A REASONABLE WORLD

by Damon Knight

  26

  He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be accounted a curse to him.

  Proverbs 27:14

  As someday it may happen that a victim must be found,

  I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list

  Of society offenders who might well be underground,

  And who never would be missed—they never would be missed!

  W. S. Gilbert

  The Joy Boys were just a bunch of young guys who looked a little bit alike and had fun hanging around together in Miami Beach; they were tall, pretty well built, blond or bleached, no big noses or anything, blue- or grey-eyed. The uniform kind of evolved: they wore T-shirts with the arms cut off, wide blue-grey belts with big buckles that said JB, grey cutoffs in the summer and grey tightbottoms in the winter, and they always had twisted grey-blue headbands around their foreheads. The hair was crewcut to begin with, but then they started cutting it short in the middle and letting it grow longer on the sides. When they walked down the street, they got a lot of respect, and when they walked down the street together, they got a lot of respect.

  Once in a while they got into shoving matches with some other gang, but everybody knew the days of brass knuckles and auto antennas were over, and they really weren’t into that anyway: it wasn’t a competitive thing, like proving they were meaner than anybody, they just enjoyed seeing the straights get off the sidewalk to let them by, or pushing them off if they didn’t. And then they would go into a bar and drink a lot of beer, and go home doing the same thing, or sometimes other things.

  One afternoon five of them were walking down the street, Carter, Erv, Tim, Walker, and Mark. All in a row. And they nudged an old dentist type off the sidewalk into the gutter. Then a couple of tourists in Hawaiian shirts.

  And Erv fell down, just facedown on the sidewalk, drooling on the concrete, his arms wide. And then a couple of seconds later Mark went down, just the same. The rest of them ran, but Walker went, and Carter, and only Tim got away.

  That was the year when the big die-off begun. I remember it real well, because three of my relatives went that same year. My uncle Ralph, my aunt Lorraine, and my cousin Jeff. It wasn’t no kind of disease—they weren’t sick or nothing—it was them McNultys done it. Seemed like anybody that was just a mortal nuisance to all and sundry, why, they had better watch out, because the McNultys would get them. And after the first few months, you could see folks walking around kind of holding theirselves in, trying to be polite, don’t you know. But it was too much for them mostly. Sooner or later they would take to cussing and carrying on like they used to, and that would be the end of them.

  Oral history, Paul Z. Wilson,

  recorded November 23, 2036.

  This little kid, nasty little brute, about ten or eleven I’d say, red hair, freckles, mean little eyes too close together, horrid child, his parents should have drowned him at birth. He had a sort of feud going with a man named Palmer who lived two doors down. Palmer didn’t like him crossing the front garden, you see. And the kid knew that Palmer had a temper. I saw the whole thing from across the road. Nice morning in May, Palmer working in his petunias. Here comes the kid on his bicycle, swerves into the garden, makes Palmer jump up and shout, goes on round the corner. Five minutes later, back again, same thing, off again. Palmer waited for him. Kid came by, riding no hands, thumbs in his ears, gave Palmer the raspberry. Palmer grabbed him off the bicycle—just what the kid was hoping for, do you see—and next moment he was lying in the gutter dead as mutton. No, not Palmer, the kid. It was a big surprise all round. Palmer quite cut up about it, but the inquest cleared him absolutely. Kid dead, not a mark on him. Cause of death, act of God—that was what they called it then.

  Oral history, Victor Levering,

  recorded February 2, 2041.

  His name was Raúl Pacheco Quinones; he was thirty-five, a lawyer, a widower, a poet who never showed his verses to anyone. He thought of himself as essentially normal sexually, if perhaps a little more fastidious than most; his shyness prevented him from approaching any woman unless he felt a shared attraction… Well, anyhow, in his successful encounters he instinctively and naturally behaved in a caring way, solicitous of the woman and desiring her pleasure, and yet in his fantasies and in the kind of pornography he preferred, he thought obsessively of women stripped and compelled—not brutally raped, as a rule, but compelled to submit nevertheless, and moreover forced to respond against their will. And of course this was a sick fantasy, the rapist’s fantasy that the victim really likes it. Later he began to have other fantasies, in which he experienced the excitement of blood and dismemberment. In actual life he would never take part in such a thing, but he remembered that as a young boy he had had daydreams of this kind, of stripping and humiliating a certain woman teacher, for example—this was early, before he had even found out what men and women did with their sexual parts. And perhaps this sadistic motif came from that time, when he had felt sexually confused, ignorant and powerless, and wanted to retaliate by injuring a woman. Sometimes, with a metal fist, he wanted to strike his parents in the face with such power that it would drive them back against their parents and grandparents and knock them all down like trees felled by a hurricane.

  In a suburb of Lima called Miraflores, where he had just finished lunch with a client, he was walking down a sunny street between whitewashed walls toward the holotheaters and the bus stop, looking at the people he passed. Here a woman in her thirties, face a little drooping and sad, and he thought of closing the door, the fright in her eyes, then the first slicing blow. He saw rich rolling intestines cascading out on the floor, blood spurting between fingers, grey intestines and yellow fat, all the forbidden interior; yes, and the closed eyes, the mouth straining open to scream its disbelief. That this could happen, that another human being could…

  He slipped out and into an elderly woman named Velásquez who was walking in the same direction. Come and look at this, please. Without pleasure.

