The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library)

by John Sladek

  ‘A bribe? You’re going to offer him a bribe?’

  Suggs stared at his new assistant incredulously, wondering if he could possibly be as naive as all that. His meditations were only broken into by an urgent, scalding message from his intestines.

  That evening they went to a small motel on the edge of town overlooking the Atlas Mountains to see Marcel Brioche. He proved to be a personable young man with handsome, immobile features, wearing a dress uniform of the French Air Force. A look of surprise and annoyance flickered across his face, then he smiled.

  ‘Good evening, Monsieur Suggs,’ he said. ‘I was just going out to dinner. What is it you wished to, see me about?’ He spoke standing in the doorway, and did not ask them in.

  ‘If you know my name, maybe you know my game,’ Suggs snapped.

  ‘Please, please. I have no time to fence. At any moment, my friends will be here—’

  ‘I’ll be brief, Brioche. We represent the US government, as you know already, no doubt. We are prepared to deal—’

  ‘I am not. Bon soir.’

  ‘Wait. All we ask is that you take one of our men with you, as an observer. We have no intention of interfering with your moon shot—if you cooperate with us. The ship, we know, will hold two men. What harm can it do to take along—an autostoppeur?’

  ‘A hitchhiker? Let us speak in English, if you please; in very plain English. You ask me why I am not anxious to cooperate with your government. Very well, I will tell you.

  ‘When I first heard of Le Bateau Ivre, three years ago, I was engaged to be married. The ship was planned to take the two of us on a honeymoon. But two years ago, when work on the ship had progressed too far to be cancelled, she left me.’

  ‘My sympathies,’ said Barthemo Beele. ‘I can understand how you feel. My wife has just left me, too.’

  ‘Oddly enough, I’m being served with divorce papers right now myself,’ chuckled Suggs. ‘But that’s the breaks. Why didn’t you get another girl?’

  ‘Let me tell you what happened. The man she left me for was an American Air Force liaison officer at NATO in Paris. He had a brief affair with her and then dropped her. Liaison officer—drôle, eh? He had a brief liaison with her, you see?’ There were tears in the astronaut’s eyes. He was not weeping, however, but smiling dangerously. ‘She threw herself from the Eiffel Tower. You ask me why I have not replaced her? The answer is obvious, I should think. No one can ever replace her. Ah, there are my friends now.’

  He indicated a taxi drawing up before the motel. In it were Vetch and Vovov. Brioche drew on his white gloves.

  ‘You don’t understand!’ Beele said passionately. ‘We free nations must cooperate in space, not compete. We have to pull together to beat totalitarian Russia.’

  ‘I would suppose space big enough to hold all three mighty nations,’ the Frenchman murmured with a mild salute.

  ‘How does two hundred fifty thousand dirham sound, Brioche?’ asked Suggs desperately.

  ‘You do not insult me only because I understand how it is with you Americans. You wish always to purchase the honour of others. That is because, of course, you have none of your own. Bonsoir, messieurs.’

  With a careless wave he strode away, leaving his door unlocked. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this!’ Suggs screamed

  after him. The two Russian agents grinned hugely as their taxi accepted its third passenger.

  ‘See you round, Suggs,’ Vovov called out, making an obscene gesture.

  Vetch, a small man with a scholar’s beard and a thoughtful manner, kept quiet and let Vovov do the talking. Vovov could always talk, joyfully and persuasively, even when his mouth was full, as it was now, of toast and caviare. He spoke English, as Brioche insisted.

  ‘Caviare and champagne!’ Vovov crowed. ‘Caviare and champagne! The one from the icy bowels of the Baltic sturgeon, the other from the pale, temperate, shady hills of France. They go together like France and Russia go together. Each is perfect in its own right, yet the combination, it is—’ As words failed him, he seized another slice of warm toast and spread it with caviare.

  ‘The Americans,’ he said, cramming his mouth full and choking slightly. He coughed, masticated and swilled champagne for a moment, then continued speaking through his food. ‘The Americanff are pigff! Pigff!

  ‘Eh?’ The astronaut was not really paying attention, but letting his own champagne go flat. He had already had too much to drink, and, as always, it plunged him into gloomy thoughts of the one person he ought to be having champagne with.

