Los Angeles

by Philip Wylie

  He smiled, “Thanks.”

  “It’s lucky I was in the office when we learned who you were. You see, I majored in history, in college. In my Senior year we were given a twenty-five year period to cover for a final thesis. If we had no choice, we merely got randomly assigned periods. I chose 1950 to 1975, the time when you rose to such … importance. It was all American history, but I wanted to know what it was like before the big calamities occurred. When my mother and dad were young, and when their parents had grown up, and all. Interesting people, my grandparents. Tell you about them, someday. Anyhow. You cannot major in that twenty-five years, that ‘last, great interval’ without learning at least something about a press lord and media czar”—she laughed at his look of distress—“without, that is, running across a lot of stuff about the head of Howard Associates.”

  “I see.” It was getting to be his constant response.

  The drinks came.

  He raised his in a toast which she caught onto and returned. He downed half the outsized drink and recognized a faint added flavor to what he knew was Jack Daniel’s; not true bourbon, but, in his view, near enough and far superior.

  She choked on her drink.

  But she finished it while explaining the equipment in his living room.

  As did he, refusing her suggestion of another.

  He had been weary and near to a state of shock, of collapse, of mandatory rest. Now, all that vanished. He felt great. Fresh. And very male.

  The lovely girl took on an almost transcendent quality, as if she shone from within and as if her already nearly irresistible physical appeal was becoming utterly irresistible. Her brown eyes fixed on him with plain amorousness and soon she rose.

  “Let me show you the rest of this place,” she said.

  That led to a whirlwind tour of the apartment during which she pointed gayly to each item she thought needed notice and described it, usually in a single word. She was charming in that inviting, delighted near-dance.

  The tour moved from the living room to the bedroom where she switched on beautifully shadowed lamps before she beckoned him in.

  Here, she continued her antic proceedings with warmth and speed.

  “Bedroom,” she said, as if that was required.

  “Bed,” and she pointed to the large bed, and the silken coverlet spread on it.

  “Girl,” she said next, and flung herself, smiling and overtly inviting, on the bed.

  She reached behind her back and undid fastenings, he realized, because her next word came after two sweeping movements that took off her garments.

  “Nude girl,” she truly stated.

  Her arms reached out.

  “Yours.”

  She could see, of course, as before, the complex effect.

  Glenn started toward her without the slightest hesitation but, just before he embraced the beautiful person with the willing, wanting, yet innocently pure smile, he stopped.

  His eyes began to move about the dim walls of this room. His exultant feeling died. He walked away from the lady and started looking about, closely.

  The bugs were well camouflaged, minute tubes with shiny lenses, little electronic sound pickup devices, but he found several.

  “The experiment?” he finally said, turning to her at last.

  She was crying and getting dressed.

  He said, “Never mind. I meant it, darling. Only it occured to me that I’m not for public lovemaking. Too personal and too important.”

  “I meant it, too,” she half sobbed. “I forgot, myself, there would be—”

  “Peeping Toms!” he said, harshly. “Voyeurs.”

  Her bright hair swung in negation as she sniffled, took a handkerchief from an unnoted pocket and blew her nose. “Scientists, Glenn. Not—dirty people. Nobody is dirty-minded, any more. If I’d remembered—and thought at all—I’d have known how you’d feel. I’m horribly sorry! Not to say”—the lifted face and its first, next smile again dazzled him—“disappointed.”

  “So am I.” He gave her a grin that was sympathetic as well as ardent. “Later? How do we get some privacy?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, unevenly. “Maybe it’ll be permitted.”

  “I could go around,” he suggested, staring at one of the cameralike objects he’d uncovered, “and smash them all.”

  “Don’t do that!” She was frightened, to his surprise.

  “No? Why?”

  “I guess,” she said, standing and feeling with her bare feet for her slippers, “you don’t understand at all. As long as you’re being studied, you do what they require. They will make sound tapes and visuals of all you do, that they want to record. Eventually, providing the scientists get all the data they want, and providing you are given back all that the President—promised, you’ll be as free as anybody else.”

  He began to understand. “Big Brother, eh?”

  She laughed feebly. “George Orwell? 1984? I read the contemporary books, hundreds, of course. But I doubt if anybody in this city, even any member of the Board, would have the faintest idea of what ‘Big Brother’ meant!”

  “In other words, I’m actually a prisoner. Under limited parole. As well as under observation, by remote electronics, wherever I go?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And, apparently, everybody’s in that boat. Or, at least, subject to spot checks, at random and unknown times?”

  “Except the A-Class Alpha-plus people. Which you’ll be, if things go all right.”

  “And what, exactly, is Alpha-plus?”

  “Any man or woman with an A thru C Class rating who also has undamaged genes is an Alpha. The Alpha-plusses have genes of new and added and valuable sorts. You’re one.”

  “How in hell do you know that?”

  “You got a complete workup, didn’t you? Or maybe you don’t remember. Don’t understand. As you came in, you went thru the physical screening and so on. They had to be sure you weren’t bringing in any outside poison, or diease—germ, virus—that they couldn’t deal with. And at the same time they automatically made a complete gene-portrait—from blood and other samples.”

