Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

  He broke free long enough to get into the service elevator and shivered at the hungry, despairing moan that went up when the elevator doors closed in the earnest faces of the advance guard. As he descended, he heard a girlish voice sing out: "I know where he lives, everybody! I'll take you to his home!"

  They were so damned cooperative, he groaned. He'd always dreamed of being a male god, but he'd never anticipated that one of a god's characteristics is that he is worshipped unselfishly.

  He ran out of the elevator on the ground floor and hailed a taxi, observing that the girl operator had followed him out unswervingly and was also getting one. As he gave frenzied directions to the driver, he saw that all over the street women were climbing into cabs and commandeering buses.

  "Hurry, hurry," he chattered at the driver. "Fast, fast, fast."

  "I'm doing the best I can, fella," the man told him over his shoulder. "I observe traffic regulations. Which is more than I can say for those dumb dames back there."

  Peeping despairingly through the rear window, Irving Bommer saw a complete disregard of red lights, arm-flailing policemen, and intersecting traffic as the cars behind him charged on. Every time his driver stopped, they picked up more motorized femininity.

  And yet the sweat poured out of him more luxuriantly than ever as his fear increased, and yet the effluvium of Irving Bommer spread more widely through the streets.

  He'd take a bath when he got home—that's what he'd do—he'd take a shower with some strong soap and wash the awful stuff off. But he'd have to hurry.

  The taxi's brakes shrieked with the effort of gripping the wheels. "There you are, mister. This is as far as I can go. Some sort of riot going on."

  As he paid the driver, Irving Bommer looked ahead and winced. The street was black with women.

  The bottle of aftershave lotion—that's what it was. There was an open nozzle on it, and some of the odor had seeped out. The bottle was nearly full, so it must have been quite powerful. Still, if just leakage could do this...

  The women stood about in the street, in the yard, in the alleyway, their faces turned up to his room like dogs who had treed a possum. They were very patient, very quiet, but every once in a while a sigh would start up and swell to the volume of shell-fire.

  "Listen," he told the driver. "Wait for me. I may be back."

  "That I can't promise. Don't like the looks of the mob."

  Irving Bommer pulled his jacket over his head and ran for the entrance of his boarding-house. Faces—startled, happy faces—began turning in his direction.

  "That's him!" he heard Mrs. Nagenbeck's hoarse voice. "That's our wonderful Irving Bommer!"

  "Heem! Heem!" That was the gypsy woman. "The 'ansome wan!"

  "Make way there," he yelled roughly. "Get out of my way." Reluctantly, adoringly, the mob moved back and made a path for him. He pushed the front door open just as the first of the pursuing vehicles roared around the corner.

  There were women in the hall, there were women in the parlor and the dining room, there were women all the way up the stairs to his room. He pushed past them, past their swimming eyes and agonizing caresses, and unlocked the door of his room. He slammed it shut.

  "Got to think, think," he patted his wobbling head with a feverish hand. A bath wouldn't be enough, not while the huge bottle of aftershave lotion remained to disseminate its fearful contents. Pour it down the drain? It would mix with water, dilute still further. Besides, he might get female sewer rats charging at him next. No, the potion had to be destroyed. How? How?

  The furnace in the cellar. There was alcohol in the aftershave lotion, and alcohol burned. Burn the stuff, then take a shower fast, not using puerile soap but something truly effective like lye—or sulphuric acid. The furnace in the cellar!

  He plumped the bottle under his arm like a football. Outside, he could hear a hundred automobile horns honking, a thousand female voices sighing and muttering of their love. In the distance, very faintly, was the sound of police sirens and the disgusted, amazed voice of the law, trying to move that which was thoroughly determined to be immovable.

  The moment he unlocked the door, he felt he had made a mistake. Women poured in as if the combination of the potion, his perspiration and the seeping bottle were absolutely irresistible.

  "Back," he roared. "Get back! I'm coming through!"

