Alien Accounts

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

John Sladek explains the theme of the darkly comic stories in this wonderful collection:"The aliens here are human. This book contains no giant flying snails or telepathic octopods, no Ganymedean cat-women dressed in silver, no aggressive dugong chiefs roaming the galaxy in their pulsar-powered yo-yo ships. The aliens here are human aliens. Most of them work in ordinary offices, and they do not commute to work from Proximo Centauri, either. Yet these here humans are aliens. Office life attracts them ..."

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 138

Sample

‘Whoever is in charge of operations should be designated with real authority to be used in case of an emergency.’


A.P. Sloan

My Life with General Motors

PART ONE: CLERKS ALL!

Section I: The Lutte Agency

Division A: Mr. Gelford

Henry found that, when he had filled out the orange card listing his education, work experience and hobbies, he was permitted
to pass beyond the railing next to the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist was a fat, pretty girl whose bare feet would
be soft and pink. Being bored in the evenings, especially Sunday evenings, she would draw on black silk stockings and fuck
someone in front of a movie camera. Once a famous American executive, watching her in a movie, had had an unusual experience.


Henry moved down the light green hail to a barn-like room where each stall was equipped with a desk and a living soul. The
black wooden floor was wavy. Little incandescent bulbs, strung on wires, pumped light into the room, but dark corners drained
it away too fast. Henry sat down in the second rank of folding chairs, along with a blind man and a Negro who would someday
be a well-known boxer. The blind man’s dog looked at Henry, seeing him.


Henry remembered visiting the dentist with just such an orange card in his hand. He was thinking of some way of explaining
this to the blind man or the Negro, when far down the barn a tall man stood up and beckoned.


‘Henry,’ he called. Henry and the blind man stood up together.

‘Did he say Amory?’ asked the blind man.

‘No, Henry.’

‘Eh? Henry?’

‘Henry.’

‘Henry!’ called the tall man again, beckoning over the waves. Henry walked towards him, past the desks of Mr. Blair and Mr.
Clemens and Mrs. Dudevant and Mr. Beyle and Miss Knye.


Division B: Mr. Nind

Mr. Gelford asked Henry to call him Al. With a special pen, Al initialled the orange card in several places, maintaining the
attitude of a dentist marking caries. His eyes, small and dark – like human nipples, they were surrounded with tiny white bumps – looked searchingly
at Henry’s hair or teeth.


‘Henry C. Henry, eh? What does the C. stand for?’ Henry looked at him in silence until Al turned his nipples to a mimeographed
list. ‘Nothing here, I’m afraid, for someone with almost no experience. I’ll turn you over to Mr. Nind.’


Don kept a telephone receiver well in front of his mouth as he spoke, because the inside of his lip had developed a terrible
cold sore he wished to hide. It was, as he already suspected, syphilis.


‘I have a really challenging job in a small, friendly engineering company,’ he said. ‘No experience necessary, and there is
no limit to how far you can work your way up. What do you say, fella?’


Henry leaned forward and laid a hand on Nind’s desk calendar. ‘Fine, Don,’ he said softly.

Section II: An Interview

In an almost bare room evenly coated with dust, Mr. Masterson toyed with a slide rule, a clipboard, a retractable ballpoint
pen and a thin book, Steam Tables, by Keynes and Keyes. Henry sat motionless before him. Out of the window he could see a soup line, and in the distance a
building was being demolished. A man in uniform walked up the soup line, pulled a man out of it and began hitting him in the
face. Perhaps later the victim would go to a movie theatre, buy a ticket, enter the Gents and comb his hair.


‘Are you a good, steady worker?’ asked Masterson.

‘Yes.’

Fingers like white slugs curled around the slide rule. Undoubtedly Masterson was puffy and white all over, like a drowned
corpse. His unpleasant glasses were hinged in the centre like motorcycle goggles, and folded hard against the colourless bubbles
of his eyes. Mr. Masterson contained a great quantity of liquid.


‘Do you work good?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘If you work good, we’ll do good by you.’ Henry was never to forget this sentence, for he wrote it on a sheet of paper and
taped it in the drawer of his desk, where it became a kind of motto.


‘You start at fifty.’ The corner of Mr. Masterson’s mouth lifted in a kind of smile, revealing a rotten tooth.

Section III: The Arrangement

The Masterson Engineering Company occupied the third and fourth floors of the building. Henry was to work on the third floor.
An old man, whose tie was fastened with a paper clip, whose sleeves were rolled high above his parched elbows, led Henry downstairs
into a room full of clerks at oak desks. There were in the room perhaps a dozen, perhaps a hundred men of various sizes and ages.


Gesticulating wildly with his skinny arms, the old man began in a high, clear voice to explain Henry’s duties:

See this here form

This here is the system sheet.