  … another slice, and the white bone before the blood covered it; then the hairy pubis parting… But he has never—? No. He knows he would die. Unusual. Let’s call a few others.

  They rode him together into a bus, where he sat looking out the dusty window awhile, then took a pad from his breast pocket and wrote:

  Aunque me maten

  Por no ser feliz,

  Por no creer en su mundo antiséptico,

  Diré que el ser feliz no es lo mío.

  Lo mío es decir la verdad,

  La verdad mía, sola mi verdad,

  Aunque sea amarga.

  This ugliness is beautiful to him._______True. And he harms

  Then why kill him?___________no one.

  Only to spare ourselves

  from having to see___________Let him live.

  these things again?__________________What if he is unhappy?

  He says his business as

  a poet is to tell his own truth,

  even if it is bitter.

  How can we know he is wrong?

  All right. Good-bye. *Pop* *Pop* *Pop* *Pop*

  Ralph W. Steinleser owned and operated an electronic parts manufacturing company in Cleveland, Ohio; he was a choleric man of fifty-six who had been disillusioned in love several times and whose doctor no longer allowed him to eat the foods he liked best. Lately he had noticed that the people in the office were giving him strange looks. The new head of his catalog department, Tom Eberhard, for instance. One morning Steinleser was saying to him, “I wouldn’t wipe my ass on a piece of junk like that. A kid nine years old could—” There was that look again. It wasn’t suppressed anger; he was used to that, and people who worked for him damn well had to suppress their anger; it was something else, almost like fear or, no, more like excitement.

  “What’s the matter?” he said irritably.

  Eberhard moistened his lips. “Nothing.”

  “Come on, give for Chrissake. What are you, afraid to tell
me? Come on, be a mentsh.”

  “I’m just wondering how much longer you’ll be with us, Mr. Steinleser,” Eberhard said.

  Steinleser looked at him. “You going to explain that or what?”

  “If I do, you’ll fire me.”

  Steinleser took a grip on himself. “I won’t fire you, okay? I swear on my mother’s grave.”

  “Okay, you know Al Mahony over at Capitol Processing?”

  “Know him? I knew him. He dropped dead last Wednesday.”

  “Right, and so did Win Colford at World, and Rich Piotto at Hi-Tek, and three or four others that I know about. Not last Wednesday, but like the last six months or so.”

  “And you think I might be next, huh?” Steinleser moved toward the door, turned around. “What did all those guys have in common, Eberhard? They were all sons of bitches, right, and I’m another one?”

  Eberhard said nothing.

  “You’re fired,” Steinleser said. “No, the hell with it. You’re not fired. Maybe I’m going to give you a raise, who knows.” With an effort, he added, “Thanks.”

  He went back to his own office, told the computer, “Pinky, hold my calls,” and leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed. Well, he was an SOB; he could afford to be one, and it came natural, so why not? “Pinky,” he said, “there was something on the news about rudeness, when was it, last week sometime.”

  “Is this it?” In the holo, the head and shoulders of a local anchor appeared. “A new development in the story of McNulty’s Symbiont,” she said. “A wave of unexplained deaths in Eastern cities has a few scientists worried. Like earlier victims apparently killed by symbionts, they were mostly men between the ages of thirty-five and sixty, but unlike those earlier deaths, there is no evidence that they were about to commit any act of violence. They were, however, said to be extremely rude and overbearing persons, who made everyone around them miserable. In other news—”

  “Yeah, that was it,” Steinleser said. “Any more?”

  A well-known commentator appeared in the holo. “Here’s a new wrinkle,” he said. “A company called Feelsafe is marketing a gadget that fits on your wrist and buzzes you if you start to lose your temper. They point to the recent wave of deaths among middle-aged men, particularly those in management positions: These people, they say, dropped dead in the middle of tantrums because the McNulty’s Symbiont got them. Wear their gadget, they say, and live longer.” He leaned closer in the holo, with a conspiratorial smile. “How do you like them apples?”

  “Enough,” said Steinleser. “Look up Feelsafe.”

  A picture came up in the holo: a computer bracelet in two styles, silver and gold, the gold one a little broader. A voice was saying, “Feelsafe looks like an ordinary wrist computer, and actually has a full spectrum of functions, but in addition it is a sensitive biofeedback device that lets you know when you are about to give vent to anger and hostility. Feel safe and live longer.” The prices and order numbers were flashing.

  “Enough,” he said. “That’s craziness.” He took a cigar out of the box on his desk, looked at it and put it back. Were they killing people for being rude, for Chrissake? But he more than half believed it, and he told the computer to order him a bracelet, the gold model, three hundred twenty-nine ninety-five.

  27

  Three Mexican-looking men were standing beside Hugh Wilkins’ powder-blue BMW when he came out of the mall. “Sir,” one of them said, “this is your car?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It is a very nice car. Will you give it to us?”

  “What are you, crazy?”

