The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (17 page)

Jack watched the engine, awaiting its fall. Its blue-green lights, the colour of
Calliphoridae
, shone in the afternoon haze. The engine was pushing a giant crank before it, made of twisted I-beams, whose handle was a telephone pole. The crank drove a gear system atop a derrick perched on a low building, a factory or school.

* * *

Gurgling, the row of automatic washers began its intricate ballet once more, each blocky tub hopping in place. If they started moving towards her, Daisy told herself, she’d scream. Not that it would do any good.

Just now it was a place to sit, glancing at an abandoned newspaper.

VENUS PROBE A-OK

Obscene idea. Nothing about the attack of the washermen, she noticed. There wouldn’t be, of course, anything like
Washing Crossing Delaware.

One of the machines burst into streaky-green flames.

* * *

How many preparations there were to make or keep women beautiful Brian Gallopini (Ph.D.) had never realized. Here Lady Clinge, Queen Esther, Prince Gloriani and other nobility vied for the privilege of caring for milady’s surface. Or, as at present, they vied in providing big, boxlike machines with cold cream lubricants and parfum fuels. A gross of stretch girdles had been tied together to propel a large boxy thing that the small boxy things were now winding up; a kind of giant, wingless model plane. It began to move, majestically, out of the smashed front of the shop, backwash from its great propellor whipping up a froth of lace.

* * *

In a covered wagon marked
WAGONS WEST COCKTAIL LOUNGE
, horsedrawn, moving slowly eastward, lay a stack of nude figures.

‘Dummies,’ Harry assured Cal.

The two sidekicks were astride 10¢ mechanical ponies from the supermarket, heading west. As they passed a busy casino, Harry pointed out the zombie-like creatures inside. Mindless, these pushed coins into and pulled handles of slot machines. Wheels spun, jackpots rattled, but nothing affected them. They were not clearly machines, nor yet unmistakably human. Alone, of all the fixtures of Las Vegas, these remained (though employed by a new master) outwardly unchanged. One-handedly they nibbled club sandwiches without pausing in their work.

* * *

‘Judo,’ muttered Harry admiringly, as he watched two dog-sized boxes warring, ‘or something.’ One’s shield was a bent sign on which the word
KENO
was still legible. Kenogenesis? Cal wondered. What else could turn brother against brother like this?

The dachshund of a box fought with cable cutters, nipping at the delicate legs of the other, a tall, airedale box. Armed with a ball of lead on a stick, it seemed to be trying to beat the dachshund even flatter. Would Keno cut Fido down to size? Or would Fido knock Keno into submission?

The lavender X-ray machine from a dentist’s office, buzzing angrily came to intervene. Cal dragged Harry away from the spot before, he hoped, they were both lethally dosed.

* * *

‘Kinematograph!’ cried the Professor, surveying the unfamiliar equipment of the electronics shop. ‘Phonogram! Stereophone!’ He paused before a video tape player. Having never seen television before, Brian was charmed by this old news tape of the Venus probe, running forwards and backwards like a palindrome.

* * *

Mechanical elaborations rose rococo on every side. Daisy looked at them, hardly able to focus her uncomprehending gaze. A grain elevator’s screw lifted up an incline bowling balls and dropped them through the second-story window of the

casino. Through collimating holes they fell freely to the basement kitchen where, their potential energy having become kinetic energy, their momentum was converted into impulse by their striking, one by one, the levers of a punch. Day and night it punched out aluminium frames for new cells, new cells, new cells. Along with club sandwiches, the bowling balls were pulleyed to the first floor via dumb waiter. The sandwiches were conveyed on belts to the organisms they fuelled, which ran the one-armed dynamos, while the bowling balls were rolled down a chute to the street and waiting elevator. The latter was run by clockwork gears, an hydraulic system, and, ultimately, exploding cans of sauerkraut in another part of town. These caused pistons to oscillate, driving a crank which compressed air into long cylindrical tanks. These cylinders then formed rollers for the transport of heavy objects to or from the vicinity of the elevator, where, connected to air motors, an hydraulic system and gears from a tower clock, they operated it continuously. Power to form the extruded sheet aluminium from which the frames were to be punched was provided by evacuation of the city water supply through water-wheels. The aluminium was melted down in a vat in the pet department of a nearby department store, heated by the rays of the sun concentrated through fishbowls. Scrap aluminium was dumped into this vat by a relay team of cats.