  “Other? Oh. I was out cold, mostly.”

  “Yes. Biology, and other sciences, and their medical uses, are far ahead of 1971. After all—!”

  “I guess they are!” He led her back to the less distressful frustration of the front room. He sat with her on the divan—with a cautious space between them.

  “You can perhaps understand—” she began.

  There was a break. He suddenly wished for a cigar and without thinking, glanced about. She’d said, “Vacuobox,” in that one-word dance of explaining his apartment and its fixtures and that is what he looked at, because he recalled its resemblance to a humidor. It was on a table, oval, near the divan. It held, he found, cigars—and cigarettes.

  “Another bit from your history courses?”

  She smiled, somewhat shyly. “Yes. And maybe I should tell you more. About that Alpha-plus thing.”

  He found the cigar excellent and fresh-seeming though, he was sure, it was forty-six years old, minimally. The arts of preserving or of flavor-renewal had advanced, evidently, too. He blew smoke, realizing no one he’d seen had smoked anything, so far: like drinking, perhaps, a dead custom.

  “It smells wonderful,” she murmured.

  “You were about to explain my high marks in genes?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t, at first. I thought, we’d make love, and then I’d tell. Because I have a selfish interest in doing just that, with you, and often, and for endless days or more! You see—I’m possibly sterile.”

  “I gathered that, somewhere. So?”

  “But there is a slight chance I might not be. One that would require a male with a very high and very vigorous sperm index. Which you have. And an Alpha—because, except for that matter of never yet getting pregnant, my genes are fine.”

  He tried to digest that. Other—lovers? Well … partners. No luck. Try Glenn Howard, right
off, given the chance.

  “It was like that,” she said softly, “till I saw you. There at the foyer doors—and looking at me—and so madly desirous!”

  That shocked Glenn slightly. She ignored his look. “It meant I did it—to you. I know I’m attractive, of course. But even if I’ve sometimes had such instant effect, Glenn, I never had such a tremendous response. Never. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “I guess so,” he replied slowly. “Things have changed, tho.”

  “Yes, they have.” She seemed lost in reverie, then, and he waited, smoking quietly, to hide a churning under his visible features.

  She finally spoke, with care and slowly. “You see, even when the world population was—what did you used to say?… exploding?—and when people were at least aware that had to be stopped, no laws were passed to restrict child-producing, and none would have been enforced, if passed.”

  “Difficult, naturally. But we were trying to teach people to have smaller families.”

  Her locks swung in that negating way, again, and light flickered over them as from tinsel, from all the hues of Christmas tinsels, gold to silver, and others, he found himself noticing. She went on:

  “Suppose every couple had agreeed to have just two children? Or suppose laws demanded that, and were enforced? What would next happen?”

  “You tell me.”

  “The Joneses would have two normal kids, boy and girl, say. Across the street, the Griggs would have two defectives. Kids with inherited, that is, genetic disabilities. Mental retardation. Bifodas or other crippling things. Hemophilia. There were many hundreds of inheritable defects!”

  “I know. So?”

  “The Joneses would realize their normal boy and girl were going to grow up and have to support the two Griggses, all their lives, right?”

  “I suppose they would.”

  “And the Joneses of the world begin to protest. Because that wouldn’t be fair, at all. Besides, from a genetic standpoint, it would merely continue an already intolerable situation.”

  “I guess I see. We were producing a lot of—”

  “Runts. Culls. The feeble minded!” She was disturbed, now, nearly angry. “The more your ‘humane’ values held, and the more your medical arts advanced, the more of these genetic nothings were allowed to live, even to breed—! The world’s gene pool was becoming degraded and faster in ‘advanced’ nations than anywhere else. Disadvantaged peoples, you called them, still had their genetically ruined tots swept away by natural causes—mere physical liabilities that led to early death. Not in America! You were cherishing, and wasting billions, on a system which guaranteed the ruination of your human stock!”

  He looked at his cigar and it trembled so he set it down because he could keep his voice steady, at least. “You seem pretty sure of that datum.”

  “Perfectly! You can find it in the books right here. We picked them to help you catch up, by reading. Anyway.” She pulled herself together and discarded her anger by an act of will. “Anyway. Down here, we didn’t start out breeding better pigs and dogs and cattle than you free people! We couldn’t afford to! Life wasn’t just what you called ‘cheap’—though always for other people—”

  “There was a distinction,” he put in, coldly.

  “Was there? Life was cheap in China? India? How cheap was American life on America’s highways? How cheap was an American when he was allowed to have increasing chances at being defective? How valuable is life when you have a system that insures it will be mentally less and less capable, physically more and more damaged, every next generation?”

  She waited for his answer, eyes hot and direct.

  He had no answer.

  People, in his “time,” had been aware of the horrors of the population explosion. Who, however, had foreseen that, if control were somehow managed, the next great and shocking problem would be genetic management—the prevention of national, racial, species decay—owing to the leaps of medicine and owing to what this woman, this girl, rightly called “sentimentality”?

  We weren’t even near to any answers! his mind shouted.

  If we hadn’t ruined our environment, we’d have become a race of cripples and morons.

  So, maybe, this was the best way of solving it all!

