Bugs

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

This comic novel about an Englishman lost in the surreal high-tech computer country of America's mid-west describes how the hero Fred Jones goes to America to seek his fortune and ends up with his private life out of control, working for the KGB and people wanting to murder him.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 220

Sample

The televised naturalist looked a bit like Susan. She kept a fixed smile as she demonstrated how to use some sort of beetle to clean an animal skull.

‘We start with something like this badger head, for example. After skinning and boiling it, I cut away most of the meat. Then all I have to do is drop it in this box. My little darlings do the rest.’

The camera looked down into the box at a seething mass of pale beetles crawling over bones, into eye-sockets.

‘I put a few things in here yesterday. Let’s see how they’re doing.’

The gleaming white object she lifted from the box was a small human skull. It matched her own fixed smile.

‘Like little piranhas, they are. Clean as a whistle. Now, let’s see what else we have.’

She dipped her hand into the box again, as into a bran-tub for some prize. The smile held for a moment, then vanished. Her hand seemed somehow to be stuck in the box.

‘Help me, Fred!’

Fred reached out and took Susan’s other hand, but he couldn’t pull her back. She was not just stuck, but being slowly pulled into the machine. Susan screamed and screamed, but her voice never rose above the loud hissing of the hungry bugs.

Fred woke to find he was the last passenger on the Minneapolis Rapid Transit city bus. He retrieved his book, a paperback of The Time Machine, which had fallen to the floor. The bus, full of sleep-inducing fumes, lurched off the freeway into a concrete lay-by and hissed to a stop.

‘This is it,’ said the driver, looking pleased. After a brief hesitation, he added: ‘Sir.’

‘Doesn’t this bus go all the way to Paradise Valley?’

‘Nope.’ The driver was positively gleeful now. ‘That’s eight more miles, sir. You need the extension bus.’

‘The extension bus. All right. When does the next one leave?’

‘Only one a day, at five-twenty P.M.’ By now the driver seemed ready slap his knee and fall out of his seat. ‘Sir.’

Fred looked at the watch he’d bought from a man in the street in New York City: 9.10 A.M. Fred had twenty more minutes to get to his job interview at VIMNUT Industries.

‘Only one bus a day? I can’t wait here all day. I –’

The bus driver waited until Fred had stumbled down the steps. ‘Don’t wait. It don’t stop here anyways.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothin’ to be sorry about. You gotta go back downtown to catch it. So long, sir,’ said the driver cheerfully, as he closed the door and drove off.

Fred looked around. He seemed to be on a round elevated platform, a kind of saucer of smooth concrete that jutted out from the side of the freeway and flew over a wild forest. There were no buildings below, no sign of civilization unless you counted the spray-painted graffiti on the parapet, most of which was illegible. THE CONdUMS, he read. A street-gang? A rock band? Or some cryptic general observation, like ‘the pits’? Life in this here modern American gheddo is just the condoms. He leaned over the parapet and gazed upon translucent green aspen leaves. There was nothing to be seen through their translucency but other green aspen leaves, round and shuddering.

His full name was Manfred Evelyn Jones. A month ago he had been at home in Britain, thinking of himself as a promising young novelist. All right, a promising novelist. Now he was desperately scrambling for a technical writing job in a strange disturbing land. The pits, he thought.

It was mainly from television that he knew how Americans went about defining this or that as the pits. Aside from sport, the main function of British television now seemed Americology – the detailed study of Yank culture and idiom. And the only way Britain could keep up was to import more and more American television: cop dramas, soap operas, chat shows, comedies and family sagas. When any genre began to pall, all you had to do was combine it with another: family comedies, cop operas, soap sagas. It was the way Americans liked to combine all the things they loved: cookies in ice-cream, maple syrup in sausages. If only a family crisis during an exciting car chase could somehow be combined with an American pro football game …

The British could not get enough of all this. The worst intellectual fast foods America could develop were eagerly devoured in Britain: programmes like ‘All My Cops’ were beginning to rival football or show jumping in popularity. For that matter, British kids now wanted to grow up to play American football – the kind that requires fifty pounds of padding and still causes crippling injuries in every game.

