The Müller-Fokker Effect

by John Sladek

  [Dozes. Flash of dream in which Spot, his son, heaves rock at flame-throwing tank. Nazi soldiers crucify Spot. Marge, the man’s wife, weeps beneath the crucifix. Now and then during her long speech of sorrow and demand for justice, which should be improvised, she slyly hauls on the boy’s feet to add to his pain.]

  STEWARD [waking him]: Your son Spot is dead, sir.

  MAN: That’s about the worst pun in this novel. Are the crew murmuring yet?

  CREW: Why did we ever set sail to find the land of the Iructu? Why did we leave the comparative security of our homeland and set out on this silly quest? We’ll fall off the edge of the sea! We’ll drown among the plankton! We’ll go broke! We’ll get back and no one will believe us! Probably there aren’t any Iructu anyway, and Iructria is a lot of hooey!

  MAN [reappearing among the crew in the vestments of Father O’C.]: Boys, boys! As your spiritual adviser, I thought it was time we had a little chat. We’re about to find and conquer a new and virgin land, fellas, and I think this is as good a time as any to remind you that contraception is murder.

  CREW [begin to mill about, shouting slogans]:

  Hey hey/whadya say/ how many kids did you kill today?

  All the way! Whadya say? All the way! Etc.

  MAN [reappearing among the crew as a condom salesman]: Buy me and stop one. [He is clapped in irons, reappears among the crew as Father O’C.] Because preventing a life is murder, and it contravenes Natural Law—just like building houses and brushing your teeth. I…let us pray:

  [The background, a process shot of calm sea, suddenly moves into the foreground, obliterating all, and becomes the leafing pages of Eternity magazine. In an ad for an airline that shows movies, Mack and Mike appear on the screen still boning. The audience laughter, we now realize, is directed not at them but scornfully at Mike’s newspaper baton, a scandal sheet bearing the headline HE KILLS, CUTS UP, COOK & EATS WIFE, INVITES HER FRIENDS TO DINNER. All references to the U----- S----- have been blacked out.]

  MAN [in vaudeville audience in movie]: Barbecues his wife! Get it? Barbara, not Bocardo!

  MAN [in airplane audience, watching movie]: Stewardess! Another plankton steak!

  [The automatic pilot—the only pilot—has failed, and the stewardess is praying.]

  STEWARDESS:

  Tom Swift, help me

  Casey Jones, guide me

  Maelzel, let me win through

  Azuma-zi, protect me

  Daedalus, fortify me

  Vulcan, arm me

  Mr & Mrs Zero, sum my chances

  Rossum, strengthen me

  Hey, Lullay, etc.

  MAN [in magazine article on facing page, reading ad]: I guess the idea is all these levels map each other or something, but Gee, why mess around with mapping? Cartoons on the curtains—why don’t we get where we’re going?

  MAN [aboard ship, reading magazine]: Good idea. The detective all along has been shadowing himself, staking out his own house, bugging his own phone—but because there isn’t anyone else. Good article. Now let’s see what they have to say about the Iructu…

  VOICE OF FATHER O’C: Let us pray: Our hallowed thy thy on give. And as lead but deliver, not into those who father be kingdom will earth us forgive. We us evil temptation heaven name heaven our our art who done be in as in it is thy us us from this forgive come…

  [The Iructu are shown on the final page, being napalmed by an aircraft without markings. The caption under the picture is God’s final message, variously interpreted as denial of all negatives, self-contradiction, a call to action.]

  GOD: TO BE OR TO BE, THAT IS THE QUEST.

  VOICE OF FATHER O’C: For the day daily against the power and and bread trespass ever debts forever debtors glory us amen and kingdom trespasses is the thing amen. Nema live morf su reviled tub…

  [God dies]

  LOOKOUT: Land Ho!

  [The ship has arrived at—the map of—Cafe Island.]

  [As the ship closes on the island, the camera closes in on the plankton in the surrounding waves. They have selected 1940 as a target date for landing a plankton on the sun, which appears to hang just over the next wave.]

  SPEECH BY FIRST PLANKTON ON THE SUN : It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here representing not only our own wave, but plankton of peace of all waves, plankton with interest and curiosity and plankton with vision for the future.

