Complete Short Fiction, page 446
As this particular Steven came opposite him the psychiatrist walked rapidly across the street. “Please tell Mr. Dalkins,” he said loudly, “that Dr. Buhner would like him to call. Tell him he’s now going to have to admit why he did all this—”
That was as far as he got. Dalkins turned in mid-stride, ran across the street, and then along the sidewalk. Suddenly, he seemed to see what he wanted. He darted to a car by the curb just as a woman was climbing into it. There seemed to be some struggle between them; which Dalkins won. The car started up. The last thing Buhner saw was the machine receding down the street, with Dalkins at the wheel and the woman lying back against the seat. Her head rolled limply, and she slipped out of sight.
Buhner’s men found the abandoned car twenty minutes later with the dead body of the woman owner lying on the floor of the front seat.
“—Let him get out of that!” said Jack Brooks when the news was phoned to him by the murderer. His flushed face smirked into a grimacing smile. “Sending out fourteen of him was the smartest idea I’ve had up to now.”
He was feeling better for another reason. There was a possibility that a percentage of men would be willing to sign over a car or other property in exchange for the kit rather than pay $10 and be idetifiable and on a list. It was too bad that there was no cash in the perfect world, and that every money transaction had to be by computer credit, but still—he shrugged—there was always a way.
The murder was announced over the news media; the circumstances described.
“Now—” the psychiatrist reported—“Steven has no alternative. He has to contact us.”
It was a quarter after three when Steven phoned Dr. Buhner.
Carrying his equipment, the psychiatrist arrived at the prearranged rendezvous. A man at the door guided him to a large, tastefully decorated anteroom. The pretty girl there escorted him through a door to a large inner office, then closed the door behind her as she departed.
Silently, Buhner set up his equipment, then faced the youth who sat behind a gleaming desk. Steven Dalkins waved him at the two vacant chairs, one soft and one hard. The M.D. settled into the hard chair.
“Hmm,” said Steven, “I was wondering which one you would choose.”
He leaned back with a twisted smile on his small face. “How does it feel, doc, to have someone giving you that superior treatment?”
Dr. Buhner stared at him with his pale, gray eyes, and said, “Steven, slightly over forty thousand members of Overthrow Associates had been arrested by the time I started out for your place.”
“This is only one of my places,” said Steven.
The older man ignored the interruption. “Four out of five have already elected to go voluntarily to one of the space colonies. That way they can keep their money for sure.” He smiled grimly. “Not everyone cares to gamble his million.”
“So only I am in jeopardy?”
“Steven,” said Buhner tensely, “who could have killed, or ordered the killing, of that woman?” As the silence lengthened, Buhner said, “Maybe we’ve already got him in custody, and can verify your story in a few seconds.” He indicated the machines that were focused on the boy in front of him, and urged, “Steven, you mustn’t be loyal to someone who’s trying to pin a murder on you.”
“What happens to a convicted murderer?” asked Steven, after another pause.
“Nobody is convicted of murder in our day,” was the reply. “The only crime is alienation.”
“All right, what happens to a person convicted of alienation?”
“That’s classified information.”
“The rumor is that they’re executed. Is that true?”
“I’m not a member of the board that handles that. I’ve heard the rumor.” Buhner smiled his grim smile. “Now that you’ve met some of them, Steven, what would you do with alienated individuals?”
Steven hesitated. “It’s unfair,” he said finally, “for the unalienated to pass judgment on those persons who, through some accident of childhood trauma, got to be alienated.”
“But you noticed?”
There was a faraway expression in the boy’s eyes. “Many of them are exceptionally warm-hearted—” he temporized.
Buhner refused to be sidetracked. “Steven, how many murders that you heard about were committed by your followers in the past four months?”
The barest shadow of a sad smile was suddenly on Steven’s face. “Most of them are alienated about other things,” he said, “but those who are alienated that way killed about eight hundred persons.”
“Why? Did you find out why they did it?”
“The victims said or did something that violated the ideals of the murderer.”
“And so,” said Buhner with the touch of grief in his voice that he always felt at such revelations, “in this great universe where a man’s life, so far as we know, is only a tiny span of years, they, in their inner fury of rightness, denied even that short a time to nearly a thousand human beings. Tell me, what should be done with people like that?” Once more, their gazes met. This time, the boy looked away quickly. And there seemed no question. The four months of close contact with the endless twists and distortions of truths which alienated persons live by had left their scarring marks.
On his face was the consequent judgment.
Steven said, “His name is Jack Brooks.”
Buhner pressed some buttons on his machinery, watched the dials briefly; then: “He’s among the captured.” Once more, manipulation, followed by the comment: “The computer is asking him if he ordered, or committed, the murder. He denies it. But his heart, his lungs, his liver, his blood vessels, tell a different story.”
