Now Wait for Last Year Page 2

  'So?' Jonas said. They still have to go back to—'

  Himmel mumbled, 'I'll buy it.' He dug into his trouser pocket, straining to find his wallet; it was a long and arduous struggle but at last he produced it.

  'Buy it for what?' Jonas demanded.

  'I have a schedule arranged,' Himmel said, after an agonized pause. 'I pay a half cent apiece for Lazy Brown Dog rejects, twice what they're worth, so the company's making a profit. So why should anyone object?' His voice rose to a squeak.

  Pondering him, Jonas said, 'No one's objecting. I'm just curious as to what you want it for.' He glanced sideways at Eric as if to ask. What do you say about this?

  Himmel said, 'Urn, I use them.' With gloom he turned and shambled toward a nearby door. 'But they're all mine because I paid for them in advance out of my salary,' he said over his shoulder as he opened the door. Defensively, his face dark with resentment and with the corrosive traces of deeply etched phobic anxiety, he stood aside.

  Within the room – a storeroom, evidently – small carts rolled about on silver-dollar-sized wheels; twenty or more of them, astutely avoiding one another in their zealous activity.

  On board each cart Eric saw a Lazy Brown Dog, wired in place and controlling the movements of the cart.

  Presently Jonas rubbed the side of his nose, grunted, said, 'What powers them?' Stooping, he managed to snare a cart as it wheeled by his foot; he lifted it up, its wheels still spinning futilely.

  'Just a little cheap ten-year A-battery,' Himmel said. 'Costs another half cent.'

  'And you built these carts?'

  'Yes, Mr Ackerman.' Himmel took the cart from him and set it back on the floor; once more it wheeled industriously off. 'These are the ones too new to let go,' he explained. 'They have to practice.'

  'And then,' Jonas said, 'you give them their freedom.'

  That's right.' Himmel bobbed his large-domed, almost bald head, his horn-rimmed glasses sliding forward on his nose.

  'Why?' Eric said.

  Now the crux of the matter had been broached; Himmel turned red, twitched miserably, and yet displayed an obscure, defensive pride. 'Because,' he blurted, 'they deserve it.'

  Jonas said, 'But the protoplasm's not alive; it died when the chemical fixing-spray was applied. You know that. From then on it – all of these – is nothing but an electronic circuit, as dead as – well, as a robant.'

  With dignity Himmel answered, 'But I consider them alive, Mr Ackerman. And just because they're inferior and incapable of guiding a rocketship in deep space, that doesn't mean they have no right to live out their meager lives. I release them and they wheel around for, I expect, six years or possibly longer; that's enough. That gives them what they're entitled to.'

  Turning to Eric, Jonas said, 'If the old man knew about this—'

  'Mr Virgil Ackerman knows about this,' Himmel said at once. 'He approves of it.' He amended, 'Or rather, he lets me do it; he knows I'm reimbursing the company. And I build the carts at night, on my own time; I have an assembly line – naturally very primitive, but effective – in my conapt where I live.' He added, 'I work till around one o'clock every night.'

  'What do they do after they're released?' Eric asked. 'Just roam the city?'

  'God knows,' Himmel said. Obviously that part was not his concern; he had done his job by building the carts and wiring the Lazy Brown Dogs in functioning position. And perhaps he was right; he could hardly accompany each cart, defend it against the hazards of the city.

  'You're an artist,' Eric pointed out, not sure if he was amused or revolted or just what. He was not impressed; that much he was sure of: the entire enterprise had a bizarre, zany quality – it was absurd. Himmel ceaselessly at work both here and at his conapt, seeing to it that the factory rejects got their place in the sun ... what next? And this, while everyone else sweated out the folly, the greater, collective absurdity, of a bad war.

  Against that backdrop Himmel did not look so ludicrous. It was the times. Madness haunted the atmosphere itself, from the Mole on down to this quality-control functionary who was clearly disturbed in the clinical, psychiatric sense.

  Walking off down the hall with Jonas Ackerman, Eric said, 'He's a pook.' That was the most powerful term for aberrance in currency.

  'Obviously,' Jonas said, with a gesture of dismissal. 'But this gives me a new insight into old Virgil, the fact that he'd tolerate this and certainly not because it gives him a profit – that's not it. Frankly I'm glad. I thought Virgil was more hard-boiled; I'd have expected him to bounce this poor nurt right out of here, into a slave-labor gang on its way to Lilistar. God, what a fate that would be. Himmel is lucky.'

