The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (23 page)

From the direction of the city a speck came into view, grew to mirage size, wavered in the heat, finally decided to connect itself to the ground with wheels, added more of an illusion of substance to itself, chose to become real, and drew nearer. It was a light truck that slowed to sniff at their offering and finally stopped to graze. At Cal’s beckoning, the group scrambled out of the roadside ditch and piled into the back—amid a welcome cargo.

The truck was a milk van, and, though many of its products were turning sour, there was more than enough fresh yoghurt, buttermilk and cottage cheese to go round. After making their lunch on it, the five resumed their long-interrupted discussion of coincidence.

It began when the mercurial Professor, happily sated on curds and whey, roundly declared that he had never in his life made a finer meal, in terms of both delectation and wholesomeness. What better meal could there be, he argued, than milk? Babies, who dine upon it exclusively, do not have gout, gallstones, liver ailments or apoplexy. Diet and diet alone explains the difference between a laughing, healthy child and an aguey old man. How providential (he exclaimed) that this truck should be full

of such a perfect food!

Daisy then said she was not afraid to ascribe such good fortune to a Higher Power. For, though out at pocket and without the slightest resources, they were now fed, sheltered, and travelling in the best company.

‘Out at pocket!’ Brian shouted. ‘I should think so. D—Las Vegas!’ he cried with passion. ‘I hope that I may never see nor hear of Las Vegas again!’

He sulked on in silence past oil pumps, or pastures where myriads of parabolic dishes, like flowers, turned their heads to the sun. They had entered a lightly-wooded gorge when suddenly the milk truck began to limp on three tyres.

‘I knew it,’ Brian said with savage glee. ‘There’s your Higher Power for you.’ The words were no sooner out of his mouth when the engine began to stutter; it died before they had gone another hundred yards.

‘Here’s a pretty kettle of finny prey,’ Brian said. ‘See what your Author has done to us now! I just knew—’

Daisy shushed him, saying she’d enough of his clairvoyance. The five of them climbed out to stretch their legs and survey their surroundings.

The prospect was far from displeasing. On the slope above stood a rude cabin, from whose chimney puffs of smoke rose at regular intervals. Below the road the trees were thick, and there came the sound of a running brook. Cal elected to fill some empty milk bottles with spring water, and Daisy and the Professor went with him, while Harry and Jack climbed to pay a call at the cabin. Under his breath, the Professor kept up a constant flow of invective.

In a short while there was a cry from the cabin, and two figures rushed out. Jack and Harry still managed to look dignified in their summer suits, though they had removed their straw hats and now waved them aloft boyishly as they bounded down the hill. When they neared him, Cal could see their flushed faces and wild eyes.

‘The jackpot!’ Harry bellowed. ‘We hit the jackpot! Gold! There’s a big hunk of machinery up there, a steam engine or something,
all made out of gold
.’

‘A steam engine! That explains the regular puffing of the chimney,’ said Cal. ‘But gold? Gold is too soft to be made into machinery. Must be brass.’

‘Look! I yanked this off it!’ Jack exhibited a valve handle,

wheel-shaped, apparently made of gold.

‘Wait a minute.’ Cautiously Cal scraped the handle against a rough stone until the steel showed through. There was about a quarter-inch of gold about a steel core. ‘Looks as if it’s being used for rustproofing. It’s gold all right.’

‘Then that’s the best use for it,’ Daisy stoutly declared.

‘Even though it isn’t solid gold, there’s still enough there to make us all rich!’ Brian said ‘
Rich
, my dear!’ He took both of Daisy’s hands in his, but she drew them away.

‘Gold is the root of all evil,’ she said tonelessly.

‘Now there you are wrong, my dear. It isn’t
gold
that’s the root of all evil, but the
love
of gold.
Cupiditas
. And as far as that goes, I hate gold as much as the next man. But do be a dear, my dear, and let us, this once, prosper.’

‘Prosper!’ As she inhaled the word, Daisy’s nostrils began to dilate. ‘Prosper! If you have no more sense than to clamber up there and fool with dangerous machinery, so be it! Go ahead and
prosper
!’ The nostrils continued dilating. ‘If you are so hungry for gold, add
this
to your treasury!’

And tearing off her engagement ring (she had to resort at last to the milk van and find some rancid butter to slather on it, but finally succeeded), she threw it at him.

‘If that is the way you wish to behave, woman, I am your humble servant, to be sure!’ the Professor shouted, and colour began mounting in his veinous neck. But it had not crept up to his eyebrows when Brian was disconcerted by Daisy’s sobbing. Her great, red-rimmed eyes, long over-burdened, now fairly exploded tears over her face.

At the sight of this tall, thick statue of a woman so far forgetting her goddess-like composure as to weep, Brian himself burst into tears. Running to her, he slipped the ring back on her still-slathered finger.

‘I don’t want this gold, my dear,’ he sobbed, and for once almost forgot to make a figure of speech, ‘this, or any other!’

Harry made a disgusted sound. ‘Women make a guy soft,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Jack chuckled, rubbing his hands together. ‘I guess that leaves just the three of us.’

‘Count me out,’ said Cal. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking. In the first place, we haven’t any guarantee we’ll ever get out of here (or, if out of here, to any place where gold is valuable again). In the second place, I don’t see any way of getting at it,

other than by melting down the whole machine or bringing it all with us—which doesn’t seem likely,’ he added, eyeing the thirty-pound handle.

‘In the third place, maybe it belongs to someone else—a small point, but one worth considering, since as far as we know the laws of Nevada or Utah are still operating, and people have a way of defending their property with arms. I can’t believe anyone walked off and left this to take care of itself. No, I’m sure this is a piece of the Reproductive System, which brings us to the fourth place.

