The Müller-Fokker Effect (3 page)

‘Watch, Spot.’ Bob pushed open the door with his foot and came in juggling eggs. ‘Got it up to four, now, and…’

The boy had fallen asleep at his homework. One thin arm lay crooked around the teaching machine, which was still trying to get him to answer something about the gold standard. His pajamas were black, and cut to resemble some kind of uniform complete with false pockets, belts and plastic medals

As Spot stirred, cuddling the machine closer, his father saw what kind of uniform it was. The red brassard turned to show a white circle and a hooked cross…

Bob put him to bed and then cleaned up the eggs from the floor.

‘Grow up, Bob! It doesn’t
mean
anything to him. All the kids have them. On account of that German TV program.’

‘Leutnant Krieger?
You let him watch that crap? Christ, no wonder he worships the SS.’

Without answering, Marge opened her recipe file and began sorting cards.

‘So that’s what this “military school” thing is all about! All the kids do it, he says. It’s harmless, you say. And in twenty years, when they start up new concentration camps…’

For God’s sake! You haven’t even watched the program, so how can you judge it? It isn’t so bad, really. This Leutnant Krieger’s not really an SS man at all. He’s working to assassinate Hitler. So you see, when he beats up a Jew, it’s only part of his cover story. And when he…’

‘I get it. The best of both worlds, right? That’s just the way the Nazis worked in the first place. “This isn’t really me doing this medical experiment, it’s Destiny working through me. It’s Blood and Destiny, and besides, it’s orders.” What’s the use, nobody’s listening.’

Marge snapped the file box shut. ‘Oh, we’re all against you, is that it? Listen, you know what they say about aggression. He needs permissible outlets. Isn’t it better to let him get it out of his system now?’

‘Or into his system, maybe?’

‘Listen, you. If anybody in this family turns Spot into a little Nazi, it’ll be you! You, with all your petty restrictions and rules. Who wanted to keep him away from TV altogether? Who wouldn’t let him box?
Oh, damn you?’

She began to cry over a fistful of Japanese recipes. Later, after they had made love, she whispered, ‘There was something I meant to tell you tonight, only I’ve forgotten.’

‘Mm?’

‘Oh yes. The window peeper.’

‘N.’

‘One of the neighbors saw someone lurking around our windows last night.’

Bob sat up and turned on the light. ‘And I’m going away tomorrow? Why in hell didn’t you say something? Who saw him?’

She hesitated, chewing a thumbnail. ‘Don’t laugh, but it was Mrs Fellstus.’

The light went off and Bob dragged the blankets toward his side of the bed.

Don’t you want to hear about it?’

For answer, he twitched away more of the blankets.

The Thursday meetings of the Jess Hurch Society had dwindled, dwindled. No one seemed to care about fighting Communism any more, and Grover attributed this to Lack of Moral Fiber and to Red propaganda.

‘They control the press, the radio, television,’ he said to the two people in the hall. ‘Wall Street, which they revile unceasingly, is really their tool. My own bank today refused us a loan to keep die fight going. So now I’m going to ask all of you to be generous…’

One of the two snorted, murmured something about a con game, and left. That left only Amy Birdsall (Sec. and Treas.). Grover Minus (Pres.) climbed down off the dais, set the American flag back in its holder, and sat down next to her. Amy lay down her pencil and applauded wildly until he shushed her. Then the room was silent, except for the creak of their folding chairs, as two old bodies shifted and shifted, searching for comfortable positions.

‘I give up, Amy. The cumminisks have won.’

She looked shocked. ‘Grover! How can you say such a thing! Why only yesterday…’

‘No, no. We’re too old for this kind of thing. My arm’s too bad to run the printing press. How can we warn the world, the two of us against millions of cumminisk spies? Better for you to go back to your bible and your Billy Whatsisname. Me, I’ll—I’ve got a few friends in that Florida retirement home we talked about. Thought I might drop down and—and see. Just see.’

Amy started weeping, pushing up her bifocals to scrub away the tears. ‘The only thing I ever believed in,’ she whimpered. ‘Besides God Almighty. I’d carry on by myself, but what can
I
do? I’m only a weak woman.’

For all her eighty years, Amy was stronger than Grover. She had once been a Rockette, and prided herself on still being able to kick off a man’s hat—if men still wore hats. But Grover was desperate to comfort her, all the same.

‘All right,’ he said, patting her hand. ‘All right, kid, the Jess Hurchists
will
go forward. But
underground
. No more pamphleteering, no more speeches. We’ll just spy them out, and turn over everything we learn to the FBI.’

The original Jess Hurch (1842-1887) was a cowpoke, miner, farmer and grain merchant. He was also a gambler, pimp, drunk and petty swindler. Yet his was a life redeemed at the last moment, and, in the town of Medicine Dumps, California, Jess paid his debts.

He was celebrating something by shooting out store windows and store owners along Main Street when he noticed a crowd collecting by the railway station. The governor of the state was about to campaign for re-election from the rear platform of his special train. Jess just naturally found a good spot in the front of the crowd.

It was a hot day. The speech was long. The governor invited everyone to sit down. Jess hunkered down on a rail and dozed off.

Midway through his speech, the governor asked if anyone wanted government by guess and by golly. Jess awoke, thought someone had called upon him to say a few words, and jumped up.

The swarthy man seated right behind him picked that moment to shoot the governor.

Though somewhat startled at being sprayed with brains and blood, the governor was unhurt. The citizenry sighed with relief at Jess’s departure. Then they strung up the wrong man. Then they shot up the town, good-naturedly.

