The Steam-Driven Boy (7 page)

There was nothing to plunder, and only the pseudostomach of the Spore to burn. Seizing torches, the crowd set fire to the Spore, which immediately disgorged them on a desert plain.

He had been pent up too long, and now he milled about, frustrated. Great droves of him threw down their satchels and wandered away, weeping, to die cowards’ deaths. A few of him, however, took up the abandoned luggage and began piling it in great heaps. They began to quarrel over whether to plunder these satchels or burn them, and soon they were battling furiously.

It was difficult to tell friend from foe in the mêlée of fists and torches. Friend killed friend, and foe burned foe, until the sun went down on their madness. The last of them fell asleep by the embers of his late allies.

Her name-badge read ‘Melissa Forbes’. She had long, ash-blonde hair and a lab coat that fitted well over soft breasts and hips. She was shaking him awake.

‘Doctor, get up. We have work to do.’

‘Hmm? Oh yes. Must have fallen asleep over the Fromminger equations. But who wouldn’t?’ He grinned, and Melissa caught her breath. Dr Peter O’Hare was well aware of the power of his crooked grin. ‘Now where were we?’

‘We must save the universe from certain destruction,’ she said throatily. ‘Two parallel universes have got off course. They will collide in minutes, exploding into a drop of pure energy, unless –’

‘Do you mean – ?’ he gasped, struggling into his own lab coat. One side had been cut away, to accommodate the satchel he always seemed to carry.

‘Yes, Doctor. Only you can find a way out.’

A few calculations on his slide rule, and the scientist had done so. ‘We will each go back into the past of one of the universes. There we will make the necessary adjustments to ensure that the two will never meet. Alas, we would never be able to return.’

‘Then I can tell you,’ she sobbed. ‘Doctor, I love you.’ A bright tear ran down her cheek and splashed into the test tube she grasped.

‘Do you mean – ?’ he gasped, and took her in his arms.

‘No.’ She pushed him away. ‘There isn’t time, darling. If only you could give me some token of remembrance – say that satchel.’

Peter turned away to hide his own emotion, and as he did so, he realized the lab had only three walls! Where the fourth should have been
was a dark void, filled with hostile, gleaming eyes. It was a trap, then. How well he knew the Lumpkinite police, with their combination lineup and psychodrama!

Snatching up a convenient gun, Peter fired into the crowd. ‘Sic semper tyrannus!’ he cried, leaping for the stage door.

‘All well and good,’ he said, pocketing the weapon, ‘but how am I to get out of this hell?’

He realized for the first time that the incessant drumming had stopped. Those savages were surely up to some devilment, he thought.

A white man stepped out of a thicket. He wore a white, flowing robe and had a dissipated look about him.

‘Are you by any chance the White God?’ asked Peter.

‘I am Virgil, come to guide you out of this hell.’

‘Great Dante’s ghost! What do they call this place, O noble Mantuan?’

The poet looked blank for a moment. ‘Oh, the Slough of Despond, I guess. Here, Pilgrim, let me carry thy burden.’

‘Hold this instead,’ snarled Peter, and pumped eight slugs into Virgil. The poet assumed his true shape and scuttled away.

Adrian lay tied up in the alley behind the rocket terminal. As he loosened his bonds, Peter related the case to him.

‘Rub your wrists to restore circulation, while I explain. They tied me up, too, and blindfolded me. They took me to another planet, but I counted the turns the space ship made, so I could find my way back. They’re an unscrupulous gang of servo-mechanisms, all right. The old phonograph record was just a blind. What they really wanted was the satchel itself.’

‘The satchel?’

‘It’s an antique, worth millions. The owner was stealing it from himself, to collect the insurance. But I wasn’t sure, so I hid the old phonograph record.’

‘Quick thinking, chief. Where did you hide it?’

‘In the most obvious place –
Annie’s old phonograph
.’

‘Amazing! But how did you know he wasn’t the real Virgil?’ asked Adrian.

