Fun House (21 page)

At two-thirty we left the hotel, walking down the tunnel again. The subway elevator took us to the surface where a real sun was shining in the sky. The streets were crowded with people on their way to the daily examinations, a feature of the game as they played it. Here and there were corpses, unsuccessful players strangled in the night.

“We can talk freely, darling,” Gladys smiled. “The Urban Recorder is not sufficiently perfected to sift out a conspiratorial voice in a crowd.” The sun was in her face and her blue eyes were very blue.

“You think the professor’ll listen to us?”

“Yes darling, and remember to call him comrade, not professor, Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf.”

“The professor used to talk of the mystery of human nature,” I said, shaking my head. “You look so innocent now, but a short time ago you were a mermaid. Where was the woman who spoke of a Life Party and a Death Party?”

“A woman has a right to her moods, comrade inventor.”

Beyond Red Square, we could see the immense golden dome of the Palace of Peace with its circle of round closed windows painted red, each with a white dove in the center. Behind those windows, in readiness, were the atomic cannon
¹
. A skywriter flew above the walls of the Kremlin, writing:

HEAVEN ON EARTH IS A CLASSROOM WITH THE PARTY AS A TEACHER
²

And now as if synchronized to the slogan, we heard a voice like a distant plucked wire
³
:

“People of Moscow, as you walk to the Palace of Examination, be guided by the great principle of Socialist Pedagogy. Think, reflect, relax, but do not relax too much.”

“The Secretary of the Party,” Gladys-Ekaterina said. “The Voice
⁴
.”

And as she spoke, the Voice began to report the morning news; which was mainly about the Space Ship Program and its progress.

We came to the Palace of Peace, its doors guarded by soldiers wearing berets’ made of white dove feathers. We entered a huge waiting room so crowded there wasn’t a seat left. Everywhere the players sat, clutching blueprints or miniature models of inventions. Some were silent, others argumentative, and even on the crackpot side. A man with thick glasses grabbed my arm and shouted. “Comrade, why are our space ships shot down?”

“Counter-revolutionaries,” I said. “Long live Comrade Ivan Radizl!”

“They are shot down,” he bellowed as if he hadn’t heard me, “because in the final analysis our space ships are molecular structures. Comrade, I have perfected the modified unified gravitational theory involving the phenomena of amorphous Stardust and space platforms. The mathematics is simple, comrade. Let us reduce molecules into electrons, neutrons, and mesons. Once beyond the Disaster Point, these elements will reassemble themselves molecularly into space ships!”

I eased away from the madman. Gladys-Ekaterina and I pushed through the crowd of inventors towards a desk where an official sat in a white suit with buttons of gold shaped like doves. All about him the mob called and asked questions while he concentrated on his work panel, pushing in its buttons with thin claw-like fingers. There was something odd about his face, but only when we were close did I see what it was. His eyes were perfectly round, iridescent and inhuman — the eyes of a dove.

“I am the assistant to the American comrade inventor,” Gladys-Ekaterina said to the official. “I am Comrade Ustipopoff and he is Comrade Ttekcroc
¹
.”

The dove-eyed official consulted a tiny screen. “The Comrade Judges will see you,” he said. “Proceed Comrades Ustipopoff and Ttekcroc.”

As we hurried to the flight of marble stairs behind his desk, Gladys-Ekaterina looked meaningfully at me. I understood. Dove Eyes was one of ours, another secret member of the R.T.R.

It was an impressive place, the Palace of Peace. The entire wall up to the second floor was one ascending mural, showing proletarian inventors since the dawn of time, beginning with the nameless Caveman and his invention, the first crude stone hammer. The next mural showed a collective group of neo-glacial Apemen whose invention was fire. The next skipped tens of thousands of years to feature the first birchbark canoe being made by a group of earnest proletarians, all Red Indians. As we stepped out on the second floor, thirty or forty doves appeared from nowhere and flew down the marble corridor to an immense door of gun-metal blue steel on which they arranged themselves in two words:
PEACE, ENTER
. Only then did I realize that the doves weren’t real but magnetized artificials.

