Alien Accounts

by Sladek, John

What if we fail to describe the president, Hernando Horario Murd?

  Then we have no guarantee of his physical identifiable reality. Miss Bunne, his secretary, might not know what to do with important letters marked ‘For the Immediate Attention of H. H. Murd.’

  Certainly. First she could take them to the door marked with the above name. Then through it, to the desk placarded with the above name. Then she could check the name on the letterhead stationery in the desk drawer. Then she could check the name on the memo stationery in the other desk drawer. Then she could check the initials on the golf balls, if any, if initialled, in the other desk drawer.

  Then she could check the monogram on the shirt pocket of any person seated at the desk, the monogram on the gold pen clipped to the shirt pocket, and the name on the ALL AREAS CLEARANCE company I.D. badge pinned just above the shirt pocket. Then she could check the full-color photo on the badge against the face of the sitter, the wearer.

  And she could read the name and traceable numbers on papers from the sitter-and-wearer’s billfold, including driver’s license, credit cards, Health Salon Membership, parking ticket(s), love letter(s), business cards, business letters, an ‘I Am a Diabetic, in Case of Collapse, Notify a Physician’ card, an ‘I Am a Catholic, in Case of Accident, Notify a Priest’ card, or an ‘I Am Deaf’ card, bearing on the obverse a request for money, on the reverse an Alphabet of the Hand.

  Then, using the Alphabet of the Hand, she could ask the person at the desk for a signature, fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, a retina photograph, and an earprint, hair and skin samples, an ounce of blood, a complete personal history. She could question the person on the person’s personal history, using a polygraph and/or truth serums.

  But all these things can be faked.

  True, as can ordinary recognition signs. Gentlemen, we are at an impasse. I suggest we vote to describe him, and put the description on record, reserving our question of its validity until the committee has finished fact-finding about the question of ‘validity’ itself. Agreed?

  Begin, then, with his shoelaces, double-tied, black. The ferrules resemble tightly-rolled strips of microfilm.

  These are laced through sixteen holes of his two black, perforated, wing-tip oxfords. The perforations resemble those of edge-notched cards used in one popular index system. The mirror finish reflects dark distortions of the scene around them, a scene chiefly of other shoes and the lower parts of furniture.

  The heels of these oxfords are suspiciously large and thick. They might almost be hollow heels of the type favoured by smugglers and spies for concealment of heroin or deathkit. A deathkit is simply a tiny hollow needle and a soft plastic ampule of strychnine. Being a diabetic, though neither a Catholic nor deaf, Mr Murd would not be afraid of needles.

  The suit is enormous, the colour and roughly the shape of some prototype atom bomb. There is no tie. Every day the suit walks in at the same time. Miss Bunne takes its arm to help it sit down heavily, easing the seat of the huge trousers into the day’s pattern of wrinkles.

  Now I think we can turn it over to Stoat from here.

  Agent Bob was thirty years old, though he was not writing a poem about it. Instead, he knocked out his usual daily thousand words of Memoirs of a CIA man, which he had tentatively entitled I Killed for You:

  I gave her a rabbit punch to knock the poison capsule out of her mouth. Then I kicked her until she wasn’t pretty anymore. I kept thinking of what that .375 Magnum slug had done to Larry’s face …

  The memoirs included plenty of travel to Rome, Paris, Monaco, and various pleasure centres, where Bob won large sums of money at roulette, baccarat, etc., just after he had explained the rules in detail. He also knew plenty about wines, sports cars, weapons and anything else difficult to get through Customs, which he had no difficulty doing. He managed one exciting fuck per chapter, one good kill per chapter, or the equivalent. People who phoned him rarely finished their call alive, and when he approached his own Hilton hotel room, Bob usually got an eerie feeling …

  In short, the whole thing managed to disguise pretty well Bob’s job as a code clerk. Now and then he tailed a suspect – always the same one – and his only other duty was clipping periodicals for the hunchboard.

  The hunchboard was not an information source; that was the domain of the CIA computer which daily digested 200 world magazines and newspapers. The hunchboard was a source of inspiration. Mr Stoat, Bob’s chief, would select a few items almost at random, have Bob clip them out, and tack them up with his constantly-changing collage of headlines, pictures, features and ads. From these, Mr Stoat was somehow able to develop hypotheses about world affairs.

