Alien Accounts (18 page)

The eighteen-year-old, six-foot-one, husky youth did not reply.

‘Hem. Excuse an old codger for butting in, my boy, but you’ll never do it like that. Get your fingers in the way. Here, let me help you.’

And he showed Ray how to hold his arm and push it towards the blade with a piece of two-by-four. The blade sang.

‘
That’s
the way to do her! More amateurs have lost more fingers, just by forgetting that one simple trick – statistical fact!’

Travers was standing looking at the jello girls when Miss Bunne entered without knocking.

‘Oh I’m sorry!’ she said. He whipped around and kicked a drawer shut.

‘Don’t
ever
do that again, Miss Bunne. You know I don’t like to wear this stuff. And now I have no doubt you’ll be going off to laugh about me behind my back, with one of the other Misses Bunne.’

‘Oh no, Mr Travers. You don’t know me very well, or you could never suppose a thing like that!’

‘Well, I’m sorry. Who do we have out there?’

‘A Mr Galt. He’s – handicapped.’

‘Give me ten minutes, then?’ He lent her a special smile.

When she had backed out, he slipped the elastic off his shoulders and the blue-serge-suit-with-TV-blue-shirt-and-maroon-tie outfit fell away from him. After checking the application on his desk, he put on a similar garment, a black-blazer-stiff-white-shirt-regimental-stripe-tie. On the blazer he pinned the crest of the college Galt had attended until recently. Then he whitened half his hair, and added an eye-patch. The applicant had one arm, and Travers kidded himself about not letting him get the upper hand. It was true he hated being at a sympathetic disadvantage.

Ready, he sat back and waited for Raymond Nixon Galt.

Dr Freag of Drum Laboratories addressed the stock-holders, describing a number of new telephone services his department had tested against the day when Drum should replace the Bell System as the nation’s telephone monopoly.
Tele fun
would connect subscribers to a computer capable of playing over 700 games as diverse as Boccaccio, slapjack, Chinese checkers. Another service would enable users to disguise their voiceprints. An anonymity service,
Dialerase
, would change a subscriber’s telephone number as often as hourly, signalling each change only to him and to his current register of friends.

Dr Born of Drummer Boy Enterprises addressed the stockholders, describing a number of new computer devices his department was investigating.
Scribeauty
was intended to change users’ handwriting to conform to any desired standard. One would write on a sensitised slate, and the computer would then ‘correct’ one’s writing and reproduce a finished manuscript on paper. A small, portable jukebox with a fast-response mechanism,
Swingit
could be used to ‘talk’ in ‘song’ instead of words. Useful in therapy with disturbed adolescents, it could be worn internally without discomfort.
Wordfreak
was the name of a projected monitor system for security agencies. Its computer would scan quantities of taped conversations, sorting them for high ‘wordfreaks’, or high frequencies of words/phrases of a suspicious nature. He demonstrated.

‘Mind if I call you Ray? Here, have a cigarette.’ The man behind the desk moved only the left side of his face as he spoke. His left hand shoved a silver box across the desk; the right hung down out of sight.

Ray accepted a cigarette and reached for the lighter.

‘No, let me.’ With difficulty, the man forced himself up out of his chair and lunged forward to give Ray a light. When at last he sat, or flopped
back, he was sweating. Ray felt moisture running down his own face and neck.

‘I fee you’re handicapped. Well, as you can fee, Ray, Drum Inc. couldn’t care less about that. Got mine, by the way, on Porkchop Hill.’
And you?
his left brow asked.

Ray blushed. ‘Oh, just a crazy freak accident. With a table saw. At home.’

The sight of this hopeless cripple, sitting behind his big desk and laughing at Ray’s injury, shocked him. He began to have second thoughts about working here, even as a janitor …

‘Forry, fon, I didn’t mean to laugh at you. It’s just … they fay most accidents happen … at home, ha ha … I’ve never actually
feen
one … boy o boy, I’ve feen guys shot up fo bad they had to walk ten miles on frozen feet, with their guts in their hands … but
you!
Hoo hoo hoo,
you
can’t even faw a sucking piece of
board
across …’

Ray jumped up. ‘Now just a minute!’

‘… ha ha ha, how ftupid can you …’

‘
JUST A MINUTE! IT WASN’T NO ACCIDENT, I DONE IT ON PURPOSE, TO TEACH MY GIRL A LESSON!
’

The interviewer wiped his eyes and checked a box on Ray’s card. ‘Now we’re getting fomeplace. Atta boy. Now fuppose you fit down and tell me all about it?’

OBEY YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

Advice to the management trainee at Drum, Inc.
by H. H. Murd, President

Phil Wang, the art director, stuck his head in the door.

‘OK in here? Any new problems, Marty?’

The fat man at the drawing board shook his head, but not in negation. ‘I can’t get it right, Phil. If I line up things the way they want, the girl’s hair just about has to blow across the guy’s face. How about if I – oh, I don’t know.’

‘Take it easy, guy. Let’s have a look.’

The picture showed
a young couple at an amusement park. Other people have turned to stare admiringly at them. The girl’s hair is wind-tossed; the man is dark and ruggedly handsome. They are about to enter a telephone booth.

