The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think Robin will be able to make it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m an ax-murderer and I just chopped her up into a thousand pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Except for her left nipple, which I’ll mail to you if you’ll give me your address....”

  “Aaaaah! Oh shit! Eeeee!”

  Click.

  I felt like an awful creep even as I put the phone back on the hook: that I shouldn’t have done. I wasn’t mad at poor Suzy, wasn’t her fault that Robin was giving out my number to every head in creation; I shouldn’t have done such an evil thing to her, say a thing like that to someone on acid for chrissakes!

  But that goddamn Robin. Wasn’t enough she was dealing out of my pad, she had to turn me into a fucking answering-service! Getting me involved in a goddamn dealing scene! Was Jeff right? Or was she just too damned stupid to realize that it was uncool to get someone involved in a dealing scene without asking them? What the hell was inside her head, anyway?

  I went back to my pacing, faster and faster and faster; burn the dope out of my system because I wanted to be stone-cold straight when she got back. If she got back. If I let her back.... Goddamn it, I had put all this shit behind me a thousand years ago with Anne... no one was going to put me on that bummer again.

  No one!

  “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” I shouted at Robin as she stood in the doorway.

  She glanced nervously behind her into the hall. “Cool it, will you,” she said. “I’m sorry I took so long. I’ve been missing a lot of connections.”

  I closed the door behind her and followed her into the living room. She sat down on the couch and began rolling a joint. I sat down beside her and knocked the paper out of her hand. Grains of pot went flying all over the table.

  “Hey man,” she crooned, “what is bugging you?”

  “What’s bugging me? I got two calls while you were gone from some Duke and a chick named Suzy who said she was high on your acid. They both wanted to buy some more, that’s what’s bugging me!”

  She looked at me as if I were crazy. “But that’s groovy,” she said. “I’ve still got twelve caps I couldn’t get rid of. I knew Duke wanted ten, but I couldn’t get a hold of him. How many did Suzy say she wanted?”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “Hey... what is wrong, Tom?” she said softly, her eyes worried, genuine concern written all over her face. It made me feel like a monster of uptightness. I had to get hold of myself...

  “You gave them my phone number, didn’t you?”

  “Well, of course I did. Where else would they get it?”

  “You don’t understand? You really don’t understand, do you?”

  She took my hand, squeezed it gently, studied my face. “You’re not freaking out, are you?” she said. “It’s gonna be all right... take it—”

  “I’m not freaking out. I’m not even stoned any more. Don’t you realize what you’ve done? You’ve involved me in your goddamn dealing, is what you’ve done. Giving my number to your customers as if I were your fucking answering-service.”

  “Hey, what is this?” she said a shade belligerently. “All I did was let some people know where I was so they could get to me if they wanted to score. What’s all this paranoia?”

  “It’s a dealing scene, dammit! You don’t just go and involve people in dealing scenes without bothering to ask them!”

  “Oh Wow!” she snapped, her face getting hard. “Of all the square, shitty, uptight—” Then suddenly her face melted. “Oh wow...” she said again. But this time it had the tone of an apology. “I forgot. Man, I’m sorry, I really am, I forgot you were used to junkie dealing scenes. Yeah, that kind of shit can be a real bummer. Wow. I can see you’d be uptight if every junkie in the world knew your number and knew a chick was dealing out of your pad...”

  “If you do understand, why did you go ahead and do it?”

  “Because it’s not like that, Tom, really it isn’t. I don’t deal smack, these people aren’t junkies. You can trust them. Fred’s groovy; you liked him, didn’t you? And Jeff turned out to be someone you knew....”

  “A junkie I knew!”

  “And you were once a junkie he knew, dig?”

  That brought me up short—because next thing I would’ve screamed at her might’ve been something like “once a junkie, always a junkie,” and where would that have left me?

  Robin put her hand on my knee. “Look,” she said. “I really dig you. When I’m here, I want to feel like you’re my old man. So giving people the phone number is the most natural thing in the world. I never dreamed it would put you uptight. Believe me?”