  Bob’s thirtieth birthday found him clipping out a bra ad, and lost in a daydream about gunning down Stoat where he stood.

  For almost no reason, Bob hated this sun-bronzed little man who resembled a handsome, if foreshortened, executive. He hated everything about him: the hunchboard, the way he hummed, the fact that he wore his shaggy wool overcoat in the office, the fact that he carried, not a real gun, but a toy: a wooden block printed with a picture of a gun.

  Piff! Blat! Puffs of dust rose from the shaggy wool. The stocky man spun and flopped like a rag doll, gushing blood through its tanned nostrils.

  Bob snipped viciously across the page. Unaware of his death, Mr Stoat stood before the hunchboard, gaining insights. He gained insights into subversive plots, subversive counterplots, his own plan for world domination. He looked worriedly at the ceiling, the toy gun he was using as a pointer, Bob, the board, Bob.

  ‘Look out, Bob, you’re spoiling her tits.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  Buddha-buddha. Bob gripped the two scissor handles, one in each hand, and pulled the trigger. Tracer after tracer plowed into the placid back. Stoat made irritated little hums.

  ‘Hmm. Hmm.’ He studied clippings from Grit, Rod & Custom, The Sacred Heart Messenger. ‘Ummm.’ He compared war news with suppository ads. ‘Choo-de-choom.’ He marked the conjunction of General Motors’ sales graph with pictures of dead movie stars, then with a thalidomide item. ‘Hmp?’ Russia’s Secret Space Deaths went between Is Your Marriage Really Sublime? and The Kind of Girl Tab Hunter Wants.

  ‘Hmp. Hmp. Hmp.’

  Bob drowned the little noises in a wave of .50 calibre fire. Tun. Tununun. Tununununun.

  ‘Ho!’ Stoat tore scraps of McCalls, The IBM Song Book and Detective Comics from the board and threw them on the floor. Then he knelt and stirred them with the toy weapon. ‘Yup!’ His face was grim. ‘Looks bad, Bob.’

  ‘A crisis, sir?’

  ‘In transportation or communication. Could be only a bomb in a train station, such as Batman here finds, but Mars is in conjunction with Saturn, is it? – that means something really big. Subliminal panic messages inserted in a prime-time TV show, causing a run on rifles that could cripple our rifle industry maybe, I don’t know. An army strike? Who can say? A pop singer discovers a new sound that sets off a slow-destruct mechanism buried one million years ago in the cerebral cortex. Your guess is as good as mine. The palm of the president, as revealed in the blown-up photo of a speech, reveals tendencies towards aggression, self-deprecating remarks, constipation, should seek new friends this week, not keep analretentive hold on Vietnam, cloacal gold standard. It’s anybody’s ball game.

  ‘Los Angeles and San Francisco riding the San Andreas fault, due for earthquake – could be a tie-in with the Original Fault. Can’t rightly say. Film industry, half TV industry wiped out next Columbus Day, cross-reference to Columbia Broadcasting? To Christopher movement? Their motto: “YOU can change the world”. California is altogether a bad complex; maybe it should be removed without narcotics, astringents, or surgery. Could demonstrations at Berkeley (“I am a human being. Please do not fold, staple, spindle or mutilate”) be link-up with Bishop Berkeley (“all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind … their being is to be perceived or known”)? You tell me
.’

  Pocketing his wooden gun, Stoat said slyly, ‘I want you to follow someone in connection with this crisis. My number one suspect.’

  Not again, thought Bob, but he kept his expression interested. The ‘number one suspect’ was always the same: Stoat’s wife Anne.

  ‘I want you to go to this address,’ he said coyly. ‘Follow this red-haired woman.’ He gave him a picture from his billfold. ‘And stay with her.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Stoat unwrapped a small but distinguished smile and tried it on. ‘Good luck, son, and be careful.’

  Bob lobbed a grenade into the office as he left, and shut the door quickly behind him.