‘He gave himself away when he mentioned the Slough of Despond. You see, William Faulkner didn’t invent the name until years
after
the
real
John Bunyan’s death. From there on, the rest was easy.’

Peter punched the dents out of Adrian’s green hat and handed it to him. He held a pocket mirror while Adrian put on the hat. Then Peter reloaded his gun and put eight slugs in him.

Well, that’s the spy game, he thought. The good die young. You never get rich, but you have your kicks. One week the Arcrusian space pirates get out of hand, and the next week, at about the same time, something rises out of the sea to nibble at Los Angeles.

I’ll miss old Earth, though. Along about now it’s turning into a ball of flame, as Lumpkin goes to war.

Chuckling, he pushed open the door of Annie’s Earthside Bar.

1987
AD
.

‘I don’t know,’ said James, lifting himself from the cushions scattered like bright leaves on the floor. ‘I can’t say that I’m really, you know,
happy
. Gin or something phoney?’

‘Aw, man, don’t give me decisions, give me drink,’ said Porter. He lay across the black, tufted chaise that he called James’s ‘shrink couch’.

‘Gin it is, then.’ James thumbed a button, and a martini glass, frosty and edible-looking, slid into the wall niche and filled. Holding it by the stem, he passed it to Porter, then raised his shaggy brows at Marya.

‘Nada,’ she said. She was sprawled in a ‘chair’, really a piece of sculpture, and one of her bare feet had reached out to touch Porter’s leg.

James made himself a martini and looked at it with distaste. If you broke this glass, he thought, it would not leave any sharp edges to, say, cut your wrists on.

‘What was I saying? Oh – I can’t say I’m really happy, but then I’m not – uh –’

‘Sad?’ volunteered Marya, peering from under the brim of her deerstalker.

‘Depressed. I’m not depressed. So I must be happy,’ he finished, and hid his confusion behind the glass. As he sipped, he looked her over, from her shapely calves to her ugly brown deerstalker. Last year at this time, she’d been wearing a baseball cap, blue with gold piping. It was easy to remember it, for this year all the girls in the Village were wearing baseball caps. Marya Katyovna was always ahead of the pack, in her dress as well as in her paintings.

‘How do you know you’re happy?’ she said. ‘Last week, I thought I was happy, too. I’d just finished my best work, and I tried to drown myself. The Machine pulled the drain. Then I was sad.’

‘Why did you try to kill yourself?’ James asked, trying to keep her in focus.

‘I had this idea that after a perfect work, the artist should be destroyed. Dürer used to destroy the plates of his engravings, after a few impressions.’

‘He did it for money,’ muttered Porter.

‘All right then, like that architect in Arabia. After he created his
magnum opus
, the Sultan had him blinded, so he couldn’t do any cheap copies. See what I mean? An artist’s life is supposed to lead toward his masterpiece, not away from it.’

Porter opened his eyes and said, ‘Exist! The end of life is life. Exist, man, that’s all you gotta do.’

‘That sounds like cheap existentialism,’ she snarled, withdrawing her
foot. ‘Porter, you are getting more and more like those damned Mussulmen.’

Porter smiled angrily and closed his eyes.

It was time to change the subject.

‘Rave you heard the one about the Martian who thought he was an earthman?’ James said, using his pleasant-professional tone. ‘Well, he went to his psychiatrist –’

As he went on with the joke, he studied the two of them. Marya was no worry, even with her dramatic suicide attempts. But Porter was a mess.

O. Henry Porter was his full adopted name, after some minor earlier writer. Porter was a writer, too, or had been. Up to a few months ago, he’d been considered a genius – one of the few of the twentieth century.

Something had happened. Perhaps it was the general decline in reading. Perhaps there was an element of self-defeat in him. For whatever reason, Porter had become little more than a vegetable. Even when he spoke, it was in the cheapest cliches of the old ‘Hip’ of twenty years ago. And he spoke less and less.

