The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (6 page)

Chuckling, Cal strode around another corner of the building. The helicopter lay on its side as the swarming boxes picked it clean. It was beginning to look like the skeleton of a beached whale.

The general was no longer laughing; he was screaming at the twin brothers, ‘Somebody is gonna have to pay for this ! That is government property your toy is tearing up !’

‘Government property hell !’ Grandison roared. ‘That gizmo is tearing up
my
property ! If you can’t shut it off—’

‘Mr. Wompler, General Grawk,’ said Karl solemnly, ‘there seems to be no safe way to shut it off—without jeopardizing the whole experiment, that is. We simply cannot permit it.’

Grandison caught sight of Cal. ‘So you finally came to, eh?’ he said. ‘Just in time, too. I guess one of them Endymions musta give you a little electric
shot
, eh boy? Well, I hope you can shut that thing off—Kurt and Karl here are chicken.’

‘There should be nothing easier than shutting it off,’ Cal said, ‘Every cell is equipped with a sympathetic, tuned switch that—’

‘Not any more,’ said Karl with a condescending smile. ‘That was last week. The more sophisticated mutations of the system have shed that apparatus long ago.’

‘Well then, I’ll shut off the ones that haven’t, and we’ll smash the rest.’

‘No, you don’t !’ Kurt said, bridling. ‘If you go in that lab and tamper, you’re fired !’

Grandison wavered, less sure of himself now. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t—’

‘I’m not worried about protecting property,’ said Cal quietly. ‘I’m worried about protecting a few lives. None of you seem to realize how dangerous this thing is.’

‘What are a few lives, in comparison to—’ Karl began, but Cal did not stay around to listen. He dashed around the corner to the main entrance and back to the lab.

It was scarcely recognizable. Larger and larger cells had formed, some viable, some not, which forced themselves into the corners of the room and ate away at the very structure of the building. Festoons of insulation hung above, where once there had been a fluorescent lighting system. Now the lamps and conduit were gone, and the very copper wires stripped from their insulation, which hung like abandoned snakeskins. There was not a scrap of metal in the room which had not been made into something else. Steel partitions, cabinets, desks had all been melted, running together in fantastic shapes.

There was a solid barrier before him, waist-high, of dead or dying cells welded together as dead polyps are clustered to make coral. He began to climb over them, looking for one with an intact toggle switch.

He found one, and threw it. The system shut off slowly, in stages. Cal heard the muffled whine of slowing dynamos in the basement, the dying fall of gears.

In the queer, sudden silence, he made his way out to the sunlight once more.

With the exception of a group of Marines, who were beating to death a small suitcase, the people who had been running madly about before were now still, scattered like groups of statuary on the lawn. The statues were all looking at Cal.

Grandison Wompler finally moved, shaking his head sadly. ‘I never thought you’d do a thing like that to me,’ he said. ‘Why, boy, why? I took you right out of school, I gave you the best opportunity a young man ever had to make something out of hisself, and here you stab me in the back, first chance you get.’

‘But—’

‘Oh, don’t try to worm your way out of it. I got the whole story from them Frankenstein fellows. You just turned a billion-dollar machine into a great big pile of junk.’

‘That’s right,’ Karl said nodding emphatically. ‘You realize that shutting off the Reproductive System completely inactivated the QUIDNAC memory?’

‘But it was running berserk !’ Cal cried. ‘It’s already killed

one man. It might have—’

‘Oh, it’s easy for
you
to say what might have been,’ Grandison thundered.

‘Don’t, Pop.’ Louie laid a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Don’t get yourself worked up over
him
. He ain’t worth it.’ He led his father away. Grandison’s shoulders seemed to sag more with every step he took.

‘Yas, a complete security blackout, button it up tight,’ said Grawk into a field telephone. He hung up and turned to face Cal. ‘Well, boys,’ he said to the Mackintosh brothers, ‘what do we do with this one? Shoot him? (We can do it legal, you know. Caught in an act of sabotage, etc. etc.)’