  SUMMIT CONFERENCE ON ‘GOVT SWAP’

  US may become USSR

  ANIMATED FILM STAR TO RUN FOR CONGRESS

  CARDINAL BRAKESPEARE APPROVES PILL

  LION OIL PLANS ESSO MERGER

  Gen. Max Heiliger (Ret.) was a tall, emaciated African with good-luck scars on both cheeks. As head of Operations at Drum Inc., he developed company strategy along unusual lines, using sophisticated mathematics and Dr Gibbel’s ‘surprise’ computer. He had a summit meeting with Mr Murd almost daily, but whenever reporters from the house organ, The Drum Call, asked him what was going on, he would reply with something vague about Marshall McLuhan and the global village, or quote Tarzan on the necessity for intercommunication between man and other species.

  Why are they all trying to get me, Max wondered. The FBI thinks I’m a Black Panther. The CIA thinks I’m a Panafrican revolutionist. The KKK thinks I’m a Negro. The American Nazi, Party thinks I’m a Jew. The Zionists think I’m an ex-Nazi. Mr Murd thinks I spy for Bell, Bell wonders if I’m not an East German spy. The DAR thinks I’m a cannibal, someone keeps writing anonymous letters to The Drum Call saying I’m an extraterrestrial of superior intellect, and my barber thinks I’m a vivisectionist. Snip, snip, snip. ‘What do you do all day, over there in that windowless blockhouse? Cut up small animals, ha ha?’ The scissors poised to shear off an ear.

  In any other story I’d be the hero. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. It’s the good-luck scars, that’s it. Dad’s idea. As always, the younger, audiotactile generation is left in a mess by the older, visual generation. So now everyone thinks maybe I used to wear a bone through the nose. It’s a bone through the nose to them, that’s all. They think I dine on missionaries cooked up in a big iron pot. What a disgusting idea, a cooked missionary with hairy legs. I’m just a cartoon figure, bone through the nose. Whenever I see one of those cartoons, I’ll point it out to them and ask them one simple question: Who supplied the big iron pots?

  (From The Drum Call)

  Well, team, we’re sorry to report the accident rate is up once again. The department with the highest a.r. is Cable Accounts, who now have lost the safety pennant to the typing pool by a score of 3-0. Nice going, girls, and keep it up! And of course we hope the ‘cabies’ will try extra hard next month, and maybe win back their title!

  The most serious accident in Cable Accounts was Ray GaIt’s, and a darned shame it was. Ray, in case you don’t know him, is the young one-armed janitor with the big smile. Everyone seems to miss his cheery ‘Hello!’ each morning, and we sincerely hope he’ll be back with the gang soon!

  The mishap was just one of those things, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Because there have been wedding bells tinkling around the Cable Accounts office, mainly in connection with Ray and Dot Hanson, the file clerk with the famous dimples. They say that whenever Ray had a window in the department to wash, Dot would soap a little note to him on the glass – certainly original in their love-letters, aren’t they?

  Maybe Ray was reading one of these, or just thinking about that little vine-covered cottage for two, but anyway yesterday while mopping the hall, Ray somehow caught his good arm in the elevator doors. Talk about tough luck! The hospital says he may lose his good arm, but we know he’ll never lose his good humour.

  Our newest employee in Cable Accounts, Eric Bland, will be taking care of the fruit n’ flower fund. And so, on behalf of the staff and management, may we wish Ray a speedy recovery, and hope he’ll be back on his feet in no time.

  (Radio-TV Advertisement)

  Everyone likes to have Fun,

  But no one likes to miss out on the Fun;

  When everyone is having a good time,

  Don’t you be the one left out.

  You’ll have more Fun if you get more Fun,

  And you’ll get more Fun – today!

  (Magazine Advertisement)

  (Headline)

  We’re really sorry, but we’re only human.

  (Copy)

  You’re human, too, of course. Like us. Everyone is.

  And we humans have a lot in common, don’t we? Sure,

  some of us like to bowl, while others like to take it

  easy with a cold beer. But we’re still a lot alike,

  we humans.

  Or are we? Maybe we’re a lot different, too. We

  don’t pretend to know the answer to that one.

  We haven’t got all the answers. Yet.

  Mr Kravon read The Drum Call. ‘I’d like to kill that son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘Here I thought we had the pennant sewed up. I thought we’d grab the yearly safety plaque, too. Well, he’s washed up now. Out of the company he goes. Or stick him out in a factory somewhere, where they don’t give a god damn about accidents anyhow.’

  To put the upsetting incident out of his mind, he leafed slowly and with pleasure through a new brochure of watertight caskets and vaults.