To the left of the door there was one last exhibit, a great bowl of small reddish fish and the legend:

I was staring like a boy at a circus. The immense steel door opened and Gladys-Ekaterina nudged me with her elbow. “Comrade inventor,” she said, and we walked into a white chamber, the judges seated on a red-draped dais. There were five of them, all wearing very full-fashioned gowns of white feathers that fluffed out at their shoulders. They could have been angels except for the masks on their faces. An even more enigmatic note was struck by the huge mural behind the dais. It showed a titanic masked figure, that of Jesus Christ, proclaiming the slogan:
PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO MEN.

The masked judge in the center spoke to me. “Comrades Ttekcroc and Ustipopoff, approach.”

We obeyed. I guessed that the tallest of the judges could only be Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf whom I had known as Professor Fleischkopf. “Comrades,” the chief judge said, picking up a document from which he read, “Comrade Judges, we have here an invention in the field of psychodynamics. Comrade Ttekcroc, will you outline your invention.”

I was so excited I couldn’t speak, my eyes on the huge masked figure of the professor, this conscienceless hybrid who was both bloodthirsty and learned. A hunter who lived to kill, and a philosopher who loved to discourse in a gentle voice — and this split man held the fate of the world in his hands. I couldn’t speak, I could only hope, pray.

“The comrade from America is modest,” Gladys-Ekaterina explained to the judges. “A true son of the proletariat. Modest, humble and dedicated.”

I gulped and then in a shaky voice began. “Judges, my invention is in the field of psychodynamics. It is a simple invention. Like the common clock it uses the principle of time. And time is the precious material we need in our society. Time against the A-I-D! Why is the A-I-D dangerous? Precisely because it can without a second of warning destroy all human society, including our own great society, the foremost in the world. As long as there is an A-I-D, death is the secret ruler of all mankind, including socialist mankind. That is why there is no time to adopt five-year plans or even five-day plans. Time is of the essence. Comrade Judges, I have invented what I call a Five Minute Plan. Let every citizen of the world sit down and concentrate for five minutes on the problem of the A-I-D and what should be done to neutralize it. Since the population of the Earth and Moon combined is five billion human beings, we arrive at a figure of twenty-five billion minutes which gives us enough time to perfect all human dreams, including our Space Ship Program!”

I paused. I was trembling, wondering whether the professor would accept my appeal or not. All the five masked judges could have been dead men, they were so still. Not a single feather of their robes fluttered. I waited and my eyes lifted to the masked Christ on the wall, and numbly I read his message:
PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO MEN.

“Thank you,” the chief judge said.

We were dismissed. We left the chamber, the gun-metal blue door closed behind us.

Oh, who can describe the suspense as we sat downstairs with the crowd of inventors. The hours weren’t hours, the minutes weren’t minutes, but at last when all the inventors had been received, the five masked judges walked down the marble stairs.

I can’t continue calmly. Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf spoke to us in that gentle academic voice of his I remembered so well from Bangani Castle. “Your Five Minute Plan is interesting, comrades, I would like to question you further …”

Within a half hour we had left Russoplayo and were flying back to Washington — but without the A-I-D. The professor had listened to what we had to say and then smiling he had replied. “The A-I-D isn’t in Russoplayo. Only I know where it is.” He had tapped his temple. “It is safe inside the aqueous membranes of my brain, and I laugh at your Brain-Confessors because I have taken the precaution of having my brain falmemorized.
¹
”

I forced myself to ask The Question. “Is it set to go off?”

I can still hear my trembling voice. I can still see the professor and Gladys in the private compartment of the Double-Jette flying us back to Washington, D.C. He was wearing the khaki clothes of a hunter, on his head the hydrogen hat I remembered — the black skull cap representing the hydrogen nucleus, the white revolving ring the orbit of its single electron. His face was attentive and intelligent — that is, the part above the nose.

“Is it set to go off?” he repeated. “And is it so important?”

“Even you don’t want to die, professor!” Gladys said.

“The statement
Life or Death
is a misleading one, my dear young woman. The true statement is
Life or Death but always Power.”