  ‘Fwine! They are—excuse me—swine!’ said Vovov.

  ‘Swine? Yes, that is exactly it.’ Brioche thought of the man who had taken her life—the swine named General Grawk.

  The alert waiter, proud of his minimal English, brought them more champagne. ‘Encore bouteille de swine, messieurs?’ He poured it before they could refuse.

  ‘The Americans have no love,’ Vovov went on. ‘Only supermarkets and superways. Factories and mass living. Faugh!’ He sprayed roe. ‘What is their art? Comic books. Negro work songs, stolen and sung by white exploiters. Western movies. They were not content with murdering off the poor Indian, no, they must glorify that murder. Again and again, he must fall off that pony, to satisfy fee bloodlust of the decadant imperialists. Bah! I remember one film—Battle of Comanche Arroyo, it was called—where they showed the same strip of film over and over again, depicting an Indian falling off his pony dead. They hoped their depraved audience would not notice.’

  ‘Was that with John Wayne?’ Brioche asked, interested.

  ‘No, I believe it was—I forget who. But you know, it was the one where the colonel wants them to stay and hold the fort, but the captain—the young one who’s really in love with the colonel’s wife?—Well, he—’

  ‘Oui, oui, je—I remember it very well!’ exclaimed the astronaut. ‘And then the captain is going to take a squad out to Comanche Arroyo, even though he knows it’s certain death, they’ll be massacred, because he knows he can gain the feet enough time to send for help!’

  ‘Remember his last words?’ Vovov began to weep as he poured another round of champagne. ‘“It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done, and it is a far, far better reward I go to, than I have ever known.” Ah, it wrings the heart even of a strong man, a speech like that.’

  ‘Ah yes. Wonderful film.’

  After several minutes of moody silence, Vetch spoke. ‘At the risk of spoiling our little Film Festival,’ he said drily, ‘I must ask you to get around to the real topic for discussion. That is, will you, Marcel Brioche, take a Russian observer along on your moon trip? We offer you no money, no material rewards—we’ll leave that sort of behaviour to the Americans. No, all we can offer you is the knowledge that you are assisting in the toppling of imperialism and the glorious expropriation of the expropriators.’

  Brioche shook his head. ‘No, I cannot help you. I am for France, and for France alone. The only person I ever wanted to take to the moon with me—is far, far beyond the moon now. I go alone.’

  He rose and in desolate silence took his departure.

  In Russian, Vetch said, ‘I am afraid we are going to have to kill him. A pity he isn’t working for the right side. An honest sort of chap.’

  He noticed that Vovov was staring before him, red-eyed, with a bleak expression on his face. Vetch nudged him.

  ‘Don’t take it so hard,’ he said. ‘Remember, we are agents. We cannot afford to make friends with our dinner companions, for the very reason that we might have to kill them. An agent hasno friends. We must be prepared to sacrifice anyone—’

  ‘Shhh!’ said Vovov, his broad face puckered with annoyance. ‘I almost had it—the name of the actress who played the colonel’s wife. Was it Virginia Mayo? No …’

  CHAPTER XII

  OUR HEROINE

  ‘Of love as a spectacle, Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively she knew nothing.’

  Hardy

  As
Aurora let the car coast to a stop, B476 scrambled up on the back seat and began to chatter, complaining of the cessation of motion.

  ‘There, now,’ she said, but B476, a black-and-white laboratory rat, continued shivering nervously until Aurora caressed his back with her thumb.

  Lighting a cigarette, she leaned back and gazed out at crooked telephone poles like the masts of becalmed ships. The masts were beginning to throw long shadows, now, and Aurora was lost.

  She banged open the glove compartment door, then shut it at once. Reflex insisted on her looking there again for the Nevada roadmap, while she knew it was in the pocket of her raincoat, hanging up at home in Santa Filomena, several hundred miles away.

  How many hundred, she had no idea. Clearly this road was becoming a cowpath, and it led north, not east. She had started out from Santa Filomena this morning, with the idea of reaching Millford by nightfall. It seemed that the last ‘DETOUR—NO ENTRY—MILITARIZED ZONE—DANGER’ sign had pointed her off in the wrong direction. She could be a dozen or a hundred miles off the Utah highway now. There seemed to be nothing to do, however, but press on.

