Alternating Currents (18 page)

It was week-end going-out night, and every street corner had its Mudgins Demonstrator on his flag-draped platform, frightening the passers-by with prophecies of the return of Unemployment and the Machine. Rafferty noticed that he was hungry, but he didn’t have time to eat, not while he was looking for Fat John Girty and while the letter opener was secretly fondled in his pocket.

And then at the end of the search, to see John Girty just as he was coming out of the biggest free-market restaurant of all and get into a taxicab. A taxicab, that cost real money. And there was Rafferty, with two dollar bills of real money in his pocket, hoarded over months, and a pocketful of Project vouchers and Project slugs.

He did it. He took another cab to follow Girty, but he sat with his heart in his mouth behind the cab driver, watching the clicking black numbers on the meter and doing something that was close to praying. But of course it wasn’t really praying, under the New Way.

Rafferty snarled voiceless curses at the cab driver, who had looked so openly suspicious of his Project suit and his panther’s eyes, and so contemptuous of Rafferty’s fumbling directions as he tried to keep them on the trail of the fat man in the cab ahead.

‘I ought to kill you too,’ Rafferty told the driver, but silently. ‘I ought to cut your throat the way I’m going to cut the fat cow’s throat with what I have hidden here.’

The driver sat on his little bucket seat, where they had ripped out the automatic control apparatus to make room for a human driver under the New Way, and never knew that murder was right behind him. But it was only a short ride - fortunately for Rafferty’s two dollars. The meter said forty cents.

‘I ought to kill you,’ Rafferty said again, not looking at the driver who was fumbling for change but staring at the enormous white Old Way building Girty had gone into. ‘You deserve to be killed. I’ll give you a tip, and you’ll go and tell the Mudgin’s police that I’m following Girty to cut his throat. Take my money and tell the police, that’s what you’ll do.’ He picked up the half dollar from the driver’s palm and left the dime. ‘I ought to kill you too.’

But the driver couldn’t tell them what he didn’t know, so Rafferty bought a newspaper at a stand and stood looking at the headlines obstinately until he heard the cab drive away. The headlines on the news stories said
Liquidation of 80,000 Wilfully Unemployed and Legislators Hail Mudgins Way
and
Project Kitchens to Get New Wonder Yeast Meal,
but it had been a long time since Rafferty had read even a headline in a newspaper, and he didn’t read them now. He only looked at them unseeing until the cab was gone, and then he looked up at the big white building. It was a Turkish bath.

‘Fat old cow,’ Rafferty laughed silently. ‘So fat you go to a place like this to die.’

Rafferty tore the newspaper in half and threw it on the street, and then he went in, one hand on the thing in his pocket, although the man in the lobby looked at him oddly.

He had to pay a dollar, real money, to get in, and that left him with forty-five cents and the Project vouchers, the useless Project vouchers that they wouldn’t take in a free-market place like this. But he didn’t need even forty-five cents, not for what he had in mind.

But there was a problem. He had to put all his clothes in a locker, all of them. He stood there naked, a lean, bent man with panther’s eyes, wishing he had a pocket. But there was no pocket in his skin, and he had to leave the long, sharp letter opener in the locker.

Once upon a time, it seemed to Rafferty, a long, long time ago someone who
then
had been that which was Rafferty
now
had been in a place like this. That was during what they called the ‘Old Way’, although it seemed to Rafferty, they hadn’t called it that then. There was something there that did not add up neatly in his mind, but he was walking through a hot, steamy corridor of tile, and he didn’t bother about that any more. It was damp underfoot, and there were splashing showers alongside. He stepped into a shower and let the water thunder on him.

And he turned his face up into the stream and cowered back, out of sight, as fat old John Girty puffed pinkly past.

Girty was naked as a newborn, soft as a moulted crab, flabby as a pink harem eunuch. ‘I spit,’ Rafferty soundlessly told the roaring water. ‘Fat, soft thing. You’re dirty, cow.

‘Fat and dirty -                       

‘I’ll kill you, Girty.’