You’ve got to mark it down every time

An assignment bill comes in

You’ve got to mark it down every time

An assignment bill goes out

And put the tally number here off the spec

Or else the item identification.

See this here list

This here is the transfer list,

Where you put the part number here

From the compiled list of numerical transfers

Where you put the description number here

From the B column of the changeover schedule

And mark it down.

We have always initialled our work

We always will.

Be sure you initial the backlist

When you add a serial number

Be sure you initial the adjustment form

When you check this here.

Fill out the job number;

Fill out the item identification index

(Blue and yellow copies),

Make a note on the margin of the drawing

Or on the margin of the transfer book

If the alphabetical register is stamped

And initialled by the proper authority.

‘You’ll catch on …’ Winking, the old man gave his sketches of arms a final flourish and went away. Henry fingered various
piles of clean forms tentatively, murmuring fragments of the old clerk’s song; he picked up a coloured pencil and laid it
down again. It seems that being a clerk is not all fun!


Henry consulted with himself and decided to learn by observing and imitating the other clerks around him. There were eight
clerks around him in the following arrangement:


Clark Markey

Willard Bask

Karl Henkersmahl

Robert Kegel

Henry C. Henry

Rodney Klumpf

Harold Kelmscott

Edward Warner

Edwin Futch

Henry was never to learn the names of any of the sixteen or forty clerks outside this circle of desks, but soon he ‘caught
on’, or moved into the general work rhythm. He accepted from Rod or Ed Warner a batch of forms, removed paper clips from some,
marked a few of them with numbers and initials, erased the numbers or initials from others, sorted them by his own arrangement,
clipped them together, and gave them to either Bob or Willard.


Willard was born and raised in the Southern part of the United States, while Bob’s younger sister was sure to become salutatorian
of her high school class. Meanwhile Bob or Willard was undoing part or all of Henry’s work, then passing the stuff on to Clark
or Harold or Karl, who in turn undid part or all of his (Bob’s or Willard’s) work, then passed the stuff on to Rod or Ed W.
or callow Eddie Futch; each man along the chain approaching the work as if no one had gone before and no one would come after.
Numbers would be erased, altered, changed back to their original values. Forms might be sorted by names, then dates, then
colour, then in numerical order, alphabetical order and alphanumerical order. Often enough, work came back to Henry from two
to three times. This was indeed a vicious circle!


Section IV: The Happy Ending

Happily, sooner or later every form ended up with Karl, the stapler, who might put a staple in it and send it out of the department
for good. Work flow was thus:




Thus a kind of progress was achieved, without, however, sacrificing routine. The happy days blended into one another like
molten glass.


Section V: The Departures

No one ever saw Mr. Masterson on the third floor. He seemed to send all his orders through the old clerk, who descended every
morning with a memorandum to be tacked to the bulletin board.


The speaker of the intercom, fixed in the ceiling, made crackling noises that might have been the voice of Masterson. The
shape of a name emerged from the static. A clerk at once rose, squared his shoulders and climbed the stairs. He did not come
back.


The room was filled with the anxious murmur of the clerks, discussing his departure. The same thing had happened a dozen times
or more, it was said. They never came back.


The discussion stamped everyone. Some clerks stood leaning against their desks, arms akimbo. Some tapped pencils on their
blotters, made spitting motions, or leaned back. Others pretended to move their jaws sideways, while still more others sharpened
pencils and drank water from paper ‘cups’. Bob Kegel continued to read numbers from a list to Rod Klumpf, who punched the
buttons of a small adding machine. Karl picked at his stapler with a preoccupied air. Big Ed Warner, an older man known for
his leaky heart and halitosis, was swivelled around to talk to Eddie Futch. Had the bomb (or a Hiroshima-size atomic bomb)
gone off at this moment, at 5,000 feet above Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the shadow of Ed would no doubt have protected
the acne-riddled face of Eddie from the direct effects of the blast, or is this just wishful thinking?


Ed told the young man that the departed clerk was dead, and that nothing, no power on earth could bring him back.

‘Is that any way to talk? Jesus! Is that any way …’

Eddie ran off to the lavatory to pinch pimples from his hot, raw cheeks. Big Ed considered the word ‘laughter’.

Section VI: Kegel and Klumpf

Bob Kegel and Rod Klumpf were alike. Often Henry tried to envision some mirror arrangement that would allow him to see, in
place of the back of Bob’s head in front of him, the back of Rod’s head behind him. Clearly the virtual image would be the
same.


They were tall, slim and polite, with round heads, round shoulders and long, narrow feet. They wore fashionable clothes and
reasonable smiles and neat cowlicks, and they read the same consumer magazine, which prompted them to buy many of the same
articles: antifreeze, air conditioners, Ascots, attaché cases, beer mugs, berets, blazers, brandy snifters, cameras, carpeting,
cars, cats, deodorants, door chimes, filter cigarettes, golf clubs, hats, L.P.s, luggage, movie cameras, movie projectors,
shavers, silverware, slide projectors, tape recorders, typewriters, television sets, toothbrushes.