  Sighing, she crushed out her cigarette in the already choked ashtray. Then she undipped it and emptied it out of the window. Wind caught the plume of ash and whirled it away in streamers the sun made golden orange. Dust to dust, ashes to desert ash. Yucca Flats could not be far from here. A few motes remained, flying about her in senseless Brownian motion, flecks of fiery light.

  Brightness falls from the air;

  Queens have died young and fair;

  Dust hath closed Helen’s eye

  B476 and B893 had snuggled up close to her on the seat. Laboratory rats were always weak and prey to chills, and they were sensitive to this slight coolness as the sun fell. It was perverse of her, she thought, to be caring about the fate of a pair of sickly rats when the human race was about to be strangled by its own invention. She was being …

  Abnormal?

  Of child prodigies, a magazine article once had said: ‘It is not true to suppose they cannot live happy, adjusted, fulfilled lives. The popular notions of neurotic ‘quiz kids’ just aren’t true.’

  Aurora had been three years old when she read the article and pondered its promise. Was it so? Was she going to have a happy, fulfilled life? Was she, then, just the same as real people? Or was she going to be singled out, as her father was singled out, for special torment?

  The latter was the truth, as she had known it was at three years old. To his face, they called her father Charlie, but behind his back, she knew, he was ‘that crazy inventor fella’, and they laughed at him with a kind of fear in their eyes. As she would later see, it was the reason for the practical jokes. Not a trick was missed, from tipping his outhouse and hanging a toilet on the weathervane of his barn to more malicious fun like burning up his corncrib, full. He never seemed to grow angry, only perplexed. He would puff at his unlit, usually unfilled, pipe and survey the poisoned dog or the nail driven in the oil pan of his tractor as if it were a kind of equation that might be worked out by dint of hard concentration.

  Now, as she put the car in gear and moved on up the dwindling road, it seemed almost as if someone were playing a practical joke on Aurora. Another DETOUR sign appeared, pointing off to a pair of worn ruts that could not possibly lead anywhere. Shrugging, she obeyed.

  B476 climbed up on her shoulder and, snuggling between her neck and the back of the seat, disposed himself for sleep. He and B893 could not be used for experiments. They were ‘leftovers’, rats which, because of genetic defects or peculiar conditioning, were useless for behavioural experiments. She had developed a habit of picking up such and making pets of them for the few months they lived. True, they were sports, freaks, abnormals—but then Aurora knew how to empathize with abnormality.

  Aurora was a genius, and in a community where genius was

  treated as a suspicious deviation from the norm. The campaniform symmetry of the normal distribution curve of IQ’s at her first school had grown a hump like Gibraltar before they noticed her, and sent her to a ‘special school for exceptional children’. Her classmates had cleft palates, cataracts, lustreless minds. It was somehow unclear to the teachers why Aurora was there; they suspected her of some hidden and therefore more horrible defect.

  Aurora was not long at the special school. Studying at home, she took her high-school diploma by mail at ten years of age. At thirteen she graduated summa cum laude in behavioural psychology from the University of Minnesota, and at seventeen she became Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Filomena.

  It was then she had assumed the plain and prudent appearance that now took the place of character in her professional life. She wore short-cropped hair (but not too short), short and lighdy-tinted nails, and semi-sensible shoes. Besides the neat suit she now wore, there were five others in her closet at home, in varying shades of grey. She wore only enough makeup and enough jewellery to avoid being known as the kind of woman who uses none. It was not that Aurora (the real Aurora who resided somewhere inside the professional figure) would not have liked to be admired, but her situation required special tact. She needed to look unappetizing to her male students (many of them older than herself), to keep them at a cool professional distance. She needed to look older for her colleagues, who despite themselves tended to be unconsciously sceptical of the efficiency of the very young. So it was that the disguise of the classroom and lab became a habit, in both senses of the word. She was twenty, felt twenty-five, acted like thirty, and was occasionally taken for thirty-five.

