Alien Accounts (19 page)

Skin and devein arm, cut carefully away from bones (which may be saved for soup), and dice. Sauté meat in butter for minutes, then add garlic and onions and cook over medium flame for 10 more minutes. Add tomatoes, sugar, spices. Mix with cooked noodles, fill glass casserole dish and bake
45
minutes in hot oven.

Note:
Some people like to save the fingers and hand with the bones for soup. I prefer to boil the hand, oven-brown it, and serve it (palm up) on the casserole for a festive garnish.

Twenty-four tiny perfect freckles done, seven to go. Marty refilled the pen from the ink dropper and poised it. An air-hammer began clattering in the street, and he turned to look out.

A telephone crew seemed to be working down there. At least their truck was a telephone truck. But instead of the familiar black bell on the door, there was a snare drum.

Then Drum Inc. really did make telephone equipment! It was all real, or at least ‘real’! Even the rows of faces in wax, printed on plastic film?

His pacemaker began to act up, trying to cope with the multiple rhythms of his racing heart, the air-hammer, others … a different drum.

The last drop of his living sweat grew, gathered itself in an armpit, began the slow journey down the inside of his arm.
But can I really afford Heaven? It’s much more expensive than Hawaii. Out of the question now. Maybe in a few years …

The drop zig-zagged, crossed his wrist-pulse and ran down the pen. From there it dripped black on the face of the freckled girl.

‘Hello, Marilyn? He loves you.’

‘Who does?’

A crew from the telephone company, the other one, were tearing up the street near a manhole. On the windshield of a passing car was a sticker reading ‘Hello, Charlie!’

The driver leaned out, looked at the snare drum on the door of the telephone truck, and waved. ‘Hello, Charlie!’ he called. The crew foreman gave him the finger.

EXPLAIN THIS SCENE.
Look at this example:

1. Why were the crew digging near a manhole?

a) For extra light.

b)
They were rescuing a man.

c) They were outflanking it.

d) Never mind.

The correct answer (c) has been marked. Now do the rest of the problems in the same way.

2. Why did the driver call out?

a) The foreman was Charlie.

b) He looked like Charlie.

3. Why else?

a) ‘Hello, Charlie!’ is the unofficial password for employees of the Bell Telephone System.

b) The crew were Viet Cong.

4. What is Drum, Inc.?

a) One name of the Bell Telephone System in some regions.

b) The official telephone company.

c) The real owner of the Bell Telephone System.

d) A private telephone company with a vendetta against the Bell near-monopoly.

e) Vietnam.

f) It is to the Bell Telephone System as the ‘Aggressor Force’ is to the Army: an imaginary enemy, set up for training purposes. Bell employees who play rôles in it speak Esperanto, count in a duodecimal system, wear the snare-drum insignia, color-code their cables (unlike the Bell code): fuchsia, mimosa, rose, primrose, lavender, cerise and mauve.

‘Hello, Marilyn? He loves you.’

‘Listen, you, I’ve had about enough! You make me feel dirty all over, dirty with deep-brown ground-in dirt, the kind that makes washday a chore and plays havoc with delicate complexions. Do you hear?’

I tried making the general a Negro and a Nazi, then I opened my eyes and sat up on the table.

‘David sees reality as – ah –
refrangible
.’

In the next panel, the ‘doctor’, an elderly scientist from another comic book, held up a red tube. His balloon read: ‘Tell me, Herr Heiliger, what is this?’

‘A laser? The famous mail-order elixir?’

‘Ha.
You
are interested in its contents.’ Camera 3 in on Dr Born, seeing him from about chest level, deep shadows as in
Return of the Son of Man
. ‘Now let us ask David.’

I said, ‘It’s an ink drawing. Red wash and white airbrush highlight.’

‘I came all the way from Washington, or Africa, for
this
?’ The general picked up his attaché case and made to walk out of the picture. I changed his typeface to Garamond, adopted for myself Univers, a Frutiger-designed
face suited to I.B.M. ‘That man is nuts, “doctor”. I have no time …’

‘Wait!’ Exhibit B is an infra-red Polaroid shot of Born holding up his hand to count upon the fingers. ‘Let me pose for you the four great “reality” problems. One: are physical objects real, or only sense perceptions?’

‘But …’

‘Wait …’

‘I have …’

The page was getting covered with dashes, interrupted thoughts; I set it aside and began over with a story called ‘The Sinister Bean’.

‘Two: do others have thoughts and feelings as I do, or are their thoughts and feeling clever simulations? Three: are the entities of science, like atoms and quasars,
real
, or only convenient fictions? Four: …’

‘I offered to come to work for Drum only on condition that I be given vital communications work,’ the general indicated. ‘Heliograph, semaphore …’

Born speaks with his back to him, make this a circular panel, set at the end of the top right-hand page, so the reader’s eye will be drawn to it twice: once as he reads the top row, again as he reads the second row. The doctor’s glasses heliographed an urgent message: Esperanto, duodecimal number system …

‘Certifiably nuts.’

‘David, I’m going to lock you in this solid closet, and you are to get out without opening the door.’

‘I’ went in the ‘closet’. Nothing much to examine: the cellular plastic sponge, good replica of animal organisation; broomstraws to draw for randomising next move; cleaning ether to change words to sounds, to make a centrifuge, to help David understand what it is the mop and pail are getting at.

Nothing to it; one side of the closet had to be left open, so the reader could see I was really in there. I just stepped out of that side and around and back into the room.

