The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library)

by John Sladek

  She began to see military vehicles parked along both sides of the road. Apparently they were abandoned, or the occupants were playing possum. Perhaps there was more to what Mackintosh & Company had said than she’d supposed. And the blackout …

  She pulled off the road and parked. Knowing the potential danger of Project 32 was disturbing, but having the danger become actual was too horrible to understand at once. She needed to skirt the thought, she decided, switching off the lights. She needed to contemplate the calmness of the sky.

  It was brighter than she had ever seen it, since the farm in Minnesota. There were no lights below to blot anything out, and she was stunned by the heavens’ brilliance. There were Sirius

  and Alderbaran, pointing to the Pleiades, Orion between them. There were Castor and Pollux. She thought once more of the nights when she had learned their names, peering through one of her father’s cracked, unusable telescopes.

  At this time of year the farm would smell of corn and creak with crickets—as it did through nearly three seasons of the year. Unperiodically, through the night, the farm’s only ‘livestock’, the Rooster, would crow. Any time was dawn to the Rooster; he was like the broken clock on the mantel and the broken clock in the hall. Periodically, her father had set out to fix one of the clocks, but she never heard one of them tick.

  He invented a chicken-skinning machine, but somehow hadn’t the heart to try it out on the Rooster, or indeed any chicken. So, though it was a fine-looking implement, they both agreed, it stood out on the lawn, becoming finally a rusty fixture, a perch for the Rooster when he announced the 11 p.m. dawn.

  On the lawn were scattered further ornaments and perches as the years went by—A hot air balloon that leaked. A kind of mechanical birdbath shower which birds avoided. An improved kind of sewing machine. And about 168 telescopes, the first begun at Aurora’s birth, that is, at her mother’s death, the last left uncompleted seventeen years later.

  Each time, he would grind lenses diligently for a day or two, then veer off into some other project. Of all the telescopes in the yard, the only one which worked was one he’d bought at a rummage sale and repaired with scotch tape. Through it Aurora had squinted at the Square of Pegasus, Vega and Cassiopeia’s chair, the same unchangeable stars she now looked at out the windshield.

  A black, hideous shape came between her and the stars. The car door opened and a thick-necked dwarf in uniform climbed in beside her. He left the door open for a moment, to look at her in the light.

  ‘Keep cool, baby,’ he growled, waving a gun. ‘I’m General Grawk of the US Air Force, and I never raped a lady in my life. Never had to, if you get my meaning. Course there’s always a first time, ain’t there? Haha.’

  ‘What do you mean by this? Get out of my car!’ She said it in her most severe schoolmarm voice. He chuckled.

  ‘I’m commandeering this car, lady. National emergency. Maybe you heard about the big power failure?’ He thumbed his

  chest. ‘I did that Anyway, I need a car and driver, and you’re elected.’ He moved over a bit closer. ‘It don’t have to be all that bad, you know.’

  A faint squeal sounded from under the general.

  ‘Get up! You’re sitting on my pet rat!’ she shrieked.

  An instantaneous transformation took place. One moment he was a confident, grinning, aggressive little ape; the next he was screaming and vaulting into the back seat. The body of B893 lay flattened on the seat cushion. Aurora picked it up by the tail. It was dead. A strange smile played across her features as she lifted it, turning in the light.

  ‘RATgetthatRATawayfromMEgetitawayRAT!’ he screamed.

  ‘Get out of my car. Now.’

  The gunbarrel swept B893 out of her hand and out of the open door. Grawk climbed back into the front seat and looked at her with a changed—a more respectful—expression. ‘I like you,’ he said. ‘Pretty cool. Pet rat, eh? That was good. But let’s get rolling, now. Turn right at the next milestone.’ He slammed the door. Aurora did not move.

  ‘I have another pet rat in the car with me,’ she said coldly, savouring each word. ‘A live one.’

  ‘WHERE? O God, is it on me? Where?’

  ‘I have it safely out of your reach, for the moment. But unless you throw your gun in the back seat and start behaving like a gentleman, I shall stuff this rat down your collar!’

  ‘You—you’re kidding.’ Long silence. ‘There couldn’t be another—is there?’ Another long silence, then the gun thudded into the back seat.