* * *

‘
NO OTHER GYM CAN MAKE THIS OFFER
!’ Harry read the sign by flashlight. ‘Eat all you want and still lose!’ It pictured men in various positions of exquisite torture: arms pulled up in crucifix position by pulley; scourged by the slapping looped belt of a machine; doubled like a foetus under a platform of crushing weights; and spread like Prometheus, liver to the sky, dumbells in the outstretched, agonizing hands.

Harry read the poster a second time. Having just climbed five flights of stairs dragging something, he needed to catch his breath.

* * *

‘O Magic Probe!’ intoned the Professor. Charmed by it, he pretended to charm it in return; he stood posed, holding his

stick like a wand above the television set. The rocket slowly backed down to earth, swallowed and extinguished its flames like a carnival performer.

‘O Levitation!’ he murmured. ‘O Dark Work of Monsieur Mesmer!’ Rhabdomancer, he let his rune-staff dip towards the sink in the corner. Aleuromancer, he scattered filings on a magnet.

‘The image of the murderer,’ he warned, ‘will appear upon the dead man’s retina!’

But now, magically, the image on the screen metamorphosed. A man smiled, then spewed beer into a glass, till it was foaming full. In another part of the shop, a jukebox was awakening.

* * *

Placing the flashlight under his chin, Harry turned it on. Daisy screamed, and he laughed.

‘It’s only me.’

‘You ought to be put in a cage,’ she grated.

‘If you take that back,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you a secret. Somebody’s dead, and I know who.’

‘Dead? Who?’

‘Cal. Poor guy had an accident.’ Harry experimented, shining the flashlight through his own fingers to show the bones. ‘A nasty fall.’

* * *

Quite suddenly, Brian was not alone. The jukeboxes were with him, playing 200
OF YOUR FAVOURITE SELECTIONS
. Their music bore him into a past of minuets and waltzes, hoedowns and patriotic marches, as they glided past him in slow turns, filling the room with light and sound.

Dapplings of cobalt blue, strawberry, celadon, ochre spun across the walls and ceiling. On one machine a panel rippled with azure, faded to orchid, then blinked scarlet fire. Chromium and aluminium and glass took up the rich tints—coral, turquoise, ruby, lime—and multiplied them, till the room rang with colour. Brian felt his face a patchwork of rose, purple, amber, felt palpable light rhythms pluck at it as guitars, reeds and sounding brass plucked at his eardrums. His delighted multicoloured lips formed the idiot words to songs, soundless in

the tumult It was glorious and he was part of it, taking his place in line as they filed towards the door. Carmine and indigo islands fled across the ceiling and walls before him, streaking towards, shrinking towards, converging on the doorway. He knew he would follow the jukebox parade almost anywhere, on and on till he became nothing more than a noise in the street.

* * *

Red light streamed down through Harry’s fingers and gleamed on something in the dust.

‘Cal dead? Gee, that’s too bad,’ said Daisy. ‘I kind of liked him.’

Harry smiled in the dark. ‘Oh, all the girls kind of liked Cal,’ he said. ‘Hey, where you going?’

‘Look, there’s something going on at the drive-in-theatre,’ she shouted back. ‘Maybe that’s where the others are.’

‘Wait up,’ he said, genuflecting to pick up the coin.

* * *

Slowly, a foldaway sofabed humped, folding itself like an inch-worm to measure slow, but luxuriously soft, progress.

