If you want me to tell you more than that, you’re out of luck. There’s nothing more anybody can tell you.
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
tracking with closeups (3)
NO YOU DON’T!
“So what do we do?” Sheena Potter demanded for the umpty-fourth time. “And don’t take another trank—it’s all I can do to get through to you as it is!”
“You’re trying to give me ulcers,” said her husband Frank.
“You sheeting liar.”
“Then you’re doing it inadvertently, and that means you’re not fit to be allowed loose on the street, let alone breed your species.” Frank spoke from the elevated, almost Olympian level of dispassion due to the five tranks he’d taken already this anti-matter.
“You think I want to breed? That’s a different song you’re singing from the usual, isn’t it? Let’s have you carry the little bastard—they can do that now, pump you full of female hormones and implant in the visceral cavity.”
“You’ve been watching Viewers’ Digest. No, that’s wrong. You must have taken it off SCANALYZER. That’s even more sensational.”
“Dreck! It was Felicia who told me when I was last down at the night-school—”
“Lot of good your classes are doing you! You’re still as stiff as Teresa! When do they progress you to elementary Kama Sutra?”
“If you were more than half a man you’d have taught me yourself—”
“The lack of response is in the patient not the agent, which is why I—”
“Now you’re quoting ad copy, not even a news programme but a plug put out by some dribbling—”
“I should have had more sense than to marry a block who’d only had a few clumsy highschool—”
“I should have had more sense than to marry a man with colourblindness in the family—”
There was a pause. They looked around at the apartment. On the wall between the windows there was a pale patch, the same colour as the paint had been originally when they moved in. The picture which had occupied the pale area was in the red plastic crate near the door. Next to the red plastic crate were five green ones (may be tubed with padding); next to them were a dozen black ones (may be tubed without padding); and there were also two white ones which were a moderately convenient height for sitting on—the purpose Frank and Sheena were putting them to.
There was nothing in the drinks cabinet. Except a little dust and some dried spilt wine.
There was nothing in the icebox except a thin frosting on the deepfreeze section which would automatically be melted off the next time the comptroller cycled to “defrost.”
There were no clothes in the bedroom closet. The disposall was grinding quietly to itself, half-choking on a batch of disposable paper garments and the twenty-odd pounds of unused perishables from the freeze.
The auto-seals had clicked across the power sockets; no child had ever lived here, but it was against the law for any socket not to be auto-sealed when the appliance connected to it was removed.
There was a file of documents lying on the floor at Frank’s feet. It included a two-person tourist-class ticket for Puerto Rico; two ID cards of which one was stamped HEREDICHRO and the other SUSTOHEREDICHRO; twenty thousand dollars’ worth of travellers’ cheques; and a report from the New York State Eugenic Processing Board which began “Dear Mr. Potter, I regret to have to inform you that inception of pregnancy by your wife with or without you as the father is punishable under Para. 12, Section V, of the New York State Parenthood Code as at present enforced…”
* * *
“How did I know the J-but-O’s were going to ban me? The baby-farming lobby must be worth trillions of dollars and that amount of money talks!”
He was a vaguely good-looking man, rather lean, rather dark, his air and bearing older than one would expect from his chronological age of thirty.
“Well, I’ve always said I’d be willing to adopt! We could get on an adoption list and have an unwanted child in less than five years for sure!”
She was an exceptionally lovely natural blonde, plumper than her husband, dieted to the currently fashionable dimensions, and aged twenty-three.
“What’s the point of going?” she added.
“Well, we can’t stay here! We’ve sold the apt and spent some of the money!”
“Can’t we go somewhere else?”
“Of course we can’t go somewhere else! You heard about the people they shot last week trying to sneak into Louisiana—and how far would twenty thousand bucks go in Nevada?”
“We could go there and get pregnant and come home—”
“To what? We’ve sold the apartment, don’t you understand? And if we’re here past six poppa-momma they can jail us!” He slapped his thigh with his open palm. “No, we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ll have to go to Puerto Rico and save up enough to make it over to Nevada, or maybe bribe someone to give us a passport for Peru, or Chile, or—”
There was a clang from the front door.
He looked at her, not moving. At last he said, “Sheena, I love you.”
She nodded, and eventually managed a smile. “I love you desperately,” she said. “I don’t want somebody else’s secondhand child. Even if it didn’t have any legs, I’d love it because it was yours.”
“And I’d love it because it was yours.”
Another clang. He rose to his feet. On the way past her, to let the moving gang in, he kissed her lightly on the forehead.
continuity (3)
AFTER ONE DECADE
Emerging from the library, Donald Hogan looked first north, then south, along Fifth Avenue, debating which of half a dozen nearby restaurants he should go to for lunch. The decision seemed unreachable for a moment. He had been holding down his present job for ten years, almost; sooner or later he was bound to go stale.
Perhaps one shouldn’t have one’s greatest ambition realised in full at the age of twenty-four…?
He had, very probably, another fifty years to go; he had a calculable chance of a decade beyond that. And when he accepted the offer they’d made him he hadn’t raised the matter of retirement, or even resignation.
Oh, they’d have to let him retire eventually. But he had no idea whether he’d be permitted to resign.
Lately, several of his acquaintances—he made a policy of not having friends—had noticed that he was looking older than his age and had developed a tendency to lapse into brown studies. They had wondered what on earth could be the matter with him. But if someone had been in a position to say, “Donald’s wondering if he can quit his job,” even the most intimate of all those acquaintances, the man with whom he shared an apartment and an endless string of shiggies, would have looked blank.
“Job? What job? Donald doesn’t work. He’s a self-employed dilettante!”
Approximately five people, and a Washington computer, knew otherwise.
* * *
“Sit down, Donald,” the Dean said, waving an elegant hand. Donald complied, his attention on the stranger who was also present: a woman of early middle age possessed of delicate bone-structure, good taste in clothes and a warm smile.
He was a trifle nervous. In the last issue of the university’s student journal he had published some remarks which he later regretted making public, though if pressed honesty would compel him to admit that he had meant them and still did mean them.
“This is Dr. Jean Foden,” the Dean said. “From Washington.”
The alarming possibility of having his post-graduate grant discontinued on the grounds that he was an ungrateful subversive loomed up in Donald’s mind. He gave the visitor a chilly and rather insincere nod.
“Well, I’ll leave you to get on with it, then,” the Dean said, rising. That confused Donald even more. He would have expected the old bastard to want to sit in on the discussion and giggle silently—here’s one more intransigent pupil up for the axe. His mind was therefore barren of possible reasons for summoning him when Dr. Foden produced and displayed the student journal in question.