  Part 5: Announcement: Haunted Experiment ‘Man’ Socks Benefactor

  Twenty-Six

  Spot wanted to know why he had to take a bath.

  ‘Because your FATHER’s coming home! After a YEAR! Don’t you care anything about him?’

  Spot wanted to know what the difference was, since she was only going to divorce him and marry Uncle Mac anyhow.

  ‘THE DIFFERENCE IS—never mind. Don’t take a bath, then.’

  Spot took a bath and shined his shoes. Marge spilled a bottle of cologne on herself, and had to change into her second-best dress, which (she remembered as the doorbell rang) Bob loathed.

  ‘Haven’t got a key,’ he said.

  ‘You’re—the wrong size.’

  ‘I know. They couldn’t do much about Bradd’s bones, except around the face.’

  ‘But I had all your suits cleaned!’

  She started crying as he started laughing; they embraced awkwardly.

  Spot came in, shook hands politely, and pointed out his shiny shoes. ‘I learned that at school.’

  ‘So you finally got to military school? Well. I guess a lot’s happened. The divorce…’

  ‘Do we have to talk about that?’ Marge guided him to a chair as if he were crippled. Under the flesh of him she could feel Bradd’s skeleton. ‘I mean, it’s all I could do.’

  ‘Of course. Yep. Seems fair enough to me. Speaking as the beneficiary, of course.’

  Marge laughed too hard.

  Bob leaned back on the couch and tousled Spot’s lack of hair.

  ‘Well how’s military school, you little Fascist?’

  ‘Don’t you call my son…’

  ‘The term is one of affection, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  The evening collapsed after the unexceptional dinner, when Spot left to see Willy.

  ‘Who’s Willy?’

  ‘A friend of Spot’s. Some kind of Indian. Seems like a moron, but ever since he saved Spot’s life we’ve been looking after him. He’s staying at the Fellstuses’.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Dr Fellstus is trying to housebreak him.’

  After a silence, she apologized about the dinner.

  ‘Oh, it was fine. Really.’

  ‘You don’t have to…’

  ‘No, really.’

  After another silence, she asked, ‘Did you—mm—feel anything?’

  ‘Oh, you mean the charge that blew my head off? No, not a thing.’ He grinned with Bradd’s teeth. ‘I didn’t really die at all, you know. I had this different life. It was made up of, oh, this and that, old memories, odd thoughts. Kind of interesting.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  He sighed. ‘Well, for instance I remembered this dream I’d had, the night before I went to Mud Flats. I call the dream

  JELLY DAYS

  ‘It’s kind of a mixture of Castle of Otranto and Tarn of the Screw. There are two peculiar quiet kids whose brother is dead, and there are some giant manifestations. One thing, the giant manifestations always imitate reality. I mean, a giant hand reaches through the window to grab somebody who’s reaching into a cupboard to pick up something. And a giant toy plane flies in, and it flaps its wings because, out the window, you can see a gull flapping its wings. Someone around the house has the title Master in Lunacy.

  ‘The kids have a lot of whispered conversations, but the only words I can distinguish are “jelly day (or days)”. Then I go back to childhood and look into a miniature grocery store where some men are having a history argument. They mention a political event and at once I am there. An Italian political quarrel is the eve
nt. One man is supposed to be put to death in the restaurant kitchen: They mark his body off into ten zones and then shoot him in zone one, his head. If that wound heals, they shoot him in zone two, and so on, neck, chest.…The waiters all deny this plot, even the victim wants to hush it up.

  ‘I discover I’m dead. I don’t know how I know it, but I’m sure. Maybe I’m just talking to someone and suddenly realize they aren’t listening.

  ‘Death land is very pleasant, very ordinary. Everyone has to work at his former job, more or less. There seems to be a big demand for sociologists. The place looks like a kibbutz, very jolly and industrious and serious, well-equipped with wall charts.

  ‘You can only communicate with the living through accidents or imitation. The dead know nothing, as the saying goes around there, and have no power to be anything. At last I begin to understand what “jelly day” means—just means the day one leaves one’s mortal jelly.

  ‘We gather in the cafeteria after dinner to sing songs and watch a TV play about the end of the world. In the play, the actors have to tune in on some special radio station to find out how to deal with the end of the world.