  I was beginning to feel like a lower and lower form of animal life with every word she said. Goddamn, maybe I was acting like a paranoid ex-junkie. I dug Fred and Jeff; for all I knew, Duke and Suzy were okay too. They had trusted me up front, and I had come on like a king-sized shit...

  “Yeah, I believe you,” I said. “But you’ve gotta understand—”

  She squeezed my kneecap tenderly. “But I do understand,” she said. “You’re coming on as if I were getting you into a smack-dealing scene because that’s what you’re used to. But it’s just not like that....”

  “Maybe it isn’t... I dunno, maybe it is just my paranoia, but I don’t know if I can hack it—”

  She kissed my cheek lightly. “I really do understand your hangup,” she said. “But try to understand me. This is my scene; it’s where I’m at, and I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not going to play phony games with you or anyone else. We’ve gotta be honest with each other, we’ve gotta accept each other for what we are, or it’s just no good between us. Dig?”

  “Dig. But I don’t know if—”

  “I know, I know, I’m putting you on a trip back to a lot of old shit that hurt you once. I’m telling you my scene isn’t like that, but you’ve got to see I’m telling you the truth all by yourself. I dig you. I dig you enough to walk out the door with no regrets, if that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t want to do that...”

  “Then you’ll have to come to peace with who I really am, because I’m just not gonna live a game for you. If you want me around, you’ve gotta accept what I am. Otherwise, it’s been a gas....”

  “I dunno....”

  She smiled a warm human smile at me that melted my insides and made me hate my paranoia. She really wasn’t asking any more of me than I was of her. She was right. But... but...

  “Oh course you don’t know,” she said. “I don’t expect you to know right now. Look, I’ve gotta deal the rest of the acid anyway, why don’t I split for a few days and let you think it through, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. I kissed her on the lips. “You’re one fucking good chick,” I told her. “Maybe too good for me, is all—”

  She smiled, touched a finger to my nose. “You’re gonna be all right,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  “You’re not just gonna split and never come back?”

  She laughed. “Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll leave the rest of the pot here as hostage—you know I won’t leave that.” She began rolling a joint.

  “Peace-pipe for the road?” she said.

  I nodded. There was nothing wrong with her; I had to get my head straight, is all. Or maybe my head was too straight...?

  “Peace, baby,” I said, lighting the joint for her.

  18 - Into the Briar Patch

  I felt myself choking on the stale taste of Choice as I hunkered on the dusty floor of the Foundation living room between Arlene and Ted, as Harvey sat down on his folding chair, lit a cigarette, and wound up for the pitch. Not plain old choice, dig, but Choice—like: quit college, like: throw Anne out, like: cold turkey—kind of choice that leaves you with the feeling that you’re gonna go down one road and never know what’s at the end of the other, a whole string of potentialities about to be snuffed out of your world-line forever.

 
; Yeah, you could taste it in the air, hear it in the silence of maybe forty people hunched forward on the floor waiting for the Word, even smell it in the insane odor of paranoid sweat that seemed to hang over the whole room. Which was probably why I was getting that scared, empty feeling in my gut—contact paranoia. I mean, after all, I wasn’t hung-up in a Big Choice scene. Sure, Harvey was obviously going to take another big step towards San Francisco tonight, but that wasn’t my problem, there was zero probability, no chance, forget it baby, that anything would even make me consider following the Man and his junkies into the sunset. Arlene? Not even Arlene would be worth getting sucked into a bummer like that, and besides she was so hung on New York... Yeah, sure, she had a heavy choice coming, and I must be picking up her vibes... or maybe my choice was just whether I’d make one more college try at breaking up Harvey’s game, whether I’d try to make Arlene’s choice for her... Shit, maybe I had just been smoking too much metaphysical dope lately....