‘A trick!’ said Heiliger. ‘A trick?’

‘Of course,’ David communicated. A cough code was sufficient.

THE SINISTER BEAN

It lay there, perfectly harmless-looking, on a plate or plane or whatever, in the middle of a lot of places. Perhaps the most sinister thing about it was …

‘Transmission of …?’ the general opined, using the old opinion poll code. ‘
Twins
?’

I tore the money of his words in half, in quarters, and so on, five times, until they were too big a wad to handle. Then David opened my eyes and sat up on the table.

‘… sees reality as – ah –
refrangible
.’

‘And repeatable,’ I denoted.

Replacing his cracked monocle, the general said, ‘Tell me something, Herr Bland.’

‘Blandings,’ I said.

‘Blandish?’

‘No, Blandworth.’

‘Blanders, then. Tell me, what is it you – see?’

The pages of the calendar flipped past, indicating passage of time. The drivers of a locomotive, then a stationary plane, pasted against droning clouds, indicated movement in space. The slow dissolve of a wavering image indicated recollection. Then the background music came up full and newspapers rolled off the presses, to indicate an important event.

Dr Ortiz of the Lion Oil Research Branch addressed the stockholders, describing a number of new projects his group was engaged in: ‘Organic computers’ could be constructed of cheap, simple organisms; bacteria and fungi from common products like cheese had already been tested in this connection. ‘Cheese farms’ were a related project involving the use of deadly viruses to ‘grow’ cheeses from common materials. Using less potent forms in a ‘stepped’ or ‘cascaded’ system, he explained, would cut down on the type of unfortunate accident that had so far plagued his project. ‘Organic-to-inorganic’ processes would use a similar virus system to ‘grow’ from human cadavers such popular products as phonograph records and bowling balls.

INDIANA NAME OPINION REGISTER

Q-Q-QQ

1937

Name ……………………………………………………….

Address …………………………………………………….

Age ………… (Give latest date) ……………………………

1. Give your own name in full: ………………………………..

……………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………

2. Print your name in block capitals: ………………………….

……………………………………………………………

3. State surname, Christian name, middle name: ………………….

……………………………………………………………

4. Now give your NAME: ……………………………………….

……………………………………………………………

READ the instructions CAREFULLY and do not begin until the teacher tells you. In the first part, you will be expected to write as many names as you can in the time available, but you need not have every name correct. In the second part, tell what it is that you have named, and do so correctly.

NOW BEGIN PART ONE:

Part One.
Name as many things as you can before the teacher says
STOP
. Begin with your own name, then add other names. Now stop. Begin with other names. Then stop. Begin.
BEGIN
.

1. ……………………….

2. ……………………….

3. ……………………….

4. ……………………….

5. ……………………….

6. ……………………….

Part Two.
Fill in the blanks, then explain:

7. My name is ……………………………………………..

8. The name of ………. is ………………………………..

9. This is the name of ……………………………………..

10. This is my name: ……………………………………….

11. ………………………………………………………

12. Explain the names given above, and explain: ……………….

…………… ……………………………………………

…………………………………………………….. ….

Marilyn, the girl with the birthmark, had so far forgotten herself as to take away the hankie with which she had been dabbing at it. Her palms-up hands lay on her knees, and the ball of pink linen lay on the carpet.

‘… this frail heat. Daddy was a Justice of the Peace; I don’t suppose you know what that … I was eight, Eric was six, and Billy, the baby. Daddy was an engineer. We had a log cabin by the lake, with a log of visitors and everything. Daddy accidentally broke Eric’s nylon fishing rod, and he said he would give him a pair of nylons to replace it. A fish swallowed Daddy’s nylon log log slide rule, and …’

The apparent Negro behind the desk smiled sympathetically. His withered left hand lay before him on the desk like a horrible trophy, while with his good one he toyed with a syringe and a burnt spoon. ‘Go on?’

‘Well. I, Marilyn Hartsock, had to take care of the baby. I liked that, I liked to squeeze him till he kept giggling and I couldn’t stop. They had to take us to the hospital to remove Billy from me. Sometimes I think that’s how I got my withered hand, I mean my – oh!’

She snatched up the handkerchief and began dabbing at the hideous mark once more.

‘No use, it’s indelible,’ sighed the Negro, a Mr Travers. ‘I’ve tried everything myself. Even …’ The apparently tortured eyes in his drawn face sought, and connected with, the syringe.

Dr Reynolds of Lion Pharmaceutical Laboratories addressed the stockholders, describing new drugs his team is working on:

Dilasurg
is a new hormone which promises to fix human growth at any pre-adolescent age.
Tiresan II
, a sex-change drug, requires hardly more testing before it is marketed.
Estiviotrol
causes a person to go into a state of suspended animation within minutes. Researchers are now working with police riot-control units in developing an effective aerosol
delivery system.

Dr Gibbel of Lion Oil Electronics United addressed the stock holders, describing a new ‘surprise’ computer. After complex pre-programming by a team who does not know the computer’s ultimate use, it is leased to someone who does not know the pre-programming routines.

‘Ultimately,’ he said, ‘and without warning, the computer may do something either very stupid or very shrewd.’

Dr Lionel Logan, head of the Lion Oil Automotive Research Foundation, addressed the stockholders, describing a number of new advances. Talked about during his two-hour talk were hover-shoes, ‘chameleon’ body paints, and the use of hallucinogens to give a car ‘that new, yet strangely familiar feel’.