The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (10 page)

It may have been a joke to him and to most of those present (behaving in conscious or unconscious parody of old movies—‘Gee gang,’ someone said, ‘how are we going to raise money for uniforms for the team?’ ‘I have it ! We’ll put on an end of the world !’), but to Susie, it meant becoming for a moment a kind of Joan of Arc. As they left the coffee house, she was at the fore, her white boots lifting high, higher, leading the parade.

Certainly Madge never worried less about the vincibility of her daughter’s innocence than now, having just heard her insist on the word ‘seater’, and seeing her blush as she pronounced it.

How innocent Susie was, and how wise she herself had been at that age.

Madge was now only dimly aware of the dying roar of Ron’s Harley, only vaguely cognizant of her own hand, caressing the buttons on the velvet bar in Susie’s vanity kit. Madge was seeing herself of eighteen years ago, going out to the Webster Beach Club with a handsome young insurance salesman.

How like the youthful Suggs was one of Susie’s friends, Jim Porteus, she thought. Odd that Susie never noticed it in him. He was such a nice boy—so earnest, in his glasses with their customary rims of solemn black, so energetic, so eager to set the world on fire. Madge fingered the yellow pin he’d given Susie: ‘
NO RETREAT—BEAT THE VIET CONG
.’

Jim was already worth money in his own right, besides being the son of a prominent gynaecologist, and leader of the California chapter of
Young Americans to Conserve Free Enterprise
.

When he was serious, he was serious indeed. Madge recalled every detail of the first conversation she’d had with him:

‘Are you planning on studying medicine yourself, Mr. Porteus?’

‘No I’m not, Mrs. Suggs.’ He removed the glasses, startling her with the hard planes of his face. ‘No, I’m afraid the medical profession is a dead letter, these days. Despite all our efforts to prevent it, socialized medicine is on the way—and with it,
starvation for doctors
.

‘No, I’ve been keeping an ear to the ground while I pursue a course of business administration. Market analysis seems very promising—very promising, I can assure you. Qualified analysts are in short supply. It’s an uncrowded field, where an energetic, get-up-early young man can soon make his pile. Or I may opt for corporation law—chiefly protecting infant industries from the predations of the federal eagle—or some related field. I suppose the truth lies somewhere between the two. I may become an humble junior executive, an unknown but vital cog in middle management—a job where the rewards are not mere fiscal aggrandizement, but full commitment to the judicious use of power. I distribute work and rewards—and punishments—to my subordinates, while receiving my own just portion from the higher-ups; a vital link in the Great Chain of Command !’

In many ways, she reflected, thinking back on that conversation, Jim seemed older than her husband.

Madge was shocked to note the time. In the next five minutes

she was a flurry of activity, bathing, perfuming, arranging her hair, and enveloping her body in diaphanous pyjamas of mysterious misty grey barely before the bell rang. She hurriedly pinned on the yellow button and ran to greet Jim.

‘Wow !’ he said. ‘Is it dark in here ! Let’s get a little light on the subject.’

‘Wow !’ he repeated, looking her over in the light. ‘You look great, Madge.’ He took off his Tyrolean hat and kissed her.

As he undressed, neatly and efficiently, Jim talked of the coming elections for student government, in which his Student Ultra Conservatives, newly-formed, hoped to win a few seats.

‘We’re young and dynamic, though inexperienced,’ he said, folding his socks carefully and hanging them over the back of a chair. ‘The older parties will just have to move over and make room for us.’

Madge moved over and made room for him in the bed.

Woody sat in the dispatcher’s office the same night, staring unseeingly at the Lost Property form before him. For hours, he had found himself unable to even begin his strange report—though he saw every detail of it clearly, again and again.

By the time he had brought his little train to a halt that afternoon, the rest of the crew had been on the ground, running for the dispatcher’s office where the beer was kept. The Altoona-Las Vegas run always stopped here at Double Flats for beer, especially on hot days. Officially, of course, they stopped to pick up train orders.

‘Where’s the beer?’ asked Fats, the brakeman cheerily.

