The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (26 page)

Kevin Mackintosh snapped his fingers. ‘Yeah, and then get even higher.’

‘Shouldn’t you be up at the top, making sure people don’t jump off?’ Mary asked the guard.

He laughed. ‘No one ever jumps off the Eiffel Tower. And the only ones up there now are Marcel Brioche and some reporter. They wouldn’t have any reason for jumping, especially not The Astronaut.’

She clicked her cough drop thoughtfully. ‘He might,’ she said. ‘Say, if he had a secretly-broken heart. Or someone could push him off.’

‘They say that the specially-tailored space suit he wears has a built-in parachute. But come, my little, let us talk of other things. Have you ever seen a Paris bachelor’s apartment?’

‘Dozens,’ said Mary, sighing with fatigue and boredom. ‘And they’re all the same. Like their occupants.’ She thought of the sameness of the men in her past: Harry (good old Harry Stropp ! Hooves on the roof ! As she remembered him he would always be skipping rope and grinning), Cal, Barty (with his worn, too-clever prose, reminiscent of the early
Time
magazine: ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.’), the sailor with the tattooed arms, the technical writer (author of
The Fork Lift Truck
, as he never tired of telling people), the industrialist who had brought her to Paris …

They were depressingly the same, even to this guard. No, she

knew there was only one man who could ever mean more to her than free cough drops—the man now at the top of the tower—Marcel Brioche. Yesterday she had stood in the rain three hours listening to him speak, even though she could not understand his language. Today she had heard he was going up in the Eiffel Tower, and she had started up the stairs to the top, half-intending to throw herself in his way. But for the first time in her life a strange shyness overcame Mary. She dawdled now, halfway up the tower, talking to a guard with whom it was not going to be possible to talk reasonably for very much longer.

‘My room is just around the corner—’ he said.

‘Tell me, what are those little grey boxes running all over the girders?’

‘Those? I suppose they are some new inspection or repair machines. I notice they have been replacing many of the old girders with new. But let us talk, rather, of girdles. You American women all wear girdles, I know. Tell me—’

‘But what is that big iron drum down there in the centre?’ she asked. ‘It looks like a gas mantle, only hundreds of times larger. And what is all that machinery in the centre? I didn’t know the Eiffel Tower had all that junk in it.’

‘I do not know. Who pays any attention to such mundane technical matters, my little? Let us talk rather of—’

There was a faint cry from above.

‘Someone has fallen !’

‘
Merde
. On my shift. I’d better get down and keep the crowds back.’

Mary looked at the body above, hurtling down towards her, a body dressed in a silvery space suit. So he had jumped ! She saw it all in a flash—he had jumped for love ! Some woman had caused him to despair. As he slid past, his handsome face white and rigid, Mary made a sudden decision.

‘Wait for me !’ she cried, and leaped after him.

Suddenly he pulled a zipper and a tricolour chute snapped out. She was in his arms.

‘You !’ he exclaimed. ‘The woman in the picture ! But do you know this Barthemo Beele?’

‘I’m married to him,’ she said. ‘Temporarily. Gee ! How do
you
know him?’

‘Why, he’s the one who pushed me off ! This is indeed my lucky day,’ he said. ‘To escape death narrowly and at the same time meet the woman of my dreams—the woman I have waited

all my life for—and I owe it all to your husband !’

Tears of happiness stood in his eyes. Mary swallowed her cough drop and kissed him.

Barthemo Beele looked at the dwindling speck with a certain workmanlike sense of accomplishment. He had, after all, successfully given his first special treatment. It was almost like passing an initiation. Suggs would have been proud.

A second tiny figure leapt from the middle of the tower somewhere and joined the first, and almost at the same time a bright parachute blossomed. Was it possible? Was Brioche escaping his special treatment?

‘No ! It’s not fair ! I’ve been cheated ! Come back here, you cheating Frog ! Come back !’

The tower began to tremble under him. That was all he needed, now. That would make everything perfect, if the damned thing fell down with him. Talk about poetic injustice.

It was only after a minute or two that he realized the Eiffel Tower was not falling—quite the contrary.

‘Look, the Eiffel Tower !’ Ron shouted. ‘Like in
Seven Against Mars
, or
It Came In Outer Space
.’

‘Not again,’ breathed Kevin.

‘A freakout. Man, I can’t wait to get to New York and try that with the Empire State building.’

Dr. Smilax entered the recovery room just as Susie was waking. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked. While taking her pulse, he avoided the girl’s gaze.

‘Oh Doctor, my throat is so sore!’ she whispered.

‘That’s normal for tonsillectomies,’ he said shortly. ‘Yes, yes, we all must suffer.’

‘But I don’t mind.’ She said it rather doubtfully, and her chin trembled as she squeaked, ‘I’m so happy?’

He pretended to study her chart minutely.

‘You—you haven’t lost respect for me, have you?’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. She tried to take his hand but he pulled it away.

‘Why no, of course not—Susan. I respect you a great deal. Really.’

‘No, you don’t ! You hate me ! Oh, I knew I should never have given in ! I gave you my tonsils and now—now it’s “Susan” !’

As her wail rose in pitch the doctor grew restless—the way a well-mannered dog grows restless when he hears a siren. It was clear that he would rather be elsewhere. Once more, he assured her he felt the deepest respect for her, but his voice had an impatient edge and he spoke looking at the wall.

‘No, you don’t ! You don’t care for me at all ! You won’t even look at me !’

He turned to her as an arachnologist to a specimen long since added to his collection, that had turned out not to be very interesting after all.

