by Philip Wylie
It was late morning, a clock said, when he woke. He felt rested. They let me sleep, he thought. And he thought, it would always be like that: they let me, they arrange, they forbid, they live your life and cut it off when they will. But he would, if he fell in with this fantastic and yet grim world—debauched, maybe, and for most, impoverished—be one of them. He couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
An odd thought—already “odd” he mused—came to him: would the twenty-five industrial and business czars at Boiling Wells all become Board members of USA, Inc., given his chance? He imagined most would, but wasn’t sure of unanimity. Even their dedication to profits, wealth, growth and their motivated skepticism about science, their obduracy, their ignorant and chance-accepting will to go on as-is, didn’t quite omit the fact that they were Americans and not this sort—a breed Glenn vaguely discerned as fascist, as dictatorship in committee form.
His phone rang. He leaped and lifted the ear-part as the picture glowed. It was Bob Baker. Grinning.
“Got a good rest, eh?”
“Thanks. Yes.”
“You looked disappointed. Who’d you expect? Never mind! She’s busy as the devil. I’m sending a Miss Lillian Chin to show you the engineering highlights. She’s a graduate physicist—and if you don’t go rocket over her looks, you’re a pansy! However, should your morning and early afternoon, ah … date … peter out, we have a Miss Theeman on tap for the late afternoon and evening. A look at the world outside. She’s a chemist. And she’s also, lucky guy, adorable. We want you to be happy.”
Glenn had several suggestions, but Bob had cut off.
In the later morning, with the fabulously lovely Lillian Chin—Chinese-Hawaiian-Swedish, she said—Glenn watched the giant rock-boring machines chew house-sized holes into the stony face of a city-limit wall, bare rock and fairly hard. He was duly impressed by the rig and its power.
He was more impressed by his quick but vivid look at the control room of the West Gate fusion reactor and an even quicker glimpse, through inky-dark goggles at the fiery plasma which produced ten million kilowatts for L.A. Lillian Chin impressed him, too, but uncomfortably. At lunch in a closed booth she openly invited him to make love. When he reacted with embarrassment, she produced a letter which he read with rising dismay.
“Dear Mr. Howard:
“I would immensely appreciate your doing my wife and me a favor I feel no honorable man could refuse. We have one child—we are both Alphas. To have another by an Alpha-plus would be a reward beyond dreaming. If this day is not suitable, some other, perhaps? However, today, my wife has a special dispensation, a fertility grant, and would be easily made with child by your cooperation. If it pleases, we will be always grateful. And you will find no more adroit, happy, versatile and passionate woman than Lillian.”
It was signed, “George Jackson, Chief, Reactor Division.”
“Miss Chin” had watched attentively while he read the missive. And she had seen her answer. She shed tears but did not cry aloud. She left without finishing her meal and was replaced by a Miss Arnette Billgiver, a dazzling brunette who was intellectual, informed, verbal and had the lust of a nymphomaniac.
She took him in an air-tight elevator to the top of a skyscraper, built since his day, where there was a balcony with transparent plastic sides and top from which they could gaze in the afternoon sun at the mist-strangled skyline of the old city. It was from this balcony, he learned, that they had for years maintained weather measuring gauges and devices. Now, the balcony was only used for the view. VIP visitors sometimes wanted this dramatic vista of the remains of Los Angeles. Many of the mist-piercing silhouettes of tall buildings were familiar to Glenn. Others were not—being newer.
“The heart of L.A.,” his guide explained, “was never burned. Two major fires driven by the Santa Ana winds destroyed several of the suburbs but not the center. Lucky rains, both times, saved it. And later, the air didn’t support combustion quite so well. Besides, vegetation returned and stayed green, after the cold years.”
He gave the great view his full and desolate attention. But Miss Theeman soon distracted him. Her approach—and Glenn now believed it a curse to have the perfect genes of an Alpha-plus—was physical, direct, and not subject to long or repeated discouragement of an equally physical sort—hand removing, kiss-evading, and rejected body-rubbing.
Before sunset, they returned to ground level and donned breathing gear. That was a relief as the helmets and suiting prevented her greedy efforts. She led him through a series of passages and corridors, old and recent, into what he finally realized was the main floor of Carton-Embrey, the big downtown central edifice of the most lavish department store in the city—one only in the planning stage at his “cut-off time,” a term he found more useful than “death,” or even “long sleep,” “suspended animation,” any other of that sort.
The gear allowed them to converse—but over mikes.
He had little to say. But the cloying, pressing, intimately physical brunette kept him partly distracted, even in this dust-laden, ruined, half-dark and once-gaudy store: she talked about sex acts. They tramped through aisles, from one department to another. Much of the array of goods had been “looted,” of course, though only for practical ends, or largely that.
Gloria Theeman had started that tour with a set monologue:
“The men’s styles, you’ll note, were of the last date—quite different from 1971—and beginning”—she shook dust from a male dummy—“to have the sexual emphasis that increased as humanity became free.” She began to ad lib, there.