The caption was roughed in below: ‘Togetherness is the nearest friendly phone booth.’

‘What’s this guy in the background? Is he supposed to have an arm missing or what?’

‘I was, uh …’ Marty paused for a moment, fumbling with his expression, as the electronic pacemaker that controlled his heart seemed to miss. This happened to him about once a week, though the doctor assured him it could not possibly happen at all. ‘… changing perspective a little. I’ll clean that up.’

‘Do that little thing for me, and for Christ’s sake, get the girl’s hair blowing the other way. Come to think of it, I don’t like that face anyway. It isn’t –
standard
enough, if you get me.’

‘Well, Phil, I thought I’d make her a little bit
individual
. I mean, well, you and I aren’t exactly
standard
.’

Phil looked at him a long time. ‘So now it comes, eh? The stab in the back.’

‘What do you mean, Phil?’

‘I’m not standard, eh? You mean I’m not
white
. I’m
Chinese
.’

‘No, Phil. Honest, I …’

‘I guess you’ve always felt that way about me, eh, Marty? I guess while I was taking you on here and giving you a job, despite the fact that you might drop dead of a heart attack at any moment and leave me with tons of work to do, while I was giving you a job so you could buy a fancy gadget to save your Caucasian heart, all the time you were just thinking how
Chinese
I was. Right? Right.’

Marty’s pacemaker missed again; he was unable to answer.

‘I guess maybe you think I look like a “dirty Jap” in some old war comic, right? Eh? With buck teeth and bad eyes, eh? Well thanks for cluing me in, buddy. Thanks for telling me what the score is.’

Marty gasped an irrelevant reply.

‘Well let me tell
you
something. I fought in the Second World War, risked my life – and on the
right side
. And as for the Japs, they’re a damned fine bunch of people – did you see
Sayonara
, with Marlon Brando? – and they make a bunch of clever little products, including that thing in your chest.

‘I’m not going to fire you, and make it easy for you to feel sorry for yourself. But don’t you ever say I’m
not standard
again, see?’

At the door Phil paused again. ‘And fix up that girl. Don’t
draw
her, use a few of those expensive sheets of wax faces Drum paid so damned much for.’

Marty opened a file drawer and took out the trembling sheets. Here were row on row of standard faces, admiring crowds, hands holding cigarettes, empty hands ready to hold or point at a product. Here were
couples embracing, laughing, dancing, exchanging gifts, pouring champagne, walking in the country, getting into and out of sports cars, throwing beach-balls. Here were office workers comparing notes, talking on the telephone, slipping on overcoats. Here were housewives shopping, cooking, kissing babies, serving something with a delicious aroma that curled around them. And here were the backgrounds to set them against: carpeted offices, TV-equipped living rooms, built-in kitchens, shopping plazas, elegant bistros, neat countryside.

Marty held up a page of twenty neat countrysides and looked at them with loving eyes. More than anything, even more than going to Hawaii, he wanted to be young and slim and alone with a girl in countryside just like that.

But it was rush time. He chose the most standard-looking blonde, frantically grinning, freckled, and burnished her down on a fresh white page. Beginning with her wax loveliness, with her hair swept to the left by an invisible, presumably wax, wind, he would start all over and build the ad around her.

But he burnished hastily, so that when he peeled up the plastic film, her freckles were still on it, untransferred.

‘Jesus!’

And Phil was sure to ask Why no freckles? Marty washed his sweating hands and cleaned a tiny crow-quill pen. Steadying his right hand with his left, he began the miniature cosmetic surgery.

‘We’ve made up a selection of code or jargon words/phrases used by some imaginary anarchist group,’ said Dr. Freag. ‘These are: “lafodul”, “breughel”, “whee”, “the basic assumption” and “I have the hymnal in the car”. The basic assumption here is that the group will use these words in conversations with sufficient frequency to be detected. And
WORDFREAK
, scanning vocal patterns at high speed, can do the job.’

Little were any of the stockholders to know that these very words of Dr Freag’s were being selected for scanning, and that one day he would be killed by plant security guards! But that is another story.

Ray was sobbing. ‘… and then the sign on the prescription blank? It turned into something else. Like this.’ He drew two shaky signs:

Travers marked the last box below the heavy line on Ray’s application.

‘And then the …’

‘Yes, yes, I know. And then the caduceus turned into a crozier, and fo on. It’s a common enough dream, nothing to worry about. Everyone does
those things you fpeak of. And believe me, cutting off your arm was no folution. It wouldn’t even help to cut off your other arm; you’d be at it with your toes. And now, if you’ll go with Miss Bunne to the testing room, we’d like to give you a few fimple tests and a couple of forms to fill out.’

Their left hands clasped, then Ray backed awkwardly out of the room.

ARM CASSEROLE À LA MOM

Ingredients:
1 lean arm, 3 tbs. butter, 1 clove minced garlic, 3 onions minced, 2 cups stewed or canned tomatoes,
4
cups cooked egg noodles, 1 tbs. brown sugar, 1 can mushroom soup, salt and pepper to taste.