The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (5 page)

‘What do you mean, “unable”? Where is he?’

‘In his office.’ The twins pointed out the office door.

A bitter smile rippled over the simian lip. ‘I get it. I’m not important enough for him to get up off his bacon and come out to meet, is that it? A mere four-star general is nothing, huh? I guess he only talks to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or something.’

As the twins made no reply to this, the general stepped to the office door and tried it. It was locked. Lifting a set of knuckles designed to be walked upon, he rapped smartly on the
RESTRICTED AREA
sign.

A nearby door opened, and a marine guard, bearing a submachine gun, stepped out.

‘I’m afraid you can’t go in there, general,’ he said. ‘“
NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. THIS MEANS YOU
”,’ he quoted from the quite legible sign.

‘What the hell do you mean? I got a top secret clearance. I’m supposed to be inspecting this plant. If I ain’t authorized, who is? What the christ is going on here, anyway? Smilax, you come out of there !’ He rattled the knob and pounded on the door until the guard trained his gun on him and waved him away.

‘Look,’ Grawk said to him, a more conciliatory note creeping into his voice, ‘I come seven hundred miles in that hot, stuffy helicopter to inspect Smilax’s project. You mean to tell me this freak can’t even come out of his office to talk to me?’

‘I’m afraid not, general. Dr. Smilax comes and goes at his pleasure,’ said the marine tersely. ‘If you want to contact him, you’d better forward your message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.’

‘—’ said the general. That is, he opened his mouth but no sound came forth. Purple veins began to writhe in his face, and his boiled eyes bulged.

Then he turned on his heel, emitting at the same time a short, hysterical laugh. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s see this so-called project, and get it over with.’

In one corner of the lab a considerable space had been cleared. A bulky object roughly the size of an automobile here lay

shrouded in a drop cloth. Now the Mackintosh brothers moved in to lift the cloth, folding it rapidly and expertly into a cocked hat.

‘What’s all this?’ said the general, waving at the pile of large grey boxes thus revealed. They lay on three lab tables, quivering, turning slightly on their hidden wheels as they sensed movement about them.

‘It is a self-reproducing machine,’ the twins announced. ‘A Reproductive System.’

‘Yeah? Ugly, ain’t it?’

During the week, they explained, the boxes had devoured over a ton of scrap metal, as well as a dozen oscilloscopes with attached signal generators, thirty-odd test sets, desk calculators both mechanical and electronic, a pair of scissors, an uncountable number of bottle caps, paper clips, coffee spoons and staples (for the lab and office staff liked feeding their new pet), dozens of surplus walky-talky storage batteries and a small gasoline-driven generator.

The cells had multiplied—better than doubled their original number—and had grown to various sizes, ranging from shoe-boxes and attaché cases to steamer trunk proportions. They now reproduced constantly but slowly, in various fashions. One steamer trunk emitted, every five or ten minutes, a pair of tiny boxes the size of 3 × 5 card files. Another box, of extraordinary length, seemed to be slowly sawing itself in half.

General Grawk remained unimpressed. ‘What does it do for an encore?’ he growled.

‘I don’t know much about this stuff myself,’ Grandison candidly admitted. ‘I leave all the heavy think-work to my boys here, Kurt, Karl and Cal. They know all about Endymions and revanchist doctrines, all that stuff.’

With savage glee, the general spoke to one of his WAF’s. ‘Amy, make a note. I think this one is a commy,’ he spat with disgust, ‘as well as a fairy.’

‘Let me hit him, Pop !’ bawled Louie. ‘Let me use Origami on him.’

Kurt and Karl went on explaining the system, as though they had not been interrupted.

‘It is “ergetropic”,’ Karl explained. ‘That is, it can seek and use nearly any kind of power.’ He gestured to his brother as one vaudeville partner to another.

‘It is metallotropic,’ Kurt added. ‘Some cells are oriented

more towards metal, some towards energy. May we demonstrate?’