The actual assassin was found hiding in a cracker barrel, and they finished off the day with a second necktie party. The swarthy little man’s last words were ‘Long live Anarchy!’ Thus it came to be that Jess Hurch transcended his own nature (the coroner reported him rotten with two kinds of VD) and joined the roundup of history—American’s first martyr to Anarchy, better known as Communism.

Seventy years later the Jess Hurch Society began. Grover Minus was especially pleased to carry on this particular name. As he demonstrated to his friends, ‘Jess Hurchist’ was an anagram relating the movement directly to Christianity.

Jess would have liked that. ‘Jesus H. Christ’ was his favorite ejaculation.

Mrs Fellstus sat in her accustomed place by the window, peering at the world through a slit she’d cut in the curtain.

‘He’s there again!’ she cried. There was no answer from the study, so she wheeled herself in, to make sure the doctor heard. ‘The window peeper’s there again tonight! Dean, you’re not listening.’

‘That’s right, Mother, I’m not listening. I’m trying to read an article in this journal.’

‘But the window peeper…’

‘Mother.’ Dr Fellstus tucked a huge, flat thumb in his
Journal of Kennel Psychiatry
and turned to face her. ‘We’ve been over this so many times, haven’t we? Isn’t it really just another case of the Communist in the Basement?’

‘No! Dean…’

‘Let me assure you, Mother, we are very, very safe here. Since you are no longer a Jess Hurchist, you need no longer fear the “great conspiracy”. There is no one outside, no window peeper, no one at all.’

‘Just come and look at him, Dean. Just once.’

‘Mother, remember the time you read somewhere the phrase “a chink in his armor”? And how afterward you kept imagining Red Chinese clanking up the stairs—remember that?’

‘Please, Dean. Just look.’

Very (sighing) well, Dr Fellstus walked into the living room, whipped back the curtain, and saw his own surprised expression. The handlebar mustache needed a trim.

‘Nothing and no one. Why don’t you watch a little TV, Mother? I believe they’re showing Billy Koch tonight, preaching from Porklink Stadium.’

There was no edge to his voice; nevertheless it was an order. Mrs Fellstus switched on the set, and the veterinarian returned to his journal.

The easy assumptions of this particular article rankled. Dr Fellstus, like its author, specialized in nervous diseases of the collie. He did not like to see this kind of over-emphasis on Oedipal matters, at the expense of common sense.

‘Heal this child, O Lord!’ cried the TV set.

‘Angry sire indeed!’ said Dr Fellstus, pulling at his untrimmed mustache. ‘And not a damned word about early weaning!’

‘…could have sworn…’ said his mother’s lips. ‘A man…in a long gray overcoat…walking stick…’

There really was a man in a gray overcoat, and he did use a gold-headed walking stick. His name was MacCormick Hines, and he was not ‘window peeping’, but checking out the truth about reality, the truth he’d come upon twenty years before.

The truth was that reality was televised.

Tonight, for example, Mr Hines watched a soap opera called
The Shairp Family
. Others might tune in on television by turning a knob. He tuned in by telling his chauffeur to stop the car and wait while he took a little constitutional, by creeping up to the screen and peering in.

The advantage of televised reality was that one could tune out any ghosts of unpleasantness. Mr Hines was able to believe that he was not one of the richest men in the world, only ‘comfortable’. He was able to believe that his corporation, National Arsenamid, made only fine cereals to build healthy kids, and nothing at all like anthrax, smallpox and typhus. And finally he was able to believe that everything he owned was his by dint of hard, honest work.

Whenever one of the bright young men who handled his investments tried to tell him how rich he was, Mr Hines would shout him down:

‘If I have a few comforts, by Gum I’ve earned them! Application, that’s what it took. Application of the seat of my pants to the seat of a chair. Putting on my thinking cap, giving the old gray matter a good workout. I sleep four hours a night, and I don’t waste a golden hour, a diamond minute of the rest! Time is money.

‘Better wear out than rust out. A little hard work never hurt anybody! All it takes is a little Yankee ingenuity, a little “can do”. I don’t believe in the word “can’t”. It takes gumption, and grit, and stick-to-itiveness, and a lot of plain, hard, honest-to-God elbow grease!

‘Use the brains God gave you! Dream awhile and scheme awhile, but keep your feet planted on
terra firma
and
PLUG!’

Then, with the young man shouted out of the room, he could go back to his gentle dreams.

The Shairp Family
was one of his favorite programs. He preferred standing in the cold drizzle to see it, when he could be sitting in dry bleachers watching that faith-healer program across town, even if the action here was a little slow tonight. The writers were probably in a slump.

So Bob was going away on business, while Spot was not, for the time being, going to military school. Well, well. Not much to chew on. As for the business about the ‘window peeper’, that was all wrong, all wrong. The real drama ought to come from
inside
the family, and not be grafted on artificially. Mr Hines thought about complaining to the sponsors, whoever they might be.

What ought to happen is for Bob to get lost at sea in an air crash. Then Marge could remarry—or almost—and Bob could ‘return from the grave’. That would be bully realism. Whooping cough for Spot, but when Bob comes back, they all live happily…

As he shuffled away, leaning into the cold October wind, Mr Hines wondered about that window-peeper business. Who would the peeper turn out to be? Some long-lost relative? Someone in distress? Or someone who would help out the Shairps when—as inevitably it must—tragedy struck? He could hardly wait to see the mysterious stranger’s face.

Bob came out of the dream sometime during breakfast, under the combined impact of coffee and headlines:

SCIENTIST DISAPPEARS

Müller-Fokker a possible defector

EVANGELIST BREAKS RECORD

10 MORE YEARS WAR? NO, SAYS ARMY CHIEF