  ‘Sitting there among all these suntanned ghosts, I begin to wonder about that special radio station. On a hunch I tune in my own radio to it, to catch the end-of-the-world news. But there’s nothing on much, just the usual sloppy Melodiak tunes…Sunshine Balloon of Happiness, and so on.

  ‘Then I realize this is the news: ordinary life goes right on, palling, silly, disgusting, nice, unbearable—right on up to the last moment. As I realize this, I hear thousands of footsteps, a great jostling crowd coming downstairs to the cafeteria. The new people are arriving. It’s everybody’s jelly day.’

  There was a long, long silence when Bob finished. He stood up. ‘Guess I’d better get back to the hotel.’

  The bell rang. Marge answered it.

  ‘Uncle Mac! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve been watching you two,’ he said. ‘I’m—I’m the window peeper you’ve been worrying about.’

  ‘What window peeper?’ they asked together.

  Mac did a strange thing. He hissed, then, out of the side of his mouth not visible from the living room window, he whispered, ‘That’s not your line, stupid. Ask me what I want. “What do you want?” Come on!’

  ‘What do you want?’ Bob asked.

  ‘The deal’s off, you’ll both be happy to hear. I saw the two of you sitting here, Bob talking, Marge listening to his tale. You look so right together—so much a family. I just can’t take that away from you. You see, we rich men…’ He turned to face the window and took a step toward it, ‘…we rich men lose touch sometimes with reality. With real, human emotions, with vibrant life. We think we can play God and push people around like piles of money.

  ‘But all that’s over, for me. I thought I could bribe you, Marge, into—well, into loving me. But now I see my own real happiness depends on yours, and you could never be happy without Bob. God bless you both, you’ll hear no more of me now, except at the reading of my will.’

  ‘Your will?’

  ‘Which probably won’t be long, now. The doctor tells me I have a very delicate heart. In fact I don’t feel so well right now. If you’ll excuse me I—I’ll be going now.’

  ‘But wait! Shouldn’t you sit down for a minute, or…’

  ‘I’d like to be alone for awhile. I’m—very tired.’

  Gasping and clutching with a fluttering hand at his chest, Mac stepped outside. When he was just beyond the door, he dropped the pose, turned and winked.

  ‘Do you think he meant it?’

  ‘Search me.’ Marge yawned. ‘Stay here, at least for the night, why don’t you? It is late. I’d better phone and find out what’s keeping Spot.’

  ‘You don’t think anything could have happened to him, do you?’

  Mac turned away from the window, satisfied with tonight’s episode. The Shairp Family had no sooner settled everything with their kind old rich friend than Spot seemed to be in some kind of trouble. That might be a false alarm, but still, that ‘Willy Bream’ wasn’t all he pretended to be.

  More to the point, the rich old benefactor wasn’t all he pretended to be. Perhaps his heart was sound as a dollar. Perhaps he was scheming some new trouble.

  And what was Dr Fellstus really up to, with his separate cages (boy-sized and man-sized), his cattle-prods? Mac wondered how on earth the Shairp family were ever going to get their lives straightened out. He didn’t mean to miss a single heartwarming episode.

  THE END

  Aftermath

  In a serial like The Shairp Family, there can be no ending, only a gradual change of character. Not so in this life, where death is your reward for learning the labyrinth.

  Ank never became the artist he knew he was. His last work is a forty-by-sixty-foot mural in the lobby of the Pismore Tractor Company of Sandusky, Ohio, an unfinished work depicting the tractor conquering the land.

  Ank died in the middle of a furrow, when a scaffold collapsed, dropping him on his head. The scaffold was a modern design by the well-known Scandinavian architect, Ögivaal, who later admitted there was some flaw in the design. That ‘3’ should have been a ‘30’ after all.

  The Daughters of the American Legion, as an experiment in liberalism, invited Deef John Holler to sing at one of their dinner meetings. He arrived not wearing a dinner jacket, to which some of the ladies objected. A great protocol debate ensued, lasting three and a half hours and getting all the ladies into a temper. The final decision was that he could play behind a screen, and was to stick to patriotic favorites and the cleaner sort of Stephen Foster songs. But the person sent to inform Deef John that he could come in from the kitchen now found that rigor mortis had already begun setting in.