At first Henry supposed that he could tell them apart by Rod’s freckles and Bob’s half-rimmed glasses. But the sun soon brought
out freckles on Bob also, and he proved to be quite vain in regard to his glasses, wearing them less and less. At the same
time, Rod purchased and began to wear a similar pair of glasses, and since he kept out of the sun, his own freckles began
to fade. Being of a size, the two friends loaned one another clothes. Occasionally, for a joke, they would exchange desks.
Both spoke in the same modulated tones, and both moved with the grace of bowlers.


It was always Bob or Rod who got up a football pool, who sent out for coffee, who tacked up humorous signs, who started charity
drives, who instituted fines for tardiness and swearing, who collected money for flowers whenever anyone fell ill, died or married. Tirelessly and good naturedly, these clean young men organized the life
of the office. The others despised them.


Section VII: The Coffee Break

Division A: The idea of coffee break

Coffee break was an old tradition at the Masterson Engineering Company, instituted some years before by Mr. Masterson when
he had read in a management magazine the following advertisement:


UP PRODUCTION WITH A COFFEE BREAK!

Get more out of your workers by giving them a short mid-afternoon rest, with coffee, the all-purpose stimulant. Coffee perks up flagging minds and bodies the way fuel injection pumps up the power of an engine.
They will gladly pay for the coffee – while you reap the extra productivity!


His frequent memos on the subject claimed that coffee breaks cost him an enormous amount of money, but that he was determined
his clerks should be happy at all costs.


Division B: Coffee break praxis

It was during coffee break that Henry began to learn the peculiar vocabulary of the clerk.

First he heard Clark Markey, the non-lawyer, say, ‘I certainly did finalize that item.’

A delighted smile invaded the solemn features of Karl Henkersmahl. ‘Finalized it, did you? You do not know the meaning of
the word finalize. Did you expedite it or ameliorate it? Did you even estimate the final expenditures? Or did you merely correlate the old
stabilization programs? Ha!’


Harold Kelmscott stirred his coffee with a peculiar new kind of pencil. Laughter hissing in his blue eyes, he said, ‘Quit
it, Karl. We all know what a poor expediter you are yourself, and you’re a non-conservative estimator, unless I miss my guess.’


Karl nipped off his rimless glasses and polished them in aggravated silence. It was hard for him to acknowledge the presence
of a superior will, but he did so with his best grace. His tiny, wide-set eyes, were on the move, looking for a smile he could
challenge.


Karl often let his pride and quick temper draw him into an argument on any subject, especially on the subject of Germany,
about which he possessed a number of interesting statistics. Claiming to know the exact reason Germany lost the Second World
War, he usually won any arguments simply by shouting the same words over and over until his opponent gave up. The only man
who ever won the war argument from Karl was Ed Warner, who maintained that Germany had won the war.


Division C: False teeth

Karl swallowed his coffee and said, ‘I estimate that the productionalized operational format will be updated by mid-March
at the very earliest.’


Harold smiled. ‘But that’s hardly a conservative estimate, is it, Karl?’ The smile became an orange balloon, orgulous and
threatening. Karl stared at its teeth in disbelief.


Modestly swirling his coffee and studying the rainbow in it, Harold said aloud that he had found two discrepancies today.

Two! A low murmur of approval went around the group. Indian, or ‘ideal’ summer descended on the city, and a new movie came
to the Apollo. Hurricane Patty Sue was breaking up. The eyes of Eddie Futch glistened with frank hero-worship, which Harold
accepted graciously. Even Bob and Rod paused in their counting of the proceeds of a turkey raffle to make the well-known gesture
of ‘nice going’.


Karl alone refused to congratulate Harold. ‘I hope you itemized them both,’ he said testily, ‘before you followed a plan of
procedure.’


‘Of course I itemized them. What did you think I’d do – standardize them?’ Harold quipped. The others laughed heartily, as much in glee at Karl’s discomfiture as in open admiration of the excellent bon mot, or good word, of his inquisitor.


It was hard not to like Harold Kelmscott, for he was a true clerk, descended from a line of clerks that could trace its name
back to the twelfth century, to a Benedictine monk who broke his vow of celibacy. Harold once lectured to an orientation class
of incoming clerks at a business college. He said:


Section VIII: A Priesthood

My esteemed fellow-clerks:

There have not been so many ways in this world in which a man might earn his daily bread, that the desiderata of clerkdom
could invariably vie with more dramatic ways of ‘bringing home the bacon’ (slide shown of Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, 1953, or Head IV, 1949, or. . .