The Muller-Fokker Effect

Book 141: Gateway Essentials

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

This novel is about the first truly modern man. His name's Bob Shairp, and he gets completely turned into data and stored on computer tape. (How modern can you get?) Actually, there are quite a few other modern characters (though none so modern as Bob) in this book. There's Wes Davis, who knows the U.S. Army is part of a Black Conspiracy. And Billy Koch, the great faith-healing evangelist who orders a robot replica of himself to share the burden of crusading. And Glen Dale, editor of Stagman magazine and, strangely enough, a virgin. And Wise Bream, god of the Utopi Indians. And others, too numerous to enumerate.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 240

Sample

 

Glen Dale, publisher of Stagman magazine and ‘last of the old-time eligible bachelors’ (ibid.), was having another of his parties. He and his friends and a few hundred of their friends had gathered in the penthouse atop the Stagman Building to celebrate his fortieth – or thirty-ninth – birthday. The place overflowed with not-quite-young people in odd costumes: Aztec feather robes, copper shirts, bright ceramic shoes and shingle jackets; masks, body paint and glowlamp jewelry; suits of paper, steel and glass; whatever was loud without being vulgarly inexpensive.

On the mezzanine a pop group plugged in their amplified instruments and tried to make themselves heard above the talk of I, Thou and Other Celebrities. The group’s name was Direct from Las Vegas. The sounds of guitar, organ, English horn and carillon were audible through underwater speakers to those swimming in Glen’s pool, but to no one else.

Two musicologists in modified zoot suits began an argument about some old Deef John Holler blues. A girl in bead mail spoke to a friend of hers who happened to be a famous astronaut. Someone dropped the name General Weimarauner, and someone countered with the name of Mr Bradd.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Mr Bradd? Just head of National Arsenamid’s Marketing Division, that’s all.’

‘Mr Bradd. Hmm, sounds like the name of a hairdresser I used to know …’

Across the room a macrobiotics disciple explained that Christ would have lived longer if the Last Supper had consisted of boiled brown rice. ‘Instead of all that Yang bread …’

A man looking trapped inside his glasses leant against the mantel and sipped ginger ale. He wore a plain business suit dating from the sixties’ ‘Kennedy look’, enormous French cuffs, and a false smile of nonchalance. The girl in bead mail introduced herself to him, and he murmured his name.

‘Donagon?’ she echoed. ‘You look like Truman Capote … What is your thing?’

‘Biophysics. I, um, thought they didn’t say that any more: “What’s your thing.” I thought they stopped, um, saying that.’

‘They did. Only now they’re saying it again. Are you a friend of Glen’s?’

‘No, actually …’

‘I met Glen through Bill Banks. You know, the black astronaut?’

‘Yes, I think I’ve heard something …’

‘He’s the one who dropped anthrax on Central America. Poor Bill! He feels so guilty!’ The girl scanned the party as she spoke. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’

‘Well, we all …’

‘I mean it’s stupefying! He tried to kill himself, three times!’

Donagon set down his drink and put his hands behind him, out of sight. ‘Really?’

‘Ank! Aren’t you going to say hello?’ A young man in a crisp paper suit strolled over. ‘Ank, do you know Mr Dunne?’

‘Dr Donagon, actually,’ said Donagon, shaking Ank’s left hand.

‘Nancy, I need a smoke.’ The girl offered her pack of Hashmores, and Ank applied his thin moustache to the girl’s forehead, then took two. ‘I don’t usually smoke this brand,’ he explained. ‘Nothing in them. Are you a medical doctor, Doctor?’

‘No, um, just a biophysicist.’

Someone bumped Donagon from behind, spilling a drink on him. He turned to glare, but the culprit, a man in a wrinkled dinner jacket, was too busy fighting for balance to notice.

‘’S all right,’ he murmured. ‘I’m from Interpol.’ After resting a few seconds against the fireplace, he shoved off again. Some invisible ship was pitching in a stormy sea, and he lurched across its deck and into the crowd.

‘I do the art column for the Sun,’ said Ank. ‘But it’s not my real life. Really I’m a painter.’

A girl in a buckskin bikini and a hat with antlers came past with a tray. Before Donagon could protest, she took away his half-finished ginger ale and left a glass of something stronger.

‘Not that I’ve technically painted anything – yet. But I know exactly what I want to do. All I need is a computer random number generator – or, better still, some of that Müller-Fokker tape.’

Donagon gulped his drink. ‘But how did you hear about that? It’s supposed to be classified!’

Ank coughed. ‘I read Time’s science page. The “miracle tape” and so on. They said only four reels of it exist – and the inventor’s supposed to have defected to Russia or something, so I guess they can’t make any more. And not too many people know how to use it.’

Donagon looked around cautiously. No one was near enough to eavesdrop but the two zoot suits, and they were engaged in a shouting argument.

