to pay for this ! That is government property your toy is tearing up !’
‘Government property hell !’ Grandison roared. ‘That gizmo is tearing up my property ! If you can’t shut it off—’
‘Mr. Wompler, General Grawk,’ said Karl solemnly, ‘there seems to be no safe way to shut it off—without jeopardizing the whole experiment, that is. We simply cannot permit it.’
Grandison caught sight of Cal. ‘So you finally came to, eh?’ he said. ‘Just in time, too. I guess one of them Endymions musta give you a little electric shot, eh boy? Well, I hope you can shut that thing off—Kurt and Karl here are chicken.’
‘There should be nothing easier than shutting it off,’ Cal said, ‘Every cell is equipped with a sympathetic, tuned switch that—’
‘Not any more,’ said Karl with a condescending smile. ‘That was last week. The more sophisticated mutations of the system have shed that apparatus long ago.’
‘Well then, I’ll shut off the ones that haven’t, and we’ll smash the rest.’
‘No, you don’t !’ Kurt said, bridling. ‘If you go in that lab and tamper, you’re fired !’
Grandison wavered, less sure of himself now. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t—’
‘I’m not worried about protecting property,’ said Cal quietly. ‘I’m worried about protecting a few lives. None of you seem to realize how dangerous this thing is.’
‘What are a few lives, in comparison to—’ Karl began, but Cal did not stay around to listen. He dashed around the corner to the main entrance and back to the lab.
It was scarcely recognizable. Larger and larger cells had formed, some viable, some not, which forced themselves into the corners of the room and ate away at the very structure of the building. Festoons of insulation hung above, where once there had been a fluorescent lighting system. Now the lamps and conduit were gone, and the very copper wires stripped from their insulation, which hung like abandoned snakeskins. There was not a scrap of metal in the room which had not been made into something else. Steel partitions, cabinets, desks had all been melted, running together in fantastic shapes.
There was a solid barrier before him, waist-high, of dead or dying cells welded together as dead polyps are clustered to make coral. He began to climb over them, looking for one with an intact toggle switch.
He found one, and threw it. The system shut off slowly, in stages. Cal heard the muffled whine of slowing dynamos in the basement, the dying fall of gears.
In the queer, sudden silence, he made his way out to the sunlight once more.
With the exception of a group of Marines, who were beating to death a small suitcase, the people who had been running madly about before were now still, scattered like groups of statuary on the lawn. The statues were all looking at Cal.
Grandison Wompler finally moved, shaking his head sadly. ‘I never thought you’d do a thing like that to me,’ he said. ‘Why, boy, why? I took you right out of school, I gave you the best opportunity a young man ever had to make something out of hisself, and here you stab me in the back, first chance you get.’
‘But—’
‘Oh, don’t try to worm your way out of it. I got the whole story from them Frankenstein fellows. You just turned a billion-dollar machine into a great big pile of junk.’
‘That’s right,’ Karl said nodding emphatically. ‘You realize that shutting off the Reproductive System completely inactivated the QUIDNAC memory?’
‘But it was running berserk !’ Cal cried. ‘It’s already killed
one man. It might have—’
‘Oh, it’s easy for you to say what might have been,’ Grandison thundered.
‘Don’t, Pop.’ Louie laid a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Don’t get yourself worked up over him. He ain’t worth it.’ He led his father away. Grandison’s shoulders seemed to sag more with every step he took.
‘Yas, a complete security blackout, button it up tight,’ said Grawk into a field telephone. He hung up and turned to face Cal. ‘Well, boys,’ he said to the Mackintosh brothers, ‘what do we do with this one? Shoot him? (We can do it legal, you know. Caught in an act of sabotage, etc. etc.)’
A kindly-looking middle-aged man in rimless glasses wandered near, and seemed to take an interest in the proceedings.
‘No need to trouble,’ said Kurt, grinning. ‘He’s harmless—now—and I’m sure by the time Senator Moley’s committee get through with him—if you get my meaning?’
‘Meanwhile, you’re fired,’ said Karl brusquely. ‘Better get going before we have you arrested for trespassing, eh?’
Grawk laughed at Cal’s look of consternation.
‘Don’t bother turning in your lab coat,’ Kurt said. ‘Or your pocket slide rule. Keep them. Just go.’
‘Has everyone lost their minds? I’ve just saved your lives, maybe, and you act like I’m Benedict Arnold. You, sir,’ he said, appealing to the kind-looking stranger. ‘Tell me, do I look like a traitor? Do you think my shutting off this damned machine is such a crime?’
The man smiled apologetically. ‘I’m afraid I’m really too prejudiced in the matter to be of much help,’ he said, and gave a small cough. ‘You see, I’m Smilax, and it’s my machine you’ve just put to death.’
There seemed nothing to do but go. As Cal walked away, he could hear the general talking about him in a very loud voice.
‘There goes a helluva rotten bastard, if you ask me. A guy that would sell out his country like that—well, it’s just lucky for him I ain’t armed. Because if I was armed—’ Grawk lowered his voice and added something Cal couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made the four WAF’s laugh very hard indeed.
He had lost his job, disgraced himself, submitted even to the flaying knives of pretty women’s
scorn. Cal was in no condition to do anything like rational thinking. For if he had been, there was one question he surely would have asked himself :
How was it a system as intelligent, as adaptable, as clever at self-protection as this one was supposed to be had given up almost without a fight?
CHAPTER VI
THE BOXES THAT ATE ALTOONA
‘I have taught my gears to talk
Nicky-nicky Poop, tic-toc.’
LOUIS SACCHETTI (attrib.)
‘Of Altoona, Nevada, lying quite near Parsnip Peak (8,905 ft.) and not far from Railroad Valley, where no railroads run, I sing,’ wrote Mary Junes Beele on her husband’s L. C. Smith typewriter. Below it, she typed asterisks : a row of posies. The swollen belly of her thumb pressed the space bar.
From the next room came the clanking of a hand press. Editor Barthemo Beele was running off the second edition of the Altoona Weekly Truth, His hand, she thought, that rocks the cradle … Mary cursed the paper and she cursed the paper’s editor, her husband of one week.
The keys of the typewriter, she saw, were like black cough drops. Black cough drops were not to be had in Altoona. One of the typewriter’s keys had broken one of Mary’s nails. She began to chew it off, cursing everything she could think of—especially cursing Altoona. If that sailor did not take her away soon, she was going to die of this town. As she bit into another nail spitefully, contrary Mary cursed her rotten luck.
Altoona, too, had an unlucky history. In 1903, it had been the sole supplier of reuttite to the entire Western Hemisphere. Reuttite was of course that metal which made the best, most brilliant, longest-lasting gas mantles. There was no other known use for reuttite.
On Park Avenue in Altoona, the magnates of four different railroads had made their homes beside those of dozens of mine-owners and speculators. They’d built great white carpentered castles, gothic dreams in scrollwork and gingerbread, with bow windows, mullions, heart-shaped arches, wandering ivy and brave towers. The earth was shot through with old mine
