Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (34 page)

I called April first. Miss Sibyl said, “Oh, yes, there’s been a slight delay. Mrs. Sphinx had to go to Salem for a tryout. A witch-burning. She’ll be back next week.”

I called April fifteenth. Miss Sibyl’s bright young secretary told me that there was some delay getting the contracts typed. It seemed that BBDO was reorganizing its legal department. On May first Sibyl & Sphinx told me that the contracts had arrived and that
their
legal department was looking them over.

I had to take a menial job in June to keep body and soul together. I worked in the stencil department of a network. At least once a week a script would come in about a bargain with the Devil that was signed, sealed and delivered before the opening commercial. I used to laugh at them. After four months of negotiation I was still threadbare.

I saw the Devil once, bustling down Park Avenue. He was running for Congress and was very busy being jolly and hearty with the electorate. He addressed every cop and doorman by his first name. When I spoke to him he got a little frightened, thinking I was a Communist or worse. He didn’t remember me at all.

In July, all negotiations stopped; everybody was away on vacation. In August everybody was overseas for some Black Mass Festival. In September Sibyl & Sphinx called me to their office to sign the contract. It was thirty-seven pages long, and fluttered with pasted-in corrections and additions. There were half a dozen tiny boxes stamped on the margin of every page.

“If you only knew the work that went into this contract,” Sibyl & Sphinx told me with satisfaction.

“It’s kind of long, isn’t it?”

“It’s the short contracts that make all the trouble. Initial every box, and sign on the last page. All six copies.”

I initialed and signed. When I was finished, I didn’t feel any different. I’d expected to start tingling with money, success, and happiness.

“Is it a deal now?” I asked.

“Not until
he’s
signed it.”

“I can’t hold out much longer.”

“We’ll send it over by messenger.”

I waited a week and then called.

“You forgot to initial one of the boxes,” they told me.

I went to the office and initialed. After another week I called.

“
He
forgot to initial one of the boxes,” they told me that time.

On October first I received a special-delivery parcel. I also received a registered letter. The parcel contained the signed, sealed and delivered contract between me and the Devil. I could at last be rich, successful, and happy. The registered letter was from BBDO and informed me that in view of my failure to comply with Clause 27-A of the contract, it was considered terminated, and I was due for collection at their convenience. I rushed down to Sibyl & Sphinx.

“What’s Clause 27-A?” they asked.

We looked it up. It was the clause that required me to use the services of the Devil at least once every six months.

“What’s the date of the contract?” Sibyl & Sphinx asked.

We looked it up. The contract was dated March first, the day I’d had my first talk with the Devil in his office.

“March, April, May …” Miss Sibyl counted on her fingers. “That’s right. Seven months have elapsed. Are you sure you didn’t ask for
any
service?”

“How could I? I didn’t have a contract.”

“We’ll see about this,” Mrs. Sphinx said grimly. She called BBDO and had a spirited argument with the Devil and his legal department. Then she hung up. “He says you shook hands on the deal March first,” she reported. “He was prepared in good faith to go ahead with his side of the bargain.”

“How could I know? I didn’t have a contract.”

“Didn’t you ask for anything?”

“No. I was waiting for the contract.”

Sibyl & Sphinx called in their legal department and presented the case.

“You’ll have to arbitrate,” the legal department said, and explained that agents are forbidden to act as their client’s attorney.

I hired the legal firm of Wizard, Warlock, Vodoo, Dowser & Hag (99 Wall Street, Exchange 3-1900) to represent me before the Arbitration Board (479 Madison Avenue, Lexington 5-1900). They asked for a two-hundred-dollar retainer plus 20 percent of the contract’s benefits. I’d managed to save thirty-four dollars during the four months I was working in the stencil department. They waived the retainer and went ahead with the Arbitration preliminaries.

On November fifteenth the network demoted me to the mail room, and I seriously contemplated suicide. Only the fact that my soul was in jeopardy in an arbitration stopped me.

The case came up December twelfth. It was tried before a panel of three impartial Arbitrators and took all day. I was told they’d mail me their decision. I waited a week and called Wizard, Warlock, Voodoo, Dowser & Hag.