‘I may be able to help you. My project is making arrangements to use these, uh, tapes. I can’t tell you more about it, but I might be able to fix up something. If you’re still interested in a few months, when the project gets going, drop me a line.’

He gave his address as The Biomedical Research Project, Mud Flats, Nebraska. ‘It may come to nothing, but …’

‘You won’t regret it, Doctor.’ Ank went off to dance with a girl wearing only blue jeans. The other dancers – businessmen in fur wigs, poets in plastic, a senator in a caftan – swirled around them and they were lost to view.

Donagon leaned uneasily against the upholstered wall and tried to look as if he were waiting for a friend. Waves of conversational noise washed up against him, broke, slid back into the great sea of sound.

‘… a fact that it neither tamps, nor is it an ax!’

‘Lichtenstein? I thought you meant the country …’

‘Brown rice and …’

A girl laced into black patent leather from neck to toe (having even pasted on ‘lips’ of the same material) swung past, talking about the works of Thomas M. Disch. ‘Oh yes, I’ve read them all: The Geocides, Mankind under the Lash …’

Across the room, Glen Dale moved towards a lively group of painters. At his approach, they fell silent and looked into their drinks.

‘How’s it going, fellows?’

‘Fine, man.’ ‘Yeah, keen.’

‘Well that’s – fine. Everything okay? Drinks?’

‘Great.’

‘Fine, glad to hear it.’ He stood leaning lightly towards them for another minute, hoping the conversation would resume including him. It did not. ‘Well, I’d better – circulate.’ The man from Interpol tacked past. ‘Yes, well, so long.’

One of the painters called after him, ‘Great party, man!’ then turned to his friend. ‘What’d he want?’

‘Aw Christ, he wants somebody to tell him how good he looks in that stupid tin hat. You know, the one thing I can’t stand about his parties is he’s always at ’em.’

‘Yeah, I wish it was his wake.’

Glen approached a fat little bearded man in a sober suit, standing alone by the bar.

‘Well, Herr Doktor, are you having a good time?’

A pair of blank pince-nez turned up to stare at him, reflecting all the colors of Direct from Las Vegas’s light show. ‘Ah, Mister Dale.’ The little man, whose name Glen could not recall, spoke English with German precision.

‘There is someone here I would like to meet.’

‘Well, just point her out to me …’

‘No, no, this is a gentleman. A biophysicist named Doonigan. I should like it very much if you would introduce me to him.’

‘Doonigan? Doonigan? No, I’m afraid I don’t know him.’

Asking Herr Doktor if his drink was all right, Glen went over to talk to Ank and the girl in blue jeans. As it happened, they were having a good time. And their drinks were fine. But just now they were about to dance, if he would excuse them.

Donagon asked the girl in the foil pinafore who that was over there. ‘The tall skinny guy with the tin hat.’

‘Why, that’s Glen! The host – don’t you know him? Good gouts!’

‘No … I was invited by his secretary, actually.’

‘You’re a friend of Myra’s?’

‘I, um, know her, yes. She doesn’t seem to be here, tonight.’

‘Good gouts! Didn’t you know? She’s in the hospital, having a nose job. I thought everybody knew!’

‘That’s odd!’ Donagon was not aware he’d laughed so loudly until several Aztecs turned round to stare. ‘I met her in the hospital! She was having her acne sanded, and I … I was …’ He hesitated to explain the fresh scars under his outsize French cuffs. One of the false Aztecs looked him over. ‘And you were having a D. and C., were you, darling?’

‘Oh, George, you’re impossible!’ said the girl in the pinafore. She skipped off to dance with George the impossible Aztec.

‘… recorded in 1948, while he was still in prison,’ said one of the zoot suits.

‘Harry, listen – you’re out of your mind. It had to be 1950 because the company that cut the record didn’t even exist in ’48.’

In another room the girl in blue jeans asked the tall man with the axe-blade nose what he did for a living.

‘I’m an art critic.’

‘You too? I just met one art critic.’

‘The one that works for the Sun? Haha, critic? He thinks Lichtenstein is a country, for Christ’s sake. Critic?’

Something bumped their legs. They stood back to let the man in the wrinkled dinner jacket crawl past. ‘’S all right,’ he explained, ‘I’m from Innerpol.’

The Herr Doktor came through next, asking for a geneticist named Doonigan.

‘A what?’ One of the two businessmen in fur wigs who were holding each other upright near the piano turned to stare at him. ‘What does that sawed-off kraut want? A gyneticist?’

‘Geenetics,’ said his companion. ‘Genes.’

The other nudged him. ‘Hey, I wouldn’t mind getting in her jeans, Charlie.’ He leered at the girl.

