The Reproductive System

Book 142: Gateway Essentials

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Wompler's Walking Babies once put Millford, Utah, on the map. But they aren't selling like they used to. In fact, they aren't selling at all and the only alternative to winding the company up is to tap the government for a research grant. And so Wompler Research Laboratories and Project 32 come into being. The plan is to produce self-replicating mechanisms; identical cells equipped to repair intracellular breakdowns, convert power from their environment and create new cells. But suddenly the nondescript grey metal boxes start crawling about the laboratory, feeding voraciously on any metal... and multiplying at an alarming rate.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 200

Sample

Suppose that it is once more 196—, that fateful year, and suppose that you are passing through Millford, Utah, that most fated of crossroads. Population, a battered, bird-spattered sign informs you, is ‘3810 And Still Growing! Home of Shelley B—’

Home of Shelley something, Millford lies about half-way between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) buried deep in a Colorado mountain. The name ‘Millford’ is honorific; there has never been a stream through this part of the desert, nor a mill, nor anything to grind in a mill. Perhaps it was named ironically, or wishfully. Founders of other desert towns have, after all, given them pretty names, hoping that (by sympathetic magic) pretty reality would follow.

Millford is not pretty, it is worn and warped. There is little to distinguish it from Eden Acres, Greenville or Paradise. Its feed store, like theirs, is checkered red and white. Along its main drag lurk old familiar faces: The Eateria; The Idle Hour; Marv’s Eat-Gas; The Dew Drop Inn Motel.

You, the casual tourist – say you are an Air Force General from NORAD on his way to get a divorce – are more interested in your odometer than in that Coca-Cola bottling plant or whatever it is over there on the right. You are barely conscious of an ugly factory of glazed brick, with a glass-block window on its rounded corner. ‘Wompler Toy Corporation. Makers of —’

The worn sign slides past you, lost for ever. There is only one sign you are interested in: ‘Resume Speed’. Ah, there it is. And there’s another: ‘You are now leaving Millford, Utah, Home of Shelley Belle. Hurry Back!’ Your foot comes down on the gas, hard. The rattle of tappets asks:

Who the hell

Is Shelley Belle?

You are irritated with Millford. You are annoyed with your own faulty memory. You are bored with all ugly little desert towns with their smug signs: ‘Biggest Little City in the Universe!’ You are hot and bored and tired, and you exceed the speed limit a little, fleeing from the place where world history is being made …

‘She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight.

… And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine.’

WORDSWORTH

‘Sorry I’m late, gang.’ Louie Guthridge Wompler, vice-president in charge of public relations, bounced into the conference room on ripple-soled shoes. He smiled at the other three members of the board, but they seemed not to notice.

‘Where were you?’ asked the president, Grandison Wompler. His jowls shook with annoyance. ‘We’ve got important business to discuss.’

‘Sorry, Pop.’ Louie threw himself into a chair at the right hand of his father. ‘I was getting in some work on my lats. You know, latissimus dorsi? That’s here.’ He pointed a thick finger at his own armpit.

‘We’re dissolving the company, son.’

‘You know, I’m getting some pretty clean definition— Dissolving the company! But why, Pop? Why?’

Grandison’s gavel made a sound like a pistol shot. ‘Meeting to order,’ he rumbled.

‘What’s the scoop, Pop?’ Louie persisted, and shone upon his father a winning, Harold Teen smile.

‘Son,’ the old man began, then stopped. He was searching for a cliché that Louie could grasp. Though forty-one years old he did not seem, at times, far removed from adolescence. Now, as he toyed with a spring grip developer and a jar of Sooper Proteen tablets, Louie seemed even – his father frowned at the thought – even childish.

The two men did not look much like father and son. The president was tall, sunburnt and rangy, fleshing out slightly in his middle age to a dignified thickness. His face was heavy and serious, with a stern jaw and thick, dark brows. There were, however, laugh lines, and his black eyes were festooned with kindly wrinkles. With no grey in his hair, Grandison (‘Granny’) Wompler looked ten years younger than his sixty-five.

Louie, known by some as ‘Louie the Womp’, was pale and porcine. He somehow managed to resemble a watercolour of his father, one which had been through the laundry. His blond, tentatively wavy hair, milk-coloured eyes and pastry-cook skin might have made him effete but for his immense bulk. There was something athletic in Louie’s sagging shoulders and pyknic belly; he seemed a man who had been hit repeatedly in the face. His nose was flattened, and indeed all his features were a trifle smooth, a trifle melted.

