Keep The Giraffe Burning

by Sladek, John

  KEEP THE GIRAFFE BURNING

  John Sladek

  www.sf-gateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today's leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Foreword

  Elephant with Wooden Leg

  The Design

  The Face

  The Master Plan

  Flatland

  A Game of Jump

  The Hammer of Evil

  The Locked Room

  Another Look

  Space Shoes of the Gods

  The Poets of Millgrove, Iowa

  The Commentaries

  Heavens Below

  Scenes from Rural Life

  The Secret of the Old Custard

  Undecember

  The Great Wall of Mexico

  Afterword

  Original Appearances

  Website

  Also by John Sladek

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  Don’t be fooled by the Surrealist title. Most of these stories are only meant to be fun, and no serious messages are intended.

  Surrealism is supposed to have something to do with Freud and dreams, which doesn’t sound entertaining at all. Psychiatrists know how boring re-told dreams can be, and so do the husbands and wives of dreamers, at their breakfast tables. Freud never strikes you as exactly a barrel of fun either, does he? Especially after he came down from Mount Ararat with the graven tables of Dream Interpretation.

  Probably what was wrong with Surrealism all along was that it got defined precisely and interpreted exactly. Nothing can stand up to that. Think of all the serious critics who’ve gone over and over The Castle of Otranto, until it’s lost most of its original appeal. I’ve met dozens of people who’ve read this gothic classic through without laughing.

  Readers who don’t like laughing can have their own kind of entertainment out of this collection. If they will only frown and bear it, reading all of the stories, they will find an exact interpretation in the Afterword. A friend of mine wrote it, and I believe it spoils every story here.

  People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers. They laughed at Galileo, at Edison’s light bulb, and even at nitrous oxide. I hope they will laugh, a little, at these stories.

  ELEPHANT WITH WOODEN LEG

  Note: Madmen are often unable to distinguish between dream, reality, and … between dream and reality. None of the incidents in Henry LaFarge’s narrative ever happened or could have happened. His ‘Orinoco Institute’ bears no relation to the actual think tank of that name, his ‘Drew Blenheim’ in no way resembles the famous futurologist, and his ‘United States of America’ is not even a burlesque upon the real United States of Armorica.

  I couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Can’t hear you, Blenheim. The line must be bad.’

  ‘Or mad, Hank. I wonder what that would take?’

  ‘What what?’

  ‘What would it take to drive a telephone system out of its mind, eh? So that it wasn’t just giving wrong numbers, but madly right ones. Let’s see: Content-addressable computer memories to shift the conversations …’

  I stopped listening. A bug was crawling up the window frame across the room. It moved like a cockroach, but I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Look, Blenheim, I’m pretty busy today. Is there something on your mind?’

  He ploughed right on. ‘… so if you’re trying to reserve a seat on the plane to Seville, you’d get a seat at the opera instead. While the person who wants the opera seat is really making an appointment with a barber, whose customer is just then talking to the box-office of Hair, or maybe making a hairline reservation …’

  ‘Blenheim, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What was it you called me up about?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. I was wondering, for instance, whether parrots have internal clocks.’

  ‘What?’ I still couldn’t be sure whether the bug was a cockroach or not, but I saluted just in case.

  ‘If so, maybe we could get them to act as speaking clocks.’

  He sounded crazier than ever. What trivial projects for one of the best brains in our century – no wonder he was on leave.

  ‘Blenheim, I’m busy. Institute work must go on, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Tell you what, why don’t you drop over this afternoon? I have something to talk over with you.’

  ‘Can’t. I have a meeting all afternoon.’

  ‘Fine, fine. See you, then. Anytime around 4:43.’

  Madmen never listen.

  Helmut Rasmussen came in just as Blenheim hung up. He seemed distressed. Not that his face showed it; ever since that bomb wrecked his office, Hel has been unable to move his face. Hysterical paralysis, Dr Grobe had explained.

  But Hel could signal whatever he felt by fiddling with the stuff in his shirt pocket. For anger, his red pencil came out (and sometimes underwent a savage sharpening), impatience made him work his slide rule, surprise made him glance into his pocket diary, and so on.

  Just now he was clicking the button on his ballpoint pen with some agitation. For a moment he actually seemed about to take it out and draw worry lines on his forehead.

  ‘What is it, Hel? The costing on Project Faith?’ He spread the schedules on my desk and pointed to the snag: a discrepancy between the estimated cost of blasting apart and hauling away the Rocky Mountains, and the value of oil recovered in the process.

  ‘I see. The trains, eh? Diesels seem to use most of the oil we get. How about steam locomotives, then?’

  He clapped me on the shoulder and nodded.