  Harvey blew out a cloud of ectoplasmic smoke. “Well this time we know what we’re here to talk about,” he said, “Whether or not the Foundation will move to San Francisco...”

  An anxious stirring among the animals on the floor: Ted was hunkered on the balls of his feet, ready to pounce; next to him, Doris was deep inside her own head; beside me, Arlene chewed her lower lip, grim and uptight as if her life were on the line.

  “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” Harvey said. “I’ve made the personal decision to go along with a move to San Francisco—but not with a simple majority vote. I think if we do move, we’ve got to do it as a community. And if we’re going to start thinking of ourselves as a community, we can’t let ourselves get trapped in a numbers game—”

  Community... was that what was eating at me? Not the Foundation, but the Brotherhood of Dope. Wasn’t that what Robin was trying to get me to see—that as a member of the International Pot-Smoking Conspiracy, I couldn’t very well get self-righteous about dealing as long as I was buying? Could that be the Choice whose nasty vibes I was tasting—in or out of the dope scene, and Robin only a part of it, the chick that I would keep if I came back to the Tribe, or the chick I would lose forever if I closed that door behind me...?

  “We’ve got to come to some kind of organic community decision,” Harvey was saying. “A vote, maybe several votes, should be part of it, but a mathematical majority would be meaningless. We’ve got to reach a community consensus, a group feeling... perhaps even a group consciousness—”

  Robin had her community and she was willing to pay her dues to it. I had had a community—Junk—and baby, I had paid all the dues there I cared to. Question was, was she right, was the smack scene different than the general dope scene? Or were only the names changed to protect the innocent, whoever they were? Was it smack that made the smack-dealing scene and acid and grass that made the acid-and-grass-dealing scene—or was it Dealing itself that made any dealing scene a paranoiac’s orgy? I couldn’t see taking the blind chance that Robin’s dealing wasn’t just dirty old Dealing... Was I starting to get smart?

  Or just getting old?

  Brrr! Yeah, that was where the cold wind was blowing from: if I couldn’t accept Robin for what she was, what was I but a dirty old man trying to make it with a young chick, but too scared and old and wasted to do anything but fake it... not really making it... Shit!

  “So what I’d like to try tonight,” Harvey said from about a thousand light-years away, “is several ways of coming to a group consensus. First, I’d like to see a show of hands of those who really want the Foundation to move to San Francisco. Not a vote on whether to go or not, just those who now feel personally committed to trying to get the Foundation to make the move.”

  About a dozen hands went up: Charley Dees, Rich Rossi, Tod and Judy, Bill Nelson, Bonnie Elbert, a few others who were still faces without names to me, and of course Ted, whose right hand shot into the air like a spastic Nazi at a Nuremburg rally. Noticing that she wasn’t Sieg-heiling, Ted shot Doris a dirty look; Doris gave me a Gallic shrug and raised her hand too.

  “Hmmm, a bit less than a third of the membership,” Harvey said. “Okay, now I want to see everyone who’s committed to staying in New York no matter what the Foundation does....”

  For a long moment, no one dared raise a hand. Then Rhoda Steiner timorously ran her hand up to half-staff. Then Mannie Davis, who had his law practice to consider. Ida. Frieda Klein, who was married to a cat who wasn’t a member. Two or three others. Harvey was playing it real cagey: now he had a phony two to one majority for San Francisco.

  Suddenly it got through to me that Arlene’s hand wasn’t up!

  “Hey, how come your hand isn’t up?” I hissed at her.

  “What about yours?”

  Huh? Jeez, that’s right, I was so busy counting the house and thinking dark thoughts that I had forgotten I had a vote too. Or more likely my arm was smart enough on a cellular level not to want to take part in this farce. Still, what the hell, it was my Patriotic Obligation to vote, so up went my arm under Constitutional protest.

  But Arlene still wasn’t voting.

  “What is this?” I said to her.

