Pohlstars (21 page)

After a while they let me watch TV and even read the papers, and when the Altair people made the first contact with Earth I was interested, and when they began buying criminally insane to be their proxies I wanted them to buy me. Anything, I wanted
anything
that would let me get out of that place, even if it meant I'd have to let them put a box in my head and never be able to live a normal life again.

But the Altair people wouldn't buy me. For some reason they only took blacks. Then the others began showing up on the fast radio, making their deals. And still none of them wanted me. The ones from Procyon liked young women, wouldn't ever buy a male. I think they have only one sex there, someone said. All these funnies are peculiar in one way or another. Metal, or gas, or blobby, or hard- shelled and rattly. Whatever. And they all have funny habits, like if you belong to the Canopus bunch you don't ever eat fish.

I think they're disgusting, and I don't really know why the USA wanted to get involved with them in the first place. But the Chinese did, and the Russians did, and I guess we just couldn't stay out. I suppose it hasn't hurt much. There hasn't been a war, and there's a lot of ways in which they've helped clean things up for us. It hasn't hurt me, that's for sure. The Groombridge people came into the market pretty late, and most of the good healthy criminals were gone; they would buy anybody. They bought me. We're a hard-case lot, we Groombridgians, and I do wonder what Carolyn was in for.

I drove all the way down the coast. Asbury Park, Brielle, Atlantic City, all the way to Cape May, phoning back to check with the locator clerk, and never found her.

The one thing I did know was that all I was missing was the shell of her, because she was working. I could have had a kiss or a feel, no more. But I wanted to find her anyway. Just on the chance. How many times do you get an indefinite furlough? If I'd been able to find her, and stay with her, sooner or later, maybe, she would have been off too. Even if it were only for two hours. Even thirty minutes.

And then in broad daylight, just as I was checking into a motel near an Army base, with the soldiers' girls lined up at the cashier's window so their boy friends could get back for reveille, I got the call: Report to the Philadelphia kennel. Soonest.

By then I was giddy for sleep, but I drove that Hertz lump like a Maserati, because soonest means soonest. I dumped the car and signed in at the kennel, feeling my heart pounding and my mouth ragged from fatigue, and aching because I had blown what would have to be my best chance of really being with Carolyn. "What do they want? I asked the locator clerk. "Go inside, he said, looking evilly amused. All locator clerks treat us the same, all over the world. "She'll tell you.

Not knowing who "she was, I opened the door and walked through, and there was Carolyn.

"Hello, Wayne, she said.

"Hello, Carolyn, I said.

I really did not have any idea of what to do at all. She didn't give me a cue. She just sat. It was at that point that it occurred to me to wonder at the fact that she wasn't wearing much, just a shortie nightgown with nothing under it. She was also sitting on a turned-down bed. Now, you would think that considering everything, especially the nature of most of my thinking about Carolyn, that I would have instantly accepted this as a personal gift from God to me of every boy's all-American dream. I didn't. It wasn't the fatigue, either. It was Carolyn. It was the expression on her face, which was neither inviting nor loving, was not even the judgment-reserving look of a girl at a singles bar. What it especially was not was happy.

"The thing is, Wayne, she said, "we're supposed to go to bed now. So take your clothes off, why don't you?

Sometimes I can stand outside of myself and look at me and, even when it's something terrible or something sad, I can see it as funny; it was like that when I did the little girl in Edison Township, because her mother had sewed her into her school clothes. I was actually laughing when I said, "Carolyn, what's the matter?

"Well, she said, "they want us to ball, Wayne. You know. The Groombridge people. They've got interested in what human beings do to each other, and they want to kind of watch.

I started to ask why us, but I didn't have to; I could see where Carolyn and I had had a lot of that on our minds, and maybe our masters could get curious about it. I didn't exactly like it. Not exactly; in fact in a way I kind of hated it, hut it was so much better than nothing at all that I said, "Why, honey, that's great! -almost meaning it; trying to talk her into it; moving in next to her and putting my arm around her. And then she said:

"Only we have to wait, Wayne.
They
want to do it. Not us.

