Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition
Page 20
“No,” Fred said quietly. “If I ever joined a church, I couldn’t face the minister.”
“So we give him a jolt,” Lew said brightly.
“No,” Fred said. “Sorry.”
“Okay,” Lew said, rising and pacing the floor. “I was prepared for that. I’ve got an alternative, and this one’s strictly legitimate. We’ll make a little amplifier with a transmitter and an aerial on it. Shouldn’t cost over fifty bucks to make, so we’d price it in the range of the common man—five hundred bucks, say. We make arrangements with the phone company to pipe signals from your antenna right into the homes of people with these sets. The sets take the signal from the phone line, amplify it, and broadcast it through the houses to make everybody in them happy. See? Instead of turning on the radio or television, everybody’s going to want to turn on the happiness. No casts, no stage sets, no expensive cameras—no nothing but that hiss.”
“We could call it the euphoriaphone,” I suggested, “or ‘euphio’ for short.”
“That’s great, that’s great!” Lew said. “What do you say, Doc?”
“I don’t know.” Fred looked worried. “This sort of thing is out of my line.”
“We all have to recognize our limitations, Doc,” Lew said expansively. “I’ll handle the business end, and you handle the technical end.” He made a motion as though to put on his coat. “Or maybe you don’t want to be a millionaire?”
“Oh, yes, yes indeed I do,” Fred said quickly. “Yes, indeed.”
“All righty,” Lew said, dusting his palms, “the first thing we’ve gotta do is build one of the sets and test her.”
This part of it was down Fred’s alley, and I could see the problem interested him. “It’s really a pretty simple gadget,” he said. “I suppose we could throw one together and run a test out here next week.”
· · ·
The first test of the euphoriaphone, or euphio, took place in Fred Bockman’s living room on a Saturday afternoon, five days after Fred’s and Lew’s sensational radio broadcast.
There were six guinea pigs—Lew, Fred and his wife Marion, myself, my wife Susan, and my son Eddie. The Bockmans had arranged chairs in a circle around a card table, on which rested a gray steel box.
Protruding from the box was a long buggy whip aerial that scraped the ceiling. While Fred fussed with the box, the rest of us made nervous small talk over sandwiches and beer. Eddie, of course, wasn’t drinking beer, though he was badly in need of a sedative. He was annoyed at having been brought out to the farm instead of to a ball game, and was threatening to take it out on the Bockmans’ Early American furnishings. He was playing a spirited game of flies and grounders with himself near the French doors, using a dead tennis ball and a poker.
“Eddie,” Susan said for the tenth time, “please stop.”
“It’s under control, under control,” Eddie said disdainfully, playing the ball off four walls and catching it with one hand.
Marion, who vents her maternal instincts on her immaculate furnishings, couldn’t hide her distress at Eddie’s turning the place into a gymnasium. Lew, in his way, was trying to calm her. “Let him wreck the dump,” Lew said. “You’ll be moving into a palace one of these days.”
“It’s ready,” Fred said softly.
We looked at him with queasy bravery. Fred plugged two jacks from the phone line into the gray box. This was the direct line to his antenna on the campus, and clockwork would keep the antenna fixed on one of the mysterious voids in the sky—the most potent of Bockman’s Euphoria. He plugged a cord from the box into an electrical outlet in the baseboard, and rested his hand on a switch. “Ready?”
“Don’t, Fred!” I said. I was scared stiff.
“Turn it on, turn it on,” Lew said. “We wouldn’t have the telephone today if Bell hadn’t had the guts to call somebody up.”
“I’ll stand right here by the switch, ready to flick her off if something goes sour,” Fred said reassuringly. There was a click, a hum and the euphio was on.
A deep, unanimous sigh filled the room. The poker slipped from Eddie’s hands. He moved across the room in a stately sort of waltz, knelt by his mother, and laid his head in her lap. Fred drifted away from his post, humming, his eyes half closed.
Lew Harrison was the first to speak, continuing his conversation with Marion. “But who cares for material wealth?” he asked earnestly. He turned to Susan for confirmation.
