The Müller-Fokker Effect (2 page)

Across the room, Glen Dale moved towards a lively group of painters. At his approach, they fell silent and looked into their drinks.

‘How’s it going, fellows?’

‘Fine, man.’ ‘Yeah, keen.’

‘Well that’s—fine. Everything okay? Drinks?’

‘Great.’

‘Fine, glad to hear it.’ He stood leaning lightly towards them for another minute, hoping the conversation would resume including him. It did not. ‘Well, I’d better—circulate.’ The man from Interpol tacked past. ‘Yes, well, so long.’

One of the painters called after him, ‘Great party, man!’ then turned to his friend. ‘What’d
he
want?’

‘Aw Christ, he wants somebody to tell him how good he looks in that stupid tin hat. You know, the one thing I can’t stand about his parties is he’s always at’ em.’

‘Yeah, I wish it was his wake.’

Glen approached a fat little bearded man in a sober suit, standing alone by the bar.

‘Well, Herr Doktor, are you having a good time?’

A pair of blank pince-nez turned up to stare at him, reflecting all the colors of Direct from Las Vegas’s light show. ‘Ah, Mister Dale.’ The little man, whose name Glen could not recall, spoke English with German precision.

‘There is someone here I would like to meet.’

‘Well, just point her out to me…’

‘No, no, this is a gentleman. A biophysicist named Doonigan. I should like it very much if you would introduce me to him.’

‘Doonigan? Doonigan? No, I’m afraid I don’t know him.’

Asking Herr Doktor if his drink was all right, Glen went over to talk to Ank and the girl in blue jeans. As it happened, they were having a good time. And their drinks were fine. But just now they were about to dance, if he would excuse them.

Donagon asked the girl in the foil pinafore who that was over there. ‘The tall skinny guy with the tin hat.’

‘Why, that’s Glen! The host—don’t you know him? Good gouts!’

‘No…I was invited by his secretary, actually.’

‘You’re a friend of Myra’s?’

‘I, um, know her, yes. She doesn’t seem to be here, tonight.’

‘Good gouts! Didn’t you
know?
She’s in the hospital, having a nose job. I thought everybody knew!’

‘That’s odd!’ Donagon was not aware he’d laughed so loudly until several Aztecs turned round to stare. ‘I met her in the hospital! She was having her acne sanded, and I…I was…’ He hesitated to explain the fresh scars under his outsize French cuffs. One of the false Aztecs looked him over. ‘And you were having a D. and C., were you, darling?’

‘Oh, George, you’re impossible!’ said the girl in the pinafore. She skipped off to dance with George the impossible Aztec.

‘…recorded in 1948, while he was still in prison,’ said one of the zoot suits.

‘Harry, listen—you’re out of your mind. It had to be 1950 because the company that cut the record didn’t even exist in’48.’

In another room the girl in blue jeans asked the tall man with the ax-blade nose what he did for a living.

‘I’m an art critic’

‘You too? I just met one art critic’

‘The one that works for the
Sun?
Haha,
critic?
He thinks Lichtenstein is a country, for Christ’s sake.
Critic?’

Something bumped their legs. They stood back to let the man in the wrinkled dinner jacket crawl past. ‘’S all right,’ he explained, ‘I’m from Innerpol.’

The Herr Doktor came through next, asking for a geneticist named Doonigan.

‘A what?’ One of the two businessmen in fur wigs who were holding each other upright near the piano turned to stare at him. ‘What does that sawed-off kraut want? A gyneticist?’

‘Geenetics,’ said his companion. ‘Genes.’

The other nudged him. ‘Hey, I wouldn’t mind getting in
her
jeans, Charlie.’ He leered at the girl.

Elsewhere other happily married men were leering at girls in crinoline, copper sheaths, feather robes and complicated layers of translucency; even at the girl in patent leather, who, hand to mouth, was searching all the rooms for her lost stick-on lips. Somebody went into the toilet to vomit, and somebody else used an overshoe in the closet. One of the zoots was spitting blood in the kitchen sink, while his friend stood by, holding his pork-pie hat for him.

‘Look, Harry, I
said
I’m sorry. Anybody can lose his temper now and then. Especially when I know that Deef John cut that side in nineteen…’

A troupe of girls in buckskin bikinis and antler hats moved through, pouring coffee and emptying ashtrays. Ank left with the girl in the foil pinafore. Donagon dozed in a chair.

Direct from Las Vegas packed up and left. The party reduced to those who had passed out, determined drinkers, and those without a sense of time, like the six persons in Egyptian dress squatting in the corner and digging a candle flame.

Glen Dale and Senator Vuje shook Donagon awake.

‘You all right?’

He nodded, and again when Glen asked if he were a scientist named Doonigal.‘…Donagon…’ he said thickly.

‘That must be you. There’s someone who wants to talk to you. Just a minute, I’ll see if I can find him.’

‘I thought you was Truman Whatsisname, the writer,’ said the senator. Somehow in his caftan he looked more like a senator than ever. ‘Here, let’s get you on your feet, fella.’

He did not get Donagon on his feet. Instead the toilet door opened behind him, knocking the senator on top of him.

‘What the hell…?’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Donagon’s glasses had been knocked off. He saw only a blurry, short figure in black, though he could hear the crisp German consonants. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going? Now look, you knocked me down, knocked this poor fella’s glasses off…’

‘I apologize again.’ The blur made a gesture with both arms. ‘But then, where
am
I going? That is a question. Where are we all going? And how is it best to watch?’

‘Listen, you little heinie, I fought your kind at Anzio…’

‘Ah, forgive me, gentlemen. I most probably am drunk. Good night.’