  ‘By the way, Mel, I won’t be at the meeting today. Blenheim just called up. Wants to see me.’

  Hel indicated surprise.

  ‘Look, I know he’s a crackpot. You don’t have to pocket-diary me, I know he’s nuts. But he is also technically still the Director. Our boss. They haven’t taken him off the payroll, just put him on sick leave. Besides, he used to have a lot of good ideas.’

  Hel took out a felt-tip pen and began to doodle with some sarcasm. The fact was, Blenheim had complete
ly lost his grip during his last year at the Institute. Before the government forced him to take leave, he’d been spending half a million a year on developing, rumours said, glass pancakes. And who could forget his plan to arm police with chocolate revolvers?

  ‘Sure he’s had a bad time, but maybe he’s better now,’ I said, without conviction.

  Institute people never get better, Hel seemed to retort. They just kept on making bigger and better decisions, with more and more brilliance and finality, until they broke. Like glass pancakes giving out an ever purer ring, they exploded.

  It was true. Like everyone else here, I was seeing Dr Grobe, our resident psychiatrist, several times a week. Then there were cases beyond even the skill of Dr Grobe: Joe Feeney, who interrupted his work (on the uses of holograms) one day to announce that he was a filing cabinet. Edna Bessler, who believed that she was being pursued by a synthetic a priori proposition. The lovely entomologist Pawlie Sutton, who disappeared. And George Hoad, whose rocket research terminated when he walked into the Gents one day and cut his throat. George spent the last few minutes of consciousness vainly tying to mop up the floor with toilet paper …

  Something was wrong with the personnel around this place, all right. And I suspected that our little six-legged masters knew more about this than they were saying.

  Finally I mumbled, ‘I know it’s useless, Hel. But I’d better find out what he wants.’

  You do what you think is best, Hel thought. He stalked out of my office then, examining the point on his red pencil.

  The bug was a cockroach, P. americana. It sauntered across the wall until it reached the curly edge of a wall poster, then it flew about a foot to land on the nearest dark spot. This was Uncle Sam’s right eye. Uncle Sam, with his accusing eyes and finger, was trying to recruit men for the Senate and House of Representatives. On this poster, he said, ‘The Senate Needs MEN’. So far, the recruitment campaign was a failure. Who could blame people for not wanting to go on the ‘firing line’ in Washington? The casualty rate of Congressmen was 30 per cent annually, and climbing, in spite of every security measure we could think of.

  Which reminded me of work. I scrubbed off the blackboard and started laying out a contingency tree for Project Pogo, a plan to make the whole cabinet – all one hundred and forty-three secretaries – completely mobile, hence, proof against revolution. So far the Security Secretary didn’t care for the idea of ‘taking to our beds’, but it was cheaper to keep the cabinet on the move than to guard them in Washington.

  The cockroach, observing my industry, left by a wall ventilator, and I breathed easier. The contingency tree didn’t look so interesting by now, and out the window I could see real trees.

  The lawn rolled away down from the building to the river (not the Orinoco, despite our name). The far bank was blue-black with pines, and the three red maples on our lawn, this time of year, stood out like three separate, brilliant fireballs. For just the duration of a bluejay’s flight from one to another, I could forget about the stale routine, the smell of chalkdust.

  I remembered a silly day three years ago, when I’d carved a heart on one of those trees, with Pawlie Sutton’s initials and my own.

  Now a security guard strolled his puma into view. They stopped under the nearest maple and he snapped the animal’s lead. It was up the trunk in two bounds, and out of sight among the leaves. While that stupid-faced man in uniform looked up, the fireball shook and swayed above him. A few great leaves fell, bright as drops of blood.

  Now what was this headache going to be about?

  All the big problems were solved, or at least we knew how to solve them. The world was just about the way we wanted it, now, except we no longer seemed to want it that way. That’s how Mr Howell, the Secretary of Personal Relationships, had put it in his telecast. What was missing? God, I think he said. God had made it possible for us to dam the Amazon and move the Orinoco, to feed India and dig gold from the ocean floor and cure cancer. And now God – the way he said it made you feel that He, too, was in the Cabinet – God was going to help us get down and solve our personal, human problems. Man’s inhumanity to man. The lack of communication. The hatred. God and Secretary Howell were going to get right down to some committee work on this. I think that was the telecast where Howell announced the introduction of detention camps for ‘malcontents’. Just until we got our personal problems all ironed out. I had drawn up the plans for these camps that summer. Then George Hoad borrowed my pocket-knife one day and never gave it back. Then the headaches started.

  As I stepped outside, the stupid-faced guard was looking up the skirt of another tree.

  ‘Prrt, prrt,’ he said quietly, and the black puma dropped to earth beside him. There was something hanging out of its mouth that looked like a bluejay’s wing.