“Uh-uh,” said Susan, shaking her head dreamily. She put her arms around Lew, and kissed him for about five minutes.
“Say,” I said, patting Susan on the back, “you kids get along swell, don’t you? Isn’t that nice, Fred?”
“Eddie,” Marion said solicitously, “I think there’s a real baseball in the hall closet. A hard ball. Wouldn’t that be more fun than that old tennis ball?” Eddie didn’t stir.
Fred was still prowling around the room, smiling, his eyes now closed all the way. His heel caught in a lamp cord, and he went sprawling on the hearth, his head in the ashes. “Hi-ho, everybody,” he said, his eyes still closed. “Bunged my head on an andiron.” He stayed there, giggling occasionally.
“The doorbell’s been ringing for a while,” Susan said. “I don’t suppose it means anything.”
“Come in, come in,” I shouted. This somehow struck everyone as terribly funny. We all laughed uproariously, including Fred, whose guffaws blew up little gray clouds from the ashpit.
· · ·
A small, very serious old man in white had let himself in, and was now standing in the vestibule, looking at us with alarm. “Milkman,” he said uncertainly. He held out a slip of paper to Marion. “I can’t read the last line in your note,” he said. “What’s that say about cottage cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese …” His voice trailed off as he settled, tailor-fashion, to the floor beside Marion. After he’d been silent for perhaps three quarters of an hour, a look of concern crossed his face. “Well,” he said apathetically, “I can only stay for a minute. My truck’s parked out on the shoulder, kind of blocking things.” He started to stand. Lew gave the volume knob on the euphio a twist. The milkman wilted to the floor.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah,” said everybody.
“Good day to be indoors,” the milkman said. “Radio says we’ll catch the tail end of the Atlantic hurricane.”
“Let ’er come,” I said. “I’ve got my car parked under a big, dead tree.” It seemed to make sense. Nobody took exception to it. I lapsed back into a warm fog of silence and thought of nothing whatsoever. These lapses seemed to last for a matter of seconds before they were interrupted by conversation of newcomers. Looking back, I see now that the lapses were rarely less than six hours.
I was snapped out of one, I recall, by a repetition of the doorbell’s ringing. “I said come in,” I mumbled.
“And I did,” the milkman mumbled.
The door swung open, and a state trooper glared in at us. “Who the hell’s got his milk truck out there blocking the road?” he demanded. He spotted the milkman. “Aha! Don’t you know somebody could get killed, coming around a blind curve into that thing?” He yawned, and his ferocious expression gave way to an affectionate smile. “It’s so damn’ unlikely,” he said, “I don’t know why I ever brought it up.” He sat down by Eddie. “Hey, kid—like guns?” He took his revolver from its holster. “Look—just like Hoppy’s.”
Eddie took the gun, aimed it at Marion’s bottle collection and fired. A large blue bottle popped to dust and the window behind the collection splintered. Cold air roared in through the opening.
“He’ll make a cop yet,” Marion chortled.
“God, I’m happy,” I said, feeling a little like crying. “I got the swellest little kid and the swellest bunch of friends and the swellest old wife in the world.” I heard the gun go off twice more, and then dropped into heavenly oblivion.
Again the doorbell roused me. “How many times do I have to tell you—for Heaven’s sake, come in,” I said, without opening my eyes.
“I did,” the milkman said.
I heard the tramping of many feet, but had no curiosity about them. A little later, I noticed that I was having difficulty breathing. Investigation revealed that I had slipped to the floor, and that several Boy Scouts had bivouacked on my chest and abdomen.
“You want something?” I asked the tenderfoot whose hot, measured breathing was in my face.
“Beaver Patrol wanted old newspapers, but forget it,” he said. “We’d just have to carry ’em somewhere.”
“And do your parents know where you are?”
“Oh, sure. They got worried and came after us.” He jerked his thumb at several couples lined up against the baseboard, smiling into the teeth of the wind and rain lashing in at them through the broken window.
“Mom, I’m kinda hungry,” Eddie said.
“Oh, Eddie—you’re not going to make your mother cook just when we’re having such a wonderful time,” Susan said.
