Memories of the Future Read online

  However, I would be the last to say that noble principles have ever guided my conduct. The word that describes me, and others like me, best is opportunistic. Opportunism is the essence of a free enterprise system. If you do not have it, you will wind up working for someone who does, and walk the alleys and not the avenues of modern civilization. I have enough liquid assets to buy the stasis ship I am dying on, to buy all the others. But I cannot buy what I need the most: a cure for the disease that is killing me.

  * * *

  The girl June brings us fruit juice, then says good night. I lie on my chair-couch and watch the polliwogs. I know that the girl June has gone to bed with the pilot. They are being paid day and night for their stay in space. They have already accrued payment for ten years, and yet they have spent but ten days away from Earth. All the pilot has to do is deactivate stasis when Earth comes into view and then activate it again after the medmen leave the ship, and all the girl June has to do is bring medicine and food (an androchef prepares the meals) to the sick and check to see whether or not they are dead yet.

  She and the pilot do not even have to jettison the corpses. They simply let the dead bodies lie on the chair-couches till the medship comes. They are getting rich virtually overnight, almost without having to lift a finger. I resent this deeply. I am paying them out of my own pocket, for the Space Force, of which they are a part, is the taxpayers’ burden. People like them are barnacles. They cannot make it on their own.

  There is a mortician assigned to the medship. Upon rendezvous, his helpers transfer the dead. He is getting rich, too.

  * * *

  It is a long night. I do not sleep well. In the morning the girl June brings me toast and scrambled eggs and decaffeinated coffee. She glances at her wristwatch. “Earth will arrive before long. I know that this time they’ll have found a cure.”

  “How many of us are there left?”

  “You’re ambulatory. Why don’t you count and see next time you go to the bathroom?”

  “You know how many. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I haven’t made a recent count. Eat your breakfast now, like a good boy.”

  I gag on the scrambled eggs. I cannot swallow the toast. I sip the decaffeinated coffee and watch the polliwogs.

  * * *

  I have figured out why I resent the girl June so much. She wears her hair the same way my wife used to wear hers, and her eyes are the same shade of blue. She even walks the way my wife did.

  I hated my wife. But I didn’t kill her.

  She jumped from her bedroom window of her own free will.

  Why did she jump?

  I don’t know why.

  Her suicide occurred the day before the series of nuclear plant disasters that had taken place in this country and in Russia, France, Israel, and the People’s Republic of China were reported on TV, so the date is well fixed in my memory. I had already implemented divorce proceedings on the grounds of constructive abandonment. She had not spoken to me for almost a year, and I had finally given up speaking to her. But we were still living together. We would sit like dummies at the meals we still shared. She slept in one bedroom and I slept in another. Fortunately, we had no children. I don’t think she ever wanted them after she miscarried. I know that after the silent treatment began, I no longer did.

  She didn’t know what constructive abandonment was. She didn’t know that shutting yourself off from someone and not speaking to him constituted grounds for divorce. When she found out, she must have undergone a rude awakening.

  But I don’t believe it was this that caused her to jump from her window.

  I think that when she married me she wanted a father rather than a husband. But I think there was another, much deeper cause of our estrangement. She was the daughter of working people. Her father worked with his hands, so had her grandfather and so did her brothers and sisters. She, too, was working with her hands when I met her, and so was her mother. In a silk mill. So she thought, and her mother and her father and her brothers and her sisters thought, that it was fitting and proper for people to work with their hands, and that people who worked with their minds could not wholly be trusted. The peasant mentality. I think she mistrusted every dollar I ever made after I got my business going. In her mind, and in her mother’s and her father’s and brothers’ and her sisters’ minds, a husband should go daily to a factory, punch a clock, work for four hours, punch the clock for lunch, punch it again afterward, work for four hours more, punch the clock once more, and then go home. And if you could work overtime, so much the better. I told her that only fools worked in factories, and I think that this was the rift that eventually resulted in our estrangement.

