Keep The Giraffe Burning
Read Keep The Giraffe Burning Online
Authors: John Sladek
John Sladek
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ONTENTS
OREWORD
Don’t be fooled by the Surrealist title. Most of these stories are only meant to be fun, and no serious messages are intended.
Surrealism is supposed to have something to do with Freud and dreams, which doesn’t sound entertaining at all. Psychiatrists know how boring re-told dreams can be, and so do the husbands and wives of dreamers, at their breakfast tables. Freud never strikes you as exactly a barrel of fun either, does he? Especially after he came down from Mount Ararat with the graven tables of Dream Interpretation.
Probably what was wrong with Surrealism all along was that it got defined precisely and interpreted exactly. Nothing can stand up to that. Think of all the serious critics who’ve gone over and over
The Castle of Otranto
, until it’s lost most of its original appeal. I’ve met dozens of people who’ve read this gothic classic through without laughing.
Readers who don’t like laughing can have their own kind of entertainment out of this collection. If they will only frown and bear it, reading all of the stories, they will find an exact interpretation in the Afterword. A friend of mine wrote it, and I believe it spoils every story here.
People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers. They laughed at Galileo, at Edison’s light bulb, and even at nitrous oxide. I hope they will laugh, a little, at these stories.
LEPHANT WITH
W
OODEN
L
EG
Note: Madmen are often unable to distinguish between dream, reality, and … between dream and reality. None of the incidents in Henry LaFarge’s narrative ever happened or could have happened. His ‘Orinoco Institute’ bears no relation to the actual think tank of that name, his ‘Drew Blenheim’ in no way resembles the famous futurologist, and his ‘United States of America’ is not even a burlesque upon the real United States of Armorica.
I couldn’t hear him.
‘Can’t hear you, Blenheim. The line must be bad.’
‘Or mad, Hank. I wonder what that would take?’
‘What what?’
‘What would it take to drive a telephone system out of its mind, eh? So that it wasn’t just giving wrong numbers, but madly right ones. Let’s see: Content-addressable computer memories to shift the conversations …’
I stopped listening. A bug was crawling up the window frame across the room. It moved like a cockroach, but I couldn’t be sure.
‘Look, Blenheim, I’m pretty busy today. Is there something on your mind?’
He ploughed right on. ‘… so if you’re trying to reserve a seat on the plane to Seville, you’d get a seat at the opera instead. While the person who wants the opera seat is really making an appointment with a barber, whose customer is just then talking to the box-office of
Hair,
or maybe making a hairline reservation …’
‘Blenheim, I’m talking to you.’
‘Yes?’
‘What was it you called me up about?’
‘Oh, this and that. I was wondering, for instance, whether parrots have internal clocks.’
‘What?’ I still couldn’t be sure whether the bug was a cockroach or not, but I saluted just in case.
‘If so, maybe we could get them to act as speaking clocks.’
He sounded crazier than ever. What trivial projects for one of the best brains in our century – no wonder he was on leave.
‘Blenheim, I’m busy. Institute work must go on, you know.’
‘Yes. Tell you what, why don’t you drop over this afternoon? I have something to talk over with you.’
‘Can’t. I have a meeting all afternoon.’
‘Fine, fine. See you, then. Anytime around 4:43.’
Madmen never listen.
Helmut Rasmussen came in just as Blenheim hung up. He seemed distressed. Not that his face showed it; ever since that bomb wrecked his office, Hel has been unable to move his face. Hysterical paralysis, Dr Grobe had explained.
But Hel could signal whatever he felt by fiddling with the stuff in his shirt pocket. For anger, his red pencil came out (and sometimes underwent a savage sharpening), impatience made him work his slide rule, surprise made him glance into his pocket diary, and so on.
Just now he was clicking the button on his ballpoint pen with some agitation. For a moment he actually seemed about to take it out and draw worry lines on his forehead.
‘What is it, Hel? The costing on Project Faith?’ He spread the schedules on my desk and pointed to the snag: a discrepancy between the estimated cost of blasting apart and hauling away the Rocky Mountains, and the value of oil recovered in the process.
‘I see. The trains, eh? Diesels seem to use most of the oil we get. How about steam locomotives, then?’
He clapped me on the shoulder and nodded.
‘By the way, Mel, I won’t be at the meeting today. Blenheim just called up. Wants to see me.’
Hel indicated surprise.
‘Look, I know he’s a crackpot. You don’t have to pocket-diary me, I know he’s nuts. But he is also technically still the Director. Our boss. They haven’t taken him off the payroll, just put him on sick leave. Besides, he used to have a lot of good ideas.’
Hel took out a felt-tip pen and began to doodle with some sarcasm. The fact was, Blenheim had completely lost his grip during his last year at the Institute. Before the government forced him to take leave, he’d been spending half a million a year on developing, rumours said, glass pancakes. And who could forget his plan to arm police with chocolate revolvers?
‘Sure he’s had a bad time, but maybe he’s better now,’ I said, without conviction.
Institute people never get better, Hel seemed to retort. They just kept on making bigger and better decisions, with more and more brilliance and finality, until they broke. Like glass pancakes giving out an ever purer ring, they exploded.
It was true. Like everyone else here, I was seeing Dr Grobe, our resident psychiatrist, several times a week. Then there were cases beyond even the skill of Dr Grobe: Joe Feeney, who interrupted his work (on the uses of holograms) one day to announce that he was a filing cabinet. Edna Bessler, who believed that she was being pursued by a synthetic
a priori
proposition. The lovely entomologist Pawlie Sutton, who disappeared. And George Hoad, whose rocket research terminated when he walked into
the Gents one day and cut his throat. George spent the last few minutes of consciousness vainly tying to mop up the floor with toilet paper …
Something was wrong with the personnel around this place, all right. And I suspected that our little six-legged masters knew more about this than they were saying.
Finally I mumbled, ‘I know it’s useless, Hel. But I’d better find out what he wants.’
You do what you think is best, Hel thought. He stalked out of my office then, examining the point on his red pencil.
The bug was a cockroach,
P. americana
. It sauntered across the wall until it reached the curly edge of a wall poster, then it flew about a foot to land on the nearest dark spot. This was Uncle Sam’s right eye. Uncle Sam, with his accusing eyes and finger, was trying to recruit men for the Senate and House of Representatives. On this poster, he said, ‘The Senate Needs
MEN
’. So far, the recruitment campaign was a failure. Who could blame people for not wanting to go on the ‘firing line’ in Washington? The casualty rate of Congressmen was 30 per cent annually, and climbing, in spite of every security measure we could think of.
Which reminded me of work. I scrubbed off the blackboard and started laying out a contingency tree for Project Pogo, a plan to make the whole cabinet – all one hundred and forty-three secretaries – completely mobile, hence, proof against revolution. So far the Security Secretary didn’t care for the idea of ‘taking to our beds’, but it was cheaper to keep the cabinet on the move than to guard them in Washington.
The cockroach, observing my industry, left by a wall ventilator, and I breathed easier. The contingency tree didn’t look so interesting by now, and out the window I could see real trees.
The lawn rolled away down from the building to the river (not the Orinoco, despite our name). The far bank was blue-black with pines, and the three red maples on our lawn, this time of year, stood out like three separate, brilliant fireballs. For just the duration of a bluejay’s flight from one to another, I could forget about the stale routine, the smell of chalkdust.
