The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (30 page)

‘I should have killed you when I had the chance,’ Smilax growled, baring his teeth in a grimace.

Cal shoved him back and grinned. ‘It’s you who’ll play dead dog Toto !’

‘Die !’ snapped Smilax, accompanying this with another shove.

‘After you !’ retorted Cal, shoving him back.

They continued to shove one another and trade insults in one corner of the room. In a second corner, Aurora still lay unconscious. Elsewhere lay scattered robotic parts, including the severed head of ‘Kurt’, whose face displayed only rows of neatly-spaced stars.

‘Down, boy !’

Giving one final shove, Cal flung the doctor free of the weapon, then aimed it at him.

‘All right !’ Smilax screamed. ‘All right ! Go ahead ! Shoot me !’

Cal threw down the weapon. ‘I don’t need this,’ he said, ‘to bring you to heel.’

Laughing, Smilax scooped up the severed leg of a robot and pitched it at him. It caught Cal across the forehead, and he fell backwards into a pile of junk. He was only dimly aware of the doctor’s fumbling a pistol from a drawer of the desk. A shot rang out. Cal hit the floor. He looked up in time to see the tail of Smilax’s white coat disappear around the edge of the doorway. Cal jumped to his feet and ran after him. Springing into the hall, he found himself in a labyrinth of unmarked passages.

The architecture in this part of the building seemed not to be a fixed structure, but a kind of dynamic principle. Varying accord-ding to some obscure formula of its own, it altered shapes and sizes constantly. Walls advanced, turned, retreated or collapsed, ceilings buckled and bulged, floors tilted alarmingly or dropped away like elevators. A door might lead to a room fifty stories high, or to one only an inch deep, or it might be false.

One pair of identical rooms contained a window between them, so that, gazing from one monotony of office furniture to the next, Cal wondered for a second at this curious mirror that failed to reflect him. He hurried out, and as he stepped over the threshold, the room behind him collapsed like a card castle.

As he stepped on it, a stairway might become a floor, a ramp, or an escalator. At any time an entire room might be given a quarter turn, might be tilted on its side, might shrink or swell to some new shape. Stairways became floors, ramps, escalators; they led to closets or twisted back upon themselves. From time to time Cal glimpsed the white-coated figure of the doctor; the gap between them was not closing. They made their way upward.

Cal passed through a final trapdoor to the roof, and there was nothing more above but the star-pierced firmament. The roof resembled nothing so much as a giant parking lot of perhaps a hundred acres, with here and there a dim yellow glow from a string of jury-rigged lights. In place of cars there were regularly-spaced, bulky stacks of lumber and crated machinery, covered with canvas. Cal could see, in the distance, fork lifts moving to and fro. Otherwise, nothing moved. There was no sign of Smilax.

Cal crept from shadow to shadow until he reached the edge of the roof. Curious, he peered over—and froze. There were

trucks and tanks moving down there. He could obscure the largest ones with the ball of his thumb. It was at least fifty stories to the ground.

A shot rang out and Cal threw himself flat, then began crawling rapidly towards one pf the stacks of lumber.

All at once an engine started up somewhere near at hand. A spotlight came on, picking out Smilax crouching on top of a pile of crates. The surgeon threw up one hand to protect his eyes. Another spotlight came on. Under the roar of the motor, Cal could hear a number of voices in excited argument. After a moment the second light went off again. Smilax stood as if transfixed by the single beam, the gun hanging limp in his hand.

A shadow passed overhead and Cal looked up. A crane boom was swinging towards Smilax. The doctor saw it too, and began to whimper. ‘It is the Porteus effect ! The System has gone beserk ! It’s going to turn on its master, just as I knew it would !’ The boom slowed, but kept coming. ‘Help !’ Smilax begged. ‘Master, don’t punish me !’

The boom stopped, and started moving away, and Smilax suddenly took courage.