  More slowly than before, more reluctantly, they let him out. He fought his way to the head of the stairs, his body twisting and writhing every time a soft hand wavered in his direction. "Clear the stairs, dammit, clear the stairs!"

  Some retreated, others didn't. But he could go down. Holding the bottle tightly, he started forward. A young, barely nubile girl extended her arms lovingly. He threw his body to one side. Unfortunately, his right foot had started down on the first step. He teetered on his left. His body moved forward; he squirmed for balance. A gray-haired matron started to caress his back and he arched it out.

  Too far. He fell, the bottle shooting out of his sweaty grasp before him.

  He hit a couple of steps on the way and finally piled painfully on the ruins of the bottle. He realized his chest was very wet.

  He looked up and managed to scream just once as the torrent of yearning, of adoring, of beseeching faces closed over him.

  That's why they have a hunk of blood-stained linoleum buried in White Willow Cemetery. And that immense monument above it was raised by enthusiastic public subscription in a single hour.

  AFTERWORD

  Why do writers go through dry periods—"slumps"? Obviously there may be as many answers to this as there are writers, but creative depletion and the need for recharging must relate to most. Several years after I became a professional, I had an agent who persuaded me to write money-making but utterly unchallenging fiction. (You'll find the whole story elsewhere in these Afterwords.) It was the only time in my life when I really tried to become a hack writer. I didn't realize then that I utterly lacked the necessary talent. Well, I made a good income for a while, then stopped writing completely.

  I mean completely. I found that when I sat at the typewriter, nothing at all would come out—not even a business letter, not a list of Things To Be Done. My psyche was simply opposed to anything that had to do with literary expression. This went on for two years, and I found myself working at miscellaneous nonwriting jobs in order to pay the rent.

  (All right, as slumps go, this would hardly compete with Lester del Rey's. Lester claimed here, as elsewhere, to have outdone every other writer: a slump seven-and-a-half years long made my two-year one look puny. But, as I told Lester, you could still starve to death on puny.)

  I had almost given up thinking of myself as a writer, and was working as a waiter—in a place called Meyer's Goodie Shoppe!—when one night, as we were sweeping up, a title occurred to me. "Everybody Loves Irving Bommer"? I couldn't wait to get home to start writing it, to find out what such a story would be about.

  I wrote it in a seven-hour stretch, before I went to bed. And it ended the slump—that slump, anyway.

  But that's only a very small part of the story about the story. I eventually wrote many other stories, many other articles; I completed a novel and became a professor at Penn State; and I retired from Penn State. Ten years after I retired, I turned on the television one night.

  And there was Irving Bommer. As a movie. On screen.

  The title was different, yes, and the protagonist was not the ugliest man in town, yes, and yes, yes, there were other differences—but the Gypsy woman was still there offering a potion that was irresistible to a womanless man, and the protagonist used the potion as a spray, and yes, yes, there were other remarkable similarities to my story. The basic plot gimmicks of the fantasy seemed to be all mine.

  I was angry. Through my nephew, David Klass, who is a well-established screenwriter, I got the name of a Hollywood lawyer. I called the lawyer.

  He told me I didn't have a chance; there was no satisfaction to be had. Assuming I was right in all t
he similarities I had noted, there was still the matter of California law as it related to the statute of limitations.

  In California, the Hollywood moguls had wisely seen to it that you had three years to raise any issue that might have to do with plagiarism. Three years and absolutely no more.

  I now was well beyond that three-year limitation. The movie I was seeing on television was a rerun, a possibly nineteenth or twentieth or thirty-fifth rerun. I should have seen more movies, the lawyer suggested: I should have seen this movie the week it was released. There was absolutely nothing, the lawyer told me, I could do.

  But I could burn. And burn. And burn.

  I tell you, it was enough to put a writer in a slump.

  Written 1950——Published 1951

  FOR THE RENT

  A MATTER OF FREQUENCY

  Dr. Amadeus Ballyhock pointed with pride across the enormous campus of Meg, Beth, & Hal Thurman University.