Vaguely, James tied it in with the Machines. Porter had been exposed to the therapeutic environment machines longer than most, and perhaps his genius was entangled with whatever they were curing. James had been too long away from his practice to guess how this was, but he recalled similar baby/bathwater cases.

‘“So that’s why it glows in the dark”,’ James finished. As he’d expected, Marya laughed, but Porter only forced a smile, over and above his usual smirk of mystical bliss.

‘It’s an old joke,’ James apologized.

‘You are an old joke,’ Porter enunciated. ‘A headshrinker without no heads to shrink. What the hell do you do all day?’

‘What’s eating you?’ said Marya to the ex-writer. ‘What brought you up from the depths?’

James fetched another drink from the wall niche. Before bringing it to his lips, he said. ‘I think I need some new friends.’

As soon as they were gone, he regretted his boorishness. Yet somehow there seemed to be no reason for acting human any more. He was no longer a psychiatrist, and they were not his patients. Any little trauma he might have wreaked would be quickly repaired by their Machines. Even so, he’d have made an extra effort to sidestep the neuroses of his friends if he were not able to dial FRIENDS and get a new set.

Only a few years had passed since the Machines began seeing to the happiness, health and continuation of the human race, but he could barely remember life before Them. In the dusty mirror of his unused memory, there remained but a few clear spots. He recalled his work as a psychiatrist on the Therapeutic Environment tests.

He recalled the argument with Brody.

‘Sure, they work on a few test cases. But so far these gadgets haven’t
done anything a qualified psychiatrist couldn’t do,’ said James.

‘Agreed,’ said his superior. ‘but they haven’t made any mistakes, either. Doctor, these people are cured. Morever, they’re happy!’

Frank envy was written all over Bro Brody’s heavy face. James knew his superior was having trouble with his wife again.

‘But, Doctor,’ James began, ‘these people are not being taught to deal with their environment. Their environment is learning to deal with them. That isn’t medicine, it’s spoon-feeding!

‘When someone is depressed, he gets a dose of Ritalin, bouncy tunes on the Muzik, and some dear friend drops in on him unexpectedly. If he is manic or violent, he gets Thorazine, sweet music, melancholy stories on TV, and maybe a cool bath. If he’s bored, he gets excitement; if he’s frustrated, he gets something to break; if –’

Brady interrupted. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let me ask you the sixty-four-dollar question: Could you do better?’

No one could do better. The vast complex of Therapeutic Environment Machines which grew up advanced Medicine a millennium in a year. The government took control, to ensure that anyone of however modest means could have at his disposal the top specialists in the country, with all the latest data and techniques. In effect, these specialists were on duty round-the-clock in each patient’s home, keeping him alive, healthy, and reasonably happy.

Nor were they limited to treatment. The Machines had extensions clawing through the jungles of the world, spying on witch-doctors and learning new medicines. Drug and dietary research became their domain, as did scientific farming and birth control. By 1985, when it became manifest that machines could and did run everything better, and that nearly everyone in the country wanted to be a patient, the U.S. government capitulated. Other nations followed suit.

By now, no one worked at all, so far as James knew. They had one and only one duty – to be happy.

And happy they were. One’s happiness was guaranteed, by every relay and transistor from those that ran one’s air-conditioner right up to those in the chief complex of computers called MEDCENTRAL in Washington – or was it the Hague, now? James had not read a newspaper since people had stopped killing each other, since the news had dwindled to weather and sports. In fact, he’d stopped reading the newspaper when the M.D. Employment Wanted ads began to appear.

There were no jobs, only Happiness Jobs – make-work invented by the Machines. In such a job, one could never find an insoluble, or even difficult problem. One finished one’s daily quota without tiring one’s mind or body. Work was no longer work, it was therapy, and, as such, it was constantly rewarding.

Happiness, normality. James saw the personalities of all people drifting downward, like so many different snowflakes falling at last into
the common, shapeless mound.

‘I’m drunk, that’s all,’ he said aloud. ‘Alcohol’s a depressant. Need another drink.’