“Power to destroy the world!” she cried passionately. “The world is holy.”

The professor smiled. “You remind me of my youth, or rather of a book I read when I was young. It was an old book published more than a hundred years ago in 1910 or 1911. The cover and title page were missing, and with it the writer’s name. He was a scientist, and he too preached of a holy world. Let us search for order and beauty in the universe, he wrote. That was his definition of science, by the way. A search for order and beauty. He wrote that our minds are a part of our bodies, a part of the living breathing world, and the world was holy.” Mockingly, the professor folded his huge hands together. “Let us revere all that is alive and serve no masters who would destroy the goodness and beauty and mercy that exists in man
except
when he is occupied with war and death! In 1914, holy man fought his first unholy world war, and in 1939 his second. And the searchers for order and beauty searched for death! The chemists searched for chemical death, the bacteriologists for plague, the physicists for their poisoned mushrooms, the thinkers and philosophers for the cold death of words. And holy man marched in blood behind the waving triumphant banner of Science.”

I stared at him, at the white spinning of his hydrogen hat. “Have you set it?” I gasped.

“Only power is holy,” he answered. “I follow the instructions of my master!” His eyes had become fanatic. Those intelligent eyes of his were like a mad dog’s.

“For God’s sake!” I cried. “You’ve set it!”

“What is set, what is unset? Settled, unsettled, life, death?” the professor philosophized. “At the stroke of midnight it will be the 4th of July.”

“Will it be Zero Hour?”

‘What is Zero Hour but the beginning of infinity in one view, and in another, the beginning of a finite circle?”

It was twilight when we landed. The Commissioner was waiting for us at the airport and instantly we went to L. and O. Headquarters. There, the professor repeated his story, and the Commissioner said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting us, professor. We are grateful that you saw fit to accompany Crockett.”

“We are old hunting friends and a friendship sealed in the woods is lasting.”

From his face it was impossible to guess whether he was joking or serious. “We will go see the President right now, professor. Will you accept his assurances?”

The professor nodded. “I voted for him,” he said simply.

“Crockett,” the Commissioner said to me. “There isn’t time to explain why you can’t come along. Briefly, the Minister of Police X-Y has circulated all sorts of slanders about you and your abilities.” He glanced at his watch. “My God, time’s going! Crockett, you’ve done a great job. You deserve the Medal of Honor — ” He broke off and said to Gladys E. “Come along. I may need you.”

Before we parted he arranged for me to meet him at nine o’clock at the downstairs library of the New Senate Office Building. When I entered it was almost empty. Three or four men were reading newspapers or talking quietly with their One-Shot Animateds. On the walls there were murals showing the great inventions of the past — the electric bulb, the automobile, the cyclotron, the rocket. Other murals showed the great inventions of more recent times — the Space Bubble, the U-Latu pill etc.

Because the closets of an older America had a certain historical and symobolical significance, they had been preserved. The downstairs Library, as I should have mentioned, had once been the Men’s Room. (At the far end of the library was the simple biochemical product that had superceded the older habits — a glass container holding several hundred of what seemed to be candy balls, the manufacturer’s name No-Canno
¹
printed above the well-known cherub trademark.)

I sat down and waited. I tried to read but it was nine o’clock, nine o’clock of July 3rd. I thought of how wonderful it would be to go home to my wife and family. These eleven days on the Outside were like eleven years, but I couldn’t relax. It was past nine o’clock and getting later with each breath I took. Later and later and later. God alone knew whether the Commissioner would succeed. The A-I-D was still missing and for all we knew set to detonate every A and H-Bomb in the world on the stroke of midnight.

I had to rush to the glass container. I pulled the lever. One of the No-Cannos rolled down the little chute, and I popped it into my mouth.

At that instant, I felt somebody’s hand on my shoulder. It was, a young man with a dapper little mustache. “Let’s sit down, Crockett,” he whispered in a deep gruff voice.

I’d never seen this particular L. and O., but without a word I followed him to a leather couch against the white wall (also preserved) opposite the antique closets.