Fun House (20 page)

“Atanos?”

“The greatest man in the R.T.R. Darling, don’t look so worried. Nobody can hear us. They have neutralized every listening device in this Building. Comrade Atanos — Commissioner Sonata to you — is a genius.”

I began to see daylight as we say on the Reservation. The R.T.R., as I had suspected, was an L. and O. front.

The door remained shut. Gladys-Ekaterina smiled and kicked it four times again. We heard footsteps. The door opened and we went into a living room, or so I guessed, for never had I seen so much tobacco smoke
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. I blinked at what was probably people, grayish blurs without faces. Several of the blurs approached us and before I knew what was happening, they seized us. “Spies!” one of them shouted.

I was so stunned I didn’t resist, and then it was too late — they had tied me up with what must have been All-Emergency Thread.

“We’re not spies!” Gladys-Ekaterina cried.

“Only spies would know the secret knock of the R.T.R.!” one of the gray blurs answered her. “Unsmoke the room!” he ordered.

In a few minutes they were all completely visible. I stared hopelessly at a dozen teen-agers
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who were armed to the teeth. Literally so, for several of them carried the outlawed daggers
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of the St. Ewagiow between their molars. The St. Ewagiow, I thought with numb horror.

“Death to the spies!” they shouted and now the St. Ewagiow daggers were in their hands as they rushed us. I stood stiffly, trying to face the onslaught as a brave man should. “Death the Victorious!” they chanted. “Death — ”

“Stop!” their leader ordered, a pale boy of nineteen or twenty with a waxy white face. “We will give these spies a trial before execution.” He turned sternly to Gladys-Ekaterina. “How did you know the secret kick of the R.T.R.?”

“We overheard an R.T.R. agent at the hotel,” she lied with the professional coolness of an experienced police agent.

The pale boy grunted. “Guilty. You are both guilty.”

“Hallelujah!” they approved the verdict.

“Man is born of dust and to dust he shall return,” shrieked a red haired girl in a St. Ewagiow black dress.

“Hallelujah Dust!” the fanatics echoed her.

“Dust the Glorious! Dust the Victorious!” they chanted.

The pale boy said, “Brother Fecalle, recite the prayer for the dead.”

It was all over, I thought numbly. Death had won.

A boy of seventeen in a torn black coat who looked like some kind of preacher stepped into the middle of the room. I choked with fear, for this was indeed the end of the rope, a rope made of neutrons, not only around my own neck but that of all mankind. For who now would have the patience to negotiate with the professor? There was so little time left to find the A-I-D! Then suddenly, inspired, I shouted. “Execute me? Execute a member of the St. Ewagiow?”

They surrounded me, cursing me for a liar, but steadily I said in the deepest and most death-like voice I could manage. “I swear on my honor as a man who holds the skeleton within him in sacred trust that I will do all to hasten its revelation.”

This password that I had learned at Bangani Castle caused them to stare at me and to whisper among themselves.

“Let us end the world!” I shouted like a true fanatic. “Let us end the world and the universe! Smash, burn up the planets! Down with Mars, Venus! Down with the moon! Down with the Milky Way! Death, Universal death for every form of life! Our life and life wherever it is among the stars! Death, universal death for the universe.”

My inspired speech impressed them. And when they put me to the test, I demonstrated all the secrets I had learned at Bangani Castle from the St. Ewagiow who had been Barnum Fly’s double.

I showed them the St. Ewagiow kiss, kissing each of their leader’s closed eyelids. The mystical kiss of death, for under his eyelids were the sockets of his skull. “Long live the sacred skull!” I shouted. “The final custodian of mortal flesh!”

It was a narrow escape. We couldn’t believe it when they freed us. Outside in the corridor, Gladys-Ekaterina wiped her tears of joy and whispered. “It was the wrong apartment. This is the door I wanted.” I waited fearfully as she kicked it four times, but when we entered there was no cloud of smoke and the five men present looked what they were, L. and O. operatives. Gladys-Ekaterina introduced me to their leader, a sharpfaced policeman who you could see with one eye had come up from the ranks by fair means or foul. In short, a man I could trust. “Meet Captain Weir,” she said. “Or Comrade Nyet as he is known here.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Crockett,” he said. “Everything I’ve heard from the Commissioner has been good.”

“You’ve got some interesting neighbors,” I said. “St. Ewagiows down the hall.”