Lew Harrison gave the euphio’s volume knob another twist. “There, kid, how’s that?”
“Aaaaaaaaaaah,” said everybody.
When awareness intruded on oblivion again, I felt around for the Beaver Patrol, and found them missing. I opened my eyes to see that they and Eddie and the milkman and Lew and the trooper were standing by a picture window, cheering. The wind outside was roaring and slashing savagely and driving raindrops through the broken window as though they’d been fired from air rifles. I shook Susan gently, and together we went to the window to see what might be so entertaining.
“She’s going, she’s going, she’s going,” the milkman cried ecstatically.
· · ·
Susan and I arrived just in time to join in the cheering as a big elm crashed down on our sedan.
“Kee-runch!” said Susan, and I laughed until my stomach hurt.
“Get Fred,” Lew said urgently. “He’s gonna miss seeing the barn go!”
“H’mm?” Fred said from the fireplace.
“Aw, Fred, you missed it,” Marion said.
“Now we’re really gonna see something,” Eddie yelled. “The power line’s going to get it this time. Look at that poplar lean!”
The poplar leaned closer, closer, closer to the power line; and then a gust brought it down in a hail of sparks and a tangle of wires. The lights in the house went off.
Now there was only the sound of the wind. “How come nobody cheered?” Lew said faintly. “The euphio—it’s off!”
A horrible groan came from the fireplace. “God, I think I’ve got a concussion.”
Marion knelt by her husband and wailed. “Darling, my poor darling—what happened to you?”
I looked at the woman I had my arms around—a dreadful, dirty old hag, with red eyes sunk deep in her head, and hair like Medusa’s. “Ugh,” I said, and turned away in disgust.
“Honey,” wept the witch, “it’s me—Susan.”
Moans filled the air, and pitiful cries for food and water. Suddenly the room had become terribly cold. Only a moment before I had imagined I was in the tropics.
“Who’s got my damn’ pistol?” the trooper said bleakly.
A Western Union boy I hadn’t noticed before was sitting in a corner, miserably leafing through a pile of telegrams and making clucking noises.
I shuddered. “I’ll bet it’s Sunday morning,” I said. “We’ve been here twelve hours!” It was Monday morning.
The Western Union boy was thunderstruck. “Sunday morning? I walked in here on a Sunday night.” He stared around the room. “Looks like them newsreels of Buchenwald, don’t it?”
The chief of the Beaver Patrol, with the incredible stamina of the young, was the hero of the day. He fell in his men in two ranks, haranguing them like an old Army top-kick. While the rest of us lay draped around the room, whimpering about hunger, cold, and thirst, the patrol started the furnace again, brought blankets, applied compresses to Fred’s head and countless barked shins, blocked off the broken window, and made buckets of cocoa and coffee.
· · ·
Within two hours of the time that the power and the euphio went off, the house was warm and we had eaten. The serious respiratory cases—the parents who had sat near the broken window for twenty-four hours—had been pumped full of penicillin and hauled off to the hospital. The milkman, the Western Union boy, and the trooper had refused treatment and gone home. The Beaver Patrol had saluted smartly and left. Outside, repairmen were working on the power line. Only the original group remained—Lew, Fred, and Marion, Susan and myself, and Eddie. Fred, it turned out, had some pretty important-looking contusions and abrasions, but no concussion.
Susan had fallen asleep right after eating. Now she stirred. “What happened?”
“Happiness,” I told her. “Incomparable, continuous happiness—happiness by the kilowatt.”
Lew Harrison, who looked like an anarchist with his red eyes and fierce black beard, had been writing furiously in one corner of the room. “That’s good—happiness by the kilowatt,” he said. “Buy your happiness the way you buy light.”
“Contract happiness the way you contract influenza,” Fred said. He sneezed.
Lew ignored him. “It’s a campaign, see? The first ad is for the long-hairs: ‘The price of one book, which may be a disappointment, will buy you sixty hours of euphio. Euphio never disappoints.’ Then we’d hit the middle class with the next one—”
“In the groin?” Fred said.
