The Steam-Driven Boy

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

John Sladek's first short story collection. Sladek wrote some of the best science fiction stories of the 20th-century and his parodies of famous s/f authors are uproariously "right-on". His talent went under-appreciated except by a few devoted followers, even though his satirical writing was on a par with the early Kurt Vonnegut.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 141

Sample

Agnes had been wishing for a baby all day, so it was no surprise to her when she peeked through the glass door of the oven
and found one. Bundled in clean flannel, it slept on the wire rack while she scrubbed out dusty bottles, fixed formula and
dragged down the crib from the attic. By the time Glen came home from work, she was giving the baby its first bottle.


‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘A baby!’

‘O my God, where did you get that?’ he said, his healthy pink face going white. ‘You know it’s illegal to have babies.’

‘I found it. Why illegal?’

‘Everything is illegal,’ he whispered, parting the curtains cautiously to peer out. ‘Damn near.’ The face upon Glen’s big,
pink, cubical head looked somewhat drawn.


‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said testily. ‘We’re going to have a gas war, that’s all.’

Glen was a pathetic figure as he moved so as not to cast a shadow on the curtains. His bright, skin-tight plastic suit was
far from skin-tight, and even his cape looked baggy.


‘Is it? Is that all?’

‘No. Say, that neighbour of ours has been raking leaves an awfully long time.’

‘Answer me. What’s wrong? Something at the office?’

‘Everything. The carbon paper and stamps and paper clips have begun to disappear. I’m afraid they’ll blame me. The boss is
going to buy a computer to keep track of the loss. Someone stole my ration book on the train, and I found I had last week’s
newspaper. IBM stock is falling, faintly falling. I have a cold, or something. And – and they’re doing away with the Dewey
Decimal System.’


‘You’re just overwrought. Why don’t you just sit down and dandle our new baby on your knee, while I rustle up some supper.’

‘Stealing food! It’s indecent!’

‘Everyone does it, dear. Did you know I found the baby in the oven?’

‘No!’

‘Yes, the queerest thing. I had just been wishing for a baby, and there it was.’

‘How are the other appliances doing?’

‘The automatic washer tried to devour me. The dishwater is fading away; we must have missed a payment.’

‘Yes, and we’re overdrawn,’ he said, sighing.

‘The garbage disposal is hulking.’


‘Hulking?’

‘Over there.’

He did not look where she was pointing. He continued to peer out the window, where the weather situation was building up.
A Welcome Wagon moved slowly down the street. He could not read the sign, but he recognized the armour plating and the blue
snouts of machine-guns.


‘Yes, it just sits there hulking in the sink, and it won’t eat anything. It ate its guarantee, though.’

The neighbour, a ‘Mr Green’, paused in his raking to note down the Welcome Wagon’s licence number.

‘Not hulking, darling. Sulking,’ Glen said.


‘You have such a big vocabulary. And you don’t even read “How to Build Big Words”.’

‘I read Existential Digest, when I find the time,’ he confessed. ‘But last week I took their test and learned that I’m not alienated enough. That’s
why I’m so damned proud of our kids.’


‘Jenny and Peter?’

‘The same.’

Agnes sighed. ‘I’d like to read a copy of the Irish Mail some time. By the way, the potatoes had poison again. Every eye.’ She went into the bedroom and laid the baby in its crib.


‘I’m going down and turn something on the lathe,’ Glen announced. ‘Something good.’

‘Take off your cape first. You remember the safety laws we learned at PTA.’


‘Lord, how could I forget? Snuff out all candles. Never stand in a canoe or bathtub. Give name, rank and serial number only.
Accept cheques only if endorsed in your presence. Do not allow rats to chew on matches, should they so desire.’


He disappeared, and at the same time, Jenny and Peter came home from school, demanding a ‘snack’. Agnes gave them Hungarian
goulash, bread and butter, coffee and apple pie. They paid 95 cents each, and each tipped her 15 cents. They were gruff, dour
eight-year-olds who talked little while they ate. Agnes was a little afraid of them. After their snack, they belted on guns
and went out to hunt other children, before it grew too dark to see them.


Agnes sighed and sat down to her secret transmitter.

