Kampus

by James Gunn

  She got into the front seat and put a helmet over her red hair. A moment later the car backed out of the parking space among a row of cars and started out of the lot. It was not until they reached the street that Gavin noticed the car had no controls, just like the battered electric that had abducted them into the stadium. Where the steering wheel and the gauges should have been was a black box, and Sally did not touch it. She sat straight and unmoving in her seat, watching the road.

  “What are you doing?” Gavin asked as an electric bus passed close beside them.

  The limousine swerved and then resumed its straight path.

  “This car is a cybernetic model,” Sally said. “Don't worry. I have it under my complete control.”

  “I'm distracting you!” Gavin said. “Good God, don't talk!”

  “Don't worry,” she said. “I've done much more complicated tasks while carrying on a conversation with half a dozen people. It's all a matter of experience and discipline, and if you'll pardon my appearing to boast, I'm the best there is.”

  “At what?” Gavin asked.

  “Look back at the sign in front of the stadium!”

  Gavin turned to peer through the rear window. They were passing the front of the stadium now, and in giant letters written in fire on a giant black signboard appeared: AUTOBOL TODAY! Below that a line read: DETROIT PISTONS VS. DENVER WHEELS. And below that: SALLY GRANDJON AT FORWARD.

  “That was my car you were in,” Sally said.

  “You were controlling it by a remote computer linkup,” Elaine said.

  “Of course. Once they used real drivers, but they kept getting hurt. You know? And they weren't nearly as good. Nor as quick,” Sally said. “But I must say that it was quite an experience when you two spun into the stadium. There's a feedback circuit, you know. Has to be. I can feel the engine turning and feel the sand under the wheels, and the ball bearings going round, and even the bumpers hitting the ball or the other cars, or my own fenders bending or scraping or tearing. It's an experience, having a fender torn off or feeling your engine die...”

  She paused a moment, as if reliving the sensations. “But imagine my feelings when I saw you in the front seat, felt you there, not metal and paint, but soft flesh and palpitating organs. I tell you, it was inspiring. I've never been better. Right?”

  “I don't like to complain,” Gavin said, “but you might have stopped and let us out.”

  “And spoiled the match?” Sally said. “The crowd was cheering you at the end. You were heroes. Think what they would have been like if you'd been responsible for our losing.”

  Gavin remembered the greedy adulation from which they had fled, and shuddered.

  They were entering into the heart of Denver itself. The streets were much like those in Kansas City: clean and bright and relatively empty. The buildings were neat and well kept, and where there was space, green patches of grass and trees and shrubs appeared.

  “That isn't my real work, of course,” Sally said. “That's just the way I earn what I need for other purposes. Easy money, and a lot of it. Lets me buy equipment for my cybernetics lab. I'll show you that when we get home.”

  Home was a large old Victorian mansion not too far from the inner city, shingled, turreted, set well back from the street in a shelter of tall trees and shrubbery surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. The limousine turned toward the mansion, a wrought-iron gate swung open automatically, and the car traversed a long drive that passed in front of the house before returning to the street. The car stopped in front of stone steps that led up to a brick porch and big dark carved wooden doors.

  Sally removed the helmet and turned herself toward them. Gavin was surprised again by the liveliness of her expression and the vividness of her coloring.

  “We're home,” she said.

  As Gavin got out of the car, he realized he had been sweating. Elaine joined him, and he took her hand in a gesture of reassurance. She held on as if she needed it. Her hand was clammy.

  He looked up the steps toward the open double doors leading into a dark interior. Sally was standing beside the doors, motioning to them. “Come on,” she said impatiently. “Come on!”

  Gavin started up the stairs.

  As they entered the doors, Sally took them by the arms again in an action now so familiar as to seem habitual. Gavin's and Elaine's hands were forced apart as Sally moved between them. “This,” she said, “is my husband Frank.”

  As Gavin's eyes adjusted to the darkness of the entrance hall, he saw a large middle-aged man with graying dark hair and a ruddy complexion. “Hello,” Gavin said politely.

