The Age of the Pussyfoot

by Pohl Frederik

  Vance is now married, and is in fact a grandfather. It was his second marriage; the first was annulled. His present wife was a schoolteacher before their marriage. . .and they have been happy. And I really can think of nothing else to tell you about your son Vance that does not involve attempting to explain what broke up his first marriage and why his second wife could not stay in the United States. I suppose you may meet him some day. You can ask him yourself.

  Billy, you will be astonished to learn, is now a Great Man.

  Let me see. He was two when you died. Now he’s our senator from Hawaii, and they say he will be President one day. But you will find out more about him in the history books than I can tell you, I think. Let me only say, what I know will interest you, that his first campaign was on a platform of free freezing for everyone, paid for out of Social Security funds, and you were mentioned in every speech. He won easily.

  And I . . . am seventy-nine years old.

  Since you died forty years ago I cannot now remember you well enough, my Charles, to know if you will mind what I have to say next. Three years after your death I remarried. My husband—my other husband—was a doctor. Still is, though he is out of practice now. We have been very happy, too. We had two other children. Both girls. You never met him, but he is a good man, barring the fact that at one time he drank too much. He gave it up. He looks a little like you. . . .

  If I remember correctly, he does.

  And I am now in brittle health and I think this is the last time I will write you this letter. Perhaps we will meet again. I wonder what it will be like.

  Still with affection,

  Dorothy

  Forrester put down the letter and cried, “Joymaker! Was there ever a President named Forrester?”

  “President of what, Man Forrester?”

  “President of the United States!”

  “Which United States is that, Man Forrester?”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes! The United States of America. Wait a minute. First off, do you know the Presidents of the United States of America?”

  “Yes, Man Forrester. Washington, George. Adams, John. Jefferson, Thomas—”

  “Later on! starting with the middle of the twentieth century.”

  “Yes, Man Forrester. Truman, Harry S. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Kennedy—”

  “Move it up! Start with around 1990.”

  “Yes, Man Forrester. Williams, Harrison E. Knapp, Leonard Stanchion, Karen P. Forrester, Wilton N. Tschirky, Leon—”

  “Well, my God,” said Forrester softly, and sat marveling while the joymaker droned on to the end of the twenty-first century and stopped.

  Little two-year-old Willy. Baby Bill. A senator . . . and President. It was an unsettling idea.

  The joymaker said, “Man Forrester! Notice of physical visit. Adne Bensen is to see you, purpose unstated, time of arrival less than one minute.”

  “Oh,” said Forrester, “good. Let her right in.” And he rehearsed what he would tell her, but not to any effect. Genealogy was not what was on her mind. She was angry.

  “You,” she cried, “what the sweat do you think you’re doing to my kids?”

  “Why, nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Dog sweat!” The door crashed closed behind her. “Twitching kamikaze!” She flung her cape against the wall; it dropped to a chair and arranged itself in neat square folds. “Pervert creep, you get a kick out of this, don’t you? Want to make my kids like you! Want to change them into chatter-toothed, hand-working, dog-sweaty, cowardly—”

  Forrester guided her to a chair. “Honey,” he said, attempting to get her a drink, “shut up a minute.”

  “Oh, sweat! Give me that—” She quickly produced drinks for them, without a pause in her talking. “My kids! You want to ruin them? You hid from a challenge!”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean to get them in a dangerous—”

  “Dangerous! Go crawl! I’m not talking about danger.”

  “I didn’t let them get hurt—”

  “Sweat!”

  “Well, it isn’t my fault if some crazy Martian—”

  “Dogsweat!” She was wearing a skintight coverall that seemed to be made of parallel strands of fabric running top to bottom, held together God knew how; with every movement as she turned, as her breast rose and fell, tiny slivers of skin showed disturbingly. “You’re not even a man! What do you know about—”

  “I said I was sorry. Listen, I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’ll make it up to them.”

  She sneered.