‘AUNT ROSE EXPECTED BY NOON TRAIN,’ she sent. ‘HAVE MADE ARRGTS FOR HER GLADIOLI. SEE THAT FUDGE MEETS 0400 PARIS PLANE WITH CANDLES. THE GARDNER NEEDS TROWEL XPRESS.’


In a moment, the reply came. ‘TROWEL ARRGD. FUDGE HAS NO REPEAT NO CANDLES. WILL USE DDT. HOLD ROSE TILL VIOLET HEARD FROM.’


Always the same, tired, meaningless messages. Agnes hid her transmitter in the cookie jar as Glen came up the stairs. He had
his own transmitter in the basement, she was sure of that. For all she could tell, it was him she was calling each evening.


‘Look at this!’ he said proudly, and displayed a newel post.


Outside, a plane dropped leaflets. The neighbour rushed about, raking them up and burning them.

‘Every night, the same damned thing,’ said Glen, grinding his teeth. ‘Every night they drop leaflets telling us to give up,
and every night that bastard burns them all. At this rate, we’ll never even learn who “they” are.’


‘Is it really so important?’ she asked. He would not answer. ‘Come on, quit hulking. I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want
to ride on a realway train.’


‘Railway,’ he corrected. ‘You can’t, the Public Health Department says that going more than thirty miles an hour contributes significantly
to cancer.’


‘A lot you care what happens to me!’

Glen bowed his great cube of a head resignedly over the television set. ‘You’ll notice,’ he said, ‘that it looks like an innocent
Army-Navy football game. And so it may be. Perhaps the ball won’t blow up when he kicks it. Perhaps that series of plays is
only a coincidence.’


‘Number twenty-seven fades back to pass,’ she murmured. ‘What would that mean, I wonder?’

Glen felt her hand reach out to touch his. He held hands with his wife in the darkened living-room, after making sure she
was not wearing her poison ring.


‘The common cold,’ he muttered. ‘They call it the “common cold”. By the way, have I told you we’re overdrawn?’


‘Yes. It’s that damned car. You would have to order all those special features.’

‘The bazooka in the trunk? The direction-finder radio? The gun turret? Everyone else had had them for years, Agnes. What am
I supposed to do if the police start chasing me? Try to outrun them, me with all that armour plate weighing me down?’


‘I just don’t see what we’re going to live on,’ she said.

‘We can eat green stamps until –’

‘No, they confiscated them this morning. I forgot to tell you.’

The children trooped in, smelling of mud and cordite. Jenny had scratched her knee on a barbed-wire barrier. Agnes applied
a bandaid to it, and gave them coffee and doughnuts, 15 cents. Then she sent them upstairs to brush their teeth.


‘And don’t, for God’s sake, use the tap water,’ Glen shouted. ‘There’s something in it.’ He walked into the room where the
baby slept and returned in a minute, shaking his head. ‘Could have sworn I heard him ticking.’


‘Oh, Glen, let’s get away for a few days. Let’s go to the country.’

‘Oh sure. Travel twenty miles over mined roads to look at a couple of cowpies. You wouldn’t dare get out of the car, for fear
of the deadly snakes. And they’ve sowed the ground with poison ivy and giant viruses.’


‘I wouldn’t care! Just a breath of fresh air –’

‘Sure. Nerve gas. Mustard gas. Tear gas. Pollen. Even if we survived, we’d be arrested. No one ever goes into the country any more but dope peddlers, looking for wild tobacco.’


Agnes began to cry. Everyone was someone else. No one was who they were. The garbageman scrutinized her messages to the milkman.
In the park, the pigeons all wore metal capsules taped to their legs. There were cowpies in the country, but no cows. Even
at the supermarket you had to be careful. If you picked out items that seemed to form any sort of pattern …


‘Are there any popsicles left?’ Glen asked.

‘No. There’s nothing in the icebox but some leftover custard. We can’t eat that, it has a map in it. Glen, what are we going to eat?’


‘I don’t know. How about … the baby? Well, don’t look at me like that! You found him in the oven, didn’t you? Suppose you’d
just lit the oven without looking inside?’


‘No! I will not give up my baby for a – casserole!’

‘All right, all right! I was merely making a suggestion, that’s all.’

