Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "Grandson, sir," said Lou.

  "Don't quibble. You're in deep enough now, young man," said Gramps, but he made the change. And, from there, he went without a misstep through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.

  * * * * *

  In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time or another, Lou's name was scratched out and Willy's substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom.

  "So!" said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will and substituted a new one, including the time of day. "Well--time to watch the McGarvey Family." The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was 60, or for a total of 112 years. "I can't wait to see what's going to happen next," he said.

  Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom door. Wishing Em would join him, he wondered where she was.

  He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps.

  "Em?" he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward.

  "Morty!" gasped Lou.

  Lou's great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Ford menage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand--Gramps' enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had apparently been half-emptied, and which Morty was refilling with tap water.

  A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride.

  Shocked, Lou didn't know what to do. He couldn't let Gramps take the mousetrapped anti-gerasone--but, if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.

  Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could and began to pour the contents of Gramps' bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the shelf.

  The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment, through the keyhole and under the door.

  * * * * *

  The bottle gurgled monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room and there were murmurs and the scraping of chair-legs on the floor. "Thus ends," said the television announcer, "the 29,121st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys." Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  "Just a sec," Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed on the tile floor.

  The door was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at the incriminating mess.

  Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of his neck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, waited for Gramps to speak.

  "Well, boy," said Gramps at last, "looks like you've got a little tidying up to do."

  And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd and locked himself in his bedroom.

  The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he also went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.

  Tears streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb--please don't look so awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging about Gramps."

  "No," said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I was just--"

  "You don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on your side, no matter what." She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, "It wouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn't such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd be able to go any time God decided He wanted him."

  "What's going to happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he going to do?"

  * * * * *

  Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep.

  At six o'clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son's generation.

  Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps' breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the income from his fortune.

  "Well," said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm sure there's something to be panicky about."

  "Maybe he doesn't know what it was I busted," Lou said hopefully.

  "Probably thinks it was your watch crystal," offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.

  "Don't get sarcastic with your father," said Em, "and don't talk with your mouth full, either."

  "I'd like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something," complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. "It's time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know."

  "Yeah, it is, isn't it?" said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have the tray, Em."

  "We'll both go."

  Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle of long-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door.

  Em knocked. "Gramps," she called brightly, "break-fast is rea-dy."

  There was no reply and she knocked again, harder.

  The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Ford, was empty.

  A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behind the drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.

  * * * * *

  But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the World's Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:

  "'Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night's bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.'"

  "Gosh," said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get
to see how the 5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out."

  "Or the Solar Series," Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.

  "Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," added Morty.

  "There's more," said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: "'I, Harold D. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.'"

  "No!" cried Willy. "Not another one!"

  "'I do stipulate,'" read Lou, "'that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.'"

  "Issue?" said Emerald.

  Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all own the whole damn shootin' match."

  Each eye turned instantly to the bed.

  "Share and share alike?" asked Morty.

  "Actually," said Willy, who was the oldest one present, "it's just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here and--"

  "I like that!" exclaimed Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and--"

  "How about letting somebody who's never had any privacy get a little crack at it?" Eddie demanded hotly. "Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of that goddamn barracks in the hall! How about--"

  "Yeah?" challenged Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick."

  "Silence!" shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens his mouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think."

  A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head.

  * * * * *

  In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couple battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.

  After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units.

  For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the apartment was still and spacious.

  An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.

  In the stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker.

  The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Fords and their captors watched with professional interest.

  Em and Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched out peacefully on their cots.

  "Em," called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all your own, too?"

  "Sure. Washbasin, bed, light--the works. And we thought Gramps' room was something. How long has this been going on?" She held out her hand. "For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes--look at me!"

  "Cross your fingers," said Lou. "The lawyer's going to try to get us a year."

  "Gee!" Em said dreamily. "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pull to get put away in solitary?"

  "All right, pipe down," said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain't never getting back in!"

  The prisoners instantly fell silent.

  * * * * *

  The living room of the apartment darkened for a moment as the riot scenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. "And now, friends," he said, "I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things.

  "After years of research, medical science has now developed Super-anti-gerasone! In weeks--yes, weeks--you can look, feel and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe, tested Super-anti-gerasone costs you only a few dollars a day.

  "Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard, and mail it to 'Super,' Box 500,000, Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got that? I'll repeat it. 'Super,' Box 500,000 ..."

  Underlining the announcer's words was the scratching of Gramps' pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutes earlier, from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 from across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, then had hired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction, a genius who had never gotten a client less than a year and a day. Gramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen, so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed of doing for years.

  "Schen-ec-ta-dy," murmured Gramps. "Got it!" His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut lines of bad temper. It was almost as though his trial package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter.

  Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next.

  2 B R 0 2 B, by Kurt Vonnegut

  Got a problem? Just pick up the phone. It solved them all--and all the same way!

  Everything was perfectly swell.

  There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

  All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

  Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

  The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.

  One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.

  Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.

  X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.

  Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.

  The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.

  A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.

  The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer.

  Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners.
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  Never, never, never--not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan--had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use.

  A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath a popular song:

  If you don't like my kisses, honey, Here's what I will do: I'll go see a girl in purple, Kiss this sad world toodle-oo. If you don't want my lovin', Why should I take up all this space? I'll get off this old planet, Let some sweet baby have my place.

  The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. "Looks so real," he said, "I can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it."

  "What makes you think you're not in it?" said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. "It's called 'The Happy Garden of Life,' you know."

  "That's good of Dr. Hitz," said the orderly.

  * * * * *

  He was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital's Chief Obstetrician. Hitz was a blindingly handsome man.

  "Lot of faces still to fill in," said the orderly. He meant that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blanks were to be filled with portraits of important people on either the hospital staff or from the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

  "Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something," said the orderly.

  The painter's face curdled with scorn. "You think I'm proud of this daub?" he said. "You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?"

  "What's your idea of what life looks like?" said the orderly.

  The painter gestured at a foul dropcloth. "There's a good picture of it," he said. "Frame that, and you'll have a picture a damn sight more honest than this one."

  "You're a gloomy old duck, aren't you?" said the orderly.

  "Is that a crime?" said the painter.

  The orderly shrugged. "If you don't like it here, Grandpa--" he said, and he finished the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn't want to live any more were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced "naught."