by Isaac Asimov
But perhaps it would not become necessary ever to pass that bill, as living conditions were indeed fast becoming so intolerable that the Sooey, or suicide pill, was being used with ever-increasing frequency. People rarely reached forty before using it, and then desisted only because of an excessive love for their child and a desire, more sentimental than reasoned, to help the child reach adulthood. Parents who felt less responsible or loving were using the Sooey in greater and greater numbers — in their thirties, when the child was likely to be a teen-ager, or even younger. This was a great help to the government despite the large number of orphans.
But the government did not of course sanction murder as a solution, as this would have opened the gates to total chaos and anarchy. Therefore, when thirteen-year-old Billy Overton was found dead of Sooey poisoning, the police went to work as they always did — to seek the perpetrator of this heinous deed. The boy had been a happy, healthy, loving child, and his parents were beside themselves with grief.
The “Suspects List” was immediately consulted and the computer was put to work. It came up with only three names — all people who had lost their Sooey, of course, and who, in addition, had somehow been near the scene of the crime or had known the murdered boy. All three seemed most unlikely suspects, but the police were determined to track down every clue.
One was a taxi driver, who had lost his Sooey some eight weeks ago, and whose only connection with Billy was that he had dropped off a passenger three blocks from the Over-tons’ apartment an hour or so before the crime was committed. As it would have taken him about that long to drive to the Overtons’, he became a prime suspect. But the fact remained that he insisted he had never laid eyes on Billy Overton, and all objective evidence seemed to bear out his contention. And what possible motive could he have?
The second suspect turned up by the computer was a woman who lived within walking distance of the Overtons, had lost her Sooey pill three months before, and was just about to have a new one reissued. She knew the Overtons vaguely, but never remembered having met Billy, although she may have passed him many times on the busy, frantically crowded street; and surely, she said, she had no wish to kill the young boy. She was married but as yet had no child of her own. And what possible motive could she have? She was known to be a quiet almost apathetic type.
The third suspect seemed even more remote than the other two. The computer turned up the name of Bobby’s first grade teacher who had lost her Sooey three days previous to the murder; but she now lived three hundred miles away, and since any type of transport had to be reserved months in advance, she couldn’t possibly have been at the scene of the murder even in the highly unlikely situation that she had somehow conceived a hatred for Billy in first grade and, harboring this dislike, had resolved seven years later to kill him! It was utter nonsense and the police knew it. But Billy was dead and someone had killed him.
Inspector Fenner was nearing forty-two and only his deep attachment ot his sixteen-year-old daughter kept him from using his own Sooey. His wife had used hers the year before, after writing him a heartbreaking farewell note begging forgiveness for leaving him to bring up their Hannah; but she could bear the stifling tension no longer. Inspector Fenner had held her in his arms as she gratefully breathed her last, so he knew the suffering of the bereaved.
He now regarded the Overtons with great compassion. Billy’s father, while obviously grief-stricken, was trying to console his wife, but she was beyond consolation. Her eyes were red-rimmed, swollen, with dark black circles underneath. She sobbed continually in great gasping tearless sobs.
“Billy is better off, my darling,” her husband told her. “You know that. How often have we spoken of the horrors of this world, of the horrors that awaited him, that more and more were enveloping our Billy as he grew older and came to realize what the world is like. You, who never wanted him to stop smiling. You, who protected him and built an imaginary world around him — you must know and be grateful that he is released now from the ghastly, gray, grim unrelieved life that we live.”
Inspector Fenner could bear no more. He left. But the call to duty was too strong, too deeply ingrained in him. He returned the next day and in the gentlest of voices asked the Overtons to show him their Sooey pills.
“What!” said Billy’s father, in anger. He was afraid the police officer wanted to take them away. Reassured, he brought forth his precious little lavender pill with the clenched fist stamped on it. Mrs. Overton just stood staring at the Inspector.
Three months later, after the trial of Mrs. Overton, the Inspector leaned over his sleeping Hannah, sleeping among hundreds of others in the unmarried-women’s dormitory of their apartment complex, and kissed her good-bye. That night he gratefully used his own Sooey pill, unable to bear the reverberating screams that kept resounding in his ears — screams that he had heard that afternoon — screams of Mrs. Overton after the sentencing.