  “No, I will! . . . I know. There must be something they want. I’ve got plenty of money, so—”

  “Charles, you’re pathetic! You haven’t got money enough to feed a sick pup—or character enough to make him a dog. Go rot!”

  “Now, wait a minute! We’re not married. You can’t talk to me like that!” He got up and stood over her, the glass unheeded in his hand. Now he was getting angry, too. He opened his mouth to speak, gesticulating.

  Six ounces of icy, sticky fluid slopped into her face.

  She stared up at him and began to laugh.

  “Oh, Charles!” She put down her own glass and tried to wipe her face. “You know you’re an idiot, don’t you?” But the way she said it was almost affectionate.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Times, let’s see, times three, anyway. For spilling the drink on you, for getting the kids in trouble, for yelling back at you—”

  She stood up and kissed him swiftly. As she lifted her arms, the strands of fabric parted provocatively. She turned and disappeared into the protean cubicle of the lavatory.

  Forrester picked up the rest of his drink, drank it, drank hers, and carefully ordered two more from the dispenser. His brow was furrowed with thought.

  When she came back he said, “Honey, one thing. What did you mean when you said I didn’t have a lot of money?”

  She fluffed her hair, looking abstracted.

  He said persistently, “No, I mean it. I mean, I thought you knew Hara pretty well. He must have told you about me.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  “Well, then. I had this insurance thing when I died, you see. They banked the money or something, and it’s had six hundred years to grow. Like John Jones’s Dollar, if you know what that was. I didn’t have much to begin with, but by the time they took me out of the cooler it was over a quarter of a million dollars.”

  She picked up her new drink, hesitated, then took a sip of it. She said, “As a matter of fact, Charles dear, it was a lot more than that. Two million seven hundred thousand, Hara said. Didn’t you ever look at your statement?”

  Forrester stared. “Two million see— Two mill—”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded. “Look it up. You had the papers with you in the tea room yesterday.”

  “But—but, Adne! Somebody must’ve—I mean, your kids were with me when I deposited the check! It was only two hundred and some thousand.”

  “Dear Charles. Will you please look it up in your statement?” She stood up, looking somewhat annoyed and, he thought, somewhat embarrassed. “Oh, where the devil did you put it? It was a silly joke anyway, and I’m tired of it.”

  Numbly he stood up with her, numbly found the folder from the West Annex Discharge Center, and placed it in her hands. What joke? If there was a joke, he didn’t know what it was. But already he didn’t like it.

  She fished out the sheaf of glossy sheets in the financial report, glanced at them, began handing them to him. The first was entitled CRYOTHERAPY, MAINTENANCE, SCHEDULE 1. It bore a list of charge under headings like Annual Rental, Biotesting, Cell Retrieval and Detoxification, as well as a dozen or more recurring items with names that meant nothing to him—Schlick-Tolhaus Procedures, Homiletics, and so on. On the second sheet was a list of charges for what appeared to be financial services, presumably investing and supervising his capital. The third sheet covered diagnostic procedures; there were several for what seemed to be se
parate surgeries, sheets for nursing care and for pharmaceuticals used. . . . There were in all nearly thirty sheets, and the totals at the bottom of each of them were impressive, but the last sheet of all took Forrester’s breath away.

  It was a simple arithmetical statement:

  AGGREGATE OF CONVERTED ASSETS - $2 706 884.72

  AGGREGATE OF SCHEDULES 1-27 - 2 443 182.09

  NET DUE PATIENT ON DISCHARGE - $ 263 702.63

  Forrester gasped and coughed and cried, half strangled, “Two and a half million dollars for medical—Sweet Jesus God!” He swallowed and looked up unbelievingly. “Holy AMA! Who can afford that kind of money?”

  Adne said, “Why, you can, for one. Otherwise you’d still be frozen.”

  “Christ! And—” A thought struck him— “Look at this! Even so they’re cheating me! It says two hundred and sixty thousand, and they only gave me two thirty!”