‘All My Cops’ was the formula cop drama that combined violence with elements of soap opera. The producers took pains to balance the number of drawn guns with an equal number of tearful, hugful family reconciliations. The show featured policemen and policewomen of all known races, gays and lesbians, good junkies and (for contrast) an occasional bad junkie. Thus it reached all audiences. Mum might take an interest in the sergeant’s blind wife, the lieutenant’s alcoholic father, or the captain’s homosexual son. Dad meanwhile could identify with danger and duty – the need to ‘blow away a few scumbags’ every week. For the kids, there was up-to-date slang, detectives in fashionable clothes, and car chases.

After a time, Fred found the stairway and descended. Below the trees was a Tarmac road, Roman-straight, leading nowhere discernible in two directions. Endless. No footpath, nor anything like a phone-box or a taxi-rank.

Fred wasn’t sure he could have afforded a Minneapolis taxi anyway. He had gathered some idea of their prices from the signs they carried, depicting the credit cards they would accept – Mr Card, Vice Charge, Americana Excess, Gourmandcard – with the implication that, for passengers going all the way across the city, a bank loan might be arranged. There was nothing in the credit-card class that Fred could really afford. That was why he dined only at McIntosh’s. That was one of the reasons he desperately needed this job at VIMNUT Industries.

The main reason was to save his marriage. Money, Fred believed was the secret ingredient of successful marriages. At least, a marriage could not last unless both partners had mutual cash for each other. He knew that if he could heap up a pile of wealth, and fly back to Britain on Concorde, it would at least make Susan pause and pay attention. Money could heal a marriage. Money could do anything in America.

If only Susan believed that.

It was the lack of money that had brought them to America. His American agent had asked Fred to come over and meet publishers. He’d promised a big breakthrough, swearing that ‘British novels are in’. Fred and Susan had scraped together the air fare (standby passengers on Air Zambezi) and arrived in New York with rather high hopes. If they could make it there, as the song went …

Not only hadn’t they made it there; they had been destroyed by it. New York had turned out to be noisy, dirty, dangerous, expensive, and crammed with obnoxious people who got on each other’s nerves. Within days, he and Susan had also begun to get on each other’s nerves. She’d gone back to London – leaving him, as she put it, to enjoy the city of cockroach motels.

He’d sat in an Irish ‘pub’ and said: ‘My marriage was eaten by cockroaches.’ An Irishman had told him to bugger off out of Northern Ireland.

‘No, but listen. My marriage –’

‘Why don’t you Brits just bugger off?’

Buggering off seemed like a reasonable idea. He’d buggered off to La Guardia, and from La Guardia to the high technopolis of Minneapolis. He’d arrived only yesterday, and he now calculated that his money would last two more weeks. By then, Fred had to be VIMNUT’s technical writer.

Fred found Minneapolis exciting and disturbing, especially its sky. Here the sky was huge, a living presence forcing itself upon the attention of the Cro-Magnons below, showing them that there was room for One God Only. No wonder the people here all trooped round on Sundays to their churches (designed by Finns who were obsessed with ‘natural’ wood and askew spires) to pay homage – they’d better. Even the atheists here glanced at the sky and hurried off to their Unitarian temples to ponder questions of sociology, Third World politics, and the birth of the blues.

He compared this great brooding presence to London’s miserable patch of civilized grey. Even when blue, London’s sky was about as prepossessing as a faded soiled Cambridge sweatshirt. No one looked up in London; there was nothing to behold.

Growing up in London, Fred had been five years old before he managed to catch a glimpse of a rainbow. It was not at all like the illustration in his book, Our Friend the Rain, by Dimpleby Dunbort, which clearly showed red at the bottom. This real rainbow, framing the gasworks, had red at the top.