A kindly-looking middle-aged man in rimless glasses wandered near, and seemed to take an interest in the proceedings.

‘No need to trouble,’ said Kurt, grinning. ‘He’s harmless—now—and I’m sure by the time Senator Moley’s committee get through with him—if you get my meaning?’

‘Meanwhile, you’re fired,’ said Karl brusquely. ‘Better get going before we have you arrested for trespassing, eh?’

Grawk laughed at Cal’s look of consternation.

‘Don’t bother turning in your lab coat,’ Kurt said. ‘Or your pocket slide rule. Keep them. Just go.’

‘Has everyone lost their minds? I’ve just saved your lives, maybe, and you act like I’m Benedict Arnold. You, sir,’ he said, appealing to the kind-looking stranger. ‘Tell me, do I look like a traitor? Do you think my shutting off this damned machine is such a crime?’

The man smiled apologetically. ‘I’m afraid I’m really too prejudiced in the matter to be of much help,’ he said, and gave a small cough. ‘You see, I’m Smilax, and it’s my machine you’ve just put to death.’

There seemed nothing to do but go. As Cal walked away, he could hear the general talking about him in a very loud voice.

‘There goes a helluva rotten bastard, if you ask me. A guy that would sell out his country like that—well, it’s just lucky for him I ain’t armed. Because if I was armed—’ Grawk lowered his voice and added something Cal couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made the four WAF’s laugh very hard indeed.

He had lost his job, disgraced himself, submitted even to the flaying knives of pretty women’s scorn. Cal was in no condition to do anything like rational thinking. For if he had been, there was one question he surely would have asked himself :

How was it a system as intelligent, as adaptable, as clever at self-protection as this one was supposed to be had given up almost without a fight?

‘Of Altoona, Nevada, lying quite near Parsnip Peak (8,905 ft.) and not far from Railroad Valley, where no railroads run, I sing,’ wrote Mary Junes Beele on her husband’s L. C. Smith typewriter. Below it, she typed asterisks : a row of posies. The swollen belly of her thumb pressed the space bar.

From the next room came the clanking of a hand press. Editor Barthemo Beele was running off the second edition of the
Altoona Weekly Truth, His hand
, she thought,
that rocks the cradle
… Mary cursed the paper and she cursed the paper’s editor, her husband of one week.

The keys of the typewriter, she saw, were like black cough drops. Black cough drops were not to be had in Altoona. One of the typewriter’s keys had broken one of Mary’s nails. She began to chew it off, cursing everything she could think of—especially cursing Altoona. If that sailor did not take her away soon, she was going to die of this town. As she bit into another nail spitefully, contrary Mary cursed her rotten luck.

Altoona, too, had an unlucky history. In 1903, it had been the sole supplier of reuttite to the entire Western Hemisphere. Reuttite was of course that metal which made the best, most brilliant, longest-lasting gas mantles. There was no other known use for reuttite.

On Park Avenue in Altoona, the magnates of four different railroads had made their homes beside those of dozens of mine-owners and speculators. They’d built great white carpentered castles, gothic dreams in scrollwork and gingerbread, with bow windows, mullions, heart-shaped arches, wandering ivy and brave towers. The earth was shot through with old mine

tunnels, so that now most of these heavy homes had sunk into it. Park Avenue was mainly a row of rusty fences and weedy lots. Occasionally one might glimpse through the hollyhocks a tower, its conical hat askew.

Only two of these curios still stood firm. Both were grey, trailing the dirty lace of their porches, swaybacked, pot-bellied and senile. One of them, after its ruined owner had flung himself in front of one of his own trains, had been converted into a warehouse. It now held all the reuttite mantles produced between 1904 and 1929—nearly all the reuttite there was, and representing 25 years of attempts to find some use for it other than gas mantles.

The other house was still, as it had always been, the Smilax house. Phineas Smilax, the first and only president of the Gardnerville, Fernley and New York Railway (‘Route of Reuttite’), had invested heavily in the mineral. He had hoped that, as he and Altoona grew richer, the line would actually extend as far east as New York City.