‘I ain’t your slavey !’ screamed the dispatcher, who never spoke in any other tone. ‘You know where we keep it ! You guys don’t know what work is. You don’t know how lucky you got it, being out there in the fresh air. I wish I was back on the road, I wish to God I was.’ He spat into a dim, littered corner, where there might have been a spitoon. Woody and the crew opened beer cans and settled in various creaky chairs about the dark brown room. They were not anxious to get back into the desert dust and heat, no matter how lucky they had it.

Railroading was new and wonderful to Woody, though he pretended to hate it as much as everyone else seemed to do. He was already picking up railroad jargon, such as the differences between boxes, gons, reefers and flats, but he had much to learn. One thing which continued to surprise him was that he did not

have to steer the engine. It seemed almost to guide itself, in some way he could hot yet fathom, around even the sharpest curves. The railroad was a wonderful invention, he certainly had to admit.

The Nevada Southern was the only railroad he could find still running steam locomotives. Woody would not run any other kind. He loved the heat, the hiss of steam.

‘That’s right,’ he put into conversation. ‘Anyone is crazy to go railroading.’ The others nodded.

‘I’m gonna get out,’ said Fats. ‘I got a brother in the feed grain business, I’m gonna go in with him. Feed grain, that’s where the real money is.’

‘I laud that,’ said Woody solemnly. ‘The fratricidal bond.’ The beer had cooled him off and made him feel clear-headed. Earlier, in Altoona, he had suffered an hallucination, no doubt from the heat. A classic wish-fulfilment dream, it had been—a woman he had once known, in another state, seemed to board his train at Altoona. He had even waved at the hallucination, but, being only an hallucination, it had not waved back.

He finished his beer, drew on his gauntlets, and strode to the door. And stopped.

Mac, the fireman stood on the platform, utterly dazed. Fats and the conductor were hopping and sprinting across the tracks towards the train.

The train was moving. It was moving and accelerating, with the throttle wide open.

But the throttle could not be wide open. There was no one in the cab to open it. There was no one to fire the boiler. For all practical purposes, the cab was empty.

Roaring and chattering, slipping, the engine, the coal tender and the single passenger car moved out. The hallucinatory woman seemed to be still aboard.

Fats puffed to a halt. The conductor made a try for the tail end of the car, missed, and fell. He rolled clear as the last wheels nipped by.

A mirage? Mass hypnosis?

Woody dipped the steel pen in ink and scratched upon the form.

‘
NAME
: Elwood Trivian, Ph.D.
TITLE
: Engineer.
ITEM LOST
: One train.
DESCRIBE THE CIRCUMSTANCES
: Apparently the train was stolen, by a—’ he lined out ‘a’ and wrote, ‘by what seemed to be a small, grey tin tackle box.’

The young man at the end of the bar was not wearing Western clothes. Had he worn no clothes at all he could not have appeared more conspicuus, at least in
The El Cantina Bar
in Goodtime, Nevada. The
El
, as the regulars called it, catered to the brightly-clad guests of three dude ranches. There were the ovoid, unhappy women of the Merry Widow Rancho (awaiting divorces); the unhappy, ovoid men of the Triple-Tumblebug Ranch (awaiting divorces); and the querulous, dozing old people, of no particular sex, from the Golden Sunset Retirement Ranch (awaiting death). Amid their orchids, turquoises and clarets, all the hues of a painted sunset, Cal’s rumpled grey suit and dirty-white lab coat stood out like a bird-dropping.

Hitchhiking towards California, he had made it this far before sun, sand, wind, shimmering pavement and truck smoke had driven him indoors.

‘Another one?’ asked the bartender, poising his bottle. His name, stitched in violet letters over the pocket of his carnelian shirt, was
Slim
. His unlabelled customer nodded solemnly.

‘I will have another. And pour yourself another, too, Slim.’

‘Why, thank you, Carl. Your health.’

‘It’s
Cal
. Say, Slim, tell me, who are all those people along the wall?’

