The Tomorrow File

by Lawrence Sanders

  I sipped my brandy while he was gone. Trying to make out my own features in the artificially antiqued mirror behind the bar. My face was wrinkled with wavering tendrils of gilt. Guilt? Who was I? I couldn’t make me out.

  “Yes,” a voice said. And there he was again. Looming close to me out of the gloom. “Artie came in several times with a friend. Not with a friend. He met him here.”

  “Name?” I asked.

  “Artie called him Nick.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Did you ask what he looked like? This friend of Artie’s?”

  “About your height,” the bartender said. “About your weight and build. With hair about your shade.”

  “And with a mustache,’’I said. “And a Vandyke beard. Just like mine.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “How did you know?”

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  “I adore you,” he said.

  I went reeling out of there. Remembering an experience I had at MIT when I was being conditioned on computer technology. There had been a power lapse—not a failure out a lapse—and the computer I was serving on had run wild. It had spewed out incredible nonsense until we brought it back to norm. While it was out of control, the readout screen had scanned: “Bicycle boys never into tile sky shall.” That was precisely my mood at that point in time: “Bicycle boys never into tile sky shall.”

  But it was to be compounded. I departed that dungeon and wandered back to my car. Not computing at all. Not at all. Toward me, on the crowded sidewalk, came lurching a very tall em. Apparently drunk. Picking his nose thoughtfully.

  And wearing a checkered cap.

  Z-9

  Opening remarks delivered at a conversazione of scientists of various disciplines, University of California at Berkeley, July 16, 1999:

  “It can hardly come as a surprise to most of you here tonight that, for the past fifteen years, the foreign policy of the US Government has been based on our agricultural production. Particularly of cereal grains. This agriwar, in which admittedly we have used food as an aggressive weapon, has reduced the danger of nukewar to an irre-min. For which I think we all, regardless of our political tilt, can be thankful.

  ‘ ‘Wait—wait just a minute! I do not want this colloquy to degrade into a debate on morality. Since when has morality been a scientific discipline? I’ll say only that, having spent most of my adult life in Public Service, I know it is a fatal error to confuse personal morality with political morality. The two, I assure you, have nothing in common.

  “But the thesis I wish to propose to you tonight—and which I hope will be the subject of frank and lively discussion—is that the period in which the superiority of the US in agriwar was the base of our foreign policy and national security is drawing to a close. The production of protein from petroleum, the improved strains of natural grains, the development of protein from plankton, the exciting discoveries in the area of weather control, the increasing use of soybeans in the production of synthetic foods, factory farms, hydroponic gardens: all these, plus the worldwide gains in achieving Z-Pop, have reduced the importance of food as a weapon of foreign policy.

  ““What I suggest to you now is that it is time to consider a new basis for our national strength. The Twenty-first will, in my opinion, be the Century of Sciwar. And unless we immediately establish the proposed Department ef Creative Science, bringing scientists of all disciplines into policymaking roles in the US Government, we are doomed to become a second-rate power.”

  That was the last meeting of my final Public Relations tour on behalf of the DCS. I flew directly from San Francisco to Detroit on an official courier plane. Hypersonic operations had once again been approved for the Detroit area.

  I was exhausted. Throat raspy. Unable to compute clearly all the problems that beset me. I suffered three attacks of RSC in California. Of increasing severity. During the last, I remembered a stuffed giraffe I had played with as an infant. I couldn’t have been much more than one year old at the time. It was, by far, my most ancient memory. If I went back any farther, I’d recall swimming lazily in my mother’s womb.

  I arrived at our Grosse Pointe place in time to have lunch with my father. Just before he departed for a week’s tour of his overseas factories.

  "Nick-ol ’ -as! ” he shouted. I submitted to the expected bear hug.

  He brought me up to tick. The Die-Dee Doll was a tremendous success. Worldwide markets. Eighteen ethnic models. Forty-seven national costumes. Love pouring in. Demand increasing. The problem was production. Not in raw material shortfalls, but in assembly. And just when he was convinced the problem was insoluble, along comes that little butterfly Paul Bumford with a request that he cooperate in a field test of a new drug that might double his production norms.