Their gazes met across the control instrument. “Well, Steven,” said the older man, “I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that you’re an unalienated person, and that therefore—though it would be a little hard to imagine what it could be—you have some deep-meaning reason for what you have done.”
Steven said, “I should like you to accompany me somewhere.”
“Could you use some reliable witnesses?”
“Yes.”
Buhner and the United Governments’ secretary, and Roosley, and two other important persons, stood behind a tree on one side of a tree-lined street as Steven walked across to a small suburban house on the other.
He stopped outside the gate and whistled twice long and twice short.
A minute went by. Then the door of the house opened.
Out of it there emerged a rapidly moving figure of a young girl. A child? No. She charged over to Steven Dalkins and flung her small body against his small body with an impact that sent him back several steps. The two—the dynamic girl and the high energy boy—thereupon proceeded to hit one mouth against the other, and to squeeze their bodies together in a series of minor but definite blows.
“Good God!” said Buhner, involuntarily, “he did all this in order to marry a girl his own age.”
As if he had heard the words, or deduced that they would be spoken or thought, Steven turned and called out into the gathering dusk, “But it’s not illegal; not now.”
“Love,” mumbled the psychiatrist. “I haven’t thought of anything like that since I gave up little Esther when I was eighteen.”
Suddenly, his legs wouldn’t hold him. He lay down there on the grass, vaguely aware of the others bending over him anxiously.
It was ridiculous, of course, but the shameful tears streamed down his cheeks. After all, he chided himself, Little Esther would now be big Esther, married with a brood of Esther-ettes. And, besides, it was well-known that people always out-grew age eighteen attachments.
The arguments, so cogently true, flapped unheeded through his head. The feeling that had leaped at him out of his forgotten past somehow conveyed the wordless meaning that he had never been given the chance to grow through those emotions. Muttering, Buhner struggled to his feet, shook away helping hands, and hurried off along the darkening street.
He had important things to do, like recovering from thirty years of living without love.
1974
ALL WE HAVE ON THIS PLANET
The critic wrote, “One of the faults of this novel is that never, during the entire 90,000 words, does the hero go to the bathroom.”
The author—myself—was sitting in the smallest room in his house. Because that was where he always read reviews of his books. In case there might be an unexpected shortage of toilet paper. Or a moment of blind rage; during which the usual tissue stuff was not visible at the time of greatest need.
The critic continued: “This reader, who is surely not a minority of one, kept looking for such touches of reality. And only on one page about two-thirds of the way through—which is a little long to wait—came across the following: “When he, the hero awakened, he noticed that there was a stain on the lower part of his shirt. Blood? he wondered. Or semen? Or urine?”
“One does not,” the critic continued, “have a clear picture of what has happened. There is not even an indication that he actually slept in his clothes. Or if, perhaps, the shirt referred to is a nightshirt. But, aside from the story itself—which is up to the usual par of this author—the implications of the passage constitute the only evidence in the book that he has ever heard of human nature.”
It was praise of a sort. And in this world—the author decided—one must suck spiritual nourishment from small offerings.
A little later, at the breakfast table, he read the latest on the invasion by the aliens, which was now in its third week.
Fortunately (for the Western World) the invaders had come down on India for reasons that were not yet clear. And their colossal fleets of spaceships, along with the war weapons that had debauched from them, were concentrating on the conquest of the foothill towns in the Himalayas, and seemed to be heading up toward the nearby mountain peaks. Indeed, the attackers had landed on all the highest mountain tops—including Everest—and were building odd structures on them. In the foothills their progress was hindered primarily by the ruggedness of the terrain.
Thus, while these alarming matters developed, it was possible for an American author to read about the invasion at his breakfast table. And, a little later, chat about it over the phone plate with Devastata.
Devastata had her own views on how to deal with the enemy:
“I think we should go in there while they’re bogged down, and let them have it . . .”
“The way I see this invasion of India first,” she went on, “is that they want one of the most densely populated areas in the world as their source of human experimental subjects.”
“As for that business of heading up into the mountains, it’s obvious what that’s for. Everest is the highest mountain, and they want it and similar high ground as their base of operations. Probably some far-ranging energy waves will emanate from them.”
“If you’ll read,” she said, “Steiner’s History of Mountain Battles you’ll see that command of heights has always fascinated general staffs, and that, in fact, there’s really something to it. Tamerlane used entire divisions of berserks to scale strongly-held heights. It took that kind of dedication—”
Devastata was a little repetitious at times. But she was beautiful. And admired his writings. And never required so much as a mention of human sweat. She provided a lot of ego nourishment for someone who needed a lot; and he did.