He shrugged. “What can you do, Crockett? They’re everywhere. And I’ll tell you something. They know the A-I-D is here in Russoplayo.”

“How do you know that, Captain?”

“We’ve got our men in their outfit just as they have their men in ours,” Comrade Nyet said cynically. “But we’re still ahead, thank Univac!”

He looked like a rough-and tumble type, but I had a hunch that his first loyalty was not to the Commissioner but the L. and O. Board and Her Excellency, the Minister of Police Affairs. “How are we ahead?” I asked.

“We know where the professor is, Crockett. It isn’t much because we don’t know where he’s hidden the A-I-D. That’s the big question. That damned A-I-D!” He stared at his five men and said gloomily. “We could arrest the professor. In fact, that’s our orders, and we’ll arrest him when the time comes.”

“We have until eleven tonight,” I said. “We have until eleven for me to negotiate with him. What time is it now?”

He shuddered. “Please, let’s not talk of the time.” His face had become an awful white. He pulled out a box of U-Latus. Only Gladys refused. When I thought of the watch in my pocket ticking away, I couldn’t resist a pick-me-up.

There was a moment of silence as we chewed on the happiness pills. Captain Weir-Comrade Nyet wiped his sweating face and grinned wanly. “To get back to the professor. He’s a good player, or perhaps they value intellectuals in this place. Anyway, he has a big job with Ivan Radizl. He’s one of the Judges in the Peace Prize Contest. That’s a game tied up with their Space Ship Program. This is what we’ve worked out, Crockett. You and Gladys are inventors, follow me? Tomorrow at three o’clock — or should I say today — the Peace Prize Judges, the professor among them, will be receiving inventors. You and Gladys will present your invention and that’s how you’ll contact Professor Fleischkopf or Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf, to give him his party name. He knows you, Crockett, and the rest is up to you.”

And quickly, he outlined the invention which in the dialectic of Russoplayo, might be — at least so he hoped — a means to the end. The end being the recovery of the A-I-D.

Gladys and I didn’t leave right away. “I want to talk to you where we won’t be overheard,” she said, and we went into another room. Portraits of Ivan Radizl hung on the walls but otherwise it was furnished simply. “I’m exhausted,” she sighed, dropping into a chair.

“Have you any of that Bee-Ambo on you?”

“No, it was confiscated before we passed through customs. Darling, I want to ask you a question. If all goes well today, what will you do?”

“Go home I suppose.”

“Take me with you!” she said impulsively.

I was silent, and she smiled. “Where are the roses of yesterday? The roses and the poses, the poses of love?”

“Gladys, I don’t know what to say — ”

“Don’t say it, my little sparrow.” Her face was bright and flippant like the face of the old Gladys.

“Gladys, this talk is silly. We might all be dead by tomorrow.”

She shook her head. “No, I have a feeling there’ll be a tomorrow. Death won’t give up his bad habits, but at least he’ll go back to his old job as a retailer. The wholesale merchant’ll be through! The wholesale merchant he became when we stupid blind fools took away his scythe and gave him the A-I-D.”

I stared at her — this was the new Gladys. “I can’t get over the change in you!”

She smiled at me. “Would you like to do the autobiog of my life? I’m tired of writing autobiogs. I’m tired of heroes. If we get the A-I-D, I’ll have to do one on Commissioner Sonata, not to mention one on you. The new heroes. I’m so tired of heroes. Did you know I wrote an autobiog on Barnum Fly, and another on old Doctor Bangani? Well, I did. And after the big trials, every book on a magicientist was burned. I’m tired of heroes, darling, tired of this Pleasure Republic if you must know, where science serves magicience and magicience serves the Rulers.”

“You’d go back with me to the Reservation?”

“Yes.”

“Gladys, I think it’s impossible. I wish you could, but how?”

She was silent for a second and then her hands moved before her as if at her Talko-Typo. She lifted an imaginary page and read: “Impossible is a word I’ve forgotten!” Crockett Smith retorted as he climbed on board his space ship, where the crew, Gladys Ellsberg, saluted smartly. In a split second, they were travelling towards the planet Utopia. Crockett Smith trembled when they approached the Disaster Point of 43,281 miles from Earth. ‘Is it possible,’ he said to his fellow-traveller Comrade Ekaterina. ‘No space ship has ever flown past this point.’ Interstellar silence. Interstellar mystery. 43,280 miles. 43,281 miles. 53,281 miles. 63,281 miles. ‘It is possible,’ the crew said laconically. On the planet Utopia, the two intrepid travellers found a race of Superior Beings who lived in small cities limited to 43,281 population. The Superior Beings had atomic power for all their needs. Each man and woman worked and read and thought on what was closest to his or her heart. ‘Your multi-million cityurbs are too large,’ the Superior Beings advised the two intrepid explorers. ‘We pity you. Your civilization is a circus and your culture is a clown with a painted face. You have surrendered your skills and your brains to the Circus Masters. We of Utopia pity you, for among us all men have skills, and all skills are for men and are never used against men. Return to earth, Crockett Smith and Comrade Ekaterina, and dream of Utopia and maybe even work for the day when men will recreate themselves in the image of Man.’ ”