  Adne was beginning to look faintly angry again. “Well, after all, Charles. You did go back there for extra treatment. You might get some of that back from Heinzie, I don’t know. . . . Of course, he’s protesting it because you messed things up.”

  He looked at her blankly, then back at the statement. He groaned.

  “Reach me my drink,” he said and took a long pull of it. He announced, “The whole thing’s crazy. Millions of dollars for doctors! People just can’t have that much money.”

  “You did,” she pointed out. “Given time, people can. At compound interest, they can.”

  “But it’s—it’s—medical profiteering! I don’t know what they did to me, but surely there should be some attempt to control fees!”

  Adne took his arm and drew him down again on the couch beside her. She said with patience, but not very much patience, “Dear Charles, I wish you would learn a little something about the world before you tell us all what’s wrong with it. Do you know what they had to do to you?”

  “Well— Not exactly, no. But I know something about what medical treatment costs.” He frowned. “Or used to cost, anyway. I suppose there’s inflation.”

  “I don’t think so. I—I think that’s the wrong word,” she said. “I mean, that means things cost more because the money is worth less, right? But that isn’t what happened. Those operations would have cost you just as much in the nineteenth century, but—”

  “Twentieth!”

  “Oh, what’s the difference! Twentieth, then. That is, they would have cost just as much if anybody had been able to do them. Of course, nobody was.”

  Forrester nodded unwillingly. “All right, I admit I’m alive and I shouldn’t kick. But still—”

  Impatiently the girl selected another document from the sheaf, glanced at it, and handed it to him. Forrester looked, and he was very nearly sick. Full color, nearly life size, he thought at first that it was Lon Chaney made up as the Phantom of the Opera.

  But there was no makeup. It was a face. Or what was left of one.

  He gagged. “What— What—”

  “Do you see, Charles? You were in bad shape.”

  “Me?”

  “Oh yes, dear. You really must read your report. See here . . . evidently you fell forward into the flames. Besides your being killed, the whole anterior section of the head was destroyed. At least, the soft parts. Mm . . . lucky your brains weren’t cooked, at that.” He saw with incredulity that this tender, charming girl was studying the photograph with as little passion as though the charred meat it represented were a lamb chop. She went on, “Didn’t you say you noticed your eyes were different? New eyes.”

  Forrester croaked, “Put that thing away.”

  He took a swallow of his drink and immediately regretted it, then fished one of the remaining cigarettes out of his second pack and lit it. “I see what you mean,” he said at last.

  “Do you, dear? Good. You know, I bet four or five hundred people worked on you. All sorts of specialists. All their helpers. Using all their equipment. They get a case like yours, it’s like one of those great big enormous jigsaw puzzles. They have to put it all back together, piece by piece—only they don’t have all the pieces, so they have to get or make new ones . . . and of course the stuff spoils so. They have to—”

  “Quit it!”

  “You’re awfully jumpy, Charles.”

  “All right! I’m jumpy.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette and asked the question that had been developing in his mind for ten minutes now. “Look. At a normal rate of expenditure—oh, you know; the way you see me living—roughly how long is my quarter of a million dollars going to last?”

  She looked into space and tapped her fingernails against her teeth. “There are those custom items of yours,” she said thoughtfully. “They come high—those things you smoke, and fowl eggs, and—what was that other thing? The oransh juice—”

  “Leaving out that kind of stuff! How long?”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, it depends—”

  “Roughly! How long?”

  She said, “Well, maybe the rest of this week.”

  He goggled at her. He repressed a laugh that sounded almost like a sob.

  The end of the week?

  He had been building himself up to hear an answer he wouldn’t like, but this exceeded his expectations. He said wretchedly, “Adne—what am I supposed to do?”

  “Well,” she said, “you could always get a job.”

  “Sure,” he said bitterly. “Got one up your sleeve? One that pays a million dollars a week?”

  To his surprise, she seemed to take him seriously. “Oh, Charles! Not that much. I mean, you’re not skilled. Twenty, twenty-five thousand a day—I don’t think you can really expect more.”