  * * *

  When I go to the bathroom, I look at the dead. But I do not count them. They are easy to distinguish because the girl June has tied tags to their toes. Soon I shall be too weak to walk that far. Then, each time I have to go, I shall have to summon the androrderly. It will bring me a bedpan or a urinal, and I shall no longer be able to leave my black window.

  * * *

  My wife used to tell me when we were still speaking that I made my money robbing from the poor. I told her that this was how all businessmen made their money, that it was the way free enterprise worked. The poor, I told her, were born to be robbed. But it’s wrong to rob the old poor, she said, referring to those on Supplemental Social Security, many of whom lived in the apartment complexes that I bought and refurbished. The old poor are worthless burdens on the taxpayers’ backs, I said. Somebody should rob them. You’re talking about my grandmother and my grandfather, she said. Yes, I said, and your great-aunts and your great-uncles, too.

  * * *

  “Look,” the girl June says, pausing by my chair-couch and pointing to my black window. “Earth’s coming back.”

  Seen from stasis, Earth has the aspect of a pale polliwog, much larger than the others. I can see the moon, too. It is a silver polliwog and, like Earth, seems to be hurtling toward us. Abruptly their pace slows as the pilot deactivates stasis, and Earth reacquires her blue, familiar face, and I can see the man in the moon.

  We will await the coming of the medmen. And the mortician.

  * * *

  The girl June serves dinner. I did not touch my lunch, but I haven’t even a ghost of an appetite. “They should be here by now,” I tell her.

  “They will be any minute.”

  “Is their ship in the viewscreen?”

  “No, but it will be any second. Eat your dinner.”

  She has resurrected my wife again. As we grew richer and the imaginary partition bisecting the house acquired greater and greater thickness, she grew deeper and deeper into herself. I began spending more frequent weekends with my secretary. At the trial the D.A. tried to pass my secretary off as a sort of femme fatale, arguing that, unable to wait for the divorce to go through, I had killed my wife so I could marry her. On the witness stand I stated that I had had no intention of marrying my secretary; and she, when she took the stand, stated that I had been keeping company with her solely because I was estranged from my wife, and that marriage had been even further from her mind than it had been from mine. I was found Not Guilty.

  After the trial, the abscesses began to appear.

  * * *

  The girl June makes the rounds with her medicine tray. The medship still hasn’t arrived. She is cheerful, as always. “Now don’t you people worry,” she says as she dispenses the capsules. “It’ll be here any second. And I know that this time they’ve found a cure.”

  Later on, when she makes the rounds with fruit juice, I ask if there have been any radio messages from Earth explaining the delay. She shakes her head. “There’s a slight communications problem.”

  “You mean the radio doesn’t work?”

  “We’re not certain whether it’s the radio or not, but when we transmit, we get no answer. But I’m sure that the medship will be here any minute.”

  I can hear the questions the other patients put to her
as she continues down the aisle. “They’ve given up on us,” a woman says. It is evident from the flat tone of her voice that hope left her long ago.

  I lie back in my chair-couch wondering if they really have given up, and I conclude that there must be another reason why the medship hasn’t arrived, because even if they have given up, the medmen would still come round with more capsules and more lies.

  * * *

  I watch the stars between brief bouts of sleep. It is hard to believe that once they were polliwogs in a big black pool. I like them less than I did the polliwogs. The polliwogs at least were companionable. The stars leave me cold.

  I do not care whether the medship comes or not.

  * * *

  It is clear by now that it isn’t going to come. It is morning, and breakfast has been served, and the girl June is making the rounds with her medicine tray. When she finishes she goes into the control room, and a moment later the pilot steps into the ward. He is a tall, spare man who hasn’t yet seen thirty. The health that radiates from him disgusts me.