~ * ~

Rafferty stood in the steam-room, peering across the corridor at the massage-tables where fat Girty was presenting his flabby pink flesh to be thumped. Rafferty couldn’t see through the clouded glass and so he had to keep opening the door, and every time he opened it steam billowed out and draughts knifed in on the men who sat naked on wooden benches in the steam. The metal door burned Rafferty’s hand, he noticed, but it was a cool thing compared to the black heat that stung his throat inside him.

Girty was still waddling and puffing around the massage-table, talking to the rubber. Rafferty let the door to the steam-room close on him, and squinted around the little cube of hell he was in. There were dim loose shapes sprawled around the walls. Some were fat and many were old, but none was as flabby as John Girty.

There were three lights on the wall of the steam-room, head high, candle pale. There was a fourth light that was burned out, and Rafferty sat down in the little dark under it, waiting until it was time.

‘I have a knife to kill you with,’ he crooned soundlessly. ‘Fat cow. I have a knife to cut you with and stab you with. I’ll kill you, Girty.’

Rafferty sat there with patient violence, like an avalanche waiting on cue in the wings of a spectacular drama. He was in no hurry; he might perhaps move very fast indeed, fast as lightning or the star rays that shoot across the void, but he would not be hurrying.

There was no time for such as Rafferty, and no longing for waiting to come to an end, and no regret for time lost. Though perhaps there once had been, before Mudgins, and the New Way, and the machines that taught Rafferty and those like Rafferty how to do the work of machines.

It was time to look out of the door again, and he got up, squinting his white-hot eyes against the steam, and walked over. In the massage-room Girty was on the table now, with a white towel over his ugliness. A tall, brown man in trunks clapped goggles on Girty’s eyes and pressed a switch that lit a shimmering violet light overhead.

‘Close the door, damn it!’ One of the dim white shapes behind Rafferty was sitting up and swearing at him.

‘Your mother loved hogs,’ Rafferty said without voice, but he closed the door and walked out.

This was the part that was hard to do. He walked backward and sidewise like a crab, keeping his face hidden from even the closed, goggled eyes of Girty. He climbed on to a slab next to Girty and lay down with his head turned away.

‘Put goggles on me, you filthy pig,’ he soundlessly ordered the rubber. ‘Hide my face before Girty looks this way.’ His averted eyes saw a sign on the wall:

Swedish Rub
      
      
      
$1.00

Salt Rub
      
      
      
.75

Sun Lamp & Massage
      
1.50

Rafferty had a twenty-five-cent-piece and two dimes. And the Project vouchers, of course, but not for here. The rubber came, then, and covered Rafferty. He looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke, but all he said was:

‘Good evening, sir. Swedish rub today ?’

Rafferty nodded, looking expressionlessly into the rubber’s coarse, tanned face. He could not speak out loud, so close to Girty’s fat but listening ears, but he only had to nod. ‘Anything, filthy pig,’ he said soundlessly. ‘One dollar is nothing. Perhaps I will pay you with the same knife I pay Girty with.’

The rubber assembled his greases and cloths and Rafferty waited until it was time. He thought about the one dollar of real money that someone in this place would expect him to pay, but of course he would have paid all his bills in full, for ever, before he came to the cashier’s window again. He thought of the letter opener, lost to him in the locker down below. But the knife was better, eight inches long and carefully honed, with a thin blade that would slash a throat or go between two ribs.

‘It will make meat out of Girty,’ he told the unhearing rubber. ‘Perhaps it will make meat out of you. I know it will make meat out of me, too, but not until I have finished with fat Girty.’

It was good that the knife was there, to solve all his problems at once. He waited until it was time.

Girty’s lamp went out, and his rubber rolled him over, and Girty immediately began talking to the man. Rafferty could hear the hard-muscled cupped-hand slaps on the sagging pink flesh, and Girty’s wheezing, jolting voice.

‘I’ll kill you, Girty,’ he said, and it was like a hymn. ‘I’ll kill you, Girty,’ he said without sound.