  “No, we are not crazy. I think you should give us this car.” The other two men advanced, one on either side. Wilkins started to back away, but now they were behind him.

  “I need the car,” he said. He was beginning to perspire, looking around for help. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention.

  “You have two cars,” the man said. He had narrow eyes, and there was a scar on his cheek; he looked dirty, like all of them.

  “How do you know that?”

  “You live at twenty-four hundred Live Oaks, yes? We saw the two cars.”

  “Well, one of them’s my wife’s. She needs a car too.”

  “But we have no car, and we also have wives and children.”

  Wilkins swallowed, turned, swung desperately at one of the men and missed. Then he tripped somehow, and the men were holding him down while they went through his pockets. They found his keycard, took it off the ring, and tossed the rest of the cards on the concrete beside his head. In a moment he heard the doors slam. The BMW, with the three Mexicans inside, backed out of the space, turned, rolled forward and was gone.

  The crazy manager at The Greentree fired one of the waiters just before the evening shift. The waiter’s name was Joe Balter. “I don’t care!” Limoni was yelling. “You’re out, and that’s it!”

  Balter turned and went away, stony-faced. The other three waiters followed him into the men’s room. “Hey, Joe, that’s a lousy thing,” Carpenter said.

  “He’s a maniac. See you around.” Balter put his overblouse on and went toward the door.

  Phillips caught his arm. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait, wait.” He beckoned to the others to come nearer. As they bent their heads together, he said, “I just had a crazy thought. Why should he fire us? How about if we fire him?”

  “I don’t get it. How are we going to fire him?”

  “Shove him out the door and start running the place ourselves. How does that grab you?”

  “Well, it would be fun,” said Eckert, with a slow grin. “Hey, I’m game. You, Stan?”

  “Why not?”

  “You through socializing?” Limoni asked when they returned to the kitchen. Sal Aronica, the chef, was stirring something in the pot; the busboys were standing around.

  The three waiters looked at each other. “Okay, Dave, that’s it,” said Phillips. The three of them closed in on him and pushed. Limoni shouted, “What are you doing, you crazy—!” They shoved him through the swinging door. Limoni staggered, regained his balance, and began to flail his arms around.

  “Ah-ah, don’t hit,” said Carpenter. They grabbed his arms and kept moving, through the main dining room, past the desk where the hostess and the cashier were looking at them incredulously. One of the busboys opened the door and they pushed him out. When he came in again after a moment, they pushed him out a little harder.

  “All right, listen,” said Phillips, “the first thing we have to do is keep Dave from coming in again. Second thing, I’ll manage tonight if you want, but then we’ve got to elect a new manager and revise the work schedules.”

  “You’re going to keep on working?” a busboy asked.

  “Why not? Who needs him?”

  “Who’s going to pay us?”

  “Rita will make out the vouchers, okay? Either the front office will honor them or they won’t. If they don’t, hey, we’ll take it out of the till. Listen, that might be a better idea. We take our share out and then deposit the receipts.”

  “You’re talking about larceny here,” said Rita.

  “I know it. What do you want?”

  “About keeping Dave out, he’s got a key.”

  “Locksmith,” said Phillips, snapping his fingers. “Harry, will you get on that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Next, we’ve got to hire a couple of people, one to take the place of whoever we elect for manager, and another to take up the workload. Rita, you want to phone the agency?”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, and punched the phone.

  The door opened and two police officers came in, followed by Limoni. “What seems to be the problem here?” asked the larger policeman.

  “Officer, this nut comes in and starts yelling,” said Phillips. “So we threw him out.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Ed Phillips, the manager.”

  “You!” shouted Limoni. “I’m the
goddamn manager, and you’re fired!”

  “He was fired last week,” said Phillips.

  “You son of a bitch, I’ll bust your ass!” Limoni yelled. His eyes were bulging; he started past the officers, but they held him back. “Just take it easy a minute,” one of them said. He looked around. “Who’s the manager, him or him?”

  Hands pointed toward Phillips.

  “Sorry to bother you,” said the smaller policeman. The two of them turned Limoni around and marched him through the door. Limoni’s voice had turned into a squeak.

  “Why is the manager always such a prick?” Carpenter asked.

  “Well, there’s a theory about that,” said Balter. “A guy starts out as a busboy, let’s say, he does okay, so he gets promoted to waiter. He does okay as a waiter, so he gets promoted to a manager. Now he stops doing okay, the responsibility is too much for him, so he doesn’t get promoted, and there he is. He’s reached his level of incompetence.”

  “Oh-oh. That could be me too.”

  “No, because if you’re a lousy manager we’ll make you a waiter again and try somebody else.”

  “There’s another thing, too. I went to this encounter group one time when I was working for Gentronics. I always thought these little petty tyrants got off on bossing people around, but it turns out it’s really something else. They know they don’t know enough to hold their jobs, and they’re deathly afraid somebody will show them up. So they have to keep putting everybody down. It isn’t power, it’s fear.”

  “Oh-ho. All right, let me ask you this. Suppose one of you guys goofs off and I have to fire them. Then what, do you throw me out the door and start over?”

  “Goofs off how?”

  “Insults a customer. Screws up the orders. General pain in the ass.”