  ‘Now, general, I’ll drive you where you wish to go, if you’ll tell me what this is all about.’

  ‘We’ll head for NORAD HQ in Colorado. That’s safest,’ he said in a shaken voice. ‘I can’t tell you what I’m doing here—it’s a secret.’

  ‘If it has anything to do with Project 32, you may tell me,’ said Aurora and handed him her purse. ‘My identification is in there.’

  ‘Who are you?’ He fumbled in the purse, held up a card and trained a penlight on it ‘Aurora Candlewood, Ph.D., Special Psychological Consultant for Project 32. A young kid like you? What does the fancy title mean, kid?’

  ‘If you are going to tell me what I think you are going to tell me, it means Project 32 needs me badly.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we need,’ he said. ‘We need a good dragon-slayer.’

  ‘Right. Now suppose you tell me a little more about the dragon?’

  CHAPTER XIII

  WONDER JOURNEY

  ‘Rudis indigestaque moles’

  OVID

  As the car picked up speed the conversation within slowed, until, by the time they were flying into the outskirts of the deserted city, the five had grown strangely silent.

  The car swerved, slowed, bumped down steel rollers into an unlit tunnel. Cal felt it buffeted by blasts of steam and water; he could smell the suds. There was the scream of saws on steel, and the dead blackness popped and flashed with livid gleams. By their uncanny light, Cal saw he was alone. The four others, the car, everything familiar was gone but the third of the seat to which he was still safety-strapped, which moved forward on invisible tracks to some rendezvous of its own.

  He crashed through double doors into a room full of blood-red light, full of well-dressed mute figures. Mannikins, he thought with relief. In the corners, naked mute limbs in charnel heaps. The upper half of a dummy, weakly upright, slid down an inclined oily countertop, cracking the wall with its face and falling back. A bell sounded distantly. Sprinklers drizzled on the non-existent fire, while delicate water-wheels revolved beneath them. In the atrosanguinous shadow, the dummy’s smashed face and nose-hole received the rain.

  * * *

  Brian Gallopini found himself inexplicably alone, as the seat to which he was fastened moved into dry yellow sunlight. Light blazed white-red on his retina; he squinted at the globes. Artificial suns? No, goldfish bowls, fishbowls of gold lofted on levers to the sun, a sun-offering. The goldfish floated belly-up.

  * * *

  Cats crawled along upper shelves, going from nowhere to nowhere. A few of them wore gold or silver watches strapped about their middles. One paused, near enough for her to read the watch. It was wrong. Daisy saw the date change from 7 to 8 with a click. The cat gave a tiny scream and moved faster. It was only then Daisy noticed it was pulling a little pie tin full of machine parts.

  * * *

  Dipterous toy helicopters roamed the room, weaving fine copper wire in peculiar, meaningless patterns. Jack yawned.

  * * *

  Every can seemed to have rusted enough to admit a few bacteria. The buildup of gas was terrific, as Harry gladly demonstrated. He plunged his knife into a can that exploded black juice over his hand. He laughed.

  ‘Sauerkraut!’ he said. ‘Rotten sauerkraut!’

  Cal did not laugh. ‘It’s odd. Most of the stock is gone, and the rest is rotten. In only a few days. Mysterious. Is there anything left?’

  Harry laughed again. ‘Nothing to write home about,’ he s
aid, plunging his knife into another can. It squittered black and grey curds.

  Later Cal would see how the system incorporated these exploding cans into a sort of ‘internal combustion’ engine, using an old auto cylinder block, reloading eight cans after every revolution. But just now he was watching the shopping carts.

  * * *

  Ferriferous were the stately wheels of the sumptuous ‘ironclad’, or locomotive, which stood upon rails of ferric metals, burnished bright. It looked powerful, and appearances, in this case, were not deceiving, for it fairly chuffed with impatience to be off. Steam issued forth and hissed insistence into the ironic fists, then the behemoth moved down inclined grooves towards an enormous loop-the-loop. Roaring up to 110 miles per hour, the leviathan looped and looped again. Switched into the vertical circle (¼ mile high), it would continue thus until it ‘ran out of steam’, as it were.

  Jack watched the engine, awaiting its fall. Its blue-green lights, the colour of Calliphoridae, shone in the afternoon haze. The engine was pushing a giant crank before it, made of twisted I-beams, whose handle was a telephone pole. The crank drove a gear system atop a derrick perched on a low building, a factory or school.

