The Tomorrow File (40 page)

But in this case, my mother’s corpus had been flamed soon after stopping. The um had been delivered to a local church for the service. My father intended to bury her ashes on the grounds of our Grosse Pointe estate. It was illegal, but he had bribed local authorities. I approved of his arrangements.

The service was held in an Omni-Faith church, across Mack Avenue from Sunningdale Park. It was an A-frame structure of white plastisteel panels inset with long, narrow windows of colored plastiglass in abstract patterns. Rosy light fell on the altar where the gray um had been placed. The church was crowded. I was surprised by the number of objects. I had expected her obso friends. But there were so many young objects present. Adolescents. What their relationship to my mother had been, I did not know. But they may have been strangers, their attendance due to simple curiosity in a church service.

It was a short ceremony. The pastor said she was not gone. Though she was stopped, he said, the memory of her kindness, beauty, and good humor would endure. We would recall her many charitable deeds, he said. We would speak her name, and tell children of her. So she would remain alive. A small choir sang a rock lament.

Millie Jean Grunwald was delighted with my gifts. Gifts for her. Gifts for me.

“Oh,” she kept saying. “Oh, oh, oh.”

The gifts were a middy loosely tied with a light blue scarf. A white skirt that ended above her bare knees. Plastivas sneakers. And a long wig of ashen hair (nylet) that flamed about her shoulders.

How artful. Carrying her tenderly to the bed. Ministering. She a surrender, wavering. Slowly the scarf, the middy, the skirt. I held

my breath. It was sacred. I guided her fingers. She opened the mystery to me.    •

We were so slow. Just drifting. I wasn’t sure when sperm spurted. If it did. It made no difference in my dream.

“You’re going to be rich,” my father told me. “Not rich rich, but rich. Everything she had is yours.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Oh . . . maybe half a million new dollars.”

New dollars. Interesting. They were always “new.” In 1979, Lewisohn had persuaded the US Government to go to an Index System. The original idea was Brazilian. Lewisohn improved on it. Everything in the US economy—prices, wages, interest rates—was linked to the Cost of Living Index. As the index rose, as it did, inexorably, so rose every other economic factor in an intricate relationship.

The setting up of this system had required ten years of intensive computerized service, calculating the monetary, financial, and economic equations. The terms of all outstanding contracts— mortgages, bonds, stocks, insurance policies, etc.—had to be renegotiated. It was a horrendously complex task.

Yet, when completed, the Index System served reasonably well. It demanded, of course, that the US dollar be devalued, or you’d need a wheelbarrow of dollars to purchase a loaf of bread. “Revaluation” was the term used, rather than “devaluation,” for semantic reasons. After each revaluation, old bills were declared obsolete and without value. New dollars, in new designs, were put into circulation.

The Index System proved to have one unexpected benefit: It halted hoarding completely, either by misers or by objects seeking to hide illegal cash from the government. No longer could the criminal conglomerates store bills in safe deposit boxes. After each revaluation, old dollars could be exchanged for the new currency at government banks. Questions were asked.

“Half a million new dollars,” I repeated to my father. “1 imagine probate and sale of the gold and other assets will take at least a year.”

“Probably.” He nodded.

“Will you lend against it?” I asked him. ‘ ‘I may need large sums for a short time.”

“Of course,” he said. “As much as you want.”

“I insist on paying interest,” I said.

He was offended.

Paul wrote:

In the prospectus for the Department of Creative Science, it will be necessary to make certain projections, describing the role of science and technology in the world of tomorrow. Just as inevitably, objections will be made that our vision of the future is “inhuman.” It is important that we stonewall this attack. One approach: Point out the subjective nature of the term “inhuman world.” What is human? What is inhuman? Cro-Magnon man might very well have found Renaissance Italy inhuman. Queen Victoria, I am certain, would have thought amniocentesis inhuman. Yet today it is accepted casually as a proved and useful diagnostic technique. I am convinced the technology we suggest today will similarly be accepted casually tomorrow.

We were in the library. Drinking brandy. Paul, my father, Ben Baker, my father’s production manager, me. After a while we could talk.

“Hey, Nick,” Baker said. “Look at this.”

He brought a box from a comer, lifted the lid under my nose. The putrescent corpus of a Poo-Poo Doll. The same stink.