  He raises his hands for the attention he already has. “The medship, as you know, has yet to appear,” he says, “and we are unable to contact Earth. I’m certain that there’s nothing seriously wrong, but we can’t find out what the score is unless we go down and see. There’ll be no discomfort during atmosphere reentry, and after we land there’ll be no need for any of you to leave the ship. Now don’t you people worry—everything’ll turn out just fine!”

  He steps back into the control room. The girl June reappears and tells us to lie back on our chair-couches. The stars shift in my black window, and the ship descends to Earth.

  * * *

  The pilot and the girl June go outside. We have landed in a large field. Through my window, which is no longer black but green and blue, I can see the serrated shoulders of a distant city. Nearby, several cows are grazing. Our landing was silent and did not startle them.

  The pilot did not close the locks, and I can smell Earth air. It is refreshingly different from the sterile air in the ship. The sun has just risen. The season is spring.

  I sit up on my chair-couch. The other patients who are still living sit up on theirs. We wait for the girl June and the pilot to reenter the ship. The sun climbs higher into the sky. The girl June and the pilot do not reappear.

  I lower my feet to the deck and stand up. I find that I can walk with no difficulty at all. I walk through the control room and through the open locks and step outside. I see the girl June and the pilot almost at once. They are lying on the ground. Their faces are cyanotic. I bend down and feel their carotid arteries. They are dead.

  There is a highway not far away. There are no cars on it. There is no sign of human life anywhere. A flock of birds wings by overhead.

  The other patients have filed out of the ship. I see the Warricks. The abscesses have begun to fade away.

  I undo my hospital gown and look at my chest and stomach. My own abscesses have also begun to fade away.

  The air seems to shimmer with a light of its own. Each lungful I breathe in invigorates me.

  Suddenly I know that the city is dead. That most of the people on Earth are dead. And I know why.

  “Siddon’s disease” was the self-aborted attempt of the human race to adapt to the nuclear age. Had it not been for the serum, they would have succeeded, as the animals did.

  No bombs were ever dropped. None needed to be.

  Those of us who really were ill were made so first because we adapted too soon, and second, because we were poisoned by the uncontaminated air of the stasis ships.

  We have inherited the Earth.

  * * *

  The other patients have also guessed the truth. They are in a state of shock and do not know what to do. I put some of them to work burying the bodies of the girl June and the pilot, and the bodies on board the ship. There is a farmhouse beyond the field. It will do for the time being. I tell the rest of the patients to start transferring the usable contents of the ship to my new demesne. I know at last who I really am. I have fallen from heaven twice. I did a good job on the world the first time. This time I will do an even better one.

  Shakespeare of the Apes

  LOWERY WAKES; IT IS SUNDAY MORNING. Breakfast sounds come from below, but he does not immediately arise. He lies beneath the tousled muslin sheet lackadaisically listening to the faint clatter of cookware, to tap water being drawn, to the muffled sound of Nora’s footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. The bedroom is awash with bright summer sunshine, redolent with morning’s grass-green breath.

  * * *

  The walls of my prison cell are the texture of time. The door is a checkerboard of nights and days. Opposite the door, a little window looks out upon Tomorrow, but it is too high for me to see through. The furniture consists of a solitary chair and a small table. Upon the table lies a ream of writing paper; next to it, a quill pen protrudes from an inkwell that has long since gone dry—

  * * *

  He smells coffee. There will be eggs, Western style, and toast and bacon. He kicks back the sheet, swings his feet to the floor and feels with his toes for the slippers he stepped out of the night before. Felt-shod, he pads into the bathroom where he relieves his distended bladder and washes his face and hands. He combs back into place the straggly wisps of dark-brown hair that crawled down over his domical forehead during his dreams, checks to see whether he needs a shave. He doesn’t quite, but he will very soon; he must trim his minimustache too. It is his only physical affectation and lends him an appropriate academic air.