  “Nick, did you know about that?” my father demanded.

  I told him yes, I knew all about that.

  And did I think it would really serve? Would it raise his unit assembly rate?

  “I think it will,” I said.

  “That’s good enough for me,” he burbled. “I’ll flash Paul ago. That’s one bright em. I misjudged him. I admit it. What is this stuff, Nick?” “An injection,” I said. “Self-administered.”

  “What does it do? Make ’em serve faster?”

  “No,” I said. “No recorded effect on muscular coordination, physical speed, or anything like that. It’s a reward for increased production. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “A reward?” he said. “Better than overtime love?”

  “Much better,” I assured him. “And much cheaper.”

  “That’s for me.” He laughed. “But we’ll have to make it voluntary. You know that, don’t you, Nick? The unions will insist on it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Paul knows it?”

  "I’m sure he does. We’ll get Informed Consent Statements from everyone injected.”

  “You think they’ll go for it? The servers?”

  “When the word gets around, they’ll be lining up for shots.” “Wonderful!” he yelled.

  “Yes,” I said. “Wonderful.”

  I stood on the porch. Waving as my father’s helicopter lifted off the front lawn. He hadn’t married the musician. I didn’t think he would. But his new black ef copter pilot seemed to be about two meters tall. With a corpus as pliant as whalebone. Green hair down to her arse. My father’s vitality depressed me.

  I slept ten hours. Breakfasted voraciously on orange petrojuice, proham, powdered eggs, propots, two slices of soybread, and three cups of coftea. I spent four hours playing cartel bridge with Mrs. McPherson, Miss Catherine, and Charles. Then went back to bed for another eight hours. I awoke convinced that I would find solutions for all my problems and never again see another checkered cap. I called Millie Jean Grunwald.

  It was then almost 2400. I woke her up, I knew, but I had never known her to speak to me in anger, or even pique. She seemed delighted when she recognized my voice. I think she was. She told me to hurry; she had so much to tell me.

  I hadn’t brought her a gift. But I went up to what had been my mother’s bedroom, and on the top shelf of a closet, wrapped in pink tissue paper, I found an obso French doll. One of those long-legged, long-armed, fancily dressed, floppy figures young efs once left sprawled on their counterpanes.

  Into Detroit, in the antique Ford Capri. To Millie’s darkened street. The deserted porn shop. But her lights were on. She awaited me.

  As I had hoped, the French doll delighted her. Millie would never be allowed to breed, not with her genetic rating, and perhaps she knew it. Or sensed it. She adopted the doll as her very own immediately. Insisted on taking it into bed with us. Perched high on a pillow, its painted lips smiled down on our naked corpora. Eyes opened wide in enthralled astonishment.

  Millie had gained at least ten kilos since I had last seen her. Too much Qik-Freez Hot-Qizine at her factory’s cafeteria. She had scarcely any waist left. The breasts were fuller, and buttocks, thighs, calves. Even
upper arms and feet. I didn’t care. All of her was soft. That young, globular ass was particularly comforting. Her flesh had a fresh, infant’s scent. She tasted of warm milk.

  I had intended only to hold her. Listening to her long, involved accounts of what had happened to her supervisor’s husband, how her girlfriend’s boyfriend had betrayed her, and what a local florist had suggested to her (Millie): a free natural philodendron for a fast blowjob in the stockroom.

  But there was so much of her. Her almost matronly breasts hardened under my negligent urging. Long nipples stared at me expectantly. Plump thighs parted. Knees raised and widened. The lower mouth yawned. In all conscience, could I reject her when she was already humid? And panting? And I was already humid? And panting?

  I maneuvered her to hands and knees. Then pressed her head and shoulders gently downward. Until her face was turned sideways onto a pillow. Live hair flung out. Great hips and buttocks raised to me. Sleek and round. She reached up to pull the French doll down to her. Cuddled it. Kissed its pouting lips. Stroked its long, tight sausage curls. Crooned into its little ear.