Until his last breath he heard her shrieking dementedly to the Court, “Have mercy! Have mercy! I did it to save him. I loved him so dearly! Don’t make me live! For God’s sake, don’t make me live!”
But the Court refused to reissue her Sooey.
Backing Up
by Barry N. Malzberg
So I show him the gun. This is the great leveler, the great persuader. “I must tell you,” I say in my mellow voice, “that we have been dissatisfied with the collections for a very long time.” The gun is a point forty-five caliber precision job, not that this really matters since it is not the make of the guns but their function that interests most laymen. “You are five thousand dollars behind,” I add. “Not even allowing for the matter of interest.”
He looks at me with calm sad eyes. His name is Brown. I believe that I’ve got that right, and there’s no need to look on the card to check as I’m definitely in the right office. He says, “I told you, I need more time. I’m doing the best I can. Furs is a seasonal business, an erratic business, and this is not our season.” It is February, I should point out, although a very mild and springlike February. My forehead in this small room is veritably jeweled with sweat. “Next month,” he says, “next month I will have something for you.”
“Next month is not sufficient,” I say. “My instructions are not to leave without a down payment now. Two thousand dollars is suggested.”
“I don’t have two thousand dollars,” he says. He looks down at the floor, then up at me with curious brightness. “Anyway,” he says, “I don’t think you have the nerve.”
“What?”
“I said I don’t think you have the nerve. The guts.” He puts his palms flat on the desk, raises himself to military posture. “I don’t think you have the guts to blow my head off at high noon on the seventh floor of this building with at least forty people on the same floor right now. The walls are like paper here. Corners are cut in the construction business something awful. The whole place may hear the shot, up to the fortieth story. You wouldn’t think of it.”
“Don’t toy with me, Brown,” I say. I focus my mouth into a snarl. “I don’t like being toyed with and I have a vile temper, to say nothing of a job to do.”
Brown shakes his head. “We all have a job to do,” he says, “but I don’t think you have the nerve to do yours.” He stares at me from his rigid posture. “Go on,” he says, “blow my head off. I don’t have five thousand dollars. I don’t have two thousand dollars. I have nothing to give you so you’re just going to have to carry through your threat.” His eyes glint disturbingly. He is exactly right about the construction business. Roadways, churches, automobiles — nothing is built the way that it used to be. Corruption and the cutting of corners prevail. Even the silencer on the pistol is flimsy; I don’t trust it.
“Come on,” he challenges. The position he has taken seems to have given him a sense of release. “Come on, do it. I have nothing to give you.”
He is quite right. My orders don’t provide for the contingency of defiance. Whether I have the nerve is another
issue, but I don’t have to consider that now. Reluctantly I lower the pistol. “I’ll be back,” I say. “Soon. Maybe today. Certainly tomorrow. You can’t run. I know where you live — your wife, your children.”
Brown’s face leers with sudden power. “You won’t do it to them either,” he says. “You won’t do it to anyone. You’ve lost the fire. You’ve acquired scruple. You’re like all the construction people now, all the contractors. You just want an edge without risk.”
“I don’t have to take this kind of abuse,” I say. I put away the pistol and leave his office quickly. My footsteps clatter in the hallway; the whisk of elevators is audible at fifty paces.
What is the raw material of these modern office buildings? Chewing gum?
Considering the issue of scruple, I make my way crosstown and find in his accustomed place the bartender whose gambling losses are now in excess of fifteen thousand. He is alone behind the counter at this difficult hour of a February afternoon, but his face does not light with pleasure when he sees me. Quite the opposite. “I told you yesterday,” he says, “and I told you the day before that too. I don’t have it. I need time to get it together. At least a month.”
“They don’t want to wait a month.”
“That’s their problem,” he says. He dries his hands noisily on a towel. “I have to ask you to leave,” he says. “You hanging around here creates the wrong kind of atmosphere. Customers might be disturbed.”
“I’ll have a rye and soda.”