‘Go ahead, try to kill me !’ he screamed, jumping up and down and shaking his fist. ‘I defy you, you nut-and-bolt nightmare !
I’m
the master here, even Potter and Aurora know that. I alone can control you—with these !’ He tore off his rimless glasses and waved them aloft. They shone in the harsh light. The strangely-shadowed, naked face of Smilax bared its teeth and growled.

The crane boom moved in his direction once again, and now its clamshell lowered towards him like a giant, cruel jaw. Smilax shrieked and scampered down off the pile of packing cases, and, just as if it had not realized this, the clamshell seized the pile and lifted it.

‘Haha, did you think you had me? You filthy, clumsy monster, you missed ! All right, go ahead and turn on your creator ! If I cannot control you no one shall—ever !’ He flung down the glasses and crushed them under his heel.

‘Hahaha ! Down with the System ! Down with the machine !’ he bayed, and began to caper in a circle, almost like a puppy chasing its tail. ‘To hell with cats ! Down with Albert Payson Terhune ! Screw Lassie ! Piss on lamp-posts !’

The pile of boxes fell, suddenly, barely missing him, and

there was a splintering crash and the clamshell came down on top of them. Smilax leapt away and turned to bark furiously at the wreckage. The tarpaulin stirred slightly, and from the shadows under it came an ominous clicking. It was as the sound of many knitting needles knitting many dog sweaters—or dog shrouds.

Cal shivered.

‘No ! No !’ shrieked Smilax. ‘Good boy. Down. Nice System.’

The spotlight followed him as he backed away towards the edge of the roof. ‘No ! No ! Stay away !’ he called, throwing one leg over the railing. ‘Stay away from me !’ But the clicking sound seemed to leave the wreckage and move through the darkness after him, and now it was accompanied by a faint, quavering murmur, high-pitched and eerie.

‘Stay away !’ he screamed one last time, then threw himself over the edge. Cal rushed to the rail and looked down. He could see nothing of Smilax, but hear his faint scream: ‘Bowowowowowowowow !’

The spotlight remained fixed on the splice where he’d gone over. Into its beam a moment later, clicking ominously, marched a swarm of little girls in red-white-and-blue spangles. Mewing as they toddled, two gross of Wompler’s Walking Babies followed Smilax over the edge.

The motor of the crane died. The spotlight swung round to pick out the driver, Aurora. She was wearing glasses.

‘Are you all right?’ she and Cal shouted at the same time. She climbed down from the cab and ran towards him. Cal ran towards her.

‘Get that godamned spotlight out !’ shouted an argumentative voice.

‘But, Pop, no one can see if—’

‘I don’t want any ifs. We got to economize somewhere. Out !’

Stumbling along in the darkness, Cal and Aurora ran on towards one another.

Cal and Aurora were in New York, some weeks later, holding hands in front of a QUIDNAC machine.

‘
DEARLY BELOVED
,’ it typed, ‘
WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY
…’

Much had happened since the death of Smilax. The dragon was slain, the frog turned into a prince, and the pudding got off the end of the nose. Or that was the way Grandison Wompler, the new President of the United States, spoke of it. In any case, the Reproductive System had become, under the guidance of Cal and Aurora, a friend to man.

Cal had asked his fiancée how it was she’d guessed the secret of Smilax’s glasses—in the nick of time.

‘I had plenty of time to think, while I was lying there, playing unconscious,’ she said. ‘So I tried to combine our two theories. You thought the cue must be some sort of talisman, while I was sure it was something personal and idiosyncratic. The only thing that fitted both theories had to be that pair of rimless glasses. I suppose the System had some way or another of testing them by shooting light through them.

‘When you two left, I looked all over for a spare pair. Then it occurred to me, he wouldn’t dare keep a spare pair around, lest someone should get them. At the same time, he’d have to have access to another pair, because otherwise he’d have to stop being God while he went to an optician. So I asked the System to make me a duplicate pair to his prescription, and it did, in seconds. Then I was God. I took the elevator to the roof, where I met the Womplers and Elwood Trivian and so on.’