  “Hi!” Elaine said.

  Frank didn't speak to them. “This isn't another one, is it, Sal? I don't think I can stand it if you've brought home another one.”

  “No, no,” Sally said. “These are just a couple of strangers I found at the stadium. I brought them home to meet the family and get a meal and maybe rest up.”

  Gavin could see now that Frank looked tired and anxious.

  “That's what you said about Jay-Jay,” Frank said sullenly.

  “Don't be jealous,” Sally said soothingly, reaching out to pat Frank's cheek. “You can have your turn tonight, okay?”

  He moved his face away from her hand, but a reluctant smile crept across his face, and he nodded. “George will be mad,” he said.

  “Let me worry about George,” Sally said. “Come on,” she said to Gavin and Elaine, grabbing their arms, “let's go find you two babes something to eat.”

  They went into a large room with a broad staircase at the far end climbing to a landing and then branching to the right and the left. The old oak of the stairs gleamed with wax, and the broad, balustered railings shone with the polish of a half-dozen generations of hands. A blue Oriental rug covered the center of the oak floor, and antique furniture stood on the rug and around the walls.

  The room smelled of lemons.

  A young woman stood beside the walnut library table in the center of the room talking to a man of medium size and dark hair. The woman was dark too. She was small and looked sullen but sexy, like a vixen. She had a dust cloth in her hand with which she was idly rubbing the table. She and the man looked up as Sally entered, and acted guilty.

  Sally ignored their actions and took Gavin and Elaine up to them. “This is my husband George,” she said, “and my co-wife Susan.” And she introduced Gavin and Elaine and described how they had broken into her car. Everybody laughed, even Susan, who managed to look sullen in the process. She also looked speculatively at Gavin when she thought he wasn't watching. When he looked, her eyes slid away.

  Beyond the staircase a door opened into a large country kitchen, big enough for a six-burner stove, two ovens, an oversized refrigerator and matching freezer, and a large breakfast table with six chairs. The floor was covered with sunny yellow plastic squares patterned with green lines. A big kettle simmered on the stove, and delightful odors steamed from it. As they entered the kitchen, a matronly woman with wispy brown hair and red cheeks turned from the stove and smiled at them.

  They had a cook, Gavin thought, but Sally immediately said, “This is my co-wife Mary. Mary's in charge of the house. She likes to cook and bake and see that everything's clean and everyone's well-fed. She thinks that not eating enough is the cause of melancholy, discontent, neuroses, and general poor health.”

  “That's right,” Mary said cheerfully. “You look starved. Let me get you something to eat. And those bruises. You poor things.”

  “You see?” Sally said to Gavin. “Yes, Mary, I'm sure they're hungry. Give them some of the hobo stew and your good bread. Mary bakes the best bread in town.”

  “I didn't know anybody baked bread anymore,” Gavin said.

  “This is the age of the artist,” Sally said. “And artists work in any medium. Mary's is bread.”

  “Well, now,” Mary said, her face getting redder. “I do like to bake. That's all.”

  Bread, Gavin thought, is the theme of this day, b
ut man does not live by bread alone. To go with the hunks of homemade bread torn from a steaming loaf and spread with slathers of real butter, there was a rich soup full of chunks of meat and vegetables. As Gavin popped into his mouth a last piece of bread sopped in the last bit of broth on his plate, he looked around the kitchen, replete and contented. A swinging door led, no doubt, to a dining room, and another door to the outside. Near it, against the wall, was a plaque engraved with the word: RECYCLING. Underneath were five metal flaps that covered openings in the wall. On each flap a single word was engraved. From left to right they read: CANS, GLASS, PAPER, PLASTIC, and COMPOST. Gavin felt a sense of satisfaction that nothing was wasted until he recalled what the Professor had said once: “Doing the right thing for one's fellow man would be more virtuous if it didn't represent an easy way to delude one's conscience about how one really feels about one's fellow man.”