“They’ve recessed for the Christmas holidays,” they told me.

I called January second.

“One of them’s out of town.”

I called January tenth.

“He’s back, but the other two are out of town.”

“When will I get a decision?”

“It could take months.”

“How do you think my chances look?”

“Well, we’ve never lost an arbitration.”

“That sounds pretty good.”

“But there can always be a first time.”

That sounded pretty bad. I got scared and figured I’d better copper my bets. I did the sensible thing and hunted through the telephone directory until I found Seraphim, Cherubim and Angel, 666 Fifth Avenue, Templeton 4-1900. I called them. A bright young woman answered.

“Seraphim, Cherubim and Angel. Good morning.”

“May I speak to Mr. Angel, please?”

“He’s on another line. Will you wait?”

I’m still waiting.

W
e will conclude this first semester of Antiquities 107,” Professor Paul Muni said, “with a reconstruction of an average day in the life of a mid-twentieth-century inhabitant of the United States of America, as Great L.A. was known five hundred years ago.

“Let us refer to him as Jukes, one of the proudest names of the times, immortalized in the Kallikak-Jukes-feud sagas. It is now generally agreed that the mysterious code letters JU, found in the directories of Hollywood East, or New York City as it was called then—viz., JU 6-0600 or JU 2-1914—indicate in some manner a genealogical relationship to the powerful Jukes dynasty.

“The year is 1950. Mr. Jukes, a typical ‘loner’—i.e., ‘bachelor’—lives on a small ranch outside New York. He rises at dawn, dresses in spurred boots, Daks slacks, rawhide shirt, gray flannel waistcoat and black knit tie. He arms himself with a Police Positive revolver or a Frontier Six Shooter and goes out to the Bar-B-Q to prepare his breakfast of curried plankton or converted algae. He may or may not surprise juvenile delinquents or red Indians on his ranch in the act of lynching a victim or rustling his automobiles, of which he has a herd of perhaps one hundred and fifty.

“These hooligans he disperses after single combat with his fists. Like all twentieth-century Americans, Jukes is a brute of fantastic strength, giving and receiving sledgehammer blows, or being battered by articles of furniture with inexhaustible resilience. He rarely uses his gun on such occasions; it is usually reserved for ceremonial rituals.

“Mr. Jukes journeys to his job in New York City on horseback, in a sports car (a kind of open automobile), or on an electric trolley car. He reads his morning newspaper, which will feature such stories as: ‘The Discovery of the North Pole,’ ‘The Sinking of the Luxury Liner
Titanic
,’ ‘The Successful Orbiting of Mars by Manned Space Capsule,’ or ‘The Strange Death of President Harding.’

“Jukes works in an advertising agency situated on Madison Avenue (now Sunset Boulevard East), which, in those days, was a rough muddy highway, traversed by stagecoaches, lined with gin mills and populated by bullies, corpses, and beautiful night-club performers in abbreviated dresses. Jukes is an agency man, dedicated to the guidance of taste, the improvement of culture, the election of public officers, and the selection of national heroes.

“His office on the twentieth floor of a towering skyscraper is decorated in the characteristic style of the mid-twentieth century. He has a rolltop desk, a Null-G, or Free Fall chair and a brass spittoon. Illumination is by Optical Maser light pumps. Large fans suspended from the ceiling cool him in the summer, and an infrared Franklin stove warms him in the winter.

“The walls are decorated with rare pictures executed by such famous painters as Michelangelo, Renoir, and Sunday. Alongside the desk is a tape recorder, which he uses for dictation. His words are later written down by a secretary using a pen and carbon ink. (It has, by now, been clearly demonstrated that the typewriting machine was not developed until the onset of the Computer Age at the end of the twentieth century.)

“Mr. Jukes’s work involves the creation of the spiritual slogans that uplift the consumer half of the nation. A few of these have come down to us in more or less fragmentary condition, and those of you who have taken Professor Rex Harrison’s course, Linguistics 916, know the extraordinary difficulties we are encountering in our attempts to interpret: ‘Good to the Last Drop’ (for ‘good’ read ‘God’?); ‘Does She or Doesn’t She?’ (what?); and ‘I Dreamed I Went to the Circus in My Maidenform Bra’ (incomprehensible).

