Alternating Currents (22 page)

Burckhardt coughed. ‘Well, no,’ he said. Mary was not one of the strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said,’ Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming.’

Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. ‘Maybe,’ she agreed. ‘It’s almost half past eight, dear. Shouldn’t you hurry? You don’t want to be late to the office.’

He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out - not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right.

But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out of the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn’t any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before. It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power & Light Building, the town’s only skyscraper - that was the penalty of having Contro Chemicals’ main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade stills left their mark on stone buildings.

None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn’t anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.

He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn’t behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.

‘Where’s Mr Stebbins?’ Burckhardt asked.

The man said politely, ‘Sick, sir. He’ll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today ?’

‘Chesterfields,’ Burckhardt corrected.

‘Certainly, sir,’ the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.

‘Do try these, sir,’ he suggested. ‘They contain an anti-cough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while ?’

Burckhardt said suspiciously, ‘I never heard of this brand.’

‘Of course not. They’re something new.’ Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively, ‘Look, try them out at my risk. If you don’t like them, bring back the empty pack and I’ll refund your money. Fair enough ?’

Burckhardt shrugged. ‘How can I lose ? But give me a pack of Chesterfields, too, will you ?’

He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren’t bad, he decided, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn’t think much of Ralph’s stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every customer the same high-pressure sales talk.

The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials.

No, not the
usual
commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded programme in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn’t merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative bass rumble: ‘Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY Choco-bite
all up.
That’s
Choco-Bite!’
There was a sobbing female whine: ‘I
wish
I had a Feckle Freezer! I’d do
anything
for a Feckle Freezer!’ Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them.

But the office was happily normal - except that Mr Barth wasn’t in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn’t know exactly why. ‘His home phoned, that’s all. He’ll be in tomorrow.’

‘Maybe he went to the plant. It’s right near his house.’

She looked indifferent. ‘Yeah.’

A thought struck Burckhardt. ‘But today is June 15th! It’s quarterly tax return day - he has to sign the return!’

Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt’s problem, not hers. She returned to her nails.

Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn’t his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals’ downtown office, should have taken.

He thought briefly of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn’t really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn’t a soul in the factory - that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a
living
soul - just the machines.

According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man’s habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn’t hurt the man and it didn’t make the machine into a monster.

But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.

He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations out of his mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the figures - which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself.

He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. ‘Since Mr Barth isn’t here, we’d better go to lunch in shifts,’ he said. ‘You can go first.’

‘Thanks.’ Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and began to apply make-up.

Burckhardt offered her the envelope. ‘Drop this in the mall for me, will you ? Uh - wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls ?’

‘Didn’t say.’ Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex. ‘Wasn’t his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the message.’

‘The kid?’ Burckhardt frowned. ‘I thought she was away at school.’

‘She called, that’s all I know.’

Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He didn’t like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.

~ * ~

A funny thing happened on his way home. There was a disturbance at the corner where he usually caught his bus - someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze - so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried-looking man was hurrying towards him.

Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus.

He said, ‘Hello.’

Swanson’s face was desperately eager. ‘Burckhardt?’ he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt’s face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn’t know how to supply it.

Burckhardt coughed and said again, ‘Hello, Swanson.’

Swanson didn’t even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh.

‘Nothing doing,’ he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away.

Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an
odd
sort of day, he thought, and one he didn’t much like. Things weren’t going right.

Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn’t anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You
expect
things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch.

It isn’t the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong - the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.

It wasn’t just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt’s life; it was that the
wrong
things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn’t come into the office, yet Barth
always
came in.

Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife’s attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbours, all through the evening. The neighbours were people he liked - Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman’s complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife’s comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days.

Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him - he was strangely
aware
of it happening - he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep.

~ * ~

On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming. It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room.

His wife came pattering up the stairs. ‘Darling!’ she cried. ‘What’s the matter?’

He mumbled, ‘Nothing. Bad dream.’

She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say: ‘You gave me such a shock -’

But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail of sirens and a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking.

The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried fearfully to the window.

There were no rumbling fire engines in the street, only a small panel truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring loudspeaker horns crowned its top. From them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze.

Burckhardt said in amazement, ‘Mary, that’s against the law! Do you know what they’re doing? They’re playing records of a fire. What are they up to ?’

‘Maybe it’s a practical joke,’ his wife offered.

‘Joke? Waking up the whole neighbourhood at six o’clock in the morning ?’ He shook his head. ‘The police will be here in ten minutes,’ he predicted. ‘Wait and see.’

But the police weren’t - not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their games.

The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for a few minutes. Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice chanted:

‘Feckle Freezers!

Feckle Freezers!

Gotta have a

Feckle Freezer!

Feckle, Feckle, Feckle,

Feckle, Feckle, Feckle -’

It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening.

Burckhardt shouted to his wife, over the uproar, ‘What the hell is a Feckle Freezer ?’

‘Some kind of a freezer, I guess, dear,’ she shrieked back unhelpfully.

Abruptly the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still misty morning; the sun’s rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing the name of a freezer.

‘A crazy advertising trick,’ Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and turned away from the window. ‘Might as well get dressed. I guess that’s the end of-’

The bellow caught him from behind; it was almost like a hard slap on the ears. A harsh, sneering voice, louder than the archangel’s trumpet, howled:

‘Have you got a freezer!
It stinks !
If it isn’t a Feckle Freezer,
it stinks!
If it’s a last year’s Feckle Freezer,
it stinks!
Only this year’s Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers ! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer
stinks !’