  He said, “You can find me a job like that?”

  “Well, what do you think Taiko would have paid?”

  “Wait a minute! You mean Taiko would have given me a job? But I thought— I mean, he said it was his club. What did he call it, the Ned Lud Society?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” She nodded. “What do you think a club’s for, Charles?”

  “Why—so that people with like interests can, well, get together and work on their interests.”

  “And what did you used to so quaintly call a business company?”

  “Why . . . Yeah, but look, a company produces something of value. Something you can sell.”

  She sniffed. “We’ve got beyond that sort of consideration. Anything that any reasonably competent people agree is worth doing is worth a salary in exchange for doing it.”

  “Gosh,” said Charles Forrester.

  “But Taiko was quite astonished at the way you acted, Charles. I don’t know whether he’s angry or not. But I wouldn’t count on the offer still being open.”

  “Figures,” said Forrester gloomily, musing over lost possibilities.

  “Man Forrester!”

  The sound of the joymaker was almost like an alarm wakening him from sleep. It took him a few moments to realize what it was, as he emerged from his bemused state. Then he said, “In a minute, machine. Adne, let me get this straight—”

  But she was looking urgent and abashed. “Charles dear, you’d better take this message.”

  “Man Forrester! I have a priority notice of personal visit!”

  “Yeah, but Adne—”

  “Charles,” she said, “please take it. Or—never mind. I’ll tell you myself.” She looked down at her hands, avoiding his eyes. “I guess I should have told you before. I think that’s Heinzie coming now.”

  “Heinzie? The Martian? The one—”

  She said apologetically, “I told him to come, Charles dear. You’d really better let him in.”

  Seven

  As Forrester faced the man named Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, he felt he was in the state described as “ready for anything.” What this actually meant was that he was totally unready. He did not know what to expect. He could feel his heart pounding; he sensed that his hands were beginning to shake. Even Adne seemed stimulated; she was watching them,
her small face intensely interested, and she was fumbling something out of her joymaker. A tranquilizer? No, more likely something to pep her up, thought Forrester. Whatever it was, she popped it in her mouth and swallowed before she said, “Hello, Heinzie. Come on in. I think you and Charles have met.”

  Forrester gave her a look, then returned to Heinzlichen. He started to put out his hand, then stopped, balancing on the balls of his feet, half ready to shake hands, half in a stance resembling the attack position of karate. “We’ve met, all right. Too damned often, if you ask me.”

  Heinzlichen came in, allowed the door to close behind him, and stood still, studying Forrester as if he were a specimen in a museum. Adne had been playing with the lights again, and mottled reds and yellows flecked his face. They suited his personal color scheme. He was a tall, fat man. His hair was red, and he wore a close-cut red beard that covered all of his face except for nose, lips, and eyes, like the mask of a chimpanzee. He rubbed his beard thoughtfully while he examined Forrester’s face with attention, glanced appraisingly at his arms and body, stared down at the position of his feet, and finally nodded. He returned his gaze to a point on Forrester’s chest and stabbed at it with a finger. He said, “Dat is where I will kill you. Dere. In de heart.”

  Forrester exhaled sharply through his nose. It tingled. He felt the flush of adrenalin through his bloodstream. He opened his mouth; but Adne cut in swiftly before he could speak.

  “Heinze dear! You promised.”

  “Promised? What promised? I promised to talk, dat’s all. So let’s talk.”

  “But Charles doesn’t understand how things are, Heinzie. Sit down. Have a drink.”

  “Oh, sure I’ll have a drink. You pick me out something nice. But make it fast, because I have only a couple of minutes.” He returned to Forrester. “Well? You want to talk?”

  Forrester said belligerently, “You’re damned right I want to talk. And, no, Adne, I don’t want a drink. Now, look here, you—” He hesitated, finding it hard to think of the right thing to say. “Well, what I want to know is, why the devil do you want to kill me?”