  She was conscious of me on a physical level. The slow writhing of her pelvis demonstrated that. But as her corpus quickened, den became lubricious, ass heatened and tautened in my grip, she never left off crooning to the doll. Whispering into its tiny ear as I, insensate, thrust. Both of us slaves.Both of us masters. I didn’t know.

  I do know that when I felt the onset of orgasm, could no longer restrain, I withdrew and directed jets of hot semen onto her soft buttocks and dimpled back. Watching the birdlime drip and run.

  Wondering why I was doing what I was doing to this child. And she smiled, smiled, nodded, nodded, and whispered secrets into the ear of my mother’s doll.

  Hours later—one or several; I wasn’t aware—she shook me awake. Frantic. She had switched on the bedlamp.

  “Nick,” she said, “wake up. Please wake up, Nick.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Listen,” she said.

  I listened. A squeaking. Clicking. Sudden scamper.

  “Mice in the walls,” I told her. “Coming up from the basement. Try to forget them. Go back to sleep.”

  “I saw one last week,” she said. ‘‘It ran across the floor and went down a hole where the pipe is. There in the corner.”

  “A little one or a big one?” I asked.

  “A big one, Nick. Huge!”

  “How big?”

  She held her forefingers about 10 cm apart.

  “A little one,” I said. "Mus, not Rattus. They won’t hurt you. ”

  “They’ll bite me.”

  “No, Millie. Not mice. They won’t.”

  “They’ll run over me and, you know, get between my legs. And bite.”

  I sighed.

  “All right, Millie,” I said.“I’ll fix it so they can’t get up here.”

  I got out of bed, naked, and went into her tiny kitchen. I found some rags under the rusted sink. Brought them back to the big room.

  “I’ll stuff them around the pipe,” I told her. “Tomorrow you must buy some plastisteel wool, pull the rags out, and stuff the wool all around the pipe. They can’t gnaw through that. Do you understand, dear?”

  “Plastisteel wool,” she repeated.

  “Right. You stuff it around the pipe where I’m going to put the rags in for tonight.”

  “Around the pipe,” she repeated.

  “Right,” I said. “Then complain to the super or the owner. Tell them to set traps or scatter poison. Tell them you’ll complain to the Health Board.”

  “The Health Board,” she repeated faintly.

  I knew she’d never remember. But I’d do what I could. I got down on hands and knees, began to jam rags into a wide circular crack between a vertical steampipe and the old, wooden floor. There should have been a metal flange about the pipe; there was none.

  I was stuffing the rags into the crevice when I glanced at the wooden baseboard. The pipe was in a corner; walls and baseboard came to a V behind the pipe. The baseboard had been nailed in place, then painted over. But two nailheads protruded. Not more than 1 cm each. I bent forward to examine them. I had seen similar electronic devices before: nailhead microphones. Topping spikes inserted in drilled holes in the wood.

  I knelt there for several minutes. Staring at them. I remembered the night with Millie when I talked, talked, talked. About things she could have no interest in. About things ^should not have talked about. To anyone with less than a Red 2 security clearance. Poor Millie. She would never have any security clearance. Not even Red 10.

  Millie’s apartment had been shared. I had told her things she could not—no way!—comprehend. But Maya Leighton’s apartment? Was that also shared? Had I told her things? Our last evening together, when she had worn that dreadful rubber suit, had I spoken of the botulism outbreak in GPA-11? That I might have told her didn’t depress me half as much as the fact that I could not remember if I had told her or not. And the safe house? My secret garden with Grace Wingate? Was that also shared? Was / being shared with new drugs, new technologies I had not been told about because I had no need to know? I was not without fear. What object is?

  I grasped one of the protruding nailheads tightly and began to move it back and forth. I loosened the attached spike in the drilled hole. Finally I was able to withdraw it. Slowly. Carefully. There was a wire soldered to the end. It led into the wall.

  That suddenly vacated porn shop below began to make sense.

  “Come back to bed, Nick,” Millie called.

  “In a minute, darling,” I said. “Millie, is there a back entrance to this building? A back staircase?”

  “Nooo,” she said. Frowning. “Not exactly. There’s a fire escape. It’s all dirty.”

  “How do you get to that?”

