Authors: John Brunner
"Where you been, baby?" Carl demanded.
"Places." She threw down the canvas airline bag which was all she'd brought with her and reached for the joint they were sharing.
"Met this cat when I got busted at the fireworks party," she said after a while. "We went to Oregon. I didn't know it was so good up there. We had like three days of blue sky. Maybe four."
"No shit!" Carl said.
"No shit. Even found a lake we could swim in. And I got a tan, see?" She skinned her dress up under her armpits, and she was just a trifle brown.
After that there was silence for a while. It was the high. There was radio music coming soft from the back room, the gloryhole. She realized that finally and straightened her head, as far as she could.
"Who's in back?" she inquired, glancing around. "And-say! You put a padlock on that door!"
Hugh and Carl exchanged glances. But it was after all her apartment.
"Hector Bamberley," Hugh said.
"What?"
"You didn't hear about that deal?"
"Christ, of course I did. You mean…" She almost rose to her feet, but fell back on the mattress-spread floor in a burst of helpless laughter.
"You mean right here? Like under the snouts of the pigs? Ah, shit!
That's fantastic!"
Carl sat up, linking his hands around his knees, and chuckled. Hugh, though, said, "Not so funny. His stinking father won't play. And it's getting to be a grind, keeping watch all the time. Mustn't leave the pad empty, of course.
And
he's sick."
"Playing sick," Carl grunted. "It was one of the first ideas he hit on, trying to make us bring in a doctor he can talk to. Now he's back at the same game. It's getting me down to throw away so much expensive food."
"Huh?"
"All from Puritan. Ossie insisted. He's masterminding the deal."
Hugh exclaimed. "Say, isn't it about time we fed him again?"
"Could be," Carl nodded. "Kitty, any idea of the time?"
She shook her head. "Ossie?" she said. "You mean Austin? But you know he's not for real, don't you?"
"Oh, sure," Hugh sighed. "Been thinking of giving the name up, too.
Says he's sick of waiting for the real one to come out of hiding and
do
something."
"If he did," Kitty said, "he'd raise the biggest army in history, just by snapping his fingers. Up in Oregon I saw-Hell, never mind. I'll take the food in. Always wanted to meet a millionaire's son. Where is it-in the icebox?"
"Sure, all ready on a tray. And when you come out, bang the door for us to unlock. One, one-two." Carl demonstrated. "So well know it's you and not him."
"Okay," Kitty said, and took one more drag on the joint before going to the kitchen.
Hector was lying asleep, his back to the door. She made a space for the food tray among a mess of books and magazines, mainly porn-German and Danish, good-quality stuff. Then she went around the bed and found that he had his fly open and his hand clasped around his prick. Half-hidden under the pillow was another porn magazine, a lesbian one. On the floor, a soiled tissue. Wet. She dropped it into the chamber pot.
Well, so that was what a millionaire's son looked like. Kind of ordinary.
But cute with it, she decided after a while. Handsome kid. Silly thin fuzz of beard showing on his cheeks. Hmm. Pussy cat.
Wake him?
Wait him out?
She sat down on the floor with her back to the wall and stared at him, not particularly thinking. She was adrift. She'd been floating already when she arrived, and that last extra charge from the joint Hugh and Carl were using had blown her way
way
up. Somehow it seemed like too much trouble to rouse him.
After a while, though, the sight of that open fly had its effect. She parted her legs and started fingering her crotch. It was good when she was as high as this, very slow, almost getting there and then not quite, but not getting lost either. Like climbing a snow-slope, slipping back a little at each step but never quite as far as where you'd been.
She almost failed to notice when his eyes opened and he realized she was in the room. She didn't stop what she was doing when she did notice.
"Who are you?" he demanded in a thin voice.
She looked at his prick. It was filling out. He realized, and dragged a corner of the sheet over it. The bedding was all tangled.
"Kitty," she said. "I guess it's kind of boring for you in here, huh?"
"What?" Shakily, he was trying to sit up.
"I mean like is that all you got to pass the time?" Pointing with her unoccupied hand at the magazine poking out under the pillow.
He blinked at her several times, rapidly. Then he flushed bright pink.
"You're cute," she said. "Kind of good-looking, too. Say, I made myself pretty horny by now. You too?"
"What the hell's keeping her?" Hugh said muzzily, a long while later.
"Probably screwing him," Carl said indifferently. "Ever know Kitty to miss the chance? But what the hell? The poor kid deserves it. I mean like he's been cooperative. It's only his stinking old man who's holding out."
Petronella Page:
Friday again, world, the night we break the regular rules and go clear around the planet. Later, we'll be talking to a senior officer from the famed Special Branch at Scotland Yard, London, about the new British computerized system for control of subversion, widely praised as among the most modern in the world, and then we're going to Paris to talk about the weird weather they're having there, with snow in August, yet right now, though, we're going to tackle a subject closer to home. Waiting in the Chicago studios of ABS is a noted educational psychologist with strong views on a matter that concerns everyone with kids-or who's intending to have lads. He prefers to remain anonymous because his views are controversial, so we're going to bend our own standing orders and allow him to be called Dr. Doe. Are you there-?
Doe:
Sure am, Miss Page.
Page:
Fine. Well, let's start with your explanation for the present nationwide shortage of technicians, high incidence of college dropouts, and so on. Most people assume it's the result of distrust of industry and its effect on our lives, but you say it's not that simple.
Doe:
Not too complicated, though, despite the fact that a lot of factors are interacting. The pattern is really pretty clear. It's not so much that lads today are more stupid than their parents. It's that they're more timid. More reluctant to take decisions, to commit themselves.
They'd rather drift through life.
Page:
Why?