  A curdling thought!

  For, already, after his hours in the new world, Glenn had a feeling that besides the known, inferred and guessed aspects of this way of life, all such, horrifying, repellent, even abominable, to him, there would be many, many more. What he already knew, he then reflected, should have been enough to have made this beautiful companion odious, unattractive, a sort of nonwoman, a thing. Yet … that was not so! Why?

  “Time for you to change,” she said. “Then back to my place—you’ll wait at the Mayor’s—and we’ll just be at his house at eight thirty, late, but not too.”

  That, in sum, was the “adventure” over which Glenn mused while Bob showed off his astonishing home and its grounds.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA IS …

  It was not difficult to hide his preoccupation while Bob Baker showed him his front rooms, his terrace, pool and lawn. Glenn had only to express praise as each new wonder was disclosed. The Mayor was a man of taste—in everything. And his status allowed him a near-incredible range for the exercise of his appreciation.

  There were three enormous front rooms on the “ground” floor. They had high ceilings. They were opulently carpeted and each was immaculately furnished in its period: one of Louis Sixteenth, for the first salon, the center room “moderne” in a somewhat more functional but far more sybaritic manner than “moderne” meant in 1971, and the third, a dining hall, Eighteenth Century English, with even a handsome fireplace and a real fire. All three rooms could be thrown together for entertaining.

  Glenn looked, commented with enthusiasm, or the adequate sound of that, and followed his host to the terrace. Though bemused by his time with Leandra, Glenn interrupted what were not thoughts but racing feelings often enough to note some specific treasures. Holbeins, a Utrillo, two Degases, a magnificent Winslow Homer in the hall. Museum pieces, he almost said—and saw, in time, that, of course, they were. The museums of the city above them had stood empty, open, with no guards, curators, or public art lovers, for near fifty years. If they could bring down liquor for a man from the past, they could have brought down pictures, furniture, rugs and carpets, tapestry, anything.

  “Beautiful!” Glenn murmured as he completed a survey of the dining hall.

  “It is,” Bob agreed with pride. “My wife and I both enjoy the decorative arts and painting. But when your residence is ready, Glenn, this’ll look like nothing. Let’s go out on the terrace.”

  There, Glenn’s reverie was broken. His flaring feelings about Leandra were set aside. For the “terrace” seemed, at first view, to be outdoors, on a serene, starlit evening. The stars were a little hazed but in the right places and on the grassy lawn beyond the terrace, moonlight shone, and moonlight glinted, too, on a small but lovely lake, byyond. It staggered Glenn.

  He heard Bob’s chuckle. “Look real?”

  Just then Glenn had realized it was not real—could not be. “Yes.”

  Bob was busy with a panel on the terrace wall and Glenn stood, spellbound, watching the results.

  The blue, star-set “sky” paled. Dawn came in a low line of crimson, as it does for people flying east over the Pacific in a night that slowly has a crimson rim ahead and one which rapidly builds into sunrise and soon, the Coast. It was splendid and when Bob said, “Now, we’ll have it set,” the deepening sky took on the colors, in the opposite direction, of a sunset, with clouds of every hue between yellow and purple, and the clouds moved along realistically while their brilliance waxed, waned, faded and left them dark against a “sky” with the first stars showing.

  “This,” Bob said with quiet pleasure, “is more or less standard. The lake—pond, if you will—is filled with regenerated fresh water, five mill
ion gallons. At seventy degrees—for swimming. There are bass, if you like to fish, which I do.”

  They strolled ahead. Close up, Glenn saw that the trees and flowers were artificial and so were the birds in the trees. But his host activated a switch somewhere and recorded bird songs filled the evening air. Glenn began to believe he could smell orange blossoms and sniffed so meaningfully that Bob said, “Right. Beyond my lake there is a plastic partition—nonrefractive and nonreflecting, totally transparent. Behind it is a real garden with orchids—Eula likes them—some fruit trees, citrus, apricot, and some vegetables—as well as strawberries. The atmosphere beyond the plastic divider is pretty damp and hot but we run a little air current through the garden-hangar so that perfume of the oranges and lemons and limes is carried to the ‘outdoors,’ here.”

  “It’s fantastic!”

  “Not really. As a Board member you’ll have a really fabulous domicile. Incidentally, the citizens who don’t rate one of the three ‘A’ Classifications don’t know—must never learn—that we who rate have such places.”

  “Oh?” It wasn’t sharp but it was nonetheless significant.

  “Certainly. After all, the nation’s a corporation, Glenn! Those in top management are rewarded, just as always. With homes such as this—and other benefits. For any B or C people who show talent and start to rise, there’s a hint, and just a hint, always, that ability and effort are rewarded—in some unstated way. Each step up shows a surprising improvement in living space, furnishings, small luxuries and then larger ones, till, say, a graduate C Class student who comes along fast for ten years, even less, gets the one thing he does know about.”

  He waited so Glen asked, “Which is—?”

  “He is moved from the C Registry to B, for erotic companions.” Box saw that Glenn hadn’t heard of the reward. “You didn’t look over the service buttons in your temporary quarters—for which I apologize? Best we could do at the moment.”