He wore no tie, and beneath the white fabric of his shirt could be discerned the T-shirt legend: ‘SOOPERPROTEEN CLUB’. His smile, as he waited for his father to go on, was as pure and meaningless as that of dentures in a glass, and as constant.

‘Son, I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you—’

‘Let me try, Granny.’ Go wan Dill, the joky ninety-year-old production manager, turned to Louie and said, ‘What your father wants to say is, we’ve hitched our wagon to a falling star.’

‘Summer slump, that’s all it is,’ Louie whined, still smiling. ‘Sales gotta pick up by Christmas.’

‘We’ll be rooned by Christmas!’ snarled his father. ‘Rooned!’

‘– summer slump, or –’

‘No, son. The truth is, we’re finished. No one wants Wompler’s Walking Babies any more.’

Grandison’s gnarled hands trembled slightly as they lifted a doll from its tissue paper packing and placed it on its feet. It began to toddle along the polished surface of the table, mewing at every step. The president’s jaw clenched with emotion. A kazoo in his head was faintly playing ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’.

Hardly anyone knew what really happened to Shelley Belle. She had been put away in tissue paper, so to speak, with other, happier memories of the thirties (Al Jolson, Bank Nite movies, the Cord roadster, Paul Whiteman’s orchestra), as though she were indeed a sunny, golden-haired doll. Just as no one wished to remember the real thirties (soup lines, bread lines, work lines), so no one wished to remember the real history of Shelley (grown, married, divorced, married, suicide attempt, bit parts in Alfred Hitchcock movies). She would always be as they first knew her, in 1935, tossing her curls and grinning impishly at W. C. Fields or Wallace Beery. All over America, housewives clutched their free dishes and gaped. As this five-year-old shrugged, tap-dancing her way through ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’, they asked in blank amazement, Wasn’t she precious? Wasn’t she the darlingest, sassiest, ittiest yummykins sweetheart, though? Wasn’t she a living doll?

Doll. The word exploded in the brain of Grandison Wompler during a performance of Heidi at the Belmont Theatre. He had leaped up and begun cursing joyfully, until the manager, Ned Lambert, had been obliged to throw him out. Granny didn’t mind. He didn’t even mind missing the Spin-O-Cash. What were a hundred silver dollars to him? He was bursting with a million-dollar plan! He went straight home and wrote, in the centre of a sheet of paper: ‘DOLL = DOLLARS’.

Why not make dolls of Shelley Belle right here in her home town, and why not distribute them all over the nation – the world? He would by God make a million and put Millford on the map at the same time.

There had been a few catches, as time went on. He had already got production started when a court order enjoined him from use of the name ‘Shelley Belle’. But Grandison had established his market; he did not need her name any longer. Soon, Wompler’s Walking Babies became famous in their own right, and his fortune was assured.

Even during the war he’d done well. The main plant had turned to making howitzer shells, while the seamstresses sewed canteen covers. The company had won two ‘E’ awards. Louie had gone into the army and been decorated with the Quartermaster’s Cross. It seems he had bought more canteen covers than any other quartermaster. Father and son had been sorry to see the enemy give up so easily.

In 1946 Wompler’s Babies walked again, but not nearly so profitably. Sales kept slipping, slipping, as people forgot about the ageing, alcoholic Shelley Belle. Now, twenty years later, the factory had come to a stop. As Gowan Dill put it, with many winks and digs of his frail elbow, ‘Production has come to the end of the line, boys. The eye division is tight shut. Not a head rolling off the assembly line. We might just as well take the remainder of our dolls and—’

‘Stuff them, I know,’ said Grandison wearily. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ He stared, bleary-eyed, at the doll walking away from him.

It had huge blue eyes and gold, stiff sausage curls. It wore a red-white-and-blue pleated dress with silver spangles, and a tiny pillbox hat. Its pink dimpled knees were barely visible between the silver fringe of the skirt and the thick white boots with silver tassels.

‘Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,’ it said.

‘Looks swell to me, Pop,’ said Louie loyally. He had caught his fist inside the jar of Sooper Proteen tablets. It had not occurred to Louie not to reach into a jar with the spring grip developer in his hand. ‘I think it’s a neat little product.’

‘But it isn’t wanted, son. Little girls don’t want Wompler’s Walking Babies any more. They want Barbie dolls. Dolls they can dress up in fashions.’ His voice grew thick with fury, and he flushed purple beneath his sunburn. ‘Dolls that can’t walk a single step!’

‘Gee, Pop, that’s keen! Why don’t we build a doll they can dress up?’

‘Because we don’t know the first thing about fashion, that’s why. Mrs Lumsey’s seamstresses can’t sew anything but spangles and pleats.’