“Not again?” I said. “Another bad run?”

“What are you looking at?” Paul said.

The production manager shoved it at him.

“My God!” Paul cried. “What
is
it?”

I told him about the Connecticut River spill, the polluted rinse water in my father’s factory, the ruined dolls.

“But this one is deliberate,” my father said. “We got those doll bodies so they decay within predictable time limits. And that’s not all we’ve got. It’s going to be big, Nick.”

I looked at him. Not certain.

“What’s going to be big?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “A couple of weeks after we solved— after
you
solved the problem of the spoiled run—I went over to Ben’s place for an outdoor barbecue. Ben’s youngest daughter— What is she, Ben? Five? Six?”

“Penny is five,” Ben Baker said. “Smart as a whip.” “Right,” my father said. “Well, when I got there, Penny and

some of her friends were having a funeral for her pet turtle which had just died. They were burying him in a cigar box. Regular funeral: ceremony, procession, a grave, a piece of cardboard for a marker. The kids were crying. It was the real thing.”

“Did exactly the same thing when our canary died.” Baker nodded.

“Right,” my father said. “Well, Ben and I got to brainstorming a doll that stops. Get it? The Die-Dee Doll. After the kid buys it, it begins to decay. I mean the body of the doll and the face just fall apart. The eyes sink. The hair falls out. I knew it could be done. After all, I have a BS in chemistry.”

‘ ‘And I suggested a death rattle, ” Ben said. ‘ ‘We could do it with a fused Japanese battery and noisemaker. The kid hears the death rattle, at any hour of the day or night—we can’t program it
that
accurately—and knows her doll is dead. It’s all falling apart by then.”

“Right,” my father said. “Then the little ef has the funeral. Now get this, Nick—this is where the love comes in. The basic Die-Dee kit is just the doll itself: young, pretty, blue eyes, blond wig. Other colors for other ethnic markets, of course. But the accessories! First of all, a model doctor’s kit: toy stethoscope, plastic scalpel, bandages^—the works. Then, when the doll rattles and stops, aplastic snap-together coffin. Get it now? And a little shovel and a plastic marker for the grave. A blank marker, shaped like an obso tombstone, so the kid can write on it the doll’s name and age and whatever else. Well? Nick? What do you think? About the Die-Dee Doll?”

I stood up slowly and poured brandy in all the glasses.

“Well,” I said. “That’s quite a conception. Unusual. You’ll get a lot of flak on it, of course.”

“We’re prepared for it,” Ben Baker said.

“Right,” my father said. “We’ve already got the go-ahead from our house child psychologist. Excellent emotional catharsis, he says. Teaches the child to feel. Second of all, we’ve paid out some good love for a motivational research survey. Kids between the ages of four and ten, both efs and ems, are fascinated by stopping, Nick. Third of all, we went to an independent psychological testing lab. That cost ten thousand new dollars, Nick. We got some big names in child psychology. Really big. You’d be surprised. They substantiated our in-house em. The Die-Dee Doll is recommended for emotional catharsis. Aids normal adjustment to stopping.”

“Well, Nick?” my father asked.

“I think you’ve got a winner,” I said.

Paul Bumford caught my warning glance and kept his mouth shut.

“I told you!” my father said. He leaned forward to slap Ben Baker on the knee. “I told you Nick would go for it!”

“When do you go into production?” I asked.

“As soon as we can get approval,” my father said. “The sooner the better.”

He and Baker began to exchange their coarse jokes. I signaled to Paul and we withdrew. Paul was sleeping in a second-floor guestroom. I stopped in with him for a nightcap and a Bold.

“Nick,” he said, as soon as the door was closed, “that idea— that Die-Dee Doll—” He choked on the name. “—That will have to come to my Division for approval.”

“Of course,” I said mildly. “Why do you think my father and Baker were giving us that sales pitch?”

“Well, I’m not going to approve it.”

“Oh? Mind telling me why?”

“Two reasons I can think of offhand. One, the projected sale of a toy doctor’s kit along with a doll inexorably fated to stop. So the young ef, or em, is conditioned to the inefficiency of medicine and science.”

“A possible result,” I admitted. “If the child makes the connection, comes to that conclusion.”