Elsewhere other happily married men were leering at girls in crinoline, copper sheaths, feather robes and complicated layers of translucency; even at the girl in patent leather, who, hand to mouth, was searching all the rooms for her lost stick-on lips. Somebody went into the toilet to vomit, and somebody else used an overshoe in the closet. One of the zoots was spitting blood in the kitchen sink, while his friend stood by, holding his pork-pie hat for him.

‘Look, Harry, I said I’m sorry. Anybody can lose his temper now and then. Especially when I know that Deef John cut that side in nineteen …’

A troupe of girls in buckskin bikinis and antler hats moved through, pouring coffee and emptying ashtrays. Ank left with the girl in the foil pinafore. Donagon dozed in a chair.

Direct from Las Vegas packed up and left. The party reduced to those who had passed out, determined drinkers, and those without a sense of time, like the six persons in Egyptian dress squatting in the corner and digging a candle flame.

Glen Dale and Senator Vuje shook Donagon awake.

‘You all right?’

He nodded, and again when Glen asked if he were a scientist named Doonigal. ‘… Donagon …’ he said thickly.

‘That must be you. There’s someone who wants to talk to you. Just a minute, I’ll see if I can find him.’

‘I thought you was Truman Whatsisname, the writer,’ said the senator. Somehow in his caftan he looked more like a senator than ever. ‘Here, let’s get you on your feet, fella.’

He did not get Donagon on his feet. Instead the toilet door opened behind him, knocking the senator on top of him.

‘What the hell … ?’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Donagon’s glasses had been knocked off. He saw only a blurry, short figure in black, though he could hear the crisp German consonants. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going? Now look, you knocked me down, knocked this poor fella’s glasses off …’

‘I apologize again.’ The blur made a gesture with both arms. ‘But then, where am I going? That is a question. Where are we all going? And how is it best to watch?’

‘Listen, you little heinie, I fought your kind at Anzio …’

‘Ah, forgive me, gentlemen. I most probably am drunk. Good night.’

Donagon retrieved his glasses and got to his feet. The short man in black was disappearing out the hall door when Glen came in from the dining room.

‘I fought his kind at Anzio,’ the senator mumbled. ‘Arrogant little …’

One of the business twins sat down suddenly in the middle of the floor, ‘I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME, I WANT TO GET ME ONE OF THESE LITTLE GIRLIES AND GO UPSTAIRS.’

‘But, Charlie, we are upstairs. This is the penthouse.’

‘I guess he’s gone,’ Glen said, shrugging. ‘That guy was looking for you all evening.’

‘Well, I’ll get going.’ Donagon shook hands with his host and with the veteran of Anzio, and with a long-toothed man Glen introduced as his psychiatrist, Dr Feinwelt.

‘Whazzis?’ The businessman called Charlie, still seated on the floor, held up a black object. ‘HEY! Some guy lost his leatha mustache!’

As Donagon left, he heard someone say, ‘Wasn’t that Truman Capote?’

‘Are you kidding? Anybody who wears French cuffs that big couldn’t be anybody.’

 

They say your heart is dacron

And you just caint love nohow

But darlin I know …

It was a false day. Drizzle and the amplified, reedy heartbreak of a country-western singer drifted over the parking lot. There were tear-streaks on the mistproof windshields, pools of tears on the uneven plasphalt, and (in case everyone hadn’t got the message) a wet, melodious wind to blast the faces of several hundred National Arsenamid employees. The message, straight from the hearts of industrial psychologists, was: ‘What a hell of a day! Great to get inside, where it’s warm, and dry, and the Melodiak’s playing a light, bouncy tune like “Sunshine Balloon”.’

One man in a seam-split raincoat did not get the message; he walked slowly, ignored the rain, and even tried whistling along with ‘Cold Old Dacron Heart’. He was looking at the factory, too. All the others had averted their false morning faces from the rain, but not Bob Shairp.

He was looking at the factory for almost the last time – and seeing it for the first.

It looked exactly what it was, a service factory for the great food/missile corporation. A long, white building without character, neither ugly nor interesting.

No, today it was a ship, lying at anchor by the edge of the parking lot, with light streaming from every porthole. A voyage a day, for almost two years … and today the last. It was going on without him.

The whistle blew. Bob hurried in to the security office. The walls were maize over raw sienna this morning. On a sunny day they would go azure over dark green. As the soft saxophones of Melodiak greeted him (‘fill up that sun-shine ba-LLOON with hap-pi-ness’), Bob fumbled for his identity card.

‘Must be in the coat I usually wear,’ he said. The guard did not return his smile. ‘But you know me, anyway.’

‘Yeah, I know you, Shairp. Losing your card on your last day here! Just what in hell do you think you’re gonna walk off with – a few plans, maybe?’

Bob smiled to see if he was kidding. The guard turned his back on it. ‘All right, get the hell in there and stop wasting my time.’