The System had made considerable changes in the political look of things. Upon his election, Grandison Wompler had embarked on a speaking tour of the Russian provinces, speaking chiefly before ladies’ clubs. At the same time, the new Premier of the Soviet Union had engaged to speak to the ladies of Nebraska and Iowa. These were not cultural exchange programmes, but the main duties of the heads of state now.

After all, they had no more paperwork to do—ever. The System had taken care of that.

In fact it had taken over all the jobs no one wanted to do. The System collected garbage and turned it into valuable chemicals like pearls and perfume and maple sugar and finger-paints.

It did all the dishes in all the homes of the world. It filed all the papers no one wanted to read, and it read them, too. It took care of other distasteful jobs like typing, and like preventing war.

All the typists and government clerks had at first been unhappy about their unemployment. They had, in fact, marched in protest on the System Central in Washington. But the Reproductive System knew very well these women didn’t want to break their nails every day on typewriter keys; it found them husbands. It knew these men didn’t want to sit around in offices growing lardy-assed and fluorescent-pale; it gave them service medals of pure gold, which they were able to pawn for trips to Mexico.

But perhaps more important even than the happiness of former government clerks was the prevention of war. And this was accomplished by Project
LULU
(Longrange Unilateral Locking Up). It would lock up, say, a warhead or tank or flamethrower from each nation. Then it would weld up the locks. Then it would pour concrete over the whole thing. Then it would apply very expensive armour plate to this giant block of concrete. Then, if the taxpayers had not tired of the whole mess, it would build sleek, extravagant atom-powered ships for the sole purpose of transporting these big blocks of concrete-preserved armament to a certain rendezvous point in the ocean, where both the US and USSR War Rafts were tethered. Each piece of armament was there attached to its nation’s War Raft by a long steel cable and lowered to the ocean floor. Thus the two nations were able to build enormous stockpiles of weaponry of the most frightening kind (enough to give their citizens a comfortable glow of security, as frightening weapons always do), but neither could pull a sneak attack. And it was always reassuring to learn that we had faster jets, or a newer kind of bomb, or twice as many bazookas at the bottom as they did.

But someone had to guard our commitment in mid-ocean, so anyone who wished to remain in the military was asked to

do his bit of guard duty on our War Raft. Of course there were a number of unpleasantnesses that made war Raft duty less than glorious. First, the American and Russian War Rafts were only a few hundred feet apart, and their occupants were entitled to fire on one another with small arms whenever they liked. Second, food consisted of fried canned peas and powdered eggs in abundance. Seasickness pills were not allotted to the troops. The minimum enlistment was five years, the minimum re-enlistment ten years. Finally, the commander of the American Raft was an almost legendary tyrant, one Jupiter Grawk, while the Russian Raft was under the command of a very old, very wicked woman, Gen. Lotte Smilax.

Yes, the System had taken on enough distasteful duties, so that now it was given the very pleasant one of marrying a hero to a heroine.

‘
DO YOU, CALVIN, TAKE AURORA TO BE YOUR LAWFULLY WEDDED WIFE
…?’

With shaking hands, Cal typed, ‘I do.’

‘I do,’ said Jim Porteus, grinning at Susie, his bride. She smiled back, with tears in her eyes. To think that he still cared for her, that he would marry her
now
, even knowing about her tonsils and everything … Susie wanted to swoon away with happiness.

Jim Porteus was not really thinking about his marriage at all. He’d thought he might as well get married; that damned machine had taken all the fun out of business and politics. He might as well turn engineer or inventor. Just now he was having an idea for an invention, in fact, that had to make him a fortune. He would call it the ‘Porteus Automatic Valet’, a dignified name for an elegant machine. It would tie one’s necktie—any knot wished, just press the button …

The minister cleared his throat. ‘And so you, Susie …?’ There was scarcely, he saw, a dry eye in the little chapel at Santa Filomena this morning. A gratifying sight. But there was no one weeping more copiously than poor Madge Suggs. He would have to comfort her, after the ceremony, the minister thought. He would tell her not to think of it as losing a daughter, but as …