“Has to!” he said hotly. “Secondly, the child is conditioned to an image of stopping as putrescence, ugliness, and stench. Even the word ‘die’ is used. That goes against our national psychological thrust that has taken generations to reinforce. We don’t want a society of objects pondering on stopping. Before you know it, they’ll all be sitting around naked, cross-legged, contemplating their navels. Do we want a world of mystics or a world of producers and consumers? I’m going to reject the Die-Dee Doll, Nick.”

“I can overrule your rejection, you know,” I said.

“Are you going to?”

“We'll talk about it when the time comes,” I said.

Paul wrote:

I would not favor a conventional bureaucratic hierarchy for the proposed Department of Creative Science. Rather than a Director served by deputy directors and assistant deputy directors who are specialists in one scientific or technological discipline, I recommend the Director rule a board of “omnists” that would constitute his second line of command. These ‘ ‘omnists” I see as objects conditioned in several scientific and/or technological disciplines and who can appreciate the interrelationship of those disciplines. “Renaissance man” was the term used for both objects of wide interest and expertise in several arts. I suggest the term “omnist” to describe a Renaissance object of science.

I was preparing for my visit to Millie Jean Grunwald. Paul Bumford knocked on the door of my suite. When I answered, he handed over a sealed manila envelope.

“My notes on the prospectus for the Department of Creative Science,” he told me.

I weighed the envelope in my hand.

“You’ve been serving,” I said.

“Yes. I wanted to finish them here. I’m taking a late flight back tonight.”

“The copter will take you to the airport.” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Your father arranged it.”

“Well. . . .” Strained silence. “Have a good flight. I appreciate your coming.”

He nodded.

“I’ll see you back in GPA-1,” I said.

He looked me up and down. My tooty costume.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

“Yes. Into Detroit.”

“Ef or em?”

“Ef,” I said.

“Nice?”

“My toy,” I said.

I sat in my “secret place,” staring at the paintings of Egon Schiele. Searching for answers. As always, I was dazzled by those explosions of color, the raw sensuality, the brooding despair, the probing so deep it seemed to me a scalpel rather than a paintbrush had exposed the live nerve and set it tingling.

And, as always, the answers eluded me. I was convinced they were there, but I could not decode them. Suddenly I had an infamous thought: I wanted Egon Schiele alive. Then I could take

him, send him to an R&R, into a Cooperation Room where, after he had signed an Informed Consent Statement, I could drain him and learn what I sought. But the em was stopped. And I could not read the testament of his art.

Paul wrote:

Re planning for the DCS, the problem of projection is always the same: What kind of a world do we want in 20, 50, or 100 years? Agreement will be difficult, if not impossible, but planning
must
be started unless we are to leave the future to chance and accident. Our Tomorrow File is certainly a good beginning.

Nick, I know the quality of your mind, and I wish you would give some thought to the eventual establishment of social classes based on procreative techniques. From highest to lowest: Natural, Artificial Insemination, Artificial Enovulation, Placenta Machine, Embryonic Cloning, Parthenogenesis, etc. Within each class, of course, status would be determined by genetic quality.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about this suggestion. My first impulse was to reject it. But I could not reject it totally. As Paul requested, I computed it.

The heavy conflict, to any object of reason, is between the tomorrow you desire and the tomorrow you expect.

By the mid-1980’s; the US Postal Service had reached such a nadir of inefficiency that in desperation Congress had amended existing law to allow the establishment of commercial postal services. Although their rates were higher, they did provide some degree of privacy and some assurance that a letter mailed from Point A to Point B would not end up in a dusty pigeonhole at Point K. Gradually, the US Post Office was reduced to the handling of parcels and a service called Instamail by which open letters were electronically scanned at Point A, broadcast to Point B, reproduced in facsimile on a standard form and, one hoped, delivered to the addressee. No privacy, of course, but useful for form letters and non confidential correspondence.

I had instructed Maya Leighton to send me reports on Art Roach via commercial mail, addressed to my rented box number in the Times Square section of Manhattan. On August 14, I left the compound in uniform and drove uptown. I flashed Simon Hawk-ley’s office in San Diego and told his secretary I would be out there the following Tuesday and would contact Mr. Hawkley upon arrival.