The Müller-Fokker Effect (34 page)
Ank never became the artist he knew he was. His last work is a forty-by-sixty-foot mural in the lobby of the Pismore Tractor Company of Sandusky, Ohio, an unfinished work depicting the tractor conquering the land.
Ank died in the middle of a furrow, when a scaffold collapsed, dropping him on his head. The scaffold was a modern design by the well-known Scandinavian architect, Ögivaal, who later admitted there was some flaw in the design. That ‘3’ should have been a ‘30’ after all.
The Daughters of the American Legion, as an experiment in liberalism, invited Deef John Holler to sing at one of their dinner meetings. He arrived not wearing a dinner jacket, to which some of the ladies objected. A great protocol debate ensued, lasting three and a half hours and getting all the ladies into a temper. The final decision was that he could play behind a screen, and was to stick to patriotic favorites and the cleaner sort of Stephen Foster songs. But the person sent to inform Deef John that he could come in from the kitchen now found that rigor mortis had already begun setting in.
Mac Hines persuaded the Shairps to let Dr Müller-Fokker make tapes of Marge and Spot. He then found three ‘volunteers’, created a duplicate Shairp family out of them, and put them in a duplicate house on an island he owned. Mac visited the island once a week, and it was during one of these visits, while he was peering in the window at his own personal Shairp family, that Mac’s dacron heart finally failed.
Due to legal complications and embezzlements by Mac’s bright young men, his estate was modest. It was left to the Shairps, but their duplicates contested. In the end, Bob came out with a gold-headed cane, Marge with a half-filled book of green stamps, Spot with a neurotic collie which he asked Dr Fellstus to put to sleep.
Under the vet’s tutelage, ‘Willy’ Bream not only recovered his speech but became an animal sociologist, working chiefly with bears. Times were hard for the new breed of intelligent bears on the West Coast. Racists finally had what they wanted, a non-human target; unmerciful laws were passed. It was due mainly to the selfless, untiring efforts of Dr Bream that bears were first admitted to the Forestry Service, to become useful to, without being used by, mankind.
Spot quarreled with his father and left home to drift around the country. When last heard from he was traveling with gasoline gypsies, stealing this rare commodity in one town to sell it to stations in the next.
Marge and Bob quarreled often and bitterly. She left him finally to go back to television work. But her TV career (such as it was, walk-ons in space comedies: ‘Listen, Mabel, you and I can sneak into the air lock and watch their “stag party” from there…’) came to an abrupt end when HV came along. Holovision revealed a fatal third dimension to her jaw that reminded one reviewer of Mussolini.
Bob worked at odd jobs while he pottered around with writing. In trying to set down a few ideas about his ‘jelly days’ dream, he ended up writing (under the name of ‘Brad Shairp’)
THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
. Published in his sixtieth year, it was widely unreceived.
A few more years went by. In Southeast Asia, a container of thirty human skeletons arrived. The remains, which could be identified by their rags as members of the long-defunct Pink Barrettes, had been shuffled by Modulog to upward of a thousand wrong destinations.
A new generation grew up. Brad Shairp became the first prophet of Practical Mysticism. Besides the fringe groups who took it up (the book became a film, a musical, cocktail napkins, records, and a holovision serial in which Marge had a small part) there came to be a serious group of believers, kids who were cleancut, blonde-haired, utterly without humour about this humorless world. They wore plain uniforms and marched in massive demonstrations against any authority available.
There were a few incidents: a church meeting broken up by Plain Shirts, a psychiatrist roughed up and his files burnt. The prophet reprimanded them for these in his address (at a massive rally in Minneapolis) on the thirty-fifth anniversary of his first death.
‘My little uncles and aunts,’ he said, opening his arms to them, ‘ours is not the way of war or the way of peace, ours is not the way of love or the way of hate. Ours is the way of studied indifference.
‘If God can do anything, which he can, then what is the point of living—or dying? All is, and all is true. That which is not true is not, and even that is “cannot be”. We are…’
Some say it was his wife that fired the shot that killed him. Others say it was a lunatic bear.
(Note: So-called astronauts, cosmonauts excepted)
The entire Nicene Creed (Apostles’ Creed) has 22 articles of faith. This abridged version has only seven:
I believe Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified (to death) and was buried. He rose again on the third day, and ascended into Heaven.
It can easily be seen that, if belief or disbelief is allowed for each of the seven, there are the seeds here for 2
7
, or 128 alternative creeds (the full version would generate over four million alternatives). The 128 include the above and its complete negation, and 126 other permutations of belief and skepticism. Many of them would be interesting as springboards for new religions. One may admit that Christ died, was buried, and rose again, but deny that he ascended. One may believe that he died, was buried and ascended while denying that he rose. One may affirm his burial, rising and ascension while rejecting the possibility of an actual death, and so on. One fascinating variation holds that all is true except his suffering under Pontius Pilate; while another finds this the only truth in a pack of lies.
Practical Mysticists, claiming God as the creator of heaven, earth, and self-contradiction, refuse to make a choice, but insist on embracing all 128 creeds (and all others besides). All is ambiguity, they maintain. And while agreeing with Aquinas that ‘even God cannot contradict Himself’, they hold also the opposite view.
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Novels
The Reproductive System
(1968) (aka
Mechasm
)
The Muller-Fokker Effect
(1970)
Roderick
(1980)
Roderick At Random
(1983)
Tik-Tok
(1983)
Bugs
(1989)
Wholly Smokes
Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy
(1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning
(1977)
Alien Accounts
(1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra
(1984)
DedicationMaps: The Uncollected John Sladek
(2001)
To Pearl Peace, M.A.
and
Doc Sam H Smith
John Sladek (1937 - 2000)
John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock's groundbreaking
New Worlds
magazine. Sladek began writing SF with 'The Happy Breed', which appeared in Harlan Ellison's seminal anthology
Dangerous Visions
in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF's most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include
The Muller Fokker Effect
,
Roderick
and
Tik Tok
, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 1971
All rights reserved.
The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11058 8
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
*
Must? See table in Appendix I, p. 222.
*
Camp Concentration,
Thomas M. Disch.
*
That came later: Songs by a gospel choir unblushingly called the Holy Smokes; a slapstick interpretation of the story of Job; a family tumbling troupe billed as the WingSd Michaels (formerly the Flying Fettas); an Irish tenor/harpist; assorted female impersonators, midgets and interpretive strippers; all run by an
MC
called Peter Saint who told old ‘Heaven’ jokes (‘A funny thing happened to me on my way here tonight—I died…Die? Thought I’d laugh,’ etc.) to keep the celestial sphere rolling along.
*
Knows Many Ways was his name. Every Indian tribe has its Harvard graduate; the Utopi were no exception. ‘Knows’ had gone to Harvard and majored (under Hackendorf) in anthropology.
†
Or: The seven-fold table of truth. See Appendix II.
*
Nose-picking is the mark of an enquiring mind. Had Alexander Fleming been more fastidious, he could never have (summarizing his chain of research) ‘Put in his thumb and pulled out penicillin.’