“No,” he says, “I don’t want to serve you.”
I reach my hand into my pocket in a menacing gesture. “Come on,” he says, “this business with guns no longer fascinates. I tell you, I don’t have it. I have personal problems, medical bills. Maybe by June I can work something out. Right now I can’t do a thing.”
“You’re in no position to make that statement.”
He flings the towel down the length of the bar. “Come on,” he says, “eighty-six it. I’ve had enough of this.”
Striations and laughter float from the television set — an afternoon celebrity quiz or something. The level of television has deteriorated as much as everything else, I think as I back away from the bar. Nothing works quite as it used to. Nothing can quite be trusted. Quality levels go down. Strapped gamblers and bankrupt fur manufacturers take a dictatorial position and there seems no way to deal with them. None of this would have gone on five years ago. It is part of urban rot, I think.
“And stay out of here,” the bartender says as I go through the door.
Who do these people think they are?
I phone in to tell them that collections have not gone well. They grumble if the message comes direct, but for the fourth day in a row it is the answering service and the answering service, of course, assumes a neutral posture. Sometimes I wonder if the messages are even passed on. Sometimes I wonder if they are out of the office permanently. Sometimes I wonder if I need this job, but then common sense prevails; at my age and stage of life there are few new careers open to me. It is one of the hazards of an overly liberal education; I should have learned a trade.
I take the train north and come in at the usual time. Lydia’s face is clamped with tension but at least the children are out for the evening — having dinner with their friends, I am told. “Pour your own drink,” Lydia says, “I’m not any servant. I’ve had a bad day myself.” I can see from her expression that it is going to be a difficult evening. We will be up until at least midnight and it will be necessary for me once again to explain to her the meaningfulness of life in the suburbs. Since I no longer believe in that, I will find it tedious and agonizing. “If you want dinner you take me out,” Lydia says. “I didn’t feel like cooking.”
“Restaurant food isn’t home cooking.”
“We can go to the Major.”
The Major is the local chain motel. “Franchises are no good,” I say. “Franchising has destroyed the nation. Everything is the same and nothing is very good.”
Her eyes, infinitely weary, look up at me. “I don’t want to hear that now,” she says. “Please don’t start up on that with me now.”
Who does the woman think she is, anyway? What has happened to the institution of marriage?
Wide O—
by Elsin Ann Graffam
Maybe I’ll put my head under the pillow — no, that’s no good. I can imagine him, whoever he is, sneaking up on me. Okay, that does it! I’m going to get up and stay up, put the lights on in the living room, turn on the television.
Oh, I hate going into the dark... there! Overhead light on, floor lamp on, TV on, nice and loud. Now I’ll just sit down and relax and watch the—
Hey, what was that? Oh. Old houses creak, remember? If it creaked when Bill was here, it’ll creak when he’s away, and it’s just — just something in the house. It’s only your imagination, old girl, that’s what it is. And the more sleepy you get, the more vivid your imagination will get.
All the doors are locked, right? And all the windows, ditto. Okay, then. So I feel like an idiot, trying to stay up all night. Well, sitting here in the living room is a lot better than doing what I did the last time Bill was away overnight! Locking myself in the bathroom and staying there until dawn, for heaven’s sake—
Oh— Oh, the furnace clicked on, that’s all that was! Calm down, girl, calm down! The trouble with you is, you read the papers. You should read the comics and stop there. No, I have to read MOTHER OF THREE ATTACKED BY INTRUDER and WOMAN FOUND BEATEN TO DEATH IN HOME. But, oh, they were so close to us! That old lady lived — what was it, only three, four blocks away? But she lived alone, and nobody knows I’m alone tonight. I hope.
What is the matter with me?! I’m acting like a child. Other women live alone — for years, even — and here I have to stay by myself for just one measly little night and I go all to pieces.
Sure seems cold in here! The furnace was on — still is on, in fact. Must be my nerves. I’ll go into the kitchen and make myself a nice hot cup of tea. Good idea! Maybe that’ll warm me up!
Now, where is that light switch... there... well, no wonder I’m cold, with the back door standing wide o—