He went to and through a bridal arcade and he was shocked at what brides and bridesmaids wore in the late eighties. He briefly took charge of the direction to look at a sports shop. Most of the weapons were missing but all the other grown-up toys from golf clubs to hunting bows hung in their old arrangements, dust-wrapped, spider-webbed and sombre. At the gem boutique Glenn saw, with mild amazement, that most glass cases were unbroken and bejeweled bracelets, expensive pendants, diamond-set pins lay untouched: no use to the people underneath.
The way back led across an open street and Glenn looked at the vapor-streaked, purpling sky. His eyes fixed on a moving dot and his unconscious mind followed it: a bird, a tern, he thought—without realizing how strange that doubtless was. He didn’t make that connection because his dark and ever-erotic companion took advantage of his stance, his stillness and upward gaze, to reach under his clothes and start intimately playing with him. He had to disengage her by force and found she was very strong. So, luckily, was he—far stronger.
Again, as on nights before, he got rid of the lady.
He claimed a headache and fatigue and she finally stopped pressing for dinner “at my place—which isn’t under scrutiny.” She was less annoyed, even, than the other female guides; and they, considering their efforts and apparent passion, weren’t as enraged as any woman of his era would have been at such cold rejection. People, he began to see, were pretty bland. They showed emotion only in low levels and only in moments of high stimulus—to sexual ardor, to grief, to—anything.
Again alone, he had a solitary meal, and, again, it was excellent: fresh celery and tomatoes, among other things; a pear, an apple and cheese, for desert. Nobody troubled him as he spent the next hours reading about the present city and, later on, naked again, he went to bed and soon slept.
The girl who soon waked him was, perhaps, fourteen. She had golden ringlets, blue eyes, arched brows and she had used Lysette’s way of waking him—only, now, he hadn’t found it necessary to feign slumber so as to gather himself, orient his mind, before pretending to be roused.
Her youth almost sickened him and surely scared him.
She left, quickly, laughing at him in a faintly mocking way.
Afterward, wide awake, frantic in the way any man would be at such a point, Glenn finally understood what was happening. He had been self-conscious with Leandra, the city and its mechanics, institutions, even to a snatch of a view of the dead skyscrap
ers above, but always in the company of a woman of the utmost appeal, yet, in each case, one of a different sort. They were trying to find out his “type”!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THOSE WHO ARE BRAVE
Glenn would have denied that he was a complex man or, for that matter, a sensitive one. The first would have seemed flattery, the other a weakness he would have felt he did not have. But he would readily have confessed to a temper though it rarely took charge of him.
Now, aware of the reason for his changing female guides, rage sent him pacing the room and even speaking in broken phrases, aloud. By sheer luck rather than owing to caution, these blasts of self-reproach, mixed with elaborate profanity, were not at any time directed at the establishment, the system, or its representative, Bob. What channeled his emotion was his own obtusity in not catching on, sooner, to the purpose that had led to his present state of extremity. He berated himself, kicked furniture, paced and muttered till, calming gradually, he said to himself in a tone of rebuke, “And if you’d only said yes to the one you really wanted, right at first—!”
With final, muttered, “You fool! Idiot!” he sat in the divan and after a moment, selected a cigar. When it was lighted he leaned back to laugh—at himself, silently.
He jumped inches when his visaphone chimed.
He had completely forgotten that his fury had been observed, every sight and sound recorded for “scientific” purposes, whatever those might be. And now, his observers were summoning him! Why? he wondered and answered himself: To explain that last act—overdetermination may be not allowed, in their view.
He strode to the visaphone as it chimed again, snatched up the sound-receiver and, as the visual screen began to glow, snarled, “Yes? Who is it? What do you want?”
Then the image came in focus. It was Leandra, in her bed, tousled and evidently just roused. She began to smile as he chopped his harsh words off and her smile changed from amusement to a very different thing, a warm, sleepy, loving expression. “Hello, Glenn,” she said. “Would you like me to come over?”
He couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak at all.
“I see you do,” she said, huskily. “Ten-twelve minutes?”
He nodded, wordless, still.
Then he crossed to the panel and ordered two double Jack Daniels with double Aphrons and anything else the answering voice might deem appropriate for refreshment “and an extended evening,” as Glenn euphemistically put it.
The drinks came minutes before the girl.
Leandra arrived in an all-transparent gownlike costume, faintly blue, diaphanous and shimmering. He once more opened his door with a prepared embrace but this time he carried it out. She whispered, “Darling …!”
He whispered the same word at the same moment.
It was almost an hour before they even touched the two waiting drinks. All the next day she stayed with him. His guided tour was enjoyed at home though in its way much was a novel journey, expertly conducted.
After that Leandra was assigned to Glenn as his “erotic companion” as well as the replacement for other “types.” They spent a week on the rest of his educational trips in the city. Before then they’d agreed they had fallen in love on first sight.
Glenn thought of the idyl as a honeymoon and one that would last into a distant or an endless future. For, even though his antipathy for the new “culture” increased with every passing day, he did not relate it to his relationship with Leandra. She, of course, knew how brief and tentative their shared love would be. But for a time, because it was genuine love on her part as on his, she suppressed her knowledge of reality and let herself feel, think, act and be the woman he now imagined her to be. She was, in truth, her real self then—discarding the outer facts and rules and customs from her consciousness and expressing in ways and to degrees he had not imagined possible their mated unity—as if it could be forever maintained.
