Alien Accounts (9 page)

Ernest thought it would be fun to let his computer call up Frank’s computer on the telephone.

‘Good to hear yours, too! But hey, do you know what a.m. it is out here?’

Al is seen glancing at his watch. Thanks to a vibrating quartz crystal in it, the watch keeps very, very accurate time. He looks from its Swiss face to the American face of Dot, his wife, out in the back yard eating a piece of fruit that has been picked the day before yesterday in the Orient. Will miracles – or anything – ever cease? The digital clock reports a new minute.

‘I met you,’ Al said into a portable tape recorder no larger than a packet of cigarettes, ‘a year, three days, seven hours and forty-three minutes ago, through that computer dating service. You had brushed your teeth electrically, using stannous fluoride toothpaste to prevent decay. I had just had dacron veins put in.

‘Times change. You now have someone else’s liver and kidney: I have ridden on an atomic submarine.’

On the atomic ship, Al will notice an interesting article about LSD, a drug commonly supposed to cause visions and insights. He would reproduce this article by xerography, a fast electrostatic process making use of powdered ink.

Al called Bertha, his ex-wife, on the hall video phone.

‘I just took a stay-awake pill,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so sleepy ever since the sauna I took, on the airbus from –’

‘What’s new?’

‘I’m pregnant again, due to the fertility drug I’m taking. Ah, and I have a new non-stick milk saucepan. See?’ On the screen she cuts open a tetrahedral carton of milk which was sealed for almost a year, then pours some into a special pan. The pan has previously been coated with a compound to prevent sticking and burning. So Bertha, wife of Ernest, was pregnant!

She and Al soon fell into their old argument about riot control. She favoured tanks with aluminium armour, while Al defended the judicious use of Mace, a gas which irritates the mucous membranes.

‘What’s new with you and Dot?’ she asks.

‘Oh, I’ve been sterilized. Dot has this detached retina, but luckily they can now weld it back on with lasers.’

They spoke of Dot’s trip to the Orient on a ballistic, supersonic plane. There Dot makes the acquaintance of an amateur biologist named Frank, who’s all keyed up about the isolation of the gene. His real business is the manufacture of cosmetics for men, in factories he claimed were 97%
automated.

LIFE AFTER DEATH – AL WONDERS.

Ernest took a tranquillizer before he called Dot on the teletypewriter. They were lovers, not to Al’s knowledge. This was a conveniently private mode of communication, not often used by spirit mediums, though.

As they ‘spoke’, Ernest drank coffee that had been percolated, frozen, vacuum dried and packed in jars. A spoonful of this substance to a cup of boiling water, while Dot watched the five-inch screen of her portable television set: there is a baseball game in far-off Texas, played on nylon grass beneath a geodesic dome, and she is part of it. When they have said the private things lovers must, Dot took a sleeping pill and slept.

Clement, or Clem, was Al’s son by a previous marriage. Next day he fuelled his car at a coin gas station, dry-cleaned his clothes in a similar manner, and fell foul of a peculiar police arrangement: At one end of a bridge police read the licence numbers of all passing cars into their radios. The computer at headquarters checks these for old violations.

Clem lived avoiding the army in a module apartment house, which has been made up at a factory in complete, decorated rooms, then bolted together at the building site. When he gets home he tries to call Bertha, his former stepmother, by means of a telephone message relayed through a communications satellite many thousands of miles, but she is at the hospital, having her third child.

Bertha’s first child was now a bright little five-year-old, using an unusual teaching machine to learn to type and spell at the same time. This machine would give an instruction, then lock all but the necessary keys. If only life could be like that, Al thought, with no chance to err! In a programmed novel, the reader determines the ending.

Her second child was very intelligent, possibly because Bertha wore a suit pressurized with oxygen during the brain-growing months of pregnancy. Her present delivery is difficult. The child has worked down too far for a Caesarean yet not far enough for forceps. What is the obstetrician to do?

He used a new suction device to grip the child’s head and draw him from the womb. Soon it cried, and before long, Bertha knew, it would be joining its siblings in immunity to polio, once a dread crippler and killer of children. She only hoped it would grow up to be a president like the one she now watches on colour TV, announcing the landing of men on the moon (this president had not yet been assassinated). O Frank, Frank! Where are you?

Frank had given up smoking, drinking and excessive eating since his heart-lung transplant. Yet here he is, enjoying a cigar, a martini, and what looks like boeuf Stroganoff! What can possibly be the explanation of this?

It was a photograph of Frank made many years before, to demonstrate a process that made colour prints, right in the camera, seconds after the photo was snapped. Dot became a secretary. As she rode the helicopter to the Pan Am building, she typed on her personal portable plastic typewriter. The ride compared favourably with her former trip on the 125
mph train from Tokyo to Osaka, where she met Frank. Unforgettable Japan! She revisited in memory that factory where thousands of workers began the day with the company song, followed by ‘Zen jerks’ to limber up mind and body for the assembly of portable record players.

Such as the one Clem now listened to as he avoided the draft. He did not want to die in Vietnam, but stay here, taking LSD. He saw God, was God, felt God, left God.

Frank was at this moment crossing the English Channel on a hovercraft. He liked unusual means of motion. In Paris he had stood upon a moving sidewalk. In London, he meant to ride on one of the famous ‘driverless’ Underground trains. Back in the US, he tries sitting on the beetle-like back of his robot lawnmower, as it moves its random pattern. Travel was his vice. Like Ernest’s drinking.

Ernest had thank God been cured of his drinking by aversion therapy. One by one, all the pleasant stimulus-response mechanisms linking him with alcohol were broken down. In real time, Al ponders life after death.

He had engaged a firm to freeze him soon after death and thus maintain him until such time as science should come across a way of reversing whatever killed him. Ernest would live longer than otherwise on account of his ‘pacemaker’, an electronic device to regulate the heartbeat of Ernest. In a programmed novel, he might or might not have this pacemaker; it all depends on the reader.

Al dialled Ernest’s number in another city. ‘Dialled’ is not strictly accurate, for the clumsy dial on Al’s phone had been replaced by pushbuttons and musical tones. They get into a heated discussion of missile defence systems. Ernest certainly presents his case fairly, but Al wouldn’t listen to reason. Dot counted her contraceptive pills, 20 of which must be taken each month. She also changed her paper panties. Clem receives a picture of Frank by almost magical means!

Bertha puts the picture into a machine and places the receiver of her phone upon it. Far way, Clem copies this motion, then finds the picture in his duplicate machine. Eagerly he gazes on the familiar lineaments of his real father.

Dot notices how much plastic there is around. Her plastic necklace, her boss’s plastic tie, Al’s plastic credit cards, which he claimed were displacing money in the realtime world – could there be any connection with that island where they issued bright plastic coins? Dot saw what she must do, later. Now –

She maintains that the ‘golfball’ typewriter, a highspeed machine using interchangeable spherical type fonts, is a pain in the ass. The reader, Al, may choose …

Bertha took a new antibiotic tablet, while Ernest explained again the difference between ‘Quasars’ and ‘Quarks’.

‘“Quarks” are mathematical entities proposed to explain certain behaviour in subatomic particles. “Quasars” are quasi-stellar radio sources which have often puzzled astronomers.’ Clem tore Frank’s picture into thirty-two pieces. Why can’t the others share time, the whatyoucallems,
the computer makers, the peoples? On a radio small as a pocket watch, Clem heard the news.

They had invented a polymer of water which, if uncontrolled, could turn all the water of the world into plastic.