  'How do you think it'll end?' Eric asked. 'You think the Mole will sign a separate treaty with the reegs and bail us out of this and leave the 'Starmen to fight it alone – which is what they deserve?'

  'He can't,' Jonas said flatly. 'Freneksy's secret police would swoop down on us here on Terra and make mincemeat out of him. Kick him out of office and replace him overnight with someone more militant. Someone who likes the job of prosecuting the war.'

  'But they can't do that,' Eric said. 'He's our elected leader, not theirs.' He knew, however, that despite these legal considerations Jonas was right. Jonas was merely appraising their ally realistically, facing the facts.

  'Our best bet,' Jonas said, 'is simply to lose. Slowly, inevitably, as we're doing.' He lowered his voice to a rasping whisper. 'I hate to talk defeatist talk—'

  'Feel free.'

  Jonas said, 'Eric, it's the only way out, even if we have to look forward to a century of occupation by the reegs as our punishment for picking the wrong ally in the wrong war at the wrong time. Our very virtuous first venture into interplanetary militarism, and how we picked it – how the Mole picked it.' He grimaced.

  'And we picked the Mole,' Eric reminded him. So the responsibility, ultimately, came back to them.

  Ahead, a slight, leaflike figure, dry and weightless, drifted all at once toward them, calling in a thin, shrill voice, 'Jonas! And you, too, Sweetscent – time to get started for the trip to Wash-35.' Virgil Ackerman's tone was faintly peevish, that of a mother bird at her task; in his advanced age Virgil had become almost hermaphroditic, a blend of man and woman into one sexless, juiceless, and yet vital entity.

  TWO

  Opening the ancient, empty Camel cigarettes package, Virgil Ackerman said as he flattened its surfaces, 'Hits, cracks, taps, or pops. Which do you take, Sweetscent?'

  Taps,' Eric said.

  The old man peered at the marking stamped on the inside glued bottom fold of the now two-dimensional package. 'It's cracks. I get to cork you on the arm – thirty-two times.' He ritualistically tapped Eric on the shoulder, smiling gleefully, his natural-style ivory teeth pale and full of animated luster. 'Far be it from me to injure you, doctor; after all, I might need a new liver any moment now... I had a bad few hours last night after I went to bed and I think – but check me on this – it was due to toxemia once again. I felt loggy.'

  In the seat beside Virgil Ackerman, Dr Eric Sweetscent said, 'How late were you up and what did you do?'

  'Well, doctor, there was this girl.' Virgil grinned mischievously at Harvey, Jonas, Ralf and Phyllis Ackerman, those members of the family who sat around him in his thin, tapered interplan ship as it sped from Terra toward Wash-35 on Mars. 'Need I say more?'

  His great-grandniece, Phyllis, said severely, 'Oh Christ, you're too old. Your heart'll give out again right in the middle. And then what'll she – whoever she is – think? It's undignified to die during you know what.' She eyed Virgil reprovingly.

  Virgil screeched, Then the dead man's control in my right fist, carried for such emergencies, would summon Dr Sweet-scent here, and he'd dash in and right there on the spot, without removing me, he'd take out that bad, collapsed old heart and stick in a brand new one, and I'd—' He giggled, then patted away the saliva from his lower lip and chin with a folded linen handkerchief from his breast coat pocket, 'I'd
continue.' His paper-thin flesh glowed and beneath it his bones, the outline of his skull, fine and clearly distinguishable, quivered with delight and the joy of tantalizing them; they had no entree into this world of his, the private life which he, because of his privileged position, enjoyed even now during the days of privation which the war had brought on.

  '"Mille tre,"' Harvey said sourly, quoting Da Ponte's libretto. 'But with you, you old craknit, it's – however you say a billion and three in Italian. I hope when I'm your age—'

  'You won't ever be my age,' Virgil chortled, his eyes dancing and flaming up with the vitality of enjoyment. 'Forget it, Harv. Forget it and go back to your fiscal records, you walking, droning-on abacus. They won't find you dead in bed with a woman; they'll find you dead with a—' Virgil searched his mind. 'With an, ahem, inkwell.'