  RULES FOR WRITING LOVE-LETTERS

  1. Be neat.

  2. Get the name right – that’s important!

  3. If you must criticise, praise first.

  4. Make words work for you:

  Use analogies.

  Use short words.

  5. Remember the ‘We/you/I’ formula.

  6. Put in plenty of ‘curiosity value’.

  7. Keep it short.

  Holding hands, Eric and Dot watched the replacement janitor scrub the hall window, cleansing away Dot’s last message to Ray:

  Dear Ray Darlin … asy to … especially since you’ve been so… eet, but.., met someone els… feel I re … e for, and so you see how it … dn’t possibly … u while my heart belo … nother. En … lly wonderful, and I’m so hap … st working near… esk, and the only flaw in my ha … knowing th … ke you feel bad. But dar … n’t be. I’m su … ind someone else. In fact, Eric… gested and old … end of his, Marilyn Hartso … ks in the typing poo … Anyhow, we … ix you up … ll always think of you as a …

  It was signed ‘.’

  Why are they all trying to get me, Max wondered. Jane and Jean and Jane and Janet, my four girl-friends, June my wife, Jeanne and Joan my lovely wanton mistresses, all trying to get me. Not to mention Mr Murd, who fears my sable splendor, and my secretary, Jeanette. I wonder what that new girl at the office thinks of me?

  (Newspaper Advertisement)

  STOP DEATH COLD!

  Amazing new scientific discovery! Hair health can add years to your heart, inches to your prestige. Lucky holiday stamps guaranteed SAFE! Armchair learning of psychic power increases natural size visibly. Why be old? Ancient wisdom gives you a real He-Man voice – flattering new lines of confidence. Absolutely no narcotics or surgery for FREE booklet mailed to your door from all over the world! Raise cute ‘Fairy Penguins’ (not a religious organisation) in just 15 minutes a day, and BANISH acne through organic-approved, FAST police-training methods.

  (Classified Newspaper Advertisement)

  CONC. CMP. – 1 owner. Nw. elec. fnce., late mod. full secur. meas., grd. blk. + 4 like-nw. m/g twrs. Lites, alrms., 2 bldgs. ea. approx. 200 × 150', mesh wndws., escp.-proof. Latrines, mess, Exprmntl.med.lab, the works. 50 acres brl. grnd., cap’y. 10,000+. Blt to U.S. Govt. specs. Ideal schl. cmp., retire. cntr. 1st offer takes.

  It seemed to make no difference when Travers stopped sen
ding people into the company and decided to start ‘interviewing them outwards’. He was a component, that’s all, with a single YES/NO decision to make in each case.

  ‘And tell me, Ray, why is it you want to leave Drum?’

  ‘Well sir, I’ve always wanted to work somewhere else, somewhere with a solid base salary, some big-bracket benefits, security and plenty of room for advancement. And that’s about the size of it.’

  ‘That’s it in a nutshell, eh? Now I want you to think about those benefits a moment, vis-à-vis your – ah – disability.’ Travers’s putty-colored fingers moved lightly over the braille copy of Ray’s application. He leaned forward to give Ray a good look at his hump, straining against the garish fabric of his suit. The boy gulped.

  ‘Well sir, you see – I mean …’

  ‘I don’t see, as you jokingly put it. And you’re not here to play jokes on a blind man, you cruel, intolerant young bastard! You – excuse me.’

  An alarm was ringing in a drawer. Travers shut it off, then fished out a syringe and a small bottle. ‘If you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my insulin.’ He gave himself an injection of water, all the time studying Ray through the dark glasses, noting with approval that he was hanging his head and blushing.

  ‘Well, excuse me for flying off the handle like that. We each have our own problems. But tell me this: Where in hell do you expect to get group insurance, after you’ve had two major accidents?

  ‘I’m no plaster saint to lecture you about anything, Ray. In fact, besides being blind, hunchbacked, and a diabetic, I have this drinking problem … But even so, I at least am entitled to group insurance – which means I’m entitled to leave Drum Inc. for a greener pasture.’

  The head on the armless trunk still hung down, and tears fell from it to the carpet. Travers wondered if the carpet would be stained.

  ‘Tell you what. I’ll hang on to your application for a few months, see what happens. You go back to work, I think this time at the factory. I can’t be fairer than that, OK?