The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library)
Read The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) Online
Authors: John Sladek
THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM
John Sladek
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Suppose that it is once more 196–, that fateful year, and suppose that you are passing through Millford, Utah, that most fated of crossroads. Population, a battered, bird-spattered sign informs you, is ‘3810 And Still Growing ! Home of Shelley B—’
Home of Shelley something, Millford lies about half-way between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) buried deep in a Colarado mountain. The name ‘Millford’ is honorific; there has never been a stream through this part of the desert, nor a mill, nor anything to grind in a mill. Perhaps it was named ironically, or wishfully. Founders of other desert towns have, after all, given them pretty names, hoping that (by sympathetic magic) pretty reality would follow.
Millford is not pretty, it is worn and warped. There is little to distinguish it from Eden Acres, Greenville or Paradise. Its feed store, like theirs, is checkered red and white. Along its main drag lurk old familiar faces : The Eateria; The Idle Hour; Marv’s Eat-Gas; The Dew Drop Inn Motel.
You, the casual tourist—say you are an Air Force General from NORAD on his way to get a divorce—are more interested in your odometer than in that Coca-cola bottling plant or whatever it is over there on the right. You are barely conscious of an ugly factory of glazed brick, with a glass-block window on its rounded corner. ‘Wompler Toy Corporation. Makers of—’
The worn sign slides past you, lost for ever. There is only one sign you are interested in : ‘Resume Speed’. Ah, there it is. And there’s another : ‘You are now leaving Millford, Utah, Home of Shelley Belle. Hurry Back !’ Your foot comes down on the gas, hard. The rattle of tappets asks :
Who the hell
Is Shelley Belle?
You are irritated with Millford. You are annoyed with your own faulty memory. You are bored with all ugly little desert
towns with their smug signs : ‘Biggest Little City in the Universe !’ You are hot and bored and tired, and you exceed the speed limit a little, fleeing from the place where world history is being made …
‘She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight.
… And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.’
W
ORDSWORTH
‘Sorry I’m late, gang.’ Louie Guthridge Wompler, vice-president in charge of public relations, bounced into the conference room on ripple-soled shoes. He smiled at the other three members of the board, but they seemed not to notice.
‘Where were you?’ asked the president, Grandison Wompler. His jowls shook with annoyance. ‘We’ve got important business to discuss.’
‘Sorry, Pop.’ Louie threw himself into a chair at the right hand of his father. ‘I was getting in some work on my lats. You know,
latissimus dorsi?
That’s here.’ He pointed a thick finger at his own armpit.
‘We’re dissolving the company, son.’
‘You know, I’m getting some pretty clean definition—Dissolving the company ! But why, Pop? Why?’
Grandison’s gavel made a sound like a pistol shot. ‘Meeting to order,’ he rumbled.
‘What’s the scoop, Pop?’ Louie persisted, and shone upon his father a winning, Harold Teen smile.
‘Son,’ the old man began, then stopped. He was searching for a cliché that Louie could grasp. Though forty-one years old he did not seem, at times, far removed from adolescence. Now, as he toyed with a spring grip developer and a jar of Sooper Proteen tablets, Louie seemed even—his father frowned at the thought—even childish.
The two men did not look much like father and son. The president was tall, sunburnt and rangy, fleshing out slightly in his middle age to a dignified thickness. His face was heavy and serious, with a stern jaw and thick, dark brows. There were, however, laugh lines, and his black eyes were festooned with
kindly wrinkles. With no grey in his hair, Grandison (‘Granny’) Wompler looked ten years younger than his sixty-five.
Louie, known by some as ‘Louie the Womp’, was pale and porcine. He somehow managed to resemble a water-colour of his father, one which had been through the laundry. His blond, tentatively wavy hair, milk-coloured eyes and pastry-cook skin might have made him effete but for his immense bulk. There was something athletic in Louie’s sagging shoulders and pyknik belly; he seemed a man who had been hit repeatedly in the face. His nose was flattened, and indeed all his features were a trifle smooth, a trifle melted.
He wore no tie, and beneath the white fabric of his shirt could be discerned the T-shirt legend : ‘
SOOPERPROTEEN CLUB
’. His smile, as he waited for his father to go on, was as pure and meaningless as that of dentures in a glass, and as constant.
‘Son, I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you—’
‘Let me try, Granny.’ Go wan Dill, the joky ninety-year-old production manager, turned to Louie and said, ‘What your father wants to say is, we’ve hitched our wagon to a falling star.’
‘Summer slump, that’s all it is,’ Louie whined, still smiling. ‘Sales gotta pick up by Christmas.’
‘We’ll be
rooned
by Christmas !’ snarled his father. ‘
Rooned !
’
‘—summer slump, or—’
‘No, son. The truth is, we’re finished. No one wants Wompler’s Walking Babies any more.’
Grandison’s gnarled hands trembled slightly as they lifted a doll from its tissue paper packing and placed it on its feet. It began to toddle along the polished surface of the table, mewing at every step. The president’s jaw clenched with emotion. A kazoo in his head was faintly playing ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’.
Hardly anyone knew what really happened to Shelley Belle. She had been put away in tissue paper, so to speak, with other, happier memories of the thirties (Al Jolson, Bank Nite movies, the Cord roadster, Paul Whiteman’s orchestra), as though she were indeed a sunny, golden-haired doll. Just as no one wished to remember the real thirties (soup lines, bread lines, work lines), so no one wished to remember the real history of Shelley (grown, married, divorced, married, suicide attempt, bit parts in Alfred Hitchcock movies). She would always be as they first knew her, in 1935, tossing her curls and grinning impishly at W. C. Fields
or Wallace Beery. All over America, housewives clutched their free dishes and gaped. As this five-year-old shrugged, tap-dancing her way through ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’, they
asked
in blank amazement. Wasn’t she precious? Wasn’t she the darlingest, sassiest, ittiest yummykins sweetheart, though? Wasn’t she a living doll?
Doll
. The word exploded in the brain of Grandison Wompler during a performance of
Heidi
at the Belmont Theatre. He had leaped up and begun cursing joyfully, until the manager, Ned Lambert, had been obliged to throw him out. Granny didn’t mind. He didn’t even mind missing the Spin-O-Cash. What were a hundred silver dollars to him? He was bursting with a million-dollar plan ! He went straight home and wrote, in the centre of a sheet of paper : ‘
DOLL = DOLLARS
’.
Why not make dolls of Shelley Belle right here in her home town, and why not distribute them all over the nation—the world? He would by God make a million and put Millford on the map at the same time.
There had been a few catches, as time went on. He had already got production started when a court order enjoined him from use of the name ‘Shelley Belle’. But Grandison had established his market; he did not need her name any longer. Soon, Wompler’s Walking Babies became famous in their own right, and his fortune was assured.
Even during the war he’d done well. The main plant had turned to making howitzer shells, while the seamstresses sewed canteen covers. The company had won two ‘E’ awards. Louie had gone into the army and been decorated with the Quartermaster’s Cross. It seems he had bought more canteen covers than any other quartermaster. Father and son had been sorry to see the enemy give up so easily.
In 1946 Wompler’s Babies walked again, but not nearly so profitably. Sales kept slipping, slipping, as people forgot about the ageing, alcoholic Shelley Belle. Now, twenty years later, the factory had come to a stop. As Gowan Dill put it, with many winks and digs of his frail elbow, ‘Production has come to the end of the line, boys. The eye division is tight shut. Not a head rolling off the assembly line. We might just as well take the remainder of our dolls and—’