  * * *

  Gurgling, the row of automatic washers began its intricate ballet once more, each blocky tub hopping in place. If they started moving towards her, Daisy told herself, she’d scream. Not that it would do any good.

  Just now it was a place to sit, glancing at an abandoned newspaper.

  VENUS PROBE A-OK

  Obscene idea. Nothing about the attack of the washermen, she noticed. There wouldn’t be, of course, anything like Washing Crossing Delaware.

  One of the machines burst into streaky-green flames.

  * * *

  How many preparations there were to make or keep women beautiful Brian Gallopini (Ph.D.) had never realized. Here Lady Clinge, Queen Esther, Prince Gloriani and other nobility vied for the privilege of caring for milady’s surface. Or, as at present, they vied in providing big, boxlike machines with cold cream lubricants and parfum fuels. A gross of stretch girdles had been tied together to propel a large boxy thing that the small boxy things were now winding up; a kind of giant, wingless model plane. It began to move, majestically, out of the smashed front of the shop, backwash from its great propellor whipping up a froth of lace.

  * * *

  In a covered wagon marked WAGONS WEST COCKTAIL LOUNGE, horsedrawn, moving slowly eastward, lay a stack of nude figures.

  ‘Dummies,’ Harry assured Cal.

  The two sidekicks were astride 10¢ mechanical ponies from the supermarket, heading west. As they passed a busy casino, Harry pointed out the zombie-like creatures inside. Mindless, these pushed coins into and pulled handles of slot machines. Wheels spun, jackpots rattled, but nothing affected them. They were not clearly machines, nor yet unmistakably human. Alone, of all the fixtures of Las Vegas, these remained (though employed by a new master) outwardly unchanged. One-handedly they nibbled club sandwiches without pausing in their work.

  * * *

  ‘Judo,’ muttered Harry admiringly, as he watched two dog-sized boxes warring, ‘or something.’ One’s shield was a bent sign on which the word KENO was still legible. Kenogenesis? Cal wondered. What else could turn brother against brother like this?

  The dachshund of a box fought with cable cutters, nipping at the delicate legs of the other, a tall, airedale box. Armed with a ball of lead on a stick, it seemed to be trying to beat the dachshund even flatter. Would Keno cut Fido down to size? Or would Fido knock Keno into submission?

  The lavender X-ray machine from a dentist’s office, buzzing angrily came to intervene. Cal dragged Harry away from the spot before, he hoped, they were both lethally dosed.

  * * *

  ‘Kinematograph!’ cried the Professor, surveying the unfamiliar equipment of the electronics shop. ‘Phonogram! Stereophone!’ He paused before a video tape player. Having never seen television before, Brian was charmed by this old news tape of the Venus probe, running forwards and backwards like a palindrome.

  * * *

  Mechanical elaborations rose rococo on every side. Daisy looked at them, hardly able to focus her uncomprehending gaze. A grain elevator’s screw lifted up an incline bowling balls and dropped them through the second-story window of the

  casino. Through collimating holes they fell freely to the basement kitchen where, their potential energy having become kinetic energy, their momentum was converted into impulse by their striking, one by one, the levers of a punch. Day and night it punched out aluminium frames for new cells, new cells, new cells. Along with club sandwiches, the bowling balls were pulleyed to the first floor via dumb waiter. The sandwiches were conveyed on belts to the organisms they fuelled, which ran the one-armed dynamos, while the bowling balls were rolled down a chute to the street and waiting elevator. The latter was run by clockwork gears, an hydraulic system, and, ultimately, exploding cans of sauerkraut in another part of town. These caused pistons to oscillate, driving a crank which compressed air into long cylindrical tanks. These cylinders then formed rollers for the transport of heavy objects to or from the vicinity of the elevator, where, connected to air motors, an hydraulic system and gears from a tower clock, they operated it continuously. Power to form the extruded sheet aluminium from which the frames were to be punched was provided by evacuation of the city water supply through water-wheels. The aluminium was melted down in a vat in the pet department of a nearby department store, heated by the rays of the sun concentrated through fishbowls. Scrap aluminium was dumped into this vat by a relay team of cats.