The twins each picked up one box gently. They were the size of fat attaché cases. ‘This is a power-seeking cell,’ Karl explained. ‘That one is metal-seeking.’

The wheels of the two machines whined as they set them on the floor. One spun around and headed straight for the light socket. The other dashed about the room, sampling the legs of metal furniture, pausing to nibble at the corner of a filing cabinet. Cal shooed it away and it scooted behind a lab table, out of his reach. Between the table and the wall, he could see the box working its way along towards the far corner, towards the oyster tank.

‘Kinda cute at that,’ said the general.

One of its legs eaten through, the oyster tank collapsed. As water from it spread across the floor, the fat box outran it, heading for the door. It carried a metal wastebasket, holding it aloft in crab-claws, a hard-won trophy.

‘Stop it !’ Cal shouted. The general began to laugh.

‘Halt !’ shouted the marine guard. He fired a warning shot but the attaché case kept coming. He lowered his gun and fired directly at the little box. Bullets rang on the wastebasket. The marine emptied his gun, just as the box dashed between his polished boots and out of the door.

‘All you had to do,’ said Karl, ‘was pick it up.’

The general leaned on the table, doubled up with coarse laughter. The twins and Cal were trying to trap the other box. Excited by the gun-flashes, it scooted in circles all over the room.

‘I’ll be goddamned,’ the general kept saying. ‘Funniest thing I seen since the war.’ His weight was tipping the table, and as the boxes rushed towards him it tipped even further.

Cal cornered the energy-seeking box and bent to turn it off. He saw that the toggle switch had been damaged, apparently by a welding arc. It was a fused lump of metal on top of the box. Something else occurred to him then : there had been a lot of cells running around on the table with broken or missing switches. Odd. He would have to ask someone about that.

But just now there was nothing to do but pick this one up off the floor. Cal was frightened of it, but he was even more frightened of letting it go free.

‘Careful !’ someone shouted. ‘You’re standing in brine !’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Cal. He looked up to see the table overturn on General Grawk, the boxes sliding off …

But then the scene froze, like a film hung up in the projector. And, like a stuck film, everything shrivelled and vanished, leaving only bright white emptiness.

Cal was brought up on a farm in Minnesota. His father Codman Codman Potter, was taciturn, even for a farmer. In fact, Cal could only recall his father’s speaking to him twice in all his life. Codman seemed a bottomless reservoir of wisdom; whenever he spoke, the family went into a panic.

The awful voice sounded when Cal was eight. His mother had given him a book of Aesop’s fables, and one evening he lay on the living room floor, reading of the frogs who wanted a king. His father looked at him and said loudly :

‘There’s plenty of things you don’t learn from books. Books only ruin your eyes. It’s life that’s important, not god damned books !’

Alarmed, Cal’s mother took the book from him and burned it. He never dreamed of objecting. From then on, he merely skimmed his lessons and school, and avoided bringing home any of the hated books. At home his only lapse was glancing at the back of the cereal box: ‘Niacin, Thiamine, Riboflavin …’ Surely, he reasoned, it was all right to read, as long as he did not understand.

This idea of reading only the unreadable stayed with him until he asked his father for permission to study Latin and Greek.

‘What? If you want to go to college at all, you’ll by god become an engineer. Or else I’ll Latin you, god damn it !’

Cal went off to the Miami Institute of Technocracy, then, to become an engineer. At the station, Codman nodded goodbye.

MIT was small. There were just twenty students and one professor altogether, and in Cal’s class there were but three other students. The entire school occupied one large room above a dry-cleaning plant. In after years, Cal would always associate the smell of chemicals and the hiss of steam with Dr. Elwood Trivian.

‘You have an interest in the inimicable classics? I laud that, young man. We have, alack, no time to teach them here. They are, you cogitate, useless. I must deplore you to study science, and science alone.

‘I had a thorough grinding in the classics myself, and am today but a humble pedagod. Why, I earn less here in an entire year than I would in a single week on the railroad, steering a train ! And that takes no learning at all !’