"What do you mean, wait? Wait for what? She shrugged under my arm. You mean, I said, "that we have to be plugged in to them'? Like they'll be doing it with our bodies?

She leaned against me. "That's what they told me, Wayne. Any minute now, I guess.

I pushed her away. "Honey, I said, half crying, "all this time I've been wanting to-Jesus, Carolyn! I mean, it isn't just that I wanted to go to bed with you. I mean-
"I'm sorry, she cried, big tears on her face.
"That's lousy! I shouted. My head was pounding, I was so furious. "It isn't fair! I'm not going to stand for it. They don't have any
right
!"

But they did, of course, they had all the right in the world; they had bought us and paid for us, and so they owned us. I knew that. I just didn't want to accept it, even by admitting what I knew was so. The notion of screwing Carolyn flipped polarity; it wasn't what I desperately wanted, it was what I would have died to avoid, as long as it meant letting
them
paw her with my hands, kiss her with my mouth, flood her with my juices; it was like the worst kind of rape, worse than anything I had ever done, both of us raped at once. And then- And then I felt that burning tingle in my forehead as they took over. I couldn't even scream. I just had to sit there inside my own head, no longer owning a muscle, while those freaks who owned me did to Carolyn with my body all manner of things, and I could not even cry.

After concluding the planned series of experimental procedures, which were duly recorded, the purchased person known as Carolyn Schoerner was no longer salvageable. Appropriate entries were made. The Probation and Out-Service department of the Meadville Women's Reformatory was notified that she had ceased to be alive. A purchasing requisition was initiated for a replacement, and her account was terminated.

The purchased person known as Wayne Golden was assigned to usual duties, at which he functioned normally while under control. It was discovered that when control was withdrawn he became destructive, both to others and to himself. The conjecture has been advanced that that sexual behavior which had been established as his norm- the destruction of the sexual partner-may not have been appropriate in the conditions obtaining at the time of the experimental procedures. Further experiments will be made with differing procedures and other partners in the near future. Meanwhile Wayne Golden continues to function at normal efficiency, provided control is not withdrawn at any time, and apparently will do so indefinitely.

I don't much like writing "special occasion stories for particular purposes. To be saddled with somebody else's theme or settings comports very poorly with the undisciplined and stochastic way I think I am best able to write; so it's hard work. If editors as a race had group awareness, they wouldn't ask me, either, because all too often I have dutifully done what some editor asked me to do, only to find about the time I finished the story that some higher-up had canceled the special issue or the magazine or project itself; "Kiss of Death Fred one editor called me, and she was at least in this respect right. This story is one such. It represents one of my very few involvements with the United Nations, specifically with UNICEF. I got a call from a man who said that UNICEF had decided to publish a book of what the children of the next generation would make of their world, in all the parts of the world the United Nations covered, and would I care to write one for the United States? I could not say no. With all its nasty and conspicuous faults, the United Nations has greatly bettered the world we live in; and of all the things it does, UNICEF is the most clearly, unequivocally good. So I wrote this story.., and hardly had I finished it when the word came that high-level consultations had voted to torpedo the whole plan, and the book would never appear.

Sometimes when Rememberer awoke in the morning he was crying. Not for long. Just for a minute, out of a dream he didn't like. When his mother, Peg, heard him, she came into his small, cheerful room and stood in the doorway, smiling at him until she was sure he was altogether awake. She worried about him. He was ten years old, and she thought he was too old for that. She gave him his breakfast and sent him off to school on his bicycle. By then he was cheerful again.