The crack came all too soon and in a manner she had not expected.
Leandra took him, one evening, to see an aspect of life in this city about which she had explained nothing.
Hand in hand they tramped the dismal streets until, rounding a corner, they faced the marquee of what seemed a run-down movie theatre. Over its entrance was a large, painted sign that said:
“MEL’S MINIMAL MUSIC: THE MELLOW MORTICIANS”
She “bought” two tickets and they went through the dim lobby, passing between brass standards and their burden of slack silk ropes to a heavy, flaked, rose-hued door where Glenn could sense rather than hear a beat of hard music that might have been called, half a century earlier, “acid rock.” When Leandra pushed the tickets into a slot the door yawned and they were almost knocked down by the belting music.
She put her hands to her ears. Her expression was blank but her head-movement showed that he was to follow. They entered and the sound damping portal shut. It was a murky place but slowly he made out a dance hall with a bar and tables on one side and at the opposite end a platform where eight “Mellow Morticians” played what Glenn felt was, indeed, minimal music. It consisted of two notes, one a half-tone higher than the first, and nothing more save that the pair of tones sometimes was played at a different octave and, even, though infrequently, at other points in the same key.
But that was just Glenn’s first observation. His greater, his overwhelming impression took time.
The dancers—and there were perhaps a hundred couples—were performing the same dance that had been all but universal in 1971. They were, he thought, frugging. Their long hair flew, male and female hair, their hips slashed and oscillated, their heads jerked and they faced each other without touching, faces inane, involuted, each one dancing only with himself or herself, even turning to new partners with a look which seemed to mean they either did not know they’d switched or did not care.
For a moment in which his eyes adjusted to the swirling, psychedelic lights, he thought it was just as it had been among the under-thirties in Glenn’s “period.” Then the single exception hit him. Every dancer here was elderly. The long beards and locks of the men were white, or gray, and often thin; and some were bald though these, he realized, were few, and bald only because in their solo concentration on jerking and writhing they had lost shabby wigs: several were being heedlessly trampled and kicked aside in this stylized and unconscious frenzy. The women were as old—crones, fat droolers who flopped pendulous breasts like flippers, and scrawny females, without teeth. White locks shook out dandruff like flour prostheses glinted and banged; canes and crutches kept time; glass eyes were lost and crushed. But these aged freaks danced on, some sweating in runnels, others too aged and dry to ooze; all, hard-breathing, winded, yet, relentlessly obeying the beat.
These, then, were people who had gone on from their politicized or radicalized youth, their hair dangling rebellion, their uniform and their rituals—gone on with this same dance, frugging into old age, their late sixties, their eighties, without change. They were still unclean and the chamber reeked of their bad breath and whole-body bromodrosis. Over that rotted armpit odor were smells of cigarette smoke, of sweetly acrid pot, coiling wreaths of tobacco, marijuana which seemed to flinch and thrust as the waves of sound, amplified to a pitch that informed the skulls of the stone deaf among them, shook the air and the walls, the horrid people.
As soon as he could manage, he took Leandra out. And when his ears stopped ringing, when he had somewhat cleared his lungs with deep drafts of the even-temperatured, clean (but lifeless) air of the city, he said, “My God! What is that for?”
“A lesson,” she replied, looking at him attentively.
“In what?”
“Irrelevance,” she answered.
She said nothing more about the scene. She did not need to for Glenn’s insight. Here was the cruelest mockery imaginable. Here, those youths in the Sixties and Seventies who had found science, hence, all provable knowledge, “irrelevant”—and history, too—the people who had set themselves apart from all others “over t
hirty,” were seen in that same interval which they had been utterly contemptuous of in spite of its inevitability, given time. Here was that arrogant, vain “new youth culture” carried on near fifty years, unchanged—and by that, revealed for what it had been: nothingness, a rebellion without aim, nihilism itself, a road that was no road because it began and ended where the groupies and hippies, yippies, new leftists, SDS monsters and others stood. A road, they said, when it was only a length of walled-in pavement, a prison yard that had no direction, started nowhere, ended where it could accommodate them all, at another noplace. It was, as they had said a short while ago, as Glenn remembered time, “Where it’s at.” Exactly, he’d thought.
They who believed history “irrelevant” could never know where anything was “at,” Glenn had long since reflected. For to know that, one must know where it “was at.” And since their world was composed of technological artifacts, of bastard exploitations of parts of science, which never took the whole into consideration, their regard of science and technology, as equally “irrelevant” with history, meant, quite inescapably, they did not actually have the faintest sense of where it or they were “at,” even when they thought they did. Worse, they had no intention of finding out. Everything they certainly needed to know to judge where they and the world were at, they rejected, as irrelevant. And that double rejection meant, of course, they had no means left even to rebel with any valuable or real or acceptable achievement, for, not knowing where it was, or where it is “at,” in their monodimensional “now,” they could not even claim they had means to wonder, let alone, determine, where it would be “at,” in any next day, week, let alone, man’s years to follow.