Later, as he entered his study, the author saw that the white light was flashing on the electronic letter transmitter. The letter took instant form as he pressed the release button. It was from Sleekania. It read:
“. . . Your ongoing (What you call) thoughts, as I recorded them this morning, made me realize once again how lucky I was to escape your filthy designs. Because of the universal mental pollution from the aliens, my ESP blessedly failed to pick up the stupid conversation you had with that childlike female you associate with these days. But enough came through from your earlier thought excrescences to show that you have been found out by the critics at last. Perhaps, now that you are exposed for what you are, a shallow, unskilled wordmonger, your misguided reading audience will also deservedly start shrinking. My hope is that the etheric confusion from the aliens when they do their group thing and all go to the bathroom every four hours, will henceforth give me relief six times a day for nearly an hour each time from the steady stream of trash which otherwise flows ceaselessly into my pure mind from that phony brain of yours—”
Sleekania was a little hard to take sometimes. But that she bothered to keep in touch at all implied that some of the old spark still flamed inside her . . . Love from any source was better than from none. In this world one had to get one’s emotional nourishment where it was available.
An author like myself sits down at an electric typewriter, and simply starts to write. I work at about ninety words a minute, excising with X’s when I make a typing mistake. As I write in this—what I call “flow” fashion—I have a comfortable feeling that the emerging words derive from my subconscious. What makes me feel good about this is that it has been conceded ever since Freud that the subconscious knows best, feels best, thinks best.
There is a reality about the wordage which pours forth hour after hour that nourishes not only my belief that I am a creative guy, but also my bank account.
I have no idea why my subconscious avoids going to the bathroom. I, personally, go there four or five times each 24 hours.
It could be that my attention is seldom on the act of urination or defecation. Because I usually carry with me a factual book or my latest reviews. Since I’m so busy reading, going to the bathroom is probably my most unreal experience.
I used to write longhand on legal-sized yellow pads. In those days I took the handwritten sheets to a manuscript typist—this was in the days when they only charged a dollar and ninety cents a manuscript page; and a writer could afford to have someone else type his output. Today, hiring out typing is like getting a lawyer to collect money owed you. When you finally wind your case—or sell the story—you discover that the lawyer got all the money for himself. And the typist for herself.
I believe that this explanation will not be satisfactory to my critics.
In the afternoon Devastata came over. While we made love, she asked me if I had heard the latest about the aliens. Without waiting for my reply, she proceeded to tell me.
“A study has been made by teams of psychologists,” she reported, “of the behavior of the alien invading forces. It is really amazing what even observation from a distance can do. It seems that the whole attack comes to at stop for an hour every four hours.
“One can imagine,” she said, after she had freed her mouth from my kiss, “that they have a plan whereby they re-examine periodically on an orderly basis what they will do next. And, of course, the timing has to be perfect, and nobody off on his own.”
“The impression,” she continued, “of an armed force that is completely coordinated in its every action, is obvious.”
Sleekania usually writes me after l have made love to Devastata. And today was no exception. As I entered my workroom, I saw the light was on in the electronic letter transmitter. And, guessing who it was from, went over at once, and pressed the button. The letter read:
“Stupid sex fiend, can’t you leave that silly girl alone even one day? I found myself recording from you the same kind of vicious thoughts about her as l used to receive from you during the act. If only that idiot female realized what criticism you feel against her as you go through those erotic wigglings by which you degrade her. Little does she realize that in your little mind you are actually titillating yourself into the ability to perform the act at all, by recalling your past sadistic experiences with other female dupes. You should be an alien. Your whole psyche seems to crave to be a part of the shared ecstasy of a group experience—which is what the aliens do when they all go to the bathroom at the same time. Except that, of course, you gain the group effect in your own slimy, twisted memory.”
My father always believed that if he had had the money he would have been ambassador to one of the Asian countries. He speaks fourteen Asian languages; the men usually appointed couldn’t speak any of the languages, but they had enough money—according to my father.
As a result (of not having enough) he never got further than the rank of Brigadier General. He works in the Pentagon from 8 to 4 every weekday. Shortly before 4, I called him there. As soon as he realized who it was, he said, “The ambassadorship to Afghanistan became vacant today, and it looks as if I may get it.”
I said, “Isn’t that one of the states, it is believed, will soon be overrun by the aliens?”
“A military man,” he replied sternly, “cannot allow such possibilities to deter him.”
I had my own purpose in calling him, so at this point I digressed. “In my early training, sir,” I said, “what was the parental attitude about urination?”
My father is pretty quick-minded. And, aside from this obsession to be an ambassador to an Asian country, quite bright. “Sub-rosa,” he said instantly.
“Subject didn’t exist,” he said.
“Never mentioned,” he went on. “We always set you on the potty, and looked the other way, as if you weren’t there. Or, as if we weren’t.”
“Same thing, I suppose,” he continued.
“Are you implying,” he bristled, “that this may have been the wrong way to raise a child?”
I realized it was time to change the subject back.