‘I don’t hate you,’ he said. ‘It’s you who should hate me, and perhaps that is what you meant to say, that you do hate me. I don’t blame you, my dear. We should never have met, I see that now. I’m ages too old for you.’

‘But if we love each other, what does age matter?’ she said, sniffling.

He started out the door without answering. Then he paused, without looking back, and said, ‘I’ll order an air ambulance to take you home.’

The girl turned her face to the wall.

How odd, Smilax thought, that she who had meant so much to him before the operation now meant no more than a pair of symmetrical tonsils. Seated at his desk, he rolled the bottle in his hand, watching the two spongey objects with a detachment that amazed him. He was even somewhat indifferent to the pleasure to be got out of abandoning her. He just didn’t care.

There were so many more important things to care about now. A few hours ago he had come out of surgery expecting to find Aurora Candlewood tormenting an abject Grawk. Instead, there had been no sign of either.

The control booth console told him what had happened:

Aurora had released Grawk from his cage, then made her escape through the literal-mindedness of the System. She was by now on her way west, with a .87 probability of stopping at the Wompler Lab and a .11 probability of going on to California.

Smilax typed: ‘Where is Airman Grawk?’

‘
ASSUMING AIRMAN GRAWK MEANS THE SAME AS AIRMAN THIRD CLASS GRAWK, HE IS AT COORDINATES
555
A
31,996
B
29,201
H
56,
NORAD
.’

‘What is the name of the room he is in?’

‘
THE NAME OF THE ROOM IS
402
OR LOUNGE
.’

‘What has happened to him?’

‘
HE ATTEMPTED TO MOLEST DR. CANDLEWOOD. HE WAS SUBDUED BY OPERATION FRIGHTWIG AND IS RESTING QUIETLY IN A SOFABED
.’

‘Is he dead?’

After a pause, during which the System undoubtedly checked to see if Grawk were dead, it reported ‘
NO.
’

‘Imprison him, then, according to Plan Ixion.’

That had been hours ago, and still Smilax had not gone to see his prisoner. Ordinarily he would have been glad to spend a few pleasant hours bedevilling him, but today was different. Today a warmth had gone out of Smilax’s life—Aurora Candlewood. Today a chill had crept into it—the Porteus effect.

He was upset that Aurora had left him like this, but what really frightened Toto Smilax was the means by which she had left:
She had tricked the literal-minded Reproductive System
. And if it were possible to trick it once, the trick might be repeated twice, a dozen, a thousand times. The System might be fooled in greater matters, might be cozened into blunders fatal to itself—
or to its creator
.

If there was one thing Smilax feared, it was that someday, somehow, his brain-child would turn on its master and
KILL
. How many cases there were of this very kind of occurrence, he shuddered to contemplate. Fiction abounded with famous cases like Frankenstein and Rossum(‘s Universal Robots), with ill-tempered Genii, sorcerers’ apprentices and unlucky pacts with the devil. But more horrifying by far was the factual history of the Porteus family, wherein eight generations of geniuses had been murdered by their own devices. Now, whether to frighten or reassure himself he knew not which, Smilax took

from the secret drawer of his desk a dusty genealogy and read therein of the Porteus effect.

Passing over the Puritan preacher, Interest Porteus (1680–1720, who, having burned 45 witches, was accidentally hanged on a new scaffold of his own design), he read of Nathaniel Porteus, (1710–63), printer and inventor. Nathaniel had devised a kind of rotary press which automatically turned out the paper twice as fast as his competitors could manage. But one day Nathaniel disappeared:

The Officers asked var’ous neyghbours had they seen or heard anything suspicious from his establishment, and they said Nought but clanking of the Infernal Presse.

Smilax skipped over Tertiary Porteus (1800–1840), inventor of the steam balloon, to read of Emmet Porteus (1830–1891), the barber who invented an automatic shaving machine. He was found one morning in his shop,

When Smilax had locked away the genealogy once more, and drunk off a dram of medicinal brandy, he recovered himself enough to descend to the place where his prisoner languished.

‘Good evening, Airman Grawk,’ he said cheerily. ‘Ready for more fun and games?’

The former general had been fitted into a peculiar suit, an adaptation of the ‘blank tank’ in which only his head was free. The rest of him was trussed and counter-trussed with cables running on pulleys and light springs. The sum effect was that, no matter how slightly Grawk moved, he delivered work to the System.

‘You will be fed three ounces of chocolate per day,’ Smilax informed him, ‘that is, if you do enough work to burn up that

much food. Oh any day your work rate falls below the minimum, your ration will be curtailed. Naturally you will not receive a bonus for exceeding the minimum. Three ounces a day will keep you fit, I should think, for many, many months—perhaps even for years—though your mind will doubtless fail.’

‘Lemme out of here !’ Grawk screamed, flailing his arms in puppet fashion. The spring tensions were so set that he could not bring any part of his body into contact with any other part, nor could he catch hold of the cables. He raged and turned monkeytoy somersaults in vain.

‘You just wait,’ he bellowed. ‘The US government is going to have plenty to say about this.’

‘Grawk, you don’t seem to understand. There are no United States any more. The United States are a thing of the past.’

‘What’d you say about my country? Listen, if I wasn’t tie dup like this—’

‘No,
you
listen. I’m going to bring you up to date, Airman Grawk, if for no other reason than that I can see it will make you more miserable.’

He switched on a tape of recent radio news coverage:

‘In London today, the Society for the Protection of Life on Other Planets held a massive meeting in Trafalgar Square, to welcome, they said, the superior creatures which are taking over our planet. These benevolent creatures, which they refer to as the Galactic Guardians, are allegedly taking over to prevent us from waging a disastrous war.