“What’s the matter with you people?” Lew said. “You act as though the experiment had failed.”
“Pneumonia and malnutrition are what we’d hoped for?” Marion said.
“We had a cross section of America in this room, and we made every last person happy,” Lew said. “Not for just an hour, not for just a day, but for two days without a break.” He arose reverently from his chair. “So what we do to keep it from killing the euphio fans is to have the thing turned on and off with clockwork, see? The owner sets it so it’ll go on just as he comes home from work, then it’ll go off again while he eats supper; then it goes on after supper, off again when it’s bedtime; on again after breakfast, off when it’s time to go to work, then on again for the wife and kids.”
He ran his hands through his hair and rolled his eyes. “And the selling points—my God, the selling points! No expensive toys for the kids. For the price of a trip to the movies, people can buy thirty hours of euphio. For the price of a fifth of whisky, they can buy sixty hours of euphio!”
“Or a big family bottle of potassium cyanide,” Fred said.
“Don’t you see it?” Lew said incredulously. “It’ll bring families together again, save the American home. No more fights over what TV or radio program to listen to. Euphio pleases one and all—we proved that. And there is no such thing as a dull euphio program.”
A knock on the door interrupted him. A repairman stuck his head in to announce that the power would be on again in about two minutes.
“Look, Lew,” Fred said, “this little monster could kill civilization in less time than it took to burn down Rome. We’re not going into the mind-numbing business, and that’s that.”
“You’re kidding!” Lew said, aghast. He turned to Marion. “Don’t you want your husband to make a million?”
“Not by operating an electronic opium den,” Marion said coldly.
Lew slapped his forehead. “It’s what the public wants. This is like Louis Pasteur refusing to pasteurize milk.”
“It’ll be good to have the electricity again,” Marion said, changing the subject. “Lights, hot-water heater, the pump, the—oh, Lord!”
The lights came on the instant she said it, but Fred and I were already in mid-air, descending on the gray box. We crashed down on it together. The card table buckled, and the plug was jerked from the wall socket. The euphio’s tubes glowed red for a moment, then died.
Expressionlessly, Fred took a screwdriver from his pocket and removed the top of the box.
“Would you enjoy doing battle w
ith progress?” he said, offering me the poker Eddie had dropped.
In a frenzy, I stabbed and smashed at the euphio’s glass and wire vitals. With my left hand, and with Fred’s help, I kept Lew from throwing himself between the poker and the works.
“I thought you were on my side,” Lew said.
“If you breathe one word about euphio to anyone,” I said, “what I just did to euphio I will gladly do to you.”
· · ·
And there, ladies and gentlemen of the Federal Communications Commission, I thought the matter had ended. It deserved to end there. Now, through the medium of Lew Harrison’s big mouth, word has leaked out. He has petitioned you for permission to start commercial exploitation of euphio. He and his backers have built a radio-telescope of their own.
Let me say again that all of Lew’s claims are true. Euphio will do everything he says it will. The happiness it give is perfect and unflagging in the face of incredible adversity. Near tragedies, such as the first experiment, can no doubt be avoided with clockwork to turn the sets on and off. I see that this set on the table before you is, in fact, equipped with clockwork.
The question is not whether euphio works. It does. The question is, rather, whether or not America is to enter a new and distressing phase of history where men no longer pursue happiness but buy it. This is no time for oblivion to become a national craze. The only benefit we could get from euphio would be if we could somehow lay down a peace-of-mind barrage on our enemies while protecting our own people from it.
In closing, I’d like to point out that Lew Harrison, the would-be czar of euphio, is an unscrupulous person, unworthy of public trust. It wouldn’t surprise me, for instance, if he had set the clockwork on this sample euphio set so that its radiations would addle your judgments when you are trying to make a decision. In fact, it seems to be whirring suspiciously at this very moment, and I’m so happy I could cry. I’ve got the swellest little kid and the swellest bunch of friends and the swellest old wife in the world. And good old Lew Harrison is the salt of the earth, believe me. I sure wish him a lot of good luck with his new enterprise.