  "There," he breathed to the eager group about him. "That completely streamlined building decorated with diagonal stripes. The glory of M.B. & H.T.U. and the very latest addition to our magnificent educational facilities. The Dimenocommunaplex!"

  "A whole building," the young woman at his right said in man-pleasing awe. "And one machine!"

  The university president smiled affably from her to the rest of his visitors. His broad chest expanded visibly under the expensively tailored clear-glass shirt he wore. "Yes. One machine."

  "The only thing, sir," an extremely handsome fellow who was the star of Tuesday's TV Tabloid said uncertainly, "the only thing, doctor, is that the Dimenocommunaplex can hardly be considered educational. I mean—since it won't be used for teaching. I mean—it's a research tool, isn't it? For a Nut?"

  All the other journalists looked thoughtful at this and began to scratch well-shampooed heads with extremely well-manicured fingernails.

  "You know, Steve," the pretty girl commented slowly, "I think you have something there. If it's for a Nut, it can't be very educational. It's Opening New Frontiers stuff, not the kind of material any sponsor is paying for. When a Nut is involved in a story, you have to take notes; it gets so technical. And once you take notes, what happens to the spontaneity of good TV journalism?"

  "There isn't any, Laura," the young man nodded. "Not with notes that you have to read from in order to explain things. I mean—no human interest. Then you might as well get back to dry-as-dust paper reporting, like they used to have in the old days."

  "The days of the Nuts," someone else said. "The twentieth century." Everybody shuddered.

  Dr. Ballyhock shook himself abruptly. "Not at all," he said loudly. Then, as they all looked at him, he repeated reassuringly: "Not at all! Not at all!"

  "How do you mean, sir?" Steve asked. "Anything with a name like Dimenocommunaplex must be a Nut project."

  "Quite. But, first of all, my dear fellow, the Nut involved is under careful guard and the supervision of some of our poorest minds. And may I comment here, parenthetically and with pride, on our faculty and student body, which this year possesses the very lowest average intelligence quotient of any college in the entire country?"

  "You don't say!" Laura looked around enthusiastically. "That is worth a plug on my show. I like to talk about progress. It makes my audience feel we're advancing, kind of. Know what I mean?"

  "I certainly do," Dr. Ballyhock told her, smiling warmly at the pleasing curves of her body, completely visible through the green-tinged transparent frock she wore. "Now, you journalists will need to take no notes on the Dimenocommunaplex, for the simple but entirely sufficient reason that none of you will even begin to understand its operation. It has been made so thoroughly a Nut project that only the most degraded Nuts can figure out how it works. Humans, like you, me, and your TV audience, can do no more than describe its operation and effects—if any."

  There was a general sigh of relief. Steve came forward and offered his hand. "My apologies, doctor. I really didn't mean to imply that—that—that—well, you know."

  Dr. Ballyhock nodded. "Quite. A journalist reaching millions of sets cannot be too careful. We have had more than enough of Nut thinking in this country! Now that we understand each other again, may I suggest that the explanation of the educational significance of the Dimenocommunaplex wait until we are all on our scooters and on our way to it? The experiment is due to begin at four-thirty sharp. And an unstable individual is being kept waiting."

  —|—

  They mounted the gaily colored little conveyances again, pulled the beribboned handlebar switches, and floated off to the agreeable accompaniment of tiny silver bells clustered on the miniature rear bumpers.

  "What is the significance of the Dimenocommunaplex educationally?" the university president began once more from his position in the lead scooter. "Well, first there is the merely visual interest of the student body in such a very complex piece of machinery. We will give one credit for every hour spent in the building looking at the apparatus. Surely this is not an unpleasant or, should I say, nutty way of spending one's compulsory college time? Surely that group entering the Arithmetic Building will prefer it to the hour they must now willy-nilly spend on Long Division and Decimals? These youngsters may go on to acquire a doctorate in Administration like mine; they will then have to harness and be responsible for the dangerous mental energies of from ten to a hundred Nuts. What better place for them to meet the creatures than in their early college years?"