  In fauve dressing gown, he descends the carpeted stairs, walks through the large living-dining room and enters the coffee-scented kitchen. His orange juice glows in a little frosted glass that stands upon the Formica breakfast counter; he dispatches it in three neat swallows. Behind him, Nora says, “Mom and Dad’ll be here right after mass.”

  Lowery makes no comment. Nora, who attended five o’clock Saturday mass, drops two slices of bread into the automatic toaster. The counter is set for two; she dishes out bacon and eggs and pours coffee. At thirty-eight, she is not nearly as drab as her disheveled hair and shapeless housecoat proclaim. Her movements reveal a natural litheness, a pleasing fullness of hip and thigh. Her hair, after the dishes are done and put away, will be combed to her shoulders in dark and breathless undulations, the waterfall tresses parting to reveal her narrow bit comely face, her eyes a wild-flower blue beneath plucked black cornices of brows.

  * * *

  —In choosing her for my mate, I could have done far worse. It is true she is but little less insensitive, but little less materialistic than the other members of her tribe; but she is durable, even more so than her genetic coevals. The females of my native chrono-land are worn out before they are thirty. This is all right—then. But here in the past it is comme il faut to live with the vase long after the flowers have withered and died; thus, it is well for the vase to be sturdy.

  I must include this profound observation in the text of the novel I shall never write—

  * * *

  Scene 2. The house faces east. In its shrinking backyard shadow, stillform dew-diamonds glisten on the grass. Standing on the awninged patio, wearing walking shorts and gripping a ten-pound bag of briquettes, Lowery surveys his demesne. Not far from the patio a Schwedler’s maple stands. To Lowery’s right, a rear door provides ancillary access to the adjoining garage that houses his Bonneville. Between the Schwedler and the patio rises the outdoor fireplace he built last summer with his own two hands. It is remarkably like the one in the back yard next door that his neighbor, Hungry Jack (the epithet is Lowery’s own), built with his own two hands.

  Lowery cannot start the sacred fire this early in the day, but he can and does pour forth the sacred briquettes. Several years ago on the heels of a sweltering summer, in response to some masochistic quirk, he directed his English class to write a composition entitled “How My Father Spends His Sundays.” His masochism was amply appeased: Ninet
y percent of the fathers were of the same sacerdotal stamp as he and conducted similar carbonaceous ceremonies.

  There is no need for him to mow his lawn—he mowed it yesterday. But the grass girdling the base of the Schwedler and that flanking the footing of the patio escaped the rotary blade and is both straggly and unsightly. Dutifully, he gets his trimming shears from the garage and sets to work.

  Next door, his neighbor, Hungry Jack, starts up his red riding mower; the Sunday silence, unnatural to begin with, absconds. Jack handles the mower as though it is a big bulldozer, sitting top-heavily on the little toy seat. One of his seven sons comes of the house, rubbing his eyes. He begins running after the little red bulldozer. “Dad! Can I drive it? Can I?”

  “No!” Jack roars above the ROAR. “Get back inside and finish your cereal!”

  Jack waves to Lowery as he makes the first pass. Lowery waves back, looking up from the base of the Schwedler. Seven sons . . .

  * * *

  —Unlike the Parnassian Block which the Quadripartite psycho-surgeons interposed between my personal unconscious and my endopsychic sphere, the subsequent electrosurgical excision by the Quadripartite techmeds of my vas deferens was a routine rather than a punitive measure. Prochronisms occasioned by cellular retro-dissemination and reassembly create only insignificant disturbances in the time flow and can safely be ignored (consider, for instance, how many CRR’s are involved in installing just one political prisoner in a past cell); however, a single prochronism introduced into the evolutionary pattern of the species is capable of creating a turbulence powerful enough to divert the flow into an alternate channel. Obviously, then, no dictatorship in its right collective mind would, in imprisoning a political enemy in the past, risk his impregnating a female who preceded him on the evolutionary ladder, to say nothing of his accidentally making enceinte one of his own genetic ancestors.

  I would not in any case have wanted seven sons. I do not even want one—