The Müller-Fokker Effect
THE MÜLLER-FOKKER EFFECT
John Sladek
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Part 5: Announcement: Haunted Experiment ‘Man’ Socks Benefactor
Appendix I: Table of Persons, Objects, etc., Which Have Not Fallen Back to Earth, With Explanations
Time is like an arrow’s h***,
Pointing only one way,
Like one 1** of a compass
You might be using, to go, on f***,
Another 1** of this journey
Down a one-way street
Full of factory h***s in cars
Whose cylinder h***s
All h*** the same way,
Towards the a**s factory,
Whose h*** is a friend
With whom you might play a h*** of cards,
Not noticing there is a f*** card in your h***,
A h****; oh, and maybe writing IOU’s,
In an elegant h***,
To be h***ed to whoever f***s the bill,
But now you take h****,
You s******* your c**** up life’s gangplank,
Never mind if it goes down with all h***s,
With you on watch, or if your plane n***s down
Off the isle of B**** with no one watching.
At the f*** of the steps you get ready
To f*** the next minute or two,
As depicted on your left h*** by a watch
Whose f*** has h***s like arrows.
The following extract is reprinted here as it appeared on the title page of B. Shairp, THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD (4 vols., 8vo, Univ. of Practical Mysticism Press, 19—). Other extracts from the four volumes
(The Ox, The House, The Camel, The Door)
appear as chapters three, eight, eighteen and twenty-five below.
Suspect any coincidence, any fascinating banality. Suspect ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, ‘there’s never a cop around when you need one’, and ‘everything that goes up must come down’.
*
The planet Uranus is 1782 miles from the sun. Subtract 1 from 1782 and you get 1781, the year when Uranus was discovered. Meaning?Or take the word in Cockney ryhming slang for testicles, ‘orchestras’ ( = orchestra seats, or stalls, to rhyme with balls). ‘Orchestra’, a Greek word meaning the space in front of the stage where the dancers dance. ‘Orches–’ means having to do with the dance. ‘Orches–’. Change one letter and you make this root into a tuber, i.e. the Greek ‘orchis’, our orchid, so-called because it looked to the Greeks like a set of testicles. There is a dance of meanings, a dance of word orgins—and dances are still balls.
—God, to a military adviser
Glen Dale, publisher of
Stagman
magazine and ‘last of the old-time eligible bachelors’
(ibid.)
, was having another of his parties. He and his friends and a few hundred of their friends had gathered in the penthouse atop the Stagman Building to celebrate his fortieth—or thirty-ninth—birthday. The place overflowed with not-quite-young people in odd costumes: Aztec feather robes, copper shirts, bright ceramic shoes and shingle jackets; masks, body paint and glowlamp jewelry; suits of paper, steel and glass; whatever was loud without being vulgarly inexpensive.
On the mezzanine a pop group plugged in their amplified instruments and tried to make themselves heard above the talk of I, Thou and Other Celebrities. The group’s name was Direct from Las Vegas. The sounds of guitar, organ, English horn and carillon were audible through underwater speakers to those swimming in Glen’s pool, but to no one else.
Two musicologists in modified zoot suits began an argument about some old Deef John Holler blues. A girl in bead mail spoke to a friend of hers who happened to be a famous astronaut. Someone dropped the name General Weimarauner, and someone countered with the name of Mr Bradd.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Mr Bradd? Just head of National Arsenamid’s Marketing Division, that’s all.’
‘Mr Bradd. Hmm, sounds like the name of a hairdresser I used to know…’
Across the room a macrobiotics disciple explained that Christ would have lived longer if the Last Supper had consisted of boiled brown rice. ‘Instead of all that Yang bread…’
A man looking trapped inside his glasses leant against the mantel and sipped ginger ale. He wore a plain business suit dating from the sixties’ ‘Kennedy look’, enormous French cuffs, and a false smile of nonchalance. The girl in bead mail introduced herself to him, and he murmured his name.
‘Donagon?’ she echoed. ‘You look like Truman Capote.…What
is
your thing?’
‘Biophysics. I, um, thought they didn’t say that any more: “What’s your thing.” I thought they stopped, um, saying that.’
‘They did. Only now they’re saying it again. Are you a friend of Glen’s?’
‘No, actually…’
‘I met Glen through Bill Banks. You know, the black astronaut?’
‘Yes, I think I’ve heard something…’
‘He’s the one who dropped anthrax on Central America. Poor Bill! He feels so
guilty!
’ The girl scanned the party as she spoke. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’
‘Well, we all…’
‘I mean it’s stupefying! He tried to kill himself,
three times!’
Donagon set down his drink and put his hands behind him, out of sight. ‘Really?’
‘Ank! Aren’t you going to say hello?’ A young man in a crisp paper suit strolled over. ‘Auk, do you know Mr Dunne?’
‘Dr Donagon, actually,’ said Donagon, shaking Ank’s left hand.
‘Nancy, I need a smoke.’ The girl offered her pack of Hashmores, and Ank applied his thin moustache to the girl’s forehead, then took two. ‘I don’t usually smoke this brand,’ he explained. ‘Nothing in them. Are you a medical doctor, Doctor?’
‘No, um, just a biophysicist.’
Someone bumped Donagon from behind, spilling a drink on him. He turned to glare, but the culprit, a man in a wrinkled dinner jacket, was too busy fighting for balance to notice.
‘’S all right,’ he murmured, ‘I’m from Interpol.’ After resting a few seconds against the fireplace, he shoved off again. Some invisible ship was pitching in a stormy sea, and he lurched across its deck and into the crowd.
‘I do the art column for the
Sun
,’ said Ank. ‘But it’s not my real life. Really I’m a painter.’
A girl in a buckskin bikini and a hat with antlers came past with a tray. Before Donagon could protest, she took away his half-finished ginger ale and left a glass of something stronger.
‘Not that I’ve technically painted anything—yet. But I know exactly what I want to do. All I need is a computer random number generator—or, better still, some of that Müller-Fokker tape.’
Donagon gulped his drink. ‘But how did you hear about that? It’s supposed to be classified!’
Ank coughed. ‘I read
Time’s
science page. The “miracle tape” and so on. They said only four reels of it exist—and the inventor’s supposed to have defected to Russia or something, so I guess they can’t make any more. And not too many people know how to use it.’
Donagon looked around cautiously. No one was near enough to eavesdrop but the two zoot suits, and they were engaged in a shouting argument.
‘I may be able to help you. My project is making arrangements to use these, uh, tapes. I can’t tell you more about it, but I might be able to fix up something. If you’re still interested in a few months, when the project gets going, drop me a line.’
He gave his address as The Biomedical Research Project, Mud Flats, Nebraska. ‘It may come to nothing, but…’
‘You won’t regret it, Doctor.’ Ank went off to dance with a girl wearing only blue jeans. The other dancers—businessmen in fur wigs, poets in plastic, a senator in a caftan—swirled around them and they were lost to view.
Donagon leaned uneasily against the upholstered wall and tried to look as if he were waiting for a friend. Waves of conversational noise washed up against him, broke, slid back into the great sea of sound.
‘…a fact that it neither tamps, nor is it an ax!’
‘Lichtenstein? I thought you meant the country…’
‘Brown rice and…’
A girl laced into black patent leather from neck to toe (having even pasted on ‘lips’ of the same material) swung past, talking about the works of Thomas M. Disch. ‘Oh yes, I’ve read them all:
The Geocides, Mankind under the Lash
…’