She stood up and stroked her hair with a nervous hand. “I’ve been dreaming too much this last day and not the Sweet Dreams we manufacture. Maybe we need a 29th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing life, liberty and the pursuit of a human happiness. Human happiness, the sweetest of all Sweet Dreams.”

I stared at her wet eyes, a common enough sight on the Reservation, but practically subversive among the denizens of the Fun house.

“Why so solemn, comrade inventor?” she said and laughed like the old Gladys. “We better go back and get some rest.”

We returned to the Hotel Five Year Plan. It was exactly 3.07 a.m. Seven hours and fifty-three minutes remained before what might be called D-Day — Death-Day.

The sun arose on the historic day of July 3rd, 2039, blinding me as I lay in my room. Sleepily I thought I’d get up and pull the shade. I was halfway to the window when I remembered we were a quarter of a mile below the surface of the earth. Yet the windows were a dazzling golden red
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. I touched the glass. It was warm to the touch, but when I tried to haul the window up, it wouldn’t budge.

“Comrade,” I heard Gladys-Ekaterina saying behind me. “The windows won’t open!”

She was sitting up in bed, her yellow hair tousled, her blue eyes rested; the left one, the squinty one, still drooping slightly. Across the front of her red pajamas was a Russian slogan in gold letters.

“These windows,” I complained.

“A supreme scientific achievement, comrade from America!”

I took the hint. This room too was a miracle of science, with every word monitored, every move photographed. “Well,” I said grimly. “This is the day of days — ”

“To present our invention,” she said quickly. “Think, comrade, we may win the Peace Prize! Oh, what a thought, comrade. Let us have a comradely drink!”

“Not now,” I said.

“Our appointment is at three o’clock.” She hopped out of bed and went to the wall taps where she filled two glasses, drinking her glass in one quick gulp. The transformation was astonishing. She was all smiles, leers in fact. She fetched me my glass but I had been forewarned. I glanced at the smoky red liquid
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in my glass and perhaps it was an opgin-type illusion but I could have sworn that I saw miniature little things swimming about that reminded me of mermaids. Leering mermaids, if that’s possible …

Smiling, she began unbuttoning her pajama top. She had reverted to the old Gladys, lock, stock and barrel.

“No, comrade,” I said. “We’ve got work to do. Long live Comrade Ivan Radizl!”

She only laughed, holding out her arms and offering me the Garden of Eden body so like my own wife’s. “What better work is there, comrade?”

“This isn’t the time, Gladys,” I said nervously.

“Time!” she laughed. “You’re back in your element now, you bureaucrat, the alimentary like every capitalistic bureaucrat infested with Red Tapewormitis.”

I was revolted at her humor and also worried, for under the effect of the drink she seemed to have forgotten that every word, every move was being recorded.

“Comrade, at three o’clock we are seeing the Peace Prize Judges — ” I reminded her.

“Three o’clock, darling? We’ve a lifetime ahead of us, darling. It’s Paris in June, my little bulfinch. I mean Moscow in June!” she laughed and, naked as she was, danced across the room.

I stared at that abandoned woman who might have been my own wife, that is in flesh, not the spirit. Who was she, I wondered or perhaps the question was, who wasn’t she? A writer of autobiogs, an L. and O. operative, an R.T.R., my wife and yet not my wife….

(Fellow Americans of the Reservation, I won’t sugarcoat any of my actions. Let it be a lesson to our young people. Life on the Outside would corrupt a saint.)

I thought of the Peace Prize contest and of Professor Fleischkopf alias Comrade Fpok-Hcsielf who alone knew where the A-I-D was. I thought of how time was racing away, perhaps for the last time on this doomed earth, and then weak, tempted and all too human, I swallowed the smoky red drink she had poured for me …