* * *

Tour Paris!
urged a poster on the van of broken shoes. The poster showed the Eiffel Tower, a balloon vendor, a kiosk. Cal, lying on the bed of broken shoes, had plenty of time to think it over. The wind had been knocked out of him by a fall.

* * *

Ventriloquial sounds came from belly of
ROBO
the robot. Made from a toy mechanical set, he blinked lights in his eyes, waved stiff arms and made similar signs of amiability. He stood in the unglazed, lighted window of a toy store.

‘Hullo, Earthmen,’ he boomed at Daisy. As she passed, she peered inside, where an inferior second
ROBO
was just staggering to his feet. He had only one arm, and his head was a tin can still labelled
Harmony Pears
.

Daisy and Harry hurried on. The
ROBOS
did not say goodbye.

‘We are being held prisoner in Las Vegas,’ Cal wrote on the teletype unit, then switched it over from
SEND
to
RECV
. It paused a long moment, considering, chattering. Then it replied, ‘We are being held # (%$H) (?e)U¼½p@ wE a77 bEin@ @@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@ @@@@s’

* * *

X-ray plates were being projected on the big screen. Brian Gallopini waited, yawning, for the main feature.

At the bakery, Jack found fresh bread piled up on the loading dock. The bakery was automatically baking, but there were no trucks to take it away.

Jack had been hungry without knowing it. That, he told himself, was mob psychology. Sub-conscious stuff. What’s really inside you—in this case, nothing at yet—all the time, only you don’t know it. A secret panel flies open and the murderer is revealed. Or like an X-ray.

* * *

Yelling, waving his arms, Cal ran towards the shadowy figures. They did not turn to look at him, and his pace slowed.

They passed under a dim blue street light, an army of marching mannikins. Most wore elaborate braces and trusses, gleaming and flexing in the dimness.

He saw a telephone booth across the street. Dancing, dodging through the column gingerly, he slipped into it and lifted the receiver. Dead phone. Aphonia. Not a sound except—

Gleaming and squeaking, the army limped on into the darkness.

* * *

Zodiacal, the clock on the screen recorded
TIME REMAINING UNTIL MAIN FEATURE
. As each minutes passed, one-twelfth of the clock face disappeared. The Professor, who had never seen a film, regarded it intently, but he could not detect what happened to all the vanished sectors.

* * *

As the car swerved, slowed, bumped down steel rollers into a carwash, the Reproductive System was discovering an ice-making machine in the kitchen of the Silver Horseshoe Casino. As the car was torn in chunks and ejected in several directions, the Reproductive System was discovering in dusty cans at the television studio a number of old horror films. As Brian squinted at artificial suns in the pet department, the Reproductive System discovered a glass demonstration ‘engine’ in an auto showroom, and set about making it work.

The dummy’s smashed face and nosehole received the rain as cats crawled along upper shelves. Harry looked at a man painted to an iron wall like a bug. The Reproductive System looked at the printed characters in library books and deciphered their meaning. Then it burned them, stoking a boiler. The boiler fire was smouldering, choked as it was with the ashes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Encyclopaedia Americana, and Mrs. Thrumbold, librarian.

Grocery carts, propelled by spray cans of insecticide, roamed the aisles of the
Faresafe
supermarket, where Harry plunged his knife into a can and laughed. Cal was watching the shopping carts, but Harry, weak from fumes, fell unconscious. Cal dragged him outside, while Jack yawned at toy helicopters. Inside the freezer of the Silver Horseshoe Casino, cells with ice-picks laboured carefully, shaping gears of ice.

Jack watched the behemoth move down inclined grooves towards an enormous loop-the-loop, awaiting its fall. Daisy watched a washer burst into streaky-green flames. A child, having crawled inside a slanting, crumbled house to sleep, awoke to a strange noise.

Cal and Harry watched zombie-like creatures push coins into slot machines. Daisy watched the ascent of bowling balls, hardly able to focus her uncomprehending gaze. The late mayor of Las Vegas ascended, as his body filled with gas, to the surface of his swimming pool. A giant propellor whipped up a froth of lace.