  “I’m just not all that sure, Tom—”

  Harvey puffed on his cigarette, exhaled, said: “Well now, about half a dozen are committed to New York. Very interesting—we seem to have twice as many people deeply committed to the move as we do to staying here. Which would seem to indicate that about half of us have open minds. Now I’d like to see all those leaning towards San Francisco....”

  The biggest show of hands yet, maybe fifteen, including Linda Kahn; O’Brien, George Blum, Chester White, Jeannie Goodman, and Donald Warren, our Token Negro.

  “And those leaning towards staying in New York...”

  Less than ten hands—but, thank God, Arlene’s among them.

  Harvey gave a plastic laugh. “No opinion?” he said.

  Three or four timorous souls and/or smartasses (including Rich, who had already voted) raised their hands amidst titters.

  “And finally, I’d like to see the hands of those among all groups who’d be willing to follow the community decision either way....”

  About a dozen hands went up instantly. Then more hands in groups of twos and threes. Two dozen. Then thirty or more. Then Arlene’s hand went up. And in less than a minute, everyone’s hand was in the air except mine and a few of the hardcore aginners like Mannie Davis, Frieda Klein and Ida.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I hissed at Arlene. “You’re not serious!”

  “We’re not voting to go,” she said, “just showing our confidence in the Foundation. Come on, raise your hand!”

  “No chance!” I said. Harvey was sure playing a complicated numbers game. There were so many ways to vote, even overlapping votes, that I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was getting at. Except that one way or another, it would end up adding up to San Francisco.

  “Now let’s see what all this adds up to,” Harvey said. “Less than a dozen of us are committed to staying in New York no matter what. About a third of the membership is actively committed to moving to San Francisco. About half of us haven’t made up our minds. But of that half about two-thirds are leaning towards San Francisco. And the overwhelming majority is willing to abide by the community decision—”

  I had had about as much of the Brustein Poll as I could take. “What the hell does this numbers game mean?” I yelled.

  Harvey flashed me a shit-eating smile. “You’re quite right, Tom,” he said. “Numbers by themselves mean little; these votes are just a rough tool for determining the general state of the consciousness of the Foundation community. So let’s see what we’ve found out qualitatively. First, and most important, I think it’s obvious from the final vote that we have come to see ourselves as a community, that most of us are willing to abide by the community decision. Second, it seems clear that if we do move to San Francisco, no more than about a dozen members are committed to staying behind
. Finally, it would seem that about three quarters of us are either committed to the move already or are leaning that way—”

  My head was spinning. Harvey had missed his calling: he should’ve been a tax accountant or a political statistician. Because he had neatly designed his series of votes to prove to the suckers that most of them wanted to go to San Francisco. Like they say, figures can’t lie, but liars sure can figure!

  And, as if on cue, Ted leaped to his feet with the capper: “Well that does it, right? Three-quarters of us want to go to San Francisco!”

  Harvey smiled at him benignly. “I think you’re jumping to conclusions, Ted,” he said. “Only a third of us want to got to San Francisco. The others are just leaning that way—”

  “But almost all of us are willing to go along with the group decision,” shouted Rich Rossi, another of the San Fran red-hots.

  “And we know which way the vote’ll go,” said Ted. “So what are we screwing around for?”

  “I don’t think this is the time for a final vote,” Harvey said. “But let’s see... how many want a vote now?”

  Only the hands of the dozen or so San Francisco fanatics went up. Harvey was playing it so cool I couldn’t figure out what he was doing.

  “Ah shit!” Ted shouted disgustedly. Then he got that awful gleam in his eyes. “Dig,” he said, “let’s just pretend we’re having a final vote between New York and San Francisco. Everyone has to vote one way or the other.” He looked at Harvey for approval; Harvey shrugged indifferently. Ted took it, no doubt correctly, for yes. “New York?” he said.

  Something between a dozen and fifteen hands went up: all the hard-core aginers except me, all the leaning against people including Arlene, and a few of the luke-warm San Francisco people like Chester White, who were having second thoughts.