Half-way through his course, Cal switched his major from Engrg. Arts to Biophys. Arts. He wrote his father explaining that this had more to do with life. In a sense, he was telling the truth, for it enabled him to sit next to Mary Junes, whom he loved.

Mary did not love him back; she was not likely to love him; she did not even know his name. She seemed to love Harry Stropp, their tall, thickset, swart classmate, who majored in Phys. Ed.

She was a short, chunky, tough-looking girl with a great gob of yellow hair like dirty cotton. As everyday attire she wore borrowed sweatshirts, mixed and matched with dungarees and borrowed sweatpants. She seemed addicted to black cough drops. Her breath smelt of menthol, her hands were always sticky, and her wide, sluttish mouth was stained black. Cal dreamed of pasting a kiss on those gummy lips.

He schemed to sit next to her in every class : Current events (where Dr. Trivian read his morning paper aloud), Phonics Praxis and Appreciation of Thermodynamics. Still, her nights were spent with Harry.

Barthemo Beele, the fourth member of the class and a Journalism student, published the mimeo school paper,
The MIT Worker’s Torch
. He bitterly complained of seeing Mary and Harry kiss in public, in editorials headed : ‘Is Decency Finished?’

One day Harry came down with a cold. After struggling through morning classes, he gave up and went home. Mary clicked a black cough drop deliciously, and winked at Cal.

‘What’s your name?’

Harry arose from his sickbed in a week, to find he’d lost his girl to Cal.

‘I don’t care,’ he’d say, flexing his big arm and studying it. ‘She’s not the only pebble on the beach. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.’ He remained an absolute recluse, going swimming and fishing alone, and doing lots of road-work on the roof above the schoolroom. Cal felt terribly guilty every time he heard the sound of giant, sad tennis shoes on the roof, running tirelessly.

The MIT Worker’s Torch
named Cal valedictorian of the class. On the same day, it announced the engagement of Miss Mary Junes to Barthemo Beele.

‘When did this happen?’ Cal asked her, holding up the mimeo sheet in a trembling hand.

‘Oh, you know that night last week, when you had to study?’

‘But—
engaged?
’

‘Yup. Right after graduation, me and Barty are going to live somewheres out West, where he’s got a swell job as a editor already. Isn’t that great?’

Great. The next few days Cal knew not what he did. He wept unashamedly, tore up all her notes (‘Can I borrow your sweatshirt, darling? Thanx, M.’), and took long walks, at times avoiding all meaningful places, at times haunting them. He began to feel he might become a dedicated scientist, a seeker after truth.

Most of the hundred foundations, academies and labs to which he applied for a research grant replied that they had no need for holders of the rather special degree, Bachelor of Biophysics Arts. The Wompler Research Laboratory, however, sent a letter expressing interest and an IBM card to fill out and return. In the tiny box on the card where he was to write the name of his school, there was only room for the abbreviation ‘MIT’. He was hired by return mail.

The MIT Worker’s Torch
kept up its morality campaign (now directed against its editor and his fiancée) to the last day. Dr. Trivian gave a stirring Commencement speech to his four new graduates, though most of it was drowned out by the hiss of steam from below, where the shirts lived.

* * *

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Cal said. It seemed to him that he was still trying to pick up the runaway cell, but bright white clouds kept getting in his way. Steam?

All at once he realized the clouds were real; he was looking at the sky. He rolled over and sat up, hands buried in cool grass.

A file drawer marked ‘Secret’ scooted past, pursued by a mob of people in white coats. ‘Stop it ! Catch it !’

How odd, he thought with a tolerant smile. Chasing file drawers. He began to walk around the building. Other boxes, made of garbage cans, cabinets, bent signs, swarmed over the green, pursuing and pursued by human figures. Near the fence a group of marines had set up a light machine gun. Now they were defending it desperately against the slow, blunt, methodical attacks of a kiln and a small safe, in tandem. Finally a fork-lift truck rushed in, seized the gun and apparently digested it.