It was dark now, throughout the lead-walled house, except in the kitchen. Out the quartz picture window, dusk was falling
on the lawn, on the lifeless body of ‘Mr Green’. The television showed a panel discussion of eminent doctors, who wondered
if eating were not the major cause of insanity.


Agnes went to answer the front door, while Glen went back to the kitchen.

‘Excuse me,’ the priest said to Agnes. ‘I’m on a sick call. Someone was good enough to loan me his Diaper Service tuck, but
I’m afraid it has broken down. I wonder if I might use your phone?’


‘Certainly, Father. It’s bugged, of course.’

‘Of course.’

She stood aside to let him pass, and just then Glen shouted, ‘The baby! He’s at the custard!’

Agnes and the priest dashed out to see. In the clean, well-lighted kitchen, Glen stood gaping at the open refrigerator. Somehow
the baby had got it open, for now Agnes could see his diapered bottom and pink toes sticking out from a lower shelf.


‘He’s hungry,’ she said.

‘Take another look,’ grated Glen.

Leaning closer she saw the child had pulled the map from the custard. He was taking photos of it with a tiny, baby-sized camera.

‘Microfilm!’ she gasped.

‘Who are you?’ Glen asked the priest.

‘I’m –’

‘Wait a minute. You don’t look like a man of the cloth to me.’

It was true, Agnes saw in the light. The breeze rustled the carbon-paper cassock, and she saw it was held together with paper
clips. His stole was, on closer examination, a strip of purple stamps.


‘If you’re a priest,’ Glen continued, ‘why do I see on your Roman collar the letterhead of my office?’


‘Very clever of you,’ said the man, drawing a pistol from his sleeve. ‘I’m sorry you saw through our little ruse. Sorry for
you, that is.’


‘Our?’ Glen looked at the baby. ‘Hold on. Agnes, what kind of a vehicle did he drive up in?’


‘A diaper truck.’

‘Aha! I’ve been waiting a long time to catch up with you – Diaper Man. Your chequered career has gone on far too long.’

‘Ah, so you’ve recognized me and my dimple-kneed assistant, have you? But I’m afraid it won’t do you much good. You see, we
already have the photos, and there is a bullet here for each of you. Don’t try to stop us!’


Watching them, the false priest scooped up the baby. ‘I think I had better kill the two of you in any case,’ he said. ‘You
already know too much about my modus operandi.’ The baby in his arms waved the camera gleefully and gooed its derision.


‘All right,’ said Diaper Man. ‘Face the wall, please.’

‘Now!’ said Glen. He leaped for the gun, while Agnes deftly kicked the camera from the baby’s chubby fist.

The infant spy looked startled, but he acted fast, a tiny blur of motion. Scooping up two fistfuls of custard, he flung them
in Glen’s eyes. Gasping, Glen dropped the gun, as the infamous pair made their dash for freedom.


‘You’ll never take me alive!’ snarled the false priest, vaulting into his truck.

‘Let them go,’ said Glen. He tasted the custard. ‘I should have realized earlier the baby wasn’t ticking, he was clicking. But let them go; they won’t get far anyway, and we’ve saved the map. For whatever it’s worth.’


‘Are you all right, darling?’

‘Fine. Mmmm. This is pretty good, Agnes.’

She blushed at the compliment. There was a muffled explosion, and in the distance they could see flames shooting high in the
air.


‘Esso bombing the Shell station,’ said Glen. The gas war had begun.

They say that G. was once a man of great commerce, head in fact of a large computer corporation most of whose factories were
aboard ships. These ships sailed constantly, through ocean after ocean, leaving in their wakes bits of printed circuit board
and bright scraps of wire. G. and his corporate image were known everywhere; he wanted for nothing, and yet –


Yet, sitting in his comfortable office overlooking the showrooms and guard dogs, G. was not very happy. Happy, yes, but not
very. Everything he saw made him so tired: the array of push-buttons, the towers …


One day an engineer came to show him the latest secret processes.

‘Look here. This funny material does something to the circuit. See? The electrons just get so far, and then they disappear?’


G. thought about this for a minute. He ordered an automobile built of the funny material. When it was ready, he climbed in
and let it carry him off down the turnpike.