Bob was a technical writer with a BA in English and a general understanding of engineering practice. He was not actually allowed to write anything, though he worked closely with a writing computer.

Many of National Arsenamid’s products resembled one another, and their repair manuals and parts lists differed only in details. Drawings and test routines were fed to the computer, which revised old manuals to fit new items. Bob made minor corrections in the computer’s prose.

A block of prose would appear on the screen before him:

Disassembly of half-speed prism carrier (5A1). Remove mtg screws (5A1A), carrier cover (5A1B) and gasket (5A1C). Discard gasket. Using lifting tool UA-10, lift and remove prism assembly (5A1D). Adjust prism assembly aside for testing.

He would work the keyboard to change ‘adjust’ to ‘set’, a new block of prose would appear, and so on. As the training film had explained: ‘You are the key. You understand nuances of English which the computer cannot. So you see, we can never really eliminate the human element.’

Yet today, for reasons no one quite understood, Bob was being replaced. They were sending him to Mud Flats, Nebraska, to be retrained, then to one of their fifty-four other plants.

National Arsenamid was still masquerading as a food processor. But only five plants still made Perp and other breakfast delicacies. Only eleven more made up the home kitchen of an invisible lady named Bette Cooke. The rest: were under defense contracts.

Bob had no objection to working for defense. In fact he worried now and then about the Chinese getting ahead in the Second Front missile race. They were said to be working on an orbiting missile platform, as a third-strike capability (meaning something still up their sleeves after China and the US had wiped each other out, twice over).

What Bob didn’t like was secret work. He enjoyed coming home, flopping on the couch, and saying, ‘Boy! You know what that crazy computer came up with today? Marge, you should have seen it …’

And what could he tell her today? That the computer didn’t need him anymore?

Marge was not sympathetic.

‘Retraining pay is next to nothing, Bob! And Spot counted on getting into a military school – really, you couldn’t have picked a worse time.’

‘I,’ he began, and lifted an admonishing finger from his glass. What was so admonishing about that finger? Looked pretty much like all the rest. He put it back and studied the fingers all together. Making white circles on the glass. Or it on them. The drink in the glass was called a pajama. Four parts … no, five parts gin …

‘You what?’

‘I had nothing to do with it. For one reason or another, they’re replacing me, that’s all. I’m being moved on. What are you up to, anyway?’

Marge sat on the carpet, surrounded by a sprawl of magazines. Her right hand twiddled a pencil, her left held an open copy of Luxurious Home. The first letter of the title was hidden by her fingers, offering Bob a silent pun.

‘I’m doing a test: “Does Your Mate Measure Up?” It says – just a minute – it says that you have a lot of artistic ability, and you could really go places, but that you’re inclined to fritter away your time on frivolous projects. What you want in a wife is a mother, because you tend to shirk responsibilities.’

‘Oh, that’s good, that’s good! I’ll bet I have to be careful around the fifteenth, because something enters the house of something else, and though fifteen and seven are good numbers – aw, what’s the use?’

He decided to see what Spot was working on, on the teaching machine.

‘Watch, Spot.’ Bob pushed open the door with his foot and came in juggling eggs. ‘Got it up to four, now, and …’

The boy had fallen asleep at his homework. One thin arm lay crooked around the teaching machine, which was still trying to get him to answer something about the gold standard. His pajamas were black, and cut to resemble some kind of uniform complete with false pockets, belts and plastic medals

As Spot stirred, cuddling the machine closer, his father saw what kind of uniform it was. The red brassard turned to show a white circle and a hooked cross …

Bob put him to bed and then cleaned up the eggs from the floor.

‘Grow up, Bob! It doesn’t mean anything to him. All the kids have them. On account of that German TV program.’

‘Leutnant Krieger? You let him watch that crap? Christ, no wonder he worships the SS.’

Without answering, Marge opened her recipe file and began sorting cards.

‘So that’s what this “military school” thing is all about! All the kids do it, he says. It’s harmless, you say. And in twenty years, when they start up new concentration camps …’

‘For God’s sake! You haven’t even watched the program, so how can you judge it? It isn’t so bad, really. This Leutnant Krieger’s not really an SS man at all. He’s working to assassinate Hitler. So you see, when he beats up a Jew, it’s only part of his cover story. And when he …’

‘I get it. The best of both worlds, right? That’s just the way the Nazis worked in the first place. “This isn’t really me doing this medical experiment, it’s Destiny working through me. It’s Blood and Destiny, and besides, it’s orders.” What’s the use, nobody’s listening.’

Marge snapped the file box shut. ‘Oh, we’re all against you, is that it? Listen, you know what they say about aggression. He needs permissible outlets. Isn’t it better to let him get it out of his system now?’

‘Or into his system, maybe?’

‘Listen, you. If anybody in this family turns Sp. . .