In the afternoons he helped the grownups. When Peg was housecleaning, Rem mopped and brushed and helped prepare the food. When Burt, his father, was working at home on his analyses (Burt was something like a public accountant, in charge of the Southern New York Regional energy budgets), Rem checked his figures on a pocket calculator. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went out in catamarans with his Uncle Marc to help harvest mussels from the Long Island Sound Nurseries. The mussels grew on long, knotted manila lines that hung from floats. Each day hundreds of cords had to be pulled up, and stripped of the grown mussels, and reseeded with tiny mussel larvae, and put back in the water. It was hard work. Rem was too small to handle pulling up the ropes, but he could strip and reseed, and pick up the mussels that fell in the bottom of the boat so the men wouldn't crush them with their feet, and generally be useful. It was tiring. But it felt good to be tired after three hours in the catamaran, and the water was always warm, even when the air coming down off Connecticut was blustery and cold. In all but the worst weather Marc would wink and nod toward the side, and Rem would skin out of his outer clothes and dive overboard and swim down among the dangling cords, looking to see how the mussels were growing. Sometimes he took an air-pack and his uncle or one of the other men came with him, and together they would go clear down to the bottom to look for stray oysters or crabs or even lobsters that had escaped from the pens out around Block Island.

Then he would go home and meet his father, bicycling back from the Sands Point railroad station. If the weather was nice they'd dig in the garden or toss a ball around. Then they would have dinner-wherever they were having dinner that night; they rotated around from home to home most nights of the week so that each family had the job of cooking and cleaning up only two or three times a week. One of the grownups usually helped the children with their homework after dinner. Rem liked it when it was his father's turn, particularly when the homework assignment was about ecology. He was always popping up with questions. Don't hog the floor, son, his father would say. "Give the others a chance.

"It's always the same dumb questions, too, his cousin, Grace, complained. She was eight, still pretty much a brat. " Why don't we get sick from eating sewage?' What a dumb question!

His father laughed. "Well, it's not all that dumb. The thing is, we don't eat sewage. We just use it to grow things. All the New York City sewage goes into the settling ponds and then the algae tanks. Who knows what algae is?

Rem knew the answer, of course, but he was polite enough to let one of the younger ones answer. Even Grace. "What they make bread out of, she said.

"That's one thing algae is used for, yes. But most of the algae is piped into Long Island Sound. The mussels live on it. So do the fish, but the mussels are the big crop. We grow three-quarters of the protein for the whole United States here, just on that algae. And, of course, on the waste heat from the power generators around Hell Gate. That warms up the Sound so the mussels grow all year round.

"And so do the potatoes, Grace crowed.

Rem's father said, "Yes, they do. That's a little different, though. They take the sludge from the algae tanks and spread it over the fields along the Island. Did you know they used to be covered with houses? Well, we got rid of the houses, and we began growing the best potatoes in the world there, again. But we use some of the warm water piped underground to keep the soil warm, and we get two crops a year.

Then Rem asked another question, always the same one or one like it: "But, he persisted, "aren't those bad things, sewage and sludge and all?

"People used to think so. Then we learned that some bad things are actually good things, in the wrong place.

"How
did we learn?

His father looked at his watch. "That happened almost a hundred years ago. The people who lived then made some very good decisions.

Grace said indignantly, "They did
bad
things.

"In a way, but then they did better ones. We all know about the bad things. They drove around in cars that burned gasoline! They dumped sewage in the ocean, and ruined it for fifty years all up and down the coast. They used radioactive materials that poisoned places forever, just because they wanted more and more electric thises and automatic thats. But then they realized they were being too greedy. They learned-what did they learn?

All the kids chanted, "Use it over! Put it back!

"That's right. They learned not to waste things, and that decision made all the difference in the world. They decided not to be greedy. And now, he said, looking at his watch again, "it's time for everybody under the age of thirty-two to go to bed. He looked around the room with a surprised expression. "Why, that's all of you! Good night.

And Rem went back to his own room and to bed.

He didn't mind going to sleep. After all, he was pleasantly tired. He did mind the dreams. He remembered them clearly; and they were always the same, and always so real, not as though he were falling asleep but as though he were waking...