  Mary was busy with what appeared to be the evening meal, rubbing a large beef roast and cloves of garlic together with a passion usually reserved for more erotic occasions. Sally had disappeared through the outer door when they sat down to eat. Gavin considered them: Sally the sex goddess, the provider and head of the household, Mary the motherly cook and housekeeper. Perhaps it was a good arrangement for both; Mary enjoyed the details that Sally found boring and benefited from the caliber of men that Sally attracted and kept contented with her shrewd human relations as well as the dominance of her body and personality. And who knows? Perhaps the men found in Mary the kind of gentleness and concern that was soothing after Sally's intensity.

  And then, for variety, there was Susan, the sulky vixen. Every family needed a rebellious spirit to keep it young and vigorous. Gavin wondered, though, why Sally had chosen Susan. Perhaps she understood that group dynamics required a force like Susan, or maybe she enjoyed the challenge of Susan's smoldering sexuality, or maybe it was a satisfying alternative for the husbands to Sally's frank lust and Mary's pillowy comfort. Whatever the reason, it made Sally more complicated and more fascinating.

  Then Sally was back, filled with energy and purpose, saying, “Come on, you two. I want to show you my work.” She hustled them through the back door toward a large building surrounded by trees. It must once have been a carriage house. Now it had been propped up and resurfaced with plastics and stainless steel and glass, and it was a laboratory. On the ground floor, small rooms opened off a central corridor. Each was equipped with drives for CDs and diskettes and tapes as well as other kinds of computer attachments, oscilloscopes, and apparatus that Gavin couldn't identify.

  Most of the rooms were occupied by men and women equipped with soft helmets dangling with wires or with wires attached to various parts of their bodies. Some of them were watching a moving dot of light trace a pattern across an oscilloscope or listening, their eyes closed, to a tone that varied in pitch or intensity.

  “We're into biofeedback,” Sally said, sweeping her hand at the little rooms. “People come here every day—free if they're doing something we're interested in, for a fee if it's personal development they're after. We train people to control what once was considered autonomic: heartbeats, circulation, headaches, muscular and mental tension, alpha rhythms, kidney function, pain, sleep centers, attention spans, fantasy levels, pleasure nodes, sexual readiness, and almost anything else that once was assumed to be beyond humanity's conscious control. If we can meter it, we can teach people to control it.”

  She led them up a flight of stairs to the upper floor. This was her place, Gavin could tell. It was all one room, without windows, lined on one side by a bank of computers and memory units faced with stainless steel and glass. In the middle of the room was a padded table, apparently adjustable into a lounge, covered with tan leather or vinyl and equipped with jacks and dangling wires and apparatus of all kinds, like an effete torture system.

  One of the computers had been pulled out of its place against the far wall, and a man was tinkering with its insides, wires strewn around him like arteries, cables like intestines. He looked up at them, grinning. He was black and slender and handsome. “Sal,” he said. “How'd it go at the stadium?”

  “Got the winning assist,” Sally said. “And brought back a couple of friends. Elaine and Gavin, this is my husband Jay-Jay. Jay-Jay's a computer technician. Came to fix the computer and stayed. And this is my computer. Best around. Just like Jay-Jay. Just like me. Super-cooled, high-powered, overgeared. And this is where we do our experiments.”

  “What kind of experiments?” Elaine asked.

  “We're perfecting mental control of computers. And computer-assisted thinking. CAT. As easy as spelling ‘cat.’ Already we've achieved complete physical control of our autonomic systems, muscle tone, sensory stimuli....”

  “Sal has, anyway,” Jay-Jay said. “The rest of us are just working on it. You should see her undressed.”

  “I'd like to,” Gavin murmured, and Elaine glanced at him sharply.

  “I'll tell you, it makes you marvel at the potential of the human body,” Jay-Jay went on, uninterrupted. “Sal's a wonder, she is, and when she and this computer get together, there's nothing they can't do. Highflyin’ Sal, the computer gal.”

  “Pshaw!” Sally said modestly. But her magnificent body seemed to glow and ripple under the pink slacks and paler blouse. Gavin couldn't help himself; under the stimulus of Jay-Jay's suggestion, mentally he began to strip away her clothing.