‘And canteen covers,’ cracked Dill, shooting his cuffs.

No one was smiling. Grandison stared at the walking doll, looking as if he wanted to cry, but was just too strong. Louie was staring, mystified, at his entrapped hand. Moley, the chairman, was sliding down in his chair, preparing to sleep.

‘Send this company to camp!’ ventured Dill. No response. ‘Ah well,’ he sighed. ‘Let’s put on our thinking caps.’

The doll, still mewing, walked off the end of the table. There came the crack of a gutta percha face against the floor.

‘The end of a great era,’ the president muttered hoarsely.

They thought. Louie had a hard time concentrating. He wanted to be outside, doing some road-work, or just getting a tan. He wanted to study up on his karate. He wanted to get home to see if that book had come in the mail: Seventeen New Ways to Kill a Man with Your Bare Hands. And the book on Sumo wrassling.

The trouble with books was, they didn’t give a guy the feel of killing with his bare hands. That was the trouble with living in Millford, too. There was nowhere a guy could go to learn from an instructor. Louie wanted to learn all those Jap systems of self-defence. He wanted to learn how to kill a man with Zen – without even touching him, they say. Then there was Kabuki, and there was deadliest Origami. Man!

He continued staring out the window for inspiration, until a car, air-force blue, whizzed by. It reminded him of isometric exercises. Then, somewhere in Louie’s rudimentary forebrain, a tiny circuit completed itself.

‘I got it!’ he shouted. ‘I got an idea!’

Dill groaned. ‘Not another idea,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even finished paying for that coffee machine yet.’

Louie’s last brain-storm had been to sell the workers coffee from a machine he’d bought and installed in the cafeteria, at 25 cents a cup. To increase profits on the machine, he ran the grounds through again and again. The machine would thus, he reasoned, pay for itself. The workers agreed. The machine should pay for itself.

‘No, this is a real keen idea. Listen. Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’

‘Why don’t we …’ his father repeated uncomprehendingly.

‘I think he has something, Granny!’ shouted Dill. ‘Why don’t we get some money from the government?’

‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ said Moley, sitting up and opening his eyes a little. ‘He does have something. Why don’t we—’

‘Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’ said Louie excitedly, and strained to complete the thought. His hand, encased in glass, waved impatiently. ‘From the govermint – for research!’

Bald heads nodded. ‘For research, yes!’

‘But wouldn’t we have to be making some product the government needs?’ Grandison asked, puzzled. ‘Something vital to the defence of our nation? Something important to its welfare? The government doesn’t just throw its money around, does it?’

When the others had finished laughing, Dill placed a bird-claw hand on Grandison’s sleeve. ‘You’re an old-fashioned, unpractical dreamer, Granny,’ he croaked, chuckling. ‘Maybe I am, too. We got to look to the boy here for real ideas. Times have changed since WPA, y’know. This here’s the age of the astronaut. In the old days, I’ll admit, you had to build a battleship or a municipal swimming pool – something useful. But tell me: practically speaking, of what use is it to have a man on the moon?’

‘Well, I guess …’

‘None! No earthly use at all,’ cackled Dill. ‘But seriously, the government spends millions, zillions, to put one man on the moon. On the other hand, if you have some real, some practical idea to sell them, forget it.’

‘That’s right!’ shouted Louie, jumping up and pacing about the room. ‘Remember the time I tried to sell them my idea for invisible ink? Milk, it was, plain milk. Spies could write messages in it, like invisible ink. Then you heat it up and the writing appears, as if by magic. I wrote to the Pentagon, remember, Pop?’ He threw himself into his chair again. ‘They never answered,’ he added, in a more subdued tone.

‘The fact is,’ Dill went on, tapping his sere hand on the table, ‘if we can show the government a project that is utterly, hopelessly useless, they’ll give us a grant for pure research.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know it as sure as I know that the head of the Industrial Spending Committee is Senator Dill – my cousin, get it?’

Grandison was not yet used to the idea. ‘But – but what could we do research upon? We have no facilities.’

‘They provide all that stuff, don’t worry,’ smiled Dill. ‘Concrete labs, bomb shelters, marine guards, you name it. All we have to do is figure out a project.’

‘How about a robot?’ suggested Louie.

‘No money in it,’ Dill snapped. ‘We need something which sounds easier, so that the rest of the committee can’t object to it, but which is so hard in practice that we can spend years on it. Like a bigger, faster plane.’

‘How about a robot, though?’ Louie put forth.