Doe:
Well, there have been a lot of studies-on rats, mainly-that demonstrate the crucial importance of prenatal environment. Litters born to harassed mothers, or poorly fed mothers, grow up to be easily frightened, afraid to leave an open cage, and what's more their life expectancy is reduced.
Page:
Can experiments with rats prove anything about humans?
Doe:
We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.
Page:
I don't believe many people will follow that.
Doe:
Well, the weaker ones fall victim to predators more easily. That reduces population. Competition is diminished. And the fouling of the environment, too, of course.
Page:
But our population isn't diminishing. Are you saying we're having too many children?
Doe:
It wouldn't be too many if we could guarantee adequate relaxation-freedom from anxiety-and plenty of nourishing food. We can't. Our water is fouled, our food is contaminated with artificial substances our bodies can't cope with, and all the time there's this feeling that we're in life-or-death competition with our fellow creatures.
Page:
This strikes me as very sweeping. What evidence have you apart from rats and these wild creatures you haven't specified?
Doe:
The school records, the employment roster, the panic the big corporations are in this year because there's close to a ninety per cent shortfall in graduate recruiting-isn't there?
Page:
I didn't say anything. Go on.
Doe:
Also, around the beginning of the year, a United Nations report was published which purported to show that intelligence was rising very markedly in the poor countries of the world, whereas by contrast in the wealthy countries-Page: But that report was discredited. It was pointed out that you can't apply the same criteria to lads in-Doe: Wrong. Sorry. I know all about that, and about the argument that owing to our superior medical facilities we're keeping alive sub-normal children who die in the underdeveloped countries instead of surviving to drag down the average. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm referring specifically to apparently normal children, without obvious physical or mental defects. I'm convinced people are subconsciously aware of what's going on, and becoming alarmed by it. For example, there's an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons.
One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that.
The public obviously wanted a figurehead, who'd look good and make comforting noises-Page: Dr. Doe, you're wandering from the point, aren't you?
Doe:
If you say so. But I'd claim that this illustrates the fundamental anxiety which is now coloring our social attitudes. I'd say we've subconsciously noticed that our kids are less clever, more timid, and begun to worry that we may be less able than our parents were, and in consequence we're running away from anything that might tend to show that was true. When the politicians claim that the public isn't interested any longer in environmental conservation, they're half right. People are actually afraid to be interested, because they suspect-I think rightly-that well find if we dig deep enough that we've gone so far beyond the limits of what the planet will tolerate that only a major catastrophe which cuts back both our population and our ability to interfere with the natural biocycle would offer a chance of survival. And it can't be a war which does it, because that would screw up even more of our farmland.
Page:
Thank you for talking to us, Dr. Doe, but I must say I feel most people will regard your theory as farfetched. Now after this break for station identification…
THE END OF A LONG DARK TUNNEL
Christ, Oakland had been bad. But New York was
awful.
Even indoors, even in the lobby of this hotel with its revolving door and the air-conditioning blasting so hard it almost shook the walls, Austin Train's eyes were smarting and the back of his throat hurt. He thought of losing his voice. Also of losing his mind. He had done that once and sometimes he suspected he'd been happier without it. Like those kids who'd testified before the inquiry into the riot at Bamberley Hydroponics, one after another stating in dull flat tones that they wanted most of all to be insane. But he was here, anyway.
Many times on the journey he'd feared he might not reach his destination. Naturally, with a faked ID in the name of "Fred Smith," he dared not risk flying to New York, so it was a matter of taking a roundabout route on buses and by rail. Felice had offered him one of her cars, but that too was out of the question, because cars were the favorite means employed by saboteurs to deliver bombs, and they stole, or rented in a false name, so security was tight. Not that a car would have been much faster anyway, what with the police posts at state lines, the searches, the restricted zones not merely in cities-one expected that during August-but right out in the country, in agricultural areas. Because of hijackers after food trucks, of course.
Problems like that had been among the many reasons why he had postponed his decision to re-emerge into the open. All summer long he had prevaricated, half made up his mind, changed it again and gone back to toting garbage, driving a dumper truck, loading the endless succession of wagons that carted imperishable plastic up the mountains to be jammed into abandoned mine-shafts, baling kitchen refuse to be sold as compost for the desert-reclamation projects, tramping in huge tough sweat-saturated boots over mounds of glass and piles of squashed cans. In its way the job was fascinating. A thousand years from now these scraps that he was helping to bury might be seen on display in a museum. If there were any museums.
It had been the attack on the Denver wat which settled the matter.
When he learned that Zena had taken refuge at Felice's home, only a few miles from where he was staying, he had had to call up and talk to her. And from that it had just all followed logically. Like a flower opening.
And here she came, after he'd been waiting only an hour. It had started to rain during that time-not that rain in New York cleared the air any longer, merely moistened the dirt-and she pushed through the revolving door in a shapeless bundle: plastic coat, plastic one-piece brooties which combined boots and breeches and were on show in every other clothing-store window, and of course a filtermask. She didn't even glance in his direction, but went directly to the desk to collect her room-key.
He saw the clerk lean over to inform her in hushed tones that a Mr.
Smith was waiting to see her.
She turned to survey the lobby, and the first time she looked his way failed to recognize him. That was hardly surprising. The infection which had turned his scalp to yellow scurf had killed most of his hair; now he was three-quarters bald and on the bare patches there were irregular smears of granular scar-tissue. It had spread to his eyebrows as well, and he'd lost the outer half of the right one. Since they had constituted his most recognizable feature, he'd shaved the other to match. And his eyes had grown weak, so he had arranged for Felice to take him and get glasses made. Altogether he looked very unlike the Austin Train who had been in the spotlight a few years ago.