  "And the rest of the educational aspect is communication," Laura said. "At least, that's what I read in the university throwaway my studio received. Dimensional communication. What's that?"

  "That's a Nut's phrase," Dr. Ballyhock shrugged; "a Nut will therefore have to explain it. My intelligence quotient is well below the hundred-and-twenty danger point, I am happy to say. Dimensional communication? It would seem to imply communication between the dimensions. What good that would do, I cannot imagine. But, as with all Nut developments, you never can tell. It might lead to this, or it might lead to that. For example, the scooters we are on at the moment are powered by a kind of radiant energy discovered by an astronomical Nut who was fooling around with cosmic rays. Another less degraded Nut—one who was almost human, in fact—applied it to vehicles in an engineering design that enabled normal human technicians to manufacture scooters for the rest of us. That's why all the expense we go to in feeding and taking care of Nuts is so very necessary. You never know when one of their attacks of applied science—or even an absolute fit of pure science, for that matter—is going to lead to something useful."

  "Or dangerous!" This came from a young matron floating at the edge of the group. "Remember atomic bombs, philosophy, dynamite—all those terrible things Nuts used to make in the old days?" She pulled the pink glassite jacket about her shoulders and shuddered fastidiously.

  "The old days. That's just the point. Remember your history, please," Dr. Ballyhock admonished. "First man domesticated life in the form of the lower animal to provide him with food. Then he domesticated matter in the form of machines to do his work for him. Then came his greatest and most recent achievement! He domesticated mind in the form of Nuts to do his thinking for him."

  They arrived at the striped building with backswept buttresses and alighted. Steve pointed to a barbed-wire-enclosed compound of low and old-fashioned brick buildings directly behind it. "Is that the Nut school, doctor? I mean, I know you have one on your campus. I did a human-interest expose on it three years ago."

  "Yes. Please don't look so upset, ladies. The creatures are not in a dangerously large quantity, and they are very well guarded. Our national educational laws still require universities to maintain at least one college—with separate but equal facilities—for those pathetically high IQs, but the day is not too far distant, I hope, when they will all be segregated—as most of them already are—in safe and sound institutions under the unblinking supervision of Nut specialists."

  The guard swung the barred doors open at Dr. Ballyh
ock's nod.

  Inside, the building—which was one room and one electronic machine—looked as if a wire-spinning spider had danced out an all-time arachnidian masterpiece within its walls. Banks of transformers awaited action about their compact cores; tubes, spattered like raindrops upon a huge metal plate in the center of the room, sat energyless and unwinking.

  Near the metal plate was a heavily laden switchboard at which stood a man, unkempt, somewhat hairy, and scowling. Delicate metallic threads encircled both his ankles and disappeared into a hole in the floor: it was evident that, as he walked away from the hole, they unwound from a subterranean spool; and, as he came closer to it, the slack was pulled in. Two guards walked with him; the one on his right carrying an efficient little blaster, the one on his left a tiny radio switch which controlled the action of the restraining thread.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the TV tabloids," the president intoned. "This is Physics Nut 6B306, or, as he was entered on his birth certificate, Raymond J. Tinsdale. He was born of entirely normal parents who had no suspicion of his mental flaws until a series of clever childish inventions forced them to a child-test administrator, who revealed the truth."

  "How awful!" Laura moaned. "It almost makes you not want to have children; it could happen to anybody!"

  Dr. Ballyhock nodded gravely. "It could. The consolation is that the freak would be well taken care of for the rest of its life: the parents would never have to see it again. And, of course, we use them in a kind of occupational therapy upon each other."

  "The zoo," said Physics Nut 6B306 bitterly. "The traveling zoo come to look at people. And now they'll want to be entertained. Does it matter to them that my rig isn't even ready?"

  "Now, now, now," the president warned. "Don't get obstreperous, or we'll have to deprive you of equipment and books for a week. Please start explaining what it is you have here. And, guard! Make him put on his shirt. There are ladies present!"