Ignoring the frantic waving of the jar under his nose, Moley said, ‘Now, why don’t we build a machine that can reproduce itself? I was reading about an idea like that in Life, just the other day. A self-reproducing machine – sure sounds hard enough, don’t it?’

‘But what is it good for?’ Grandison asked. ‘Besides making duplicates of itself, what is its function?’

‘A robot,’ declared Louie softly, ‘could instruct me in hand-to-hand Kabuki.’

‘You still don’t understand, Granny,’ Dill said, with a patronizing shake of his head. ‘It isn’t good for anything. That’s exactly what the government wants. What we want.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Grandison. He sighed. ‘It seems so dishonest.’

‘We’ll be creating thousands of new jobs – for scientists, marine guards, government clerks who keep us on file.’

‘I know, I know, but will we make money?’ the president snapped.

‘Millions.’

They voted at once. The vote was ‘aye’ all around the table, to Louie.

‘Aye, I guess,’ he muttered. ‘But hey, Pop, how about a robot, though? Huh, how about—’

Grandison reached over and cracked the jar with his gavel. The spring grip device leapt out, scattering glass and brown pills, and releasing the thick fingers of Louie the Womp from captivity.

‘Motion carried.’

‘$u¢¢e$$!’

Sign on wall at Wompler Research Laboratories

‘I, too, am a failure,’ murmured Cal, staring at the jellyfish thing in the tank. It was supposed to be bright pink and right-side up. ‘This is the end for me too, old Plagyodus. I’ve ruined my last experiment.’

He did not deem it necessary to add that it was his first experiment at Wompler Research, or that he had only been hired through the wonderful mistake of an IBM machine. The grey, deflated mass in the tank did not seem to be listening, anyway. A twisted rope of multicoloured wires rose from it to a panel of dials. The dials were all at zero.

Sighing, Cal began to write on the chart hanging next to the tank, ‘Biomech. arrgt. 173b aborted 1750 hours’.

It was more than a job he would be losing; it was a chance to do work leading to a doctorate. Everything I touch, he thought, turns to failure. As if bearing out his words, the ballpoint pen ran dry.

Experimenting, he found that it would write on his hand perfectly, but not on the wall chart. He covered his palm with blue scrawls and trial signatures: ‘Calvin Codman Potter, Ph.D’.

‘It’s the angle,’ said Hamuro Hita, the project statistician. ‘It won’t feed ink uphill.’

Cal blushed, corrected the angle of the pen and signed the chart. ‘Thanks. I guess I’m not very observant for an experimenter. In fact, I’ve just ruined this experiment. I suppose you won’t be seeing much of me around here from now on.’

‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll can you for one mistake. What happened, anyway?’ Hita spoke without pausing in his work, summing figures on an adding machine.

‘I forgot to put the temperature control on automatic last night.’ Ripping loose the wires from their instruments, Cal hauled up the grey, dripping lump. ‘It – it poached, or something.’ Lifting the lid of a garbage can, he plumped in the jellyfish and stuffed in the bright stiff wires after it. Hita nodded at a chair by his desk, and Cal flopped into it.

‘That’s what’ll happen to me, when they find out all about me,’ he said, indicating the garbage can. ‘The way they saw it, I was a bright, promising lad, having graduated at the top of my class at MIT. They expected me to set the world on fire. Whereas –’

‘Whereas – ?’

‘I guess I’d rather not talk about it after all. Let’s say I was hired by mistake, and I’m scared that any minute they’ll realize it.’

Hita nodded, and the two men lapsed into moody silence. Finishing his addition, the mathematician began cleaning his briar pipe with one blade of a pair of black-handled scissors. Cal stared about the lab, unable to conquer the feeling that he was saying goodbye to it all. Goodbye, QUIDNAC modular computer; goodbye, maze for phototropic ‘rats’; goodbye, solution in which grew a green crystalline tree, every branch of which formed part of an electronic circuit; goodbye, miniature automatic forge. He did not forget a goodbye to the main entrance, guarded by a stiff, humourless adolescent in the uniform of the Marine Corps.

‘We’re all flying under false colours here,’ said Hita, sliding a paperback book out of his desk drawer. ‘Do you know why the Womplers hired me? Because Louie wanted to learn Origami. The way he saw it, I’m Japanese, ergo …’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘But you’ve only been here a week. You hardly know the Womplers, father and son. You haven’t even met the project head, Dr Smilax. I assume your main dealings have been with them.’

‘Meaning the Mackintosh brothers?’

Hita smiled. ‘Or as some of us call them, the brothers Frankenstein.’

‘But what were you telling me about . . .