  * * *

  ‘NO OTHER GYM CAN MAKE THIS OFFER!’ Harry read the sign by flashlight. ‘Eat all you want and still lose!’ It pictured men in various positions of exquisite torture: arms pulled up in crucifix position by pulley; scourged by the slapping looped belt of a machine; doubled like a foetus under a platform of crushing weights; and spread like Prometheus, liver to the sky, dumbells in the outstretched, agonizing hands.

  Harry read the poster a second time. Having just climbed five flights of stairs dragging something, he needed to catch his breath.

  * * *

  ‘O Magic Probe!’ intoned the Professor. Charmed by it, he pretended to charm it in return; he stood posed, holding his

  stick like a wand above the television set. The rocket slowly backed down to earth, swallowed and extinguished its flames like a carnival performer.

  ‘O Levitation!’ he murmured. ‘O Dark Work of Monsieur Mesmer!’ Rhabdomancer, he let his rune-staff dip towards the sink in the corner. Aleuromancer, he scattered filings on a magnet.

  ‘The image of the murderer,’ he warned, ‘will appear upon the dead man’s retina!’

  But now, magically, the image on the screen metamorphosed. A man smiled, then spewed beer into a glass, till it was foaming full. In another part of the shop, a jukebox was awakening.

  * * *

  Placing the flashlight under his chin, Harry turned it on. Daisy screamed, and he laughed.

  ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘You ought to be put in a cage,’ she grated.

  ‘If you take that back,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you a secret. Somebody’s dead, and I know who.’

  ‘Dead? Who?’

  ‘Cal. Poor guy had an accident.’ Harry experimented, shining the flashlight through his own fingers to show the bones. ‘A nasty fall.’

  * * *

  Quite suddenly, Brian was not alone. The jukeboxes were with him, playing 200 OF YOUR FAVOURITE SELECTIONS. Their music bore him into a past of minuets and waltzes, hoedowns and patriotic marches, as they glided past him in slow turns, filling the room with light and sound.

  Dapplings of cobalt blue, strawberry, celadon, ochre spun across the walls and ceiling. On one machine a panel rippled with azure, faded to orchid, then blinked scarlet fire. Chromium and aluminium and glass took up the rich tints—coral, turquoise, ruby, lime—and multiplied them, till the room rang with co
lour. Brian felt his face a patchwork of rose, purple, amber, felt palpable light rhythms pluck at it as guitars, reeds and sounding brass plucked at his eardrums. His delighted multicoloured lips formed the idiot words to songs, soundless in

  the tumult It was glorious and he was part of it, taking his place in line as they filed towards the door. Carmine and indigo islands fled across the ceiling and walls before him, streaking towards, shrinking towards, converging on the doorway. He knew he would follow the jukebox parade almost anywhere, on and on till he became nothing more than a noise in the street.

  * * *

  Red light streamed down through Harry’s fingers and gleamed on something in the dust.

  ‘Cal dead? Gee, that’s too bad,’ said Daisy. ‘I kind of liked him.’

  Harry smiled in the dark. ‘Oh, all the girls kind of liked Cal,’ he said. ‘Hey, where you going?’

  ‘Look, there’s something going on at the drive-in-theatre,’ she shouted back. ‘Maybe that’s where the others are.’

  ‘Wait up,’ he said, genuflecting to pick up the coin.

  * * *

  Slowly, a foldaway sofabed humped, folding itself like an inch-worm to measure slow, but luxuriously soft, progress.

  * * *

  Tour Paris! urged a poster on the van of broken shoes. The poster showed the Eiffel Tower, a balloon vendor, a kiosk. Cal, lying on the bed of broken shoes, had plenty of time to think it over. The wind had been knocked out of him by a fall.

  * * *

  Ventriloquial sounds came from belly of ROBO the robot. Made from a toy mechanical set, he blinked lights in his eyes, waved stiff arms and made similar signs of amiability. He stood in the unglazed, lighted window of a toy store.

  ‘Hullo, Earthmen,’ he boomed at Daisy. As she passed, she peered inside, where an inferior second ROBO was just staggering to his feet. He had only one arm, and his head was a tin can still labelled Harmony Pears.

  Daisy and Harry hurried on. The ROBOS did not say goodbye.