  'Please,' Phyllis said drily, turning to look out at the stars and the black sky of 'tween space.

  Eric said to Virgil, 'I'd like to ask you something. About a pack of Lucky Strike green. About three months ago—'

  'Your wife loves me,' Virgil said. 'Yes, it was for me, doctor; a gift without strings. So ease your feverish mind; Kathy's not interested. Anyhow, it would cause trouble. Women, I can get; artiforg surgeons – well.. .' He reflected. 'Yes. When you think about it I can get that, too.'

  'Just as I told Eric earlier today,' Jonas said. He winked at Eric, who stoically did not show any response.

  'But I like Eric,' Virgil continued. 'He's a calm type. Look at him right now. Sublimely reasonable, always the cerebral type, cool in every crisis; I've watched him work many times, Jonas; I ought to know. And willing to get up at any hour of the night....nd that sort you don't see much.'

  'You pay him,' Phyllis said shortly. She was, as always, taciturn and withdrawn; Virgil's attractive great-grandniece, who sat on the corporation's board of directors, had a piercing, raptorlike quality – much like the old man's, but without his sly sense of the peculiar. To Phyllis, everything was business or dross. Eric reflected that had she come onto Himmel there would be no more little carts wheeling about; in Phyllis' world there was no room for the harmless. She reminded him a little of Kathy. And, like Kathy, she was reasonably sexy; she wore her hair in one long braided pigtail dyed a fashionable ultramarine, set off by autonomic rotating earrings and (this he did not especially enjoy) a nose ring, sign of nubility with the higher bourgeois circles.

  'What's the purpose of this conference?' Eric asked Virgil Ackerman. 'Can we start discussing it now to save time?' He felt irritable.

  'A pleasure trip,' Virgil said. 'Chance to get away from the gloomy biz we're in. We have a guest meeting us at Wash-35; he may already be there... he's got a Blank Check; I've opened my babyland to him, the first time I've let anybody but myself experience it freely.'

  'Who?' Harv demanded. 'After all, technically Wash-35 is the property of the corporation, and we're on the board.'

  Jonas said acidly, 'Virgil probably lost all his authentic Horrors of War flipcards to this person. So what else could he do but throw open the gates of the place to him?'

  'I never flip with my Horrors of War cards or my FBI cards,' Virgil said. 'And by the way I have a duplicate of the Sinking of the Panay. Eton Hambro – you know, the fathead who's board chairman of Manfrex Enterprises – gave it to me on my birthday. I thought everyone knew I had a complete file but evidently not Hambro. No wonder Freneksy's boys are running his six factories for him these days.'

  'Tell us about Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel,' Phyllis said in a bored tone, still looking out at the panorama of stars beyond the ship. 'Tell us how she—'

  'You've seen that.' Virgil sounded testy.

  'Yes, but I never get tired of it,' Phyllis said. 'No matter how hard I try I still can't find it anything but engrossing, right down to the last miserable inch of film.' She turned to Harv. 'Your lighter.'

  Rising from his seat, Eric walked to the lounge of the small ship, seated himself at the table, and picked up the drink list. His throat felt dry; the bickering that went on within the Ackerman clan always made him dully thirsty, as if he were in need of some reassuring fluid ... perhaps, he thought, a substitute for the primordial milk: the Urmilch of life. I deserve my own babyland, too, he thought half in jest. But only half.

  To everyone but Virgil Ackerman, the Washington, D.C., of 1935 was a waste of time, since only Virgil remembered the authentic city, the authentic time and place, the environment now so long passed away. In every detail, therefore, Wash-35 consisted of a painstakingly elaborate reconstruction of the specific limited universe of childhood which Virgil had known, constantly refined and improved in matters of authenticity by his antique procurer – Kathy Sweetscent – without really ever being in a genuine sense changed: it had coagulated, cleaved to the dead past... at least as far as the rest of the clan were concerned. But to Virgil it of course sprouted life. There, he blossomed. He restored his flagging biochemical energy and then returned to the present, to the shared, current world which he eminently understood and manipulated but of which he did not psychologically feel himself a native.