“At midday, Mr. Jukes takes a second meal, usually a community affair with thousands of others in a giant stadium. He returns to his office and resumes work, but you must understand that conditions were not ideal for concentration, which is why he was forced to labor as much as four and six hours a day. In those deplorable times there was a constant uproar of highway robberies, hijackings, gang wars and other brutalities. The air was filled with falling bodies as despairing brokers leaped from their office windows.

“Consequently it is only natural for Mr. Jukes to seek spiritual peace at the end of the day. This he finds at a ritual called a ‘cocktail party.’ He and many other believers stand close-packed in a small room, praying aloud, and filling the air with the sacred residues of marijuana and mescaline. The women worshippers often wear vestments called ‘cocktail dresses,’ otherwise known as ‘basic black.’

“Afterward, Mr. Jukes may take his last meal of the day in a night club, an underground place of entertainment where raree shows are presented. He is often accompanied by his ‘expense account,’ a phrase difficult to interpret. Dr. David Niven argues most cogently that it was cant for ‘a woman of easy virtue,’ but Professor Nelson Eddy points out that this merely compounds the difficulty, since no one today knows what ‘a woman of easy virtue’ was.

“Finally, Mr. Jukes returns to his ranch on a ‘commuters’ special,’ a species of steam car, on which he plays games of chance with the professional gamblers who infested all the transportation systems of the times. At home, he builds a small outdoor fire, calculates the day’s expenses on his abacus, plays sad music on his guitar, makes love to one of the thousands of strange women who made it a practice of intruding on campfires at odd hours, rolls up in a blanket and goes to sleep.

“Such was the barbarism of that age—an age so hysteric that few men lived beyond one hundred years. And yet romantics today yearn for that monstrous era of turmoil and terror. Twentieth-century Americana is all the vogue. Only recently, a single copy of
Life
, a sort of mail-order catalogue, was bought at auction by the noted collector Clifton Webb for $150,000. I might mention, in passing, that in my analysis of that curio in the current
Phil. Trans
. I cast grave doubts on its authenticity. Certain anachronisms in the text indicate a possible forgery.

“And now a final word about your term examinations. There has been some talk about bias on the part of the computer. It has been suggested that when this department took over the Multi-Ill from Biochemistry various circuits were overlooked and left operative, prejudicing the computer in favor of the mathematical approach. This is utter nonsense. Our computer psychiatrist assures me that the Multi-Ill was completely brainwashed and reindoctrinated. Exhaustive checks have shown that all errors were the result of student carelessness.

“I urge you to observe the standard sterilization procedures before taking your examination. Do not scamp your wash-up. Make sure your surgical caps, gowns, masks, and gloves are properly adjusted. Be certain that your punching tools are in register and sterile. Remember that one speck of contamination on your answer card can wreck your results. The Multi-Ill is not a machine, it is a brain, and requires the same care and consideration you give your own bodies. Thank you, good luck, and I hope to see you all again next semester.”

Coming out of the lecture hall, Professor Muni was met in the crowded corridor by his secretary, Ann Sothern. She was wearing a polka dot bikini, carried a tray of drinks and had a pair of the professor’s swim trunks draped over her arm. Muni nodded in appreciation, swallowed a quick one and frowned at the traditional musical production number with which the students moved from class to class. He began reassembling his lecture notes as they hurried from the building.

“No time for a dip, Miss Sothern,” he said. “I’m scheduled to sneer at a revolutionary discovery in the Medical Arts Building this afternoon.”

“It’s not on your calendar, Dr. Muni.”

“I know. I know. But Raymond Massey is sick, and I’m standing in for him. Ray says he’ll substitute for me the next time I’m due to advise a young genius to give up poetry.”

They left the Sociology Building, passed the teardrop swimming pool, the book-shaped library, the heart-shaped Heart Clinic, and came to the faculty-shaped Faculty Building. It was in a grove of royal palms through which a miniature golf course meandered, its air conditioners emitting a sibilant sound. Inside the Faculty Building, concealed loudspeakers were broadcasting the latest noise-hit.