  Mac Hines persuaded the Shairps to let Dr Müller-Fokker make tapes of Marge and Spot. He then found three ‘volunteers’, created a duplicate Shairp family out of them, and put them in a duplicate house on an island he owned. Mac visited the island once a week, and it was during one of these visits, while he was peering in the window at his own personal Shairp family, that Mac’s dacron heart finally failed.

  Due to legal complications and embezzlements by Mac’s bright young men, his estate was modest. It was left to the Shairps, but their duplicates contested. In the end, Bob came out with a gold-headed cane, Marge with a half-filled book of green stamps, Spot with a neurotic collie which he asked Dr Fellstus to put to sleep.

  Under the vet’s tutelage, ‘Willy’ Bream not only recovered his speech but became an animal sociologist, working chiefly with bears. Times were hard for the new breed of intelligent bears on the West Coast. Racists finally had what they wanted, a non-human target; unmerciful laws were passed. It was due mainly to the selfless, untiring efforts of Dr Bream that bears were first admitted to the Forestry Service, to become useful to, without being used by, mankind.

  Spot quarreled with his father and left home to drift around the country. When last heard from he was traveling with gasoline gypsies, stealing this rare commodity in one town to sell it to stations in the next.

  Marge and Bob quarreled often and bitterly. She left him finally to go back to television work. But her TV career (such as it was, walk-ons in space comedies: ‘Listen, Mabel, you and I can sneak into the air lock and watch their “stag party” from there…’) came to an abrupt end when HV came along. Holovision revealed a fatal third dimension to her jaw that reminded one reviewer of Mussolini.

  Bob worked at odd jobs while he pottered around with writing. In trying to set down a few ideas about his ‘jelly days’ dream, he ended up writing (under the name of ‘Brad Shairp’) THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. Published in his sixtieth year, it was widely unreceived.

  A few more years went by. In Southeast Asia, a container of thirty human skeletons arrived. The remains, which could be identified by their rags as members of the long-defunct Pink Barrettes, had been shuffled by Modulog to upward of a thousand wrong de
stinations.

  A new generation grew up. Brad Shairp became the first prophet of Practical Mysticism. Besides the fringe groups who took it up (the book became a film, a musical, cocktail napkins, records, and a holovision serial in which Marge had a small part) there came to be a serious group of believers, kids who were cleancut, blonde-haired, utterly without humour about this humorless world. They wore plain uniforms and marched in massive demonstrations against any authority available.

  There were a few incidents: a church meeting broken up by Plain Shirts, a psychiatrist roughed up and his files burnt. The prophet reprimanded them for these in his address (at a massive rally in Minneapolis) on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his first death.

  ‘My little uncles and aunts,’ he said, opening his arms to them, ‘ours is not the way of war or the way of peace, ours is not the way of love or the way of hate. Ours is the way of studied indifference.

  ‘If God can do anything, which he can, then what is the point of living—or dying? All is, and all is true. That which is not true is not, and even that is “cannot be”. We are…’

  Some say it was his wife that fired the shot that killed him. Others say it was a lunatic bear.

  Appendix I: Table of Persons, Objects, etc., Which Have Not Fallen Back to Earth, With Explanations

  (Note: So-called astronauts, cosmonauts excepted)

  Appendix II: The 128 Ways

  The entire Nicene Creed (Apostles’ Creed) has 22 articles of faith. This abridged version has only seven:

  I believe Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified (to death) and was buried. He rose again on the third day, and ascended into Heaven.

  It can easily be seen that, if belief or disbelief is allowed for each of the seven, there are the seeds here for 27, or 128 alternative creeds (the full version would generate over four million alternatives). The 128 include the above and its complete negation, and 126 other permutations of belief and skepticism. Many of them would be interesting as springboards for new religions. One may admit that Christ died, was buried, and rose again, but deny that he ascended. One may believe that he died, was buried and ascended while denying that he rose. One may affirm his burial, rising and ascension while rejecting the possibility of an actual death, and so on. One fascinating variation holds that all is true except his suffering under Pontius Pilate; while another finds this the only truth in a pack of lies.