Phineas began building his railroad line in 1885. The work progressed slowly, and this was in part due to certain peculiarities in his hiring policies. Orders existed to fire any man caught beating a horse, drowning a kitten, or tying a can to a dog’s tail. He further refused the coolie labour his competitors relied upon, preferring instead bible students, who sang, at his request, hymns while they worked. His favourite hymn was
The Celestial Railroad
. Despite his paying them the then-lavish wage of one dollar an hour, the students were so poorly suited to this work that progress was measured at first in feet per month, then in inches. By 1913, his empire stretched from Altoona to Warm Springs, a fifty-eight-mile vista of sagebrush which he inspected daily in his private car.

This car was the only luxury Phineas permitted himself, for he believed in moderation in all things. The excess of his fortune was always distributed to charities, among which he never scanted the Animal Protection League. Phineas was known to all as a kindly and temperate man—no less to his own children than to strangers. He never chastised his son and daughter by more than a reproving frown, and more was never required.

Perhaps the only fault his neighbours might have found with him was in his choice of servants. Phineas had taken into his employ in the great house in Altoona people from the Nevada Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

‘Criminals, pish !’ he would exclaim. ‘They are merely poor unfortunates, languishing for want of a kind word.’ For over twenty years he had no other servants, and a gentler, more trustworthy set could scarce be found.

One day in 1913 Phineas sat looking out the window of his private car at the sagebrush, state flower of Nevada. ‘I feel old, today,’ he remarked to his secretary, who afterwards remembered it as the first time he had ever heard his master complain. ‘I feel I’m getting near the end of the line.’

The secretary handed him a telegram from his butler, back in Altoona. Phineas Smilax read it and fell from his chair, dead.

The telegram read, ‘
DAUGHTER ENCEINTE REPEAT PREGGERS STOP HAVE BEATEN HER WITH HORSEWHIP AND DRIVEN HER FROM THE TOWN ALTHOUGH I AM FATHER OF THE CHILD STOP PLEASE ADVISE DISPOSITION HER CLOTHING PORTRAIT ETCETERA STOP SIGNED CRAGELL
’.

The daughter was never found. Cragell, having admitted to raping Lotte and frightening her into silence for several months, was returned to the Asylum. Phineas Jr. took over his father’s debts and began his own family, sired on a feeble-minded maidservant. By his own daughter he had an indeterminate number of children also, and hanged himself in 1930, when the last of the railroad had gone to pay his bootleggers. Three generations of illiterate Smilaxes still lived in the grey house, gardening in its yard. They never spoke of their banished relative, Lotte.

Rusty rails now stretched away from Altoona in three directions. Only the Nevada Southern continued to operate one train a week between Altoona and Las Vegas. Mary Junes Beele had circled on her calendar the day on which that train would leave. Tomorrow was the circled day.

The Beeles had now been here two weeks, and each had made a certain reputation. No one liked Mary. The women did not like the deliberating way she looked over their menfolk. Their menfolk did not like the insolent way she deliberated and rejected them. No one liked the way she treated her husband.

Barthemo, on the other hand, was sought out to about the same degree that Mary was snubbed. He was, after all, the finest gossip the town had ever seen, having already aired one new scandal and dug up a dozen old ones in his first week on the job. As a result of the very first issue of the
Altoona Truth
, two families were not speaking, and there was talk of a divorce, a spite fence, a duel. He reported
everything
, with scrupulous

objectivity and in delicious detail. It was said that one day Beele would describe his own cuckolding fairly.

Filled with sweet loathing for her husband, Mary entered the press room, where he was reading a proof.

‘Your coperation is appreciated,’ he read, then paused to add an ‘o’. He did not greet his wife or acknowledge her existence in any way. ‘… how long will these goings-on continue?’ he read, then amended it to ‘… how long will these goings-on go on?’