  And then he noticed that Elaine was still watching him, and looked away.

  Jay-Jay nodded in their direction. “New recruits?” he asked.

  “Just friends,” Sally said lightly. “If you stay here long enough, however,” she said to them, “I'd like you to try the equipment. Maybe tonight. I do most of my best work at night.”

  “I'll bet you do,” Elaine said.

  Sally smiled at her. “Don't we all, honey?” she said sweetly. “Come on,” she said once more. “I'll show you to your room.”

  “Rooms, I hope,” Elaine said quickly.

  “We're just traveling together,” Gavin explained. “Not sleeping together.”

  “That's too bad,” Sally said, and laughed. “We've got two spare rooms, and they've got a door between them in case you change your minds.”

  Dinner was a meal in which the entire family participated. It was a social occasion which began in an elaborate drawing room with a marble fireplace and Victorian chairs and settees covered in various shades of blue and green velvet. Mixed drinks or wines were available. Gavin stood on a thick blue-and-gold Oriental rug with a tall cold glass in his hand, feeling the moisture beading the glass under his fingers, enjoying the sophisticated hum of conversation, and thought that this, surely, was what the new freedom was all about. Here it all was: a challenging new frontier of research to keep the mind engaged, an exciting physical and mental sport to exercise the body, varied and perhaps inexhaustible sexual opportunities to lend anticipation to the day and passion to the night, and comfortable living conditions, the amenities of life, and the talk of intelligent people.

  What did it matter if Susan sulked and George pouted? What did it matter if Elaine looked at him with blue eyes narrowed in thought?

  They went into a large paneled dining room and sat down at a polished walnut table set with silver and china and crystal. There was good wine for the crystal—white wine with the magnificent broiled Colorado trout, and red wine with the beef burgundy, and a fine brandy after dessert.

  Gavin sat back in his chair sipping his brandy, and he thought that the Professor would have enjoyed all this, most of all Sally.

  “Our research?” Sally was saying in response to a question from Elaine. “We are after the ultimate conscious control of the body and the mind; we wish to make man, not his instincts, the arbiter of his condition. George, here, has trained himself to control his heartbeat. He can race it up to one hundred fifty per minute, or shut it down to virtually nothing. In fact, he could stop it completely if we could be certain of getting it started again.”r />
  George cheered up a bit. “Next I'm going to start on the adrenals.”

  “Frank, now,” Sally said, “is working on alpha rhythms. On command he can suppress everything else in his mind and achieve a serenity that yogi have worked lifetimes to achieve. Show us, Frank.”

  The weariness and concern on Frank's middle-aged face vanished as his face smoothed, his eyes closed, and a mystical smile curved his lips. As his breathing stilled and his body relaxed, Gavin had the startling impression that Frank was going to levitate off his chair and float around the room. It was a remarkable display of self-control, and at that moment Gavin envied the older man.

  But why, the Professor muttered inside his head, is he ever weary and concerned?

  “Susan is learning to control her ovulation,” Sally said sweetly. “And she's doing marvelously. Just think what a boon this would be for the poor and ignorant masses of the world!”

  “If they had the discipline to learn that,” Elaine said, “wouldn't they have the discipline to take the pill, or simply abstain at fertile periods?”

  “Of course, dear,” Sally said, “but think of the accomplishment of women at last overthrowing the tyranny of their bodies. Right, Susan?”

  “I'm beginning to think it's a waste of time,” Susan said.

  “Perhaps you need some help from Frank on alpha rhythms,” Sally said without malice. “Mary, of course, is too busy with the household to devote as much time to research as she and the rest of us would like. But when she came to us, she had migraines, and she is learning to control them by increasing the blood flow to her hands.”

  “Oh, it's a miracle,” Mary said, her face shining with gratitude and love.

  “I'd call this dinner a miracle,” Gavin said.

  Mary smiled at him, and Sally said, “Wasn't it, though? Jay-Jay hasn't been here long enough to get his own research started.”

  “That's not true,” Jay-Jay protested. “I'm working on the instantaneous erection.”