‘The Reproductive System is even more finicky about its property than people. It has a nasty way of defending itself against vandalism. I’d be very careful how I approached it, if I were to approach it at all.’

‘Careful? As a favour to you, I suppose?’ Harry sneered.

‘Should I go on?’ Cal asked. ‘In the fifth place, I saw a movie once called
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, in which it turned out that the
real
danger attached to handling gold is—’

‘Why don’t you skip all that intellectual malarky?’ Harry shouted, his voice hoarse with fury. ‘Either you’re scared of the law or else you just can’t stand me to have anything of my own. Is that it? Just because
I
discovered it, this gold ain’t good enough for you, huh? First you took away my girl, then you got rid of her, and now you want to take away my steam engine. Well, it’s mine! Jack and I are going up there and take it apart now, and anyone who follows us is gonna be sorry!’ Harry patted his gun.

The two men strode off up the hill, their identical natty summer hats trimmed to an identical angle. They went into the cabin. Cal, Brian and Daisy remained rooted to the spot, not knowing what to think of Harry’s wanton outburst. A few minutes passed.

Then a shot rang out, followed by two more in rapid succession. The echoes had not died away when Jack reeled out of the cabin door, the front of his pale suit turning black with blood. He staggered a few steps down the slope towards them, pitched forward and rolled the rest of the way down. When he reached the bottom his hat was still on, still at an elegant angle.

Cal turned him over and loosened his collar. This was all the first aid he could think of.

‘He’s crazy,’ Jack whispered. ‘I wanted to take it kind of easy

—you see, that thing is still running full blast, and neither of us know anything about dismantling steam engines—I was afraid it might blow up or something. I wanted to take it slow, maybe shut it off first. He got angry, I don’t know why, I guess he figures I was chicken. “Take it easy?” he said. “As a favour to
you
, I suppose. Boy, that really is rich.” He said it two or three times, as he shot me:

‘“That really is rich.” ’

Jack coughed, fell back, and lost the thread of his narrative.

Ts he—?’ Daisy asked.

A sudden concussion smote the ground like a giant drumhead, flinging them all off their feet. The little cabin vanished in a bulbous flash that sprouted at once, growing into a tall flower of black smoke. Clouds of steam and dust boiled out from its base. A weak-rooted tree peeled off the cliff above, adding its crash to the clatter of ratchel and debris. When it ended, it was as if the little cabin had never been.

There was no use looking for Harry, but they did. Straw from his hat, a scrap of shoe leather, some of the fabric from his suit—still wrinkle-free—were all they found of him. They buried these with Jack, and put two crosses on the grave. Brian recited a suitable elegy by Thomas Gray. Cal would always remember pan of it:

By midafternoon, using the gold valve handle—the only gold the three of them ever saw—as bait, they picked up another ride eastward. It was a grocery van.

‘I don’t think I quite understand,’ Aurora stammered. At Smilax’s announcement shock had so stiffened her features that she was barely able to speak.

‘You mean, perhaps, you don’t believe me,’ he said with pleasant pedantry. ‘Then come, I’ll show you.’ Taking her arm just above the elbow in a grip that hurt, he steered Aurora through what seemed to be a dentist’s office, down several corridors, and into a conference room. A giant screen covering one wall displayed, in blue-lighted outline, a map of North America.

‘Sit down, please. Now, just so we won’t misunderstand one another, you are going to become my employee. I am, as you know, head of Project 32.’

‘And if I no longer wish to work for Project 32?’

‘You have no choice, as I’ll shortly explain. In any case, before long to be alive will mean to work, in some capacity, for Project 32. In a short time there will exist nothing else, only Project 32, only the Reproductive System, in
my world
. Let me show you.’

He touched a button on the arm of a chair and a yellow dot appeared on the map. ‘That is NORAD.’ As he touched other controls, a red area spread from the dot, like inflammation from a pimple. Well over a third of the United States, Aurora saw, was engulfed in red. Other comedos appeared yellow in the redness, and the doctor pointed them out. ‘You see our other production centres, so to speak, our nuclei in Millford, Altoona and Las Vegas.’

‘How were you able to get control of them?’

‘A young lab worker at Millford, Calvin Potter, “shut off” the System after a disastrous demonstration. I let it be known that the System was absolutely finished. In reality, of course, it had merely gone underground with my help—literally underground, for it made its way via caverns and abandoned mine tunnels to

Altoona. From there it took the territory you see.

‘These are my latest acquisitions,’ he added proudly, and lighted two yellow dots at Washington DC. ‘They have an interesting history. Last evening, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were here. I managed to introduce into the briefcase of one of them a kind of “living time-bomb”. I’ve been in constant contact with the Pentagon since, over NORAD’s hot line, and I’m happy to say that the giant game theory computer there—the military’s war brain—is now mine. I have, without firing a shot, rendered the United States helpless.

‘The other mark represents the State Department. Another cell insinuated itself into their mail room; it is sending replicas of itself in diplomatic pouches to our embassies and consulates all over the world. It should not be long before we begin to hear from various world capitals, I should think.’

A half-dozen more yellow dots appeared, like an outbreak of acne. ‘Fort Knox, Pittsburg, Birmingham, some of the industrial sections of Los Angeles are ours,’ he said, ‘though not in every case aware of it. Fully automated factories may be taken over with a minimum of trouble and waste, quietly. Ah, I wish I had only perfectible machines to deal with, instead of frail flesh! But alas, sooner or later, one must encounter the—’ he made a grimace ‘—the human element. One must inform the public who’s in charge, and that, Dr. Candlewood, is partly why I need your help.’

‘My help? You seem to be subduing the world quite on your own doctor,’ she said, assuming a tone of irritation to hide the depth of her shock. ‘I don’t see how I can be of the slightest assistance.’