  ‘Good girl. Good girl.’

  I hurried away to the helicopter.

  Drew Blenheim’s tumbledown mansion sits in the middle of withered woods. For half a mile around, the trees are laced together with high-voltage fence. Visitors are blindfolded and brought in by helicopter. There are also rumours of minefields and other security measures. At that time, I put it all down to Blenheim’s paranoia.

  The engine shut down with the sound of a coin spinning to rest. Hands helped me out and removed my blindfold. The first thing I saw, hanging on a nearby stretch of fence, was a lump of bones and burnt fur from some small animal. The guards and their submachine-guns escorted me only as far as the door, for Blenheim evidently hated seeing signs of the security he craved. The house looked dismal and decayed – the skull of some dead Orinoco Institute?

  A servant wearing burnt cork makeup and white gloves ushered me through a dim hallway that smelled of hay and on into the library.

  ‘I’ll tell Mr Blenheim you’re here, sir. Perhaps you’d care to read one of his monographs while you wait?’

  I flicked through The Garden of Regularity (a slight tract recommending that older people preserve intestinal health by devouring their own dentures) and opened an insanely boring book called Can Bacteria Read? I was staring uncomprehendingly at one of its pages when a voice said:

  ‘Are you still here?’ The plump old woman had evidently been sitting in her deep chair when I came in. As she craned around at me, I saw she had a black eye. Something was wrong with her hair, too. ‘I thought you’d left by now – oh, it’s you.’

  ‘Madam, do I know you?’

  She sat forward and put her face to the light. The black eye was tattooed, and the marcelled hair was really a cap of paper, covered with wavy ink lines. But it was Edna Bessler, terribly aged.

  ‘You’ve changed, Edna.’

  ‘So would you, young man, if you’d been chased around a nuthouse for two years by a synthetic a priori proposition.’ She sniffed. ‘Well, thank heavens the revolution is set for tomorrow.’

  I laughed nervously. ‘Well, Edna, it certainly is good to see you. What are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘There are quite a few of the old gang here, Joe Feeney and – and others. This place has become a kind of repair depot for mad futurologists. Blenheim is very kind, but of course he’s quite mad himself. Mad as a wet hem As you see from his writing.’

  ‘Can Bacteria Read? I couldn’t read it.’

  ‘Oh, he thinks that germs are, like people, amenable to suggestion. So, with the proper application of mass hypnosis among the microbe populations, we ought to be able to cure any illness with any quack remedy.’

  I nodded. ‘Hope he recovers soon. I’d like to see him back at the Institute, working on real projects again. Big stuff, like the old days. I’ll never forget the old Drew Blenheim, the man who invented satellite dialling.’

  Satellite dialling came about when the malcontents were trying to jam government communications systems, cut lines and blow up exchanges. Blenheim’s system virtually made each telephone a complete exchange in itself, dialling directly through a satellite. Voice signals were compressed and burped skywards in short bursts th
at evaded most jamming signals. It was an Orinoco Institute triumph over anarchy.

  Edna chuckled. ‘Oh, he’s working on real projects. I said he was mad, not useless, Now if you’ll help me out of this chair, I must go fix an elephant.’

  I was sure I’d misheard this last. After she’d gone, I looked over a curious apparatus in the corner. Parts of it were recognizable – a clock inside a parrot cage, a gas laser, and a fringed shawl suspended like a flag from a walking-stick thrust into a watermelon – but their combination was baffling.

  At 4:43 by the dock in the cage, the blackface servant took me to a gloomy great hall place, scattered with the shapes of easy chairs and sofas. A figure in a diving suit rose from the piano and waved me to a chair. Then it sat down again, flipping out its airhoses behind the bench.

  For a few minutes I suffered though a fumbling version of some Mexican tune. But when Blenheim – no doubt it was he – stood up and started juggling oranges, I felt it was time to speak out.

  ‘Look, I’ve interrupted my work to come here. Is this all you have to show me?’

  One of the oranges vaulted high, out of sight in the gloom above; another hit me in the chest. The figure opened its faceplate and grinned. ‘Long time no see, Hank.’

  It was me.

  ‘Rubber mask,’ Blenheim explained, plucking at it. ‘I couldn’t resist trying it on you, life gets so tedious here. Ring for Rastus, will you? I want to shed this suit.’

  We made small talk while the servant helped him out of the heavy diving suit. Rather, Blenheim rattled on alone; I wasn’t feeling well at all. The shock of seeing myself had reminded me of something I should remember, but couldn’t.

  ‘… to build a heraldry vending machine. Put in a coin, punch out your name, and it prints a coat-of-arms. Should suit those malcontents, eh? All they probably really want is a coat-of-arms.’