Donagon retrieved his glasses and got to his feet. The short man in black was disappearing out the hall door when Glen came in from the dining room.

‘I fought his kind at Anzio,’ the senator mumbled. ‘Arrogant little…’

One of the business twins sat down suddenly in the middle of the floor,
‘I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME, I WANT TO GET ME ONE OF THESE LITTLE GIRLIES AND GO UPSTAIRS.’

‘But, Charlie, we
are
upstairs. This is the penthouse.’

‘I guess he’s gone,’ Glen said, shrugging. ‘That guy was looking for you all evening.’

‘Well, I’ll get going.’ Donagon shook hands with his host and with the veteran of Anzio, and with a long-toothed man Glen introduced as his psychiatrist, Dr Feinwelt.

‘Whazzis?’ The businessman called Charlie, still seated on the floor, held up a black object,
‘HEY!
Some guy lost his leatha mustache!’

As Donagon left, he heard someone say, ‘Wasn’t that Truman Capote?’

‘Are you kidding? Anybody who wears French cuffs that big couldn’t be
anybody.’

It was a false day. Drizzle and the amplified, reedy heartbreak of a country-western singer drifted over the parking lot. There were tear-streaks on the mistproof windshields, pools of tears on the uneven plasphalt, and (in case everyone hadn’t got the message) a wet, melodious wind to blast the faces of several hundred National Arsenamid employees. The message, straight from the hearts of industrial psychologists, was: ‘What a hell of a day! Great to get inside, where it’s
warm
, and
dry
, and the Melodiak’s playing a light, bouncy tune like “Sunshine Balloon”.’

One man in a seam-split raincoat did not get the message; he walked slowly, ignored the rain, and even tried whistling along with ‘Cold Old Dacron Heart’. He was looking at the factory, too. All the others had averted their false morning faces from the rain, but not Bob Shairp.

He was looking at the factory for almost the last time—and seeing it for the first.

It looked exactly what it was, a service factory for the great food/missile corporation. A long, white building without character, neither ugly nor interesting.

No, today it was a ship, lying at anchor by the edge of the parking lot, with light streaming from every porthole. A voyage a day, for almost two years…and today the last. It was going on without him.

The whistle blew. Bob hurried in to the security office. The walls were maize over raw sienna this morning. On a sunny day they would go azure over dark green. As the soft saxophones of Melodiak greeted him (‘fill up that sun-shine ba-LLOON with hap-pi-ness’), Bob fumbled for his identity card.

‘Must be in the coat I usually wear,’ he said. The guard did not return his smile. ‘But you know me, anyway.’

‘Yeah, I know you, Shairp. Losing your card on your last day here! Just what in hell do you think you’re gonna walk off with—a few plans, maybe?’

Bob smiled to see if he was kidding. The guard turned his back on it. ‘All right, get the hell in there and stop wasting my time.’

Bob was a technical writer with a BA in English and a general understanding of engineering practice. He was not actually allowed to
write
anything, though he worked closely with a writing computer.

Many of National Arsenamid’s products resembled one another, and their repair manuals and parts lists differed only in details. Drawings and test routines were fed to the computer, which revised old manuals to fit new items. Bob made minor corrections in the computer’s prose.

A block of prose would appear on the screen before him:

He would work the keyboard to change ‘adjust’ to ‘set’, a new block of prose would appear, and so on. As the training film had explained: ‘
You
are the key.
You
understand nuances of English which the computer cannot. So you see, we can never
really
eliminate the
human
element.’

Yet today, for reasons no one quite understood, Bob was being replaced. They were sending him to Mud Flats, Nebraska, to be retrained, then to one of their fifty-four other plants.

National Arsenamid was still masquerading as a food processor. But only five plants still made
Perp
and other breakfast delicacies. Only eleven more made up the home kitchen of an invisible lady named Bette Cooke. The rest: were under defense contracts.

Bob had no objection to working for defense. In fact he worried now and then about the Chinese getting ahead in the Second Front missile race. They were said to be working on an orbiting missile platform, as a third-strike capability (meaning something still up their sleeves after China and the US had wiped each other out, twice over).

What Bob didn’t like was secret work. He enjoyed coming home, flopping on the couch, and saying, ‘Boy! You know what that crazy computer came up with today? Marge, you should have seen it…’

And what could he tell her today? That the computer didn’t need him anymore?

Marge was not sympathetic.

‘Retraining pay is next to nothing, Bob! And Spot counted on getting into a military school—really, you couldn’t have picked a worse time.’

‘I,’ he began, and lifted an admonishing finger from his glass. What was so admonishing about that finger? Looked pretty much like all the rest. He put it back and studied the fingers all together. Making white circles on the glass. Or it on them. The drink in the glass was called a pajama. Four parts…no, five parts gin…

‘You what?’

‘I had nothing to do with it. For one reason or another, they’re replacing me, that’s all. I’m being moved on. What are you up to, anyway?’

Marge sat on the carpet, surrounded by a sprawl of magazines. Her right hand twiddled a pencil, her left held an open copy of
Luxurious Home
. The first letter of the title was hidden by her fingers, offering Bob a silent pun.

‘I’m doing a test: “Does Your Mate Measure Up?” It says—just a minute—it says that you have a lot of artistic ability, and you could really go places, but that you’re inclined to fritter away your time on frivolous projects. What you want in a wife is a mother, because you tend to shirk responsibilities.’

‘Oh, that’s good, that’s good! I’ll bet I have to be careful around the fifteenth, because something enters the house of something else, and though fifteen and seven are good numbers—aw, what’s the use?’

He decided to see what Spot was working on, on the teaching machine.