Girty was saying proudly. ‘Hell, I’ve -
ugh
- worked with Mudgins just like -
ugh
- that. Ever since the old Fifth -
ugh
- Precinct days. He and I -’

Rafferty wasn’t listening, not exactly. He was letting the words flow over him as unnoticed as his rubber’s attentions, waiting for it to be time. There would be some sort of signal, it seemed to him, and then he would make meat out of Girty.

Not exactly listening, he caught a sudden change in Girty’s voice and for a second he tensed, thinking perhaps it was the signal. ‘Easy, sir,’ said his rubber, thinking he had hit a sore spot.

But Rafferty didn’t relax until he realized that the change in Girty’s voice was because he was greeting a friend. Rafferty peered and saw another man, as pink as Girty but nothing like as fat, as old but not nearly as flabby, advancing as bare as a baby and talking to Girty.

‘Lay down with dogs, you fool,’ said Rafferty venomously, not making a sound, ‘and you get up with fleas. I warn you, Girty-lover. I’ll kill you too, with a knife that will hack your heart out before you even see it. Cows.’

Rafferty’s rubber flopped him over then, and for a plunging moment it seemed to Rafferty the man would surely see the knife. But he didn’t say anything, only: ‘Easy, sir. Let me know if I’m too brisk.’

Rafferty lay face down on the slab, watching his fingers crawl across the cloth beside his face. ‘The hands can kill you, Girty,’ he said voicelessly. ‘But the knife is better. Go and run, with your Girty-loving friend. Wherever you go, I’ll be there.’

They were talking, Girty and the Girty-lover, and Rafferty reached out to taste the conversation. The friend was complaining, while another masseur eased the kinks out of his shoulders. The friend was saying, ‘Sixty hours ? That’s a good long work week, yes. And it keeps them out of trouble, I’m not denying it. But there’s a fatigue factor, John. After sixty hours a worker is bound to make mistakes.’

Girty said: ’Not if he’s been disciplined. Give them the New Way treatment, that’s all.’ He laughed, like a pig’s squeal. ‘I’d like to see them make mistakes then.’

His friend said: ‘I don’t hold with the treatments.’

Girty said, after a moment, in a voice that was still a cow’s voice, but the voice of a shocked and stern cow:
‘Are you against Mudgins?’

Rafferty stopped feeling the texture of the conversation then, because what did it matter to him? The Girty-lover was defensive and over-emphatic, and Girty himself was hostile and only slowly allowed himself to be soothed. They were talking about full employment and the horrors of the Old Way and the Machine, and the Girty-lover was petulantly insisting that the machine-education treatments had - unspecified - faults.

Rafferty didn’t listen. The New Way treatments were machines droning and flashing in your ears and hammering, hammering, hammering at you until you
couldn’t
make a mistake, not in the things they taught you to do. Because you were half machine yourself, by the time they finished fluxing and forging your mind. And full employment was overtime at the Project and an end to the - the studio, or whatever the word was - that once had meant something back in the days of the Machine and - and Art, whatever
that
word was.

But what did it matter to Rafferty, that he should listen? Better to lie there with the secret knowledge of eight inches of honed steel waiting.

John Girty was saying in his hoarse cow’s rumble, ’I tell you, Mudgins
saved
us from going to hell in a handbasket! You don’t remember the Old Way. Love. Churches. And crackpots making speeches - about
anything.
Voting - for anybody, anybody you liked. Mudgins cleaned all that up. “Keep them busy,” he said, “and you’ll keep them out of trouble.” Get rid of the Machine, put people back to work. If they don’t want to work the way they ought to -
make
them! I remember, back in the Fifth -’

Rafferty wasn’t listening, not exactly, but the words were fuel to keep him going. But the rubber was through with him, and flopped him right-side-up again, and again there was that moment when the universe stopped, waiting to see if the man would see the knife.

The rubber said cheerfully, ‘There you are, sir. That’ll fix you up. Now how about a little suntan to tone up the skin ?’ His hand was already on the switch, and the tube overhead flared violet. Rafferty stared ragingly at it through his goggles, hating the darkened, shapeless core of the light.