Slim explained about ‘retirement ranches’. ‘They come in now and then for a little fun, with their attendants.’ He indicated a group of bored-looking young men and women at the middle of the bar, all wearing black ten-gallon hats and shirts of ochre silk. On the back of each shirt was embroidered a setting sun, or rising sun, emitting heavy black rays. The attendants’ names were stitched in black over their hearts.

‘Another thing. How come everything here seems to be made of wagon wheels and barrels? Tables and chandeliers and … Where do all the wagon wheels come from?’

Slim moved down the bar, smiling, to wait upon two middle-

aged women.

‘Oh Slim, you
beast
!’ shrilled the thin woman in a black-and-lavender-shirt. ‘We’ve been waiting for
hours
!’

Her friend, a dumpling in oriflamme orange, called Slim a bad boy, and told him she didn’t know whether she wanted a frozen Daquiri or not, from such a bad boy. Wasn’t he a bad boy, though? she asked her companion.

On the colour television a parade in Texas appeared: whole troops of cowgirls in sky blue, their white boots moving like pistons in synchronous high-kicking steps. The men from the Triple-Tumblebug wet their lips and began to chuckle.

Cal had another drink. Two swarthy strangers came in. The smaller was Cal’s height, the larger was a giant. They wore Palm Beach suits with wide shoulders and trim straw hats with narrow brims. Nevertheless, their eyes seemed to be in shadow. Cal would have taken them to be policemen, but they were drinking, and top-shelf whiskey, too. There was something familiar about the larger man. …

‘Another one, Carl?’ Slim poured him another, took the proper amount from the jumbled pile of change in front of Cal, and added another receipt to the neat, squared-up stack. An increase or was it decrease in entropy—or was it enthalpy? Cal tried to remember Dr. Trivian and Appreciation of Thermodynamics, but his thoughts were running into ellipses. …

He watched the old people along the wall, dozing over cribbage or Monopoly boards and beer. Now and then one would awaken slightly to say something cross, then drift off without waiting for a reply.

The taller of the two newcomers, who reminded Cal somehow of jock-straps, had turned his back, but the shorter man materialized at Cal’s elbow. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ he said shyly. ‘My friend and I have a little bet going. I say you’re a doctor, and he says you drive a meat truck. I wonder if you’d mind telling me which of us is correct?’

Cal smiled modestly, if crookedly. ‘Actually, I’m a biophysicist. So I’d say your guess was closer.’

‘Very interesting.’ The stranger reamed one ear with a thick finger. ‘I suppose you know a lot about mathematics, eh?’

‘Bingo !’ screamed an old person of indeterminate sex, who sat before a cribbage board.

Reluctantly, Cal admitted that he had a nodding acquaintance with the Calculus.

‘I see. Well, thanks for settling our bet.’ The stranger moved off, before Cal could ask him the name of his tall companion. ‘Tennessee’ came to mind, as did ‘tennis shoe’. Cal settled for the moment on something between Dennis Shoe and Jack Strapp. …

He realized he was shouting all this when Slim turned and smiled at him. ‘Keep it down to a dull roar, now, Carl old buddy.’

‘Cheat !’ someone along the wall squeaked. ‘Where did that hotel come from, eh? Tell me that !’

‘You watch your mouth,’ came the quavering reply. ‘I own Boardwalk and Park Place, and by the Living God, you’ll pay me my rent !’

‘Please,’ said another, an old woman in a scarlet shirt. ‘Andy can take his turn over, can’t he?’

A glass of beer went over. ‘Now see what you’ve made me do ! All the Chance cards ruined !’

‘I’ll show
you
who cheats !’ screamed a wispy old man in a tall white sombrero and a shirt of distress-signal pink. Above the green neckerchief, his goitre worked convulsively. ‘There !’ He leapt up and whipped the blanket off his opponent’s lap. A number of cards fell out of it. ‘Hah !’ he screamed. ‘Caught with the goods ! So that’s what happened to all the railroads, eh?’

The culprit, a parrot-like man in blue and orange, picked up a tiny red block of wood and flung it at him. ‘Take your hotel and go to Hades !’ he wailed. Clawing at the board, he upset it, sweeping off hotels, houses, dice and markers. ‘
You
cheat, yourself !’