After he had driven just so far, he came to a toll-gate. The new car rolled to a stop. A man in a peculiar uniform stepped
from the ticket booth and called out to him.


‘Glad you could make it, Mr G.’

‘But how did you know my name?’

‘Well, I guess about everybody knows you, Mr G. Come on, I’ll take you to the Reception Hall.’

As they walked, G. examined the stranger’s peculiar uniform. If you looked at it out of the corner of your eye, it might be
any bright colour. Only if you looked directly at it was it plain and brown.


‘Wait here, in here,’ said the man, stopping at the door of the Reception Hall. ‘The examiners will be ready to see you in
a minute.’


‘The examiners?’

‘Oh yeah. Everyone has to take an examination, you know. I’m sorry we can’t make an exception for such a V.I.P. as yourself,
but you know the saying: Regulations are made to be kept.’


G. had to wait in the stuffy hall for hours. He inspected the single tattered magazine in the rack, but it was unreadable.
For one thing, every page showed the same picture, with a different headline-caption underneath. The headline-captions were
all written in foreign languages, apparently a different language for each page. Supposing they were translations of one another,
G. leafed through searching for the English version, but there was none. He read:


‘SNIAG RUOY TUB ESOL OT GNIHTON EVAH UOY! ETINGI KROW EHT FO SREKROW! ELBANIMOBA SI NOITIDOC NAMUH EHT!’

The picture showed a flame.


‘HAWO GARK FAER JASO HAFT GAHE JAWO HARK GAIG JANI HATE!’


When he looked closer, he could see something like a shrivelled monkey in the middle of the flame.

‘YIOU HIAVIE NIOTHIINGI TIO LIOSIE BIUTI YIOURI GIAINISI!’

In the background was a curbing. The flame must have been in the middle of some street.

‘ERO KFOITR GHKEEN IRW TOS!’

Very near the flame was a kind of box.

‘INTABIL UNHABIL UNEAEBAL UNHABIL INUABLAL UNMABIL IJNAABAL INNABEBIL UNCABIL INOABAL INNABIL UNDABIL UNIABAL INTABIL UNIABAL
INOABAL INNABEBIL UNIABAL INSABEBIL UNAABAL UNBABIL INOABAL UNMABIL UNIABAL INNABIL UNAABAL UNBABIL UNLABIL UNEABAL!’

The monkey looked in a way human, but small and dark.

‘HE CUAE IONDTION AN TBOMABLS!’

He wondered if his entire, spectacular life had been leading up to this – to die in a waiting-room, leafing through an irritating
magazine.


‘TH HMN CNDTN S BMNBL!’

Or if this waiting itself were a part of the test.

‘HET MUNAH NOCDTINOI SI BONIMAABEL!’

Anyway, if this was the kind of thing they were filling their magazines with these days – pictures of a monkey which had somehow
escaped from its box and caught fire – he was more than happy to remain a busy and ignorant executive with no time to read!


‘I BOMB CONDUIT NOISE-NAIL – HAM THEN!’

This headline looked almost English, but it made no more sense than the others. What, for instance, was a ‘noise-nail’ supposed
to be?


‘THEROE HEROUMEROAN CEROONERODEROITIEROON ISERO ABEROOMEROINEROABEROLEROE!’

He threw the magazine down in disgust, just as the four examiners walked into the room.

They introduced themselves as Stone, Brown, White and another whose name G. did not catch. The four looked so much alike,
wearing identical drab suits and regimental ties, that G. was never quite sure which one was speaking to him.


‘You have three tests to take,’ one said. ‘Naturally you may fail the first two, but the third is as we say ultra-important.
If you fail that you’ve had it. All clear?’


G. nodded. ‘When do I start?’

‘Right away. We’ll take you to the Test Centre.’

Outside there was just one winding, dusty road leading past the Reception Hall. Not far away stood a series of red signs with
white lettering. G. could just make out the first two:


‘BEARDS GROW QUICKLY

IN THE GRAVE’

He hoped to read the rest, but the examiners led him off in the opposite direction.

Now that he had a chance to look at them, G. saw the four were also similar in feature and physique. They were he. . .