Fred was now thirty-one, though he thought of himself as twenty. He still appreciated rainbows. Here in Minneapolis, you could imagine rainbows of any style, popping up daily. There was plenty of other life up there besides: boiling cumulus heaped up like clotted cream, the distant rainstorm ploughing the land, high clouds like streaky bacon, lush tropical sunsets, or hundreds of Canada geese in huge formations, braying like donkeys as they surveyed the land they owned. At night the moon rose huge and yellow and healthy over a low horizon. The stars were so numerous and bright that they seemed like clusters of night cities on a landscape. It was possible to look up and imagine that he was falling from space, head first down towards some unimaginable land.

He had indeed fallen here from the sky, landing at sunset at an airport where the full magnificent blaze was visible. He paused by a great window to admire it. People kept jostling him aside, as they made their way past the window to a glass case displaying a replica of an antique car.

Minneapolis disturbed him as it does not disturb many people. It was, after all, a part of Minnesota, that low-stress locale of lakes, lutefish, and lack-lustre politicians. Dullness was all, in a city worthy of a Eugene McCarthy, a Walter Mondale or a Hubert H. Humphrey.

The city’s reputation for dullness went back a century or more. Scandinavian settlers drank gallons of strong coffee to keep their brains alive in Minneapolis. German settlers before them drank fiery peppermint schnapps and felled huge Christmas trees in the snow to keep awake. No doubt the Indians before them nodded off by its waterfalls. Before the Indians, beavers dozed in their lodges, certain that nothing would ever happen here.

So far, nothing had ever happened. The city was surrounded by sleepy suburbs through which wove a great network of biking- and jogging-paths. The centre of each suburb was a shopping-mall. Citizens of Minneapolis were able to go around wearing buttons reading BORN TO SHOP, though this irony, too, was soon lost in the general porridge of boredom. The sun rose and set on freeways carrying people from ‘town homes’ in one suburb to their work in another. Wishfully, people called it ‘Silicon Prairie’, but it was not excitingly awash in high-tech wealth. Nor was it excitingly poor and dangerous, like Detroit, or excitingly historical like Atlanta, or excitingly raw like (he filled in a name) Cody. He understood Minneapolis to offer nothing more exciting than cleanliness and good manners. And, in Fred’s case, a job.

He picked a direction (towards a distant water-tower shaped like an enormous boiled egg in its cup) and started walking.

At first the road seemed to be cutting straight through a forest, with nothing either side except the darkness of trees. Then the trees fell away quickly, replaced on both sides by high metal fences bearing the signs of security companies. An asphalt footpath began. Across the road were PREMISES SECURED BY PEACE EYE AGENCY. This side was GUARDED BY TALOS – DANGER, UNLEASHED DOGS. Talos, the bronze man of Crete. The old Cretan story had no doubt been garbled in Minoan B or something, because it no longer made any sense at all. The idea of one bronze man patrolling the entire perimeter of Crete was hard enough to imagine. His peculiar methods of defence exceeded the bounds of the possible. Talos had two tactics: before invaders could land, he shied rocks at their ships; if they managed to land, he heated himself to a glowing heat and killed the invaders by embracing them. A couple of likely stories, Fred thought.

Soon the fences gave way to humming power-transformers and railway crossings. Then came a double row of mean-looking houses covered with asphalt shingles. There were a few families sitting on porches, men in undershirts standing on steps or sitting in cars. Everyone stared at him.

He came to a corner where two men sat, and one stood, on the steps of a small grocery store. One of the men, a tall man whose costume included a camouflage undershirt and a beret, stepped out and blocked his path. He emitted a kind of drawn-out groan that, when it was repeated, Fred identified as speech.

‘What you doin’ down here?’

A man wearing a baseball cap spoke from the steps, laughing. ‘He down here lookin’ for black pussy.’

‘That right? You lookin’ for black pussy? I fix you up.’

‘Well, no, I –’

‘He say he ain’t lookin’ for no black pussy. Black pussy ain’t good enough for him.’

‘Sure it is. How much money you got, man? I fix you up.’

‘Have you ever looked at the sky?’

