“Okay, okay,” Julian interrupted. “Let’s go back to the living room. Don’t say anything, anything at all about this to anyone. Not even Martha or Edith.”
The doctor gaped at him all over again, but nodded agreement.
Chapter Twelve
The Year 2, New Calendar
The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
I’m anti-communists! What more do they want of me?
America is beginning to accept a new code of ethics that allows for chiseling and lying.
When the two men reentered the room Edith looked at them questioningly. “What have you two been up to?”
“I’ll never tell,” Julian said, doing his best to leer.
The doctor went over to the phone screen.
Julian said hurriedly, “Who are you going to call?”
“Why, that friend I just told you about.”
Julian shook his head. “Go and see him.”
Leete looked mildly surprised, but then nodded. “I see,” he said.
“Yes. And keep obviously what is in mind, in mind,” Julian insisted, and then added somewhat wearily, “I am from an age when we were conscious of these things.”
“What in heaven are you two talking about?” Edith demanded.
“A dirty joke,” Julian said.
“What is a dirty joke?”
He looked at her in exasperation. “See here,” he said. “Ever since I came out of stasis, you’ve been telling me we don’t have this any more, you don’t have banks, you don’t have cities in the sense we had them a third of a century ago. You don’t have wars, and you don’t have jails. You don’t have newspapers and you don’t have schools in the sense that we did. You don’t even have stores. But now I am calling a halt. Don’t tell me you don’t tell dirty stories any more!”
Doctor Leete was chuckling. He said, “You know, it’s been so long that I’d just about forgotten. Dirty stories were simply stories usually based on taboos such as sex, or excretion, and usually involving taboo words. Do away with the taboos and the institution disappears.”
Edith was mystified. “What’s a taboo word?”
Julian was looking from one to the other. He had been in stasis for something like ten years before Edith had even been born.
The academician laughed again. “I doubt if any explanation would make sense to you. When I was a lad, I could say ‘pee’, if I meant urinate, but if I said ‘piss,’ I was spanked.”
Julian chimed in, “I was allowed to say ‘heck,’ but if I said ‘hell,’ I was punished, although the word was used in the same way. Some parents were even more strict. Their children could say ‘Gad,’ but not ‘God.’ ‘Goddamnit’ came out ‘gaddarnit.’ ’”
“What has all this got to do with dirty jokes, whatever they are?”
Julian sighed. “Let me think of an example. Okay. An American was telling an Englishman a poem:
“The Englishman returned to London and told it to a friend:
The doctor laughed mildly but Edith merely looked at Julian and said, “That’s a dirty story?”
“Well, yes.”
“A joke?”
“Yes.”
“What’s funny about it?”
Julian closed his eyes in pain. “It’s like your father was telling you: it’s based on a taboo word. So the Englishman by suggesting it, though not actually saying it, made the joke funny.”
Edith looked at her father. “What dirty word?”
Her father cleared his throat. “ ‘Cunt.’ In Middle English it was cunte, originally derived from the Latin cunnus, and meaning vagina. It was one of the taboo words.”
“Why not simply say vagina?”
He said, “I give up. I knew very well I wasn’t going to be able to explain dirty jokes. In fact, I’m not sure I understand why I ever thought they were funny. Good-bye. I’m off to see someone on a suggestion of Julian’s that I’m not sure I understand either.” He left, shaking his head.
Edith asked Julian, “Do you know any more dirty jokes?”
“No,” he said definitely, sitting down across from her. He brought his notes from his side pocket.
“What do you have there?” she said.
“Some notes 1 was going to ask your father about, but it occurs to me that as a student of anthropology, you might be more up on it than he is. It has to do with crime.”
“Crime? Oh, of course. Fascinating. I spent over a year studying it. It must have been fabulous, living back when they had crime.”
He let the breath out of his lungs. “Yeah,” he said. “Never a dull moment. No more crime these days, hey?”
“No. Of course not.”
He didn’t bother to disguise his skepticism as he fumbled through his notes. “All right. Now let me state my case. When I went into hibernation, we had one hell of a lot of crime. It was growing so fast it was hard to keep statistics.”
He looked down at his papers. “For instance, we had petty crime, such as shoplifting, avoiding paying your fare when getting on a subway or bus, children sneaking into movies, walking out on a bill in a restaurant, figuring out methods of making long distance calls on the telephone without paying.” He paused. “Then there were servants pilfering about the household, servants getting a kickback from the butchershop and other stores where they purchased supplies for their employers. Trivia such as that.”
“Fascinating,” she repeated.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I once had a houseman who drank up three cases of vintage champagne on me.” He went back to his notes. “Then we had crimes of violence. Mugging, kidnapping, piracy even, in some parts of the world, murder, rape, robbery of homes, stores, warehouses, and banks.
“And along in here we have a whole variety of odds and ends: confidence games, prostitution, gambling, blackmail, pickpocketing, smuggling, cattle rustling, extortion. Actually, the list is endless. At the very top, even more lucrative than bank robbery, and certainly more often committed, there’s embezzlement.”
“Yes,” she said brightly. “I studied all about it. Men like Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Al Capone.”
He looked at her sarcastically. “So no more, eh?”
She shook her head.
“No more police, no more jails. Don’t need ’em any more, right?”
“That’s right,” she said reasonably.
He threw down the sheaf of notes on the coffee table.
“Why not? All through history we’ve had crime, since first some caveman slugged his neighbor over the head with a club and swiped his wife. So now, all of a sudden, why has it ended?”
“Because the reasons ended.”
He took her in silently.
She said, “Now see here. All those different types of crimes you mentioned fit roughly into one of two categories; those committed for the sake of money, and those due to mental illness. Obviously, now that we’ve eliminated money, crimes that dealt with stealing, as such, were abolished out of hand. What would you steal, these days? Those that dealt with mental illness are now in the hands of the Medical Guild, not police, courts, and jails.”