  Two figures stood in the roadway on the left, apparently waiting for a ride in the direction she had come. Aurora slowed to ask them if they knew the way to Millford, Utah. When they turned around, Aurora was startled to recognize a pupil of hers, Kevin Mackintosh.

  ‘What are you doing in Nevada, Mr. Mackintosh?’ she asked, astonished.

  The young man’s eyes seemed glazed. Instead of answering, he nudged his companion. ‘We really are high, Ron,’ he mut-

  tered. ‘That chick over there looks like one of my profs.’

  ‘Oh, that was real good stuff,’ the other assented, looking off in another direction. ‘What chick?’

  Aurora grew a bit nervous. She shifted into first, and kept her foot on the clutch. ‘Have you any idea which way is the road to Utah?’ she asked earnestly.

  Kevin Mackintosh seemed not to be looking at: anything. ‘The road to you-Tao,’ he breathed. ‘The seven-fold path. Look!’ He flung up both arms to the sunset. ‘Apocalypse! The wise virgins light their lamps! The black yoni of Night accepts the flaming lingam of Day!’

  ‘Yeah, War of the Worlds,’ said Ron.

  ‘Ma’am, my buddy Ron here and I have seen Hell itself. We have seen the death of the world, in flaming technicolour. Paratroops fighting to the death with Puppet People. They arrested our friends, but we got away.’

  ‘Who did?’ she asked. ‘The Puppet People?’

  ‘No, the Paratroople People. The Army. It’s the end of civilization.’

  ‘Repent!’ screamed the other. ‘Did you see Gorgo?’

  ‘My buddy here and I are making our way across the Sahara here without water even, and we’re going to Morocco.’

  Aurora relaxed a bit, recognizing in them a couple of not-too-bright kids from the college, dramatizing their first taste of pot. ‘If you’re not particular which way you get there,’ she said crisply, ‘you can come along with me to—I hope—Utah.’

  ‘No thank you, ma’am. I mean really, we’re going to Morocco; Ron’s got his dad’s airline credit cards. We’ve had it to here with this country. The real scene is Morocco, with Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and William Burroughs.’ He began to sing, off-key, an approximation of ‘The Road to Morocco’.

  ‘I dig,’ said his companion. ‘Did you see Casablanca?’

  ‘If we ever get a ride out of here. There’s nothing going by but jeeps and tanks, like i
n Battleground, and they don’t stop.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Aurora, and let out the clutch.

  ‘Not thanks,’ Mackintosh explained patiently. ‘Tanks.’

  As she started driving off, Ron looked at her and screamed, ‘O my God, I’m coming down! O my God! THERE’S A RAT GROWING RIGHT OUT OF HER HEAD!’

  ‘Yeah! Hey, Ron, you ever see The Lost Weekend?’

  A sign informed her that the lights on the left were those of Piedport, Nevada, four miles off the road. As Aurora was about to heave a sigh of relief and take the turnoff—for at least Piedport would have an hotel—the town’s lights went out. She stopped and waited for several minutes, but nothing happened. There was no use, as she saw it, stopping there, when she could as easily push on to a town at least equipped with lights.

  The radio gave nothing but a squeal that excited B476. None of the pushbuttons seemed to have any effect other than changing the pitch of the whine. It was odd, because it could not be later than 9:0. There ought to be dozens of stations.

  Manually she found a weak station in the southeast.

  ‘…y’all keep them cards and letters comin’, hear? Keep fahrin’ ’em right at me, now, we appreciate hearin’ from you, neighbours … tunes you want … Here’s a wahr service bulletin, folks, seems like they had a little blackout over Calyforny way. Nevada, Calyforny, Oregon, Utah, Washington … Iowa, Kansas …’

  In the middle of its alarming list, the station faded into oblivion. She found a San Francisco station, then, but it only kept urging her not to call her power company.

  ‘They are doing everything in their—I mean, everything possible to restore service. I’ll just repeat the wire service bulletin with that message from the Pentagon: “The blackout has been caused by a generating plant short in Nevada, following an experiment the full nature of which cannot be divulged, but which was vital to our national security. Power will be restored as soon as possible.” That was the Pentagon’s message. Now, once again, do not call the power company. …’