  “Out in the hall. That window right next to the door to the nest. You have to climb out the window to get onto the fire escape. But it’s all dirty.”

  “Do you have a flashlight?” I asked her.

  “Flashlight?” she said. Worried. Trying to understand, to remember.

  “I’ll look,” I told her. “You go to sleep. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I pulled on zipsuit and socmocs. I went back into her kitchen. Finally, in the back of a drawer filled with a miscellany of cheap household gadgets, I found a small, square plastic lantern.

  Out to the hallway, down to the window next to the nest door. I unlocked it, but couldn’t raise it. It appeared to be painted shut. I leaned against the frame on all four sides. Then strained upward on the sash. The window didn’t move. Back to Millie’s kitchen, carving knife, back to window, point of knife inserted between sash and frame, run all the way around.

  Finally, window open a few cm, I could get my fingertips into the crack and heave upward. Once the paint seal was broken, the window ran free. I got out onto the fire escape. Millie had been right; it was all dirty.

  I rested a moment on the encrusted, slatted iron landing. But it was a warm, muggy night; I was never going to get any cooler. I stepped down cautiously onto the counterweighted stairway. As I proceeded, it swung slowly lower. Gripping the filthy handrail, I went down step by careful step. Finally the base touched the ground. I scampered down.

  I was about to step off the fire escape ladder onto the paved rear courtyard when, suddenly, mercifully, it occurred to me that the moment I stepped off, the counterweighted section of ladder would rise again. I would be marooned in that fetid courtyard forever. Archaeologists would find my dried bones in a million years and contrive elegant theories to account for my presence there.

  I looked about frantically. Still standing on the bottom step of that cantilevered staircase. No weight within easy reach. Nothing but a barred window. Bars on the outside. There was no alternative. Still standing on the swinging escape ladder, my weight keeping it down, I skinned out of my zipsuit. Twisted it into a tough rope. Tied arms about one of the window bars, legs about a vertical ha
ndrail support on the rusty ladder. Naked, except for socmocs, I stepped onto the paved courtyard. Still gripping the handrail of the counter-weighted ladder. Relieved of my weight, the end began to rise. I let it swing up slowly. Then the knotted zipsuit snugged taut. The end of the ladder was only about a meter above the ground. I could pull it down easily.

  Third problem: an unbarred but locked rear door to the deserted porn shop. But there were six small panes of glass. I broke the one nearest the lock with the heel of a socmoc. Reached in cautiously through shards still in the sash. Turned a swivel latch. The door opened creakingly. I was in.

  Used the weak flashlight then. Down a musty corridor. Into what had apparently been the main salesroom. Shading the light carefully with my fingers so that it could not illuminate the dusty front window, possibly alert a prowling bobcar. I moved it about slowly. Slowly. Inspecting. Fascinated dread. I thought again of Maya Leighton lying motionless in her earth-colored rubber suit. Painted lips. Glittering eyes. And—and all. . . .

  Detritus of a lost civilization. Broken phalli. Ripped vaginas. Melted dildos. Vibrators long stilled. Torn photos. Dried condoms. Cracked leather masks. Rotted artificial tongues. False breasts puddled. All the technologized sex run down and stopped.

  A sexual necropolis. Dust everywhere. And mouse droppings.

  Finally, in a small inner room—office? stockroom?—I found the wires leading down from Millie’s apartment. The bare ends dangled over a wooden table relatively free of dust. The recorders had been placed there, of course. The operators had sat there, on that rickety three-legged stool. They had been emplaced for some time; the floor was littered with empty and stained plastic coftea containers, sandwich wrappings, dried bread crusts, fruit rinds, old newspapers. I shuffled through the last. They scanned a time period of almost five months. Long enough.

  I went back the way I had come. Closed the door. Locked it. Pulled the escape ladder down. Unknotted and retrieved my zipsuit. Mounted to Millie’s floor. Climbed in through the window. Closed it and locked it. Took a tepid shower in Millie’s nest, with a thin sliver of petrosoap that raised no lather at all. Dried on a ragged square of thin petrocot. Then went back to the big room. Switched off the bedlamp. Climbed into bed.