The tall man looked at him with hatred. ‘Don’t give me that hippie jazz. I asked you how much money you got.’

Fred tried to think of a suitable line from ‘All My Cops’, but nothing came to mind. Meanwhile, Camouflage slapped him across the mouth.

‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll be going now.’

Baseball Cap stood up. Fred saw that he was holding something metal – a beer-can or a knife.

Camouflage continued to block the path. ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ He swung at Fred again, and pulled at his lapel.

The lapel tore as Fred pulled away. When Camouflage staggered for a second, Fred kicked him under the kneecap and ran.

‘You come back here, you fucker. I ain’t through with you. I ain’t through with you.’

A Diet Dr Pepper can sailed past him. There were groans from one voice, and laughter from another, but there were no pursuing footsteps. Fred loped on until he was out of breath. The kick had thrown off his shoe; the exposed foot hurt already from the asphalt path. On the positive side, he was still aimed towards VIMNUT.

A car pulled over to the kerb ahead of him. The car was big, rusty and battered. For a terrible moment, Fred thought Camouflage and his friends had caught up with him. But it was a white workman, his car half-full of strips of iron. The car smelt strongly of whisky.

‘VIMNUT? Sure, I go past it. Watch your head there. If I got to stop sudden, you better duck down – that stuff can slide forward and take your head right off, there.’

The whisky man introduced himself as Vern. He said that it was his job to install sheet rock in new houses. The strips of iron were used to hold sheet rock in place. Watch your head.

Fred recalled that Talos had a hole in his foot, too. And a single vein, running up to his head. When they pulled the plug from Talos’ heel, the ichor ran out, and he was dead.

Maybe Talos was some kind of steam-powered catapult. That would explain the rock-throwing, and why he was searing hot to the touch. When they let the water and steam out, he came to a stop.

Or could Talos be a volcano? Fred was not a scholar, and he found it irritating not to have exact answers. He didn’t want a plausible hypothesis; he wanted truth, immediate and complete, as in a dream.

Full of fire, the car flew along freeways, then slammed down an exit to a minor road where it came to a stop.

Vern pointed at a large white building some distance from the road. ‘There she is. VIMNUT.’

By God, Fred thought, against all odds. Like an American success-story. Up from the gheddo. Overcoming polio to become an Olympic pole-vault champion. Fighting dyslexia to become a Supreem Cuort Jistuce.

The long white building lay before him on its lawn like a white leather jewel-box on a green velvet cushion, waiting to be opened. With all the signs of activity: hundreds of cars gleaming in the parking-lot (someone was here), sprinklers working away at the lawn, a row of flagpoles where a dozen or so American flags snapped in the wind. In the sky, a hot-air balloon disguised in rainbow colours drifted overhead. Civil War artillery-spotters, no doubt, come like a heavenly host to witness his triumph.

Fred’s first feeling of elation wore off quickly as he began his approach to the building. Though its whiteness shimmered only a hundred yards away, it seemed somehow to recede before him as he moved forward, the way a distant mountain retreats behind its foothills.

The foothills in this case were fences, roads, ditches, even a kind of moat (where a family of mallards could practise being picturesque); there was everything except a direct footpath to a door. For what seemed hours, he worked his way through parking-lots, past sealed hatches marked RECEIVING – NO ADMITTANCE and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And when he finally turned a corner and saw the main entrance it was flanked by a forty-foot sign: CYBERK CORPORATION. The wrong place! That drunken bastard had dropped him at the wrong place! Cursing to himself, Fred limped in the front door.

The young receptionist looked up with a cautious smile. Fred was suddenly aware of his torn jacket, his split lip.

‘Excuse me, can you tell me where VIMNUT Industries are located?’

‘Right here.’ She had a nice smile. ‘Today’s the official changeover to our new name, Cyberk Corporation.’

‘What a relief,’ he said. ‘M. E. Jones. I’ve come about a job.’

Her finger ran down a list. He was about to apologize for being late, when suddenly she beamed at him.
. . .