  And his vast regressive babyland had caught on: become a fad. On lesser scales other top industrialists and money-boys – to speak in a brutal and frank way, war profiteers – had made life-size models of their childhood worlds, too; Virgil's now had ceased to be unique. None, of course, matched Virgil's in complexity and sheer authenticity; fakes of antique items, not the actual surviving articles, had been strewn about in vulgar approximations of what had been the authentic reality. But in all fairness, it had to be realized, Eric reflected, no one possessed the money and economic know-how to underwrite this admittedly uniquely expensive and beyond all others – imitations all – utterly impractical venture. This – in the midst of the dreadful war.

  But still it was, after all, harmless, in its quaint sort of way. A bit, he reflected, like Bruce Himmel's peculiar activity with his many clanky little carts. It slaughtered no one. And this could hardly be said for the national effort... the jihad against the creatures from Proxima.

  On thinking of this, an unpleasant recollection entered his mind.

  On Terra at the UN capital city, Cheyenne, Wyoming, in addition to those in POW camps, there existed a herd of captured, defanged reegs, maintained on public exhibition by the Terran military establishment. Citizens could file past and gawk and ponder at length the meaning of these exo-skeletoned beings with six extremities in all, capable of progressing linearly at a great rate on either two or four legs. The reegs had no audible vocal apparatus; they communicated beewise by elaborate, dancelike weavings of their sensory stalks. With Terrans and 'Starmen they employed a mechanical translation box, and through this the gawkers had an opportunity to queston their humbled captives.>

  Questions, until recently, had run to a monotonous, baiting uniformity. But now a new interrogation had begun by subtle stages to put in its very ominous appearance – ominous at least from the standpoint of the Establishment. In view of this inquiry the exhibit had abruptly terminated, and for an indefinite time. How can we come to a rapprochement? The reegs, oddly, had an answer. It amounted to: live and let live. Expansion by Terrans into the Proxima System would cease; the reegs would not – and actually had not in the past – invest the Sol System.

  But as to Lilistar: The reegs had no answer there because they had developed none for themselves; the 'Starmen had been their enemies for centuries and it was too late for anyone to give or take any advice on this subject. And anyhow 'Star 'advisers' had already managed to take up residence on Terra for the performance of security functions... as if a four-armed, antlike organism six feet high could pass unnoticed on a New York street.

  The presence of 'Star advisers, however, easily passed unnoticed; the 'Starmen were phycomycetous mentally, but morphologically they could not be distinguished from Terrans. There was a good reason for this. In Mousterian times a flotilla from Lilistar's Alpha Centaurus Empire had migrated to the Sol System,
had colonized Earth and to some extent Mars. A fracas with deadly overtones had broken out between settlers of the two worlds and a long, degenerating war had followed, the upshot of which had been the decline of both subcultures to acute and dreary barbarism. Due to climatic faults the Mars colony had at last died out entirely; the Terran, however, had groped its way up through historical ages and at last back to civilization. Cut off from Alpha by the Lilistar-reeg conflict, the Terran colony had again become planet-wide, elaborated, bountiful, had advanced to the stage of launching first an orbiting satellite, and then an unmanned ship to Luna, and at last a manned ship . .. and was, as chef-d'oeuvre, able once more to contact its system of origin. The surprise, of course, had been vast on both sides.

  'Cat got your tongue?' Phyllis Ackerman said to Eric, seating herself beside him in the cramped lounge. She smiled, an effort which transfigured her thin, delicately cut face; she looked, for a moment, appealingly pretty. 'Order me a drink, too. So I can face the world of bolo bats and Jean Harlow and Baron von Richthofen and Joe Louis and – what the hell is it?' She searched her memory, eyes squeezed shut. 'I've blocked it out of my mind. Oh yes. Tom Mix. And his Ralston Straight Shooters. With the Wrangler. That wretched Wrangler. And that cereal! And those eternal goddam box tops. You know what we're in for don't you? Another session with Orphan Annie and her li'l decoder badge ... we'll have to listen to ads for Ovaltine and then those numbers read out for us to take down and decode – to find out what Annie does on Monday. God.' She bent to reach for her drink, and he could not resist peering with near-professional interest as the top of her dress gave way to show the natural line of her small, articulated pale breasts.

  Put by this spectacle in a reasonably good mood, Eric said playfully but cautiously, 'One day we'll jot down the numbers the fake announcer gives over the fake radio, decode them with the Orphan Annie decoder badge, and—' The message will say, he thought glumly, Make a separate peace with the reegs. At once.