The Tomorrow File (9 page)

I had met Millie Jean Grunwald at a basement cockfight. We had both bet a winner, and stood next to each other in the collect line. I won much more than she, and invited her and her girlfriend to join me at the bar for a drink. They accepted happily. I ordered a magnum of “champagne.” They adored it, so I said nothing, but drank as little as I could. I thought it might contain methanol.

They went off to the ef nest together. When they returned, the girlfriend departed suddenly, giggling. I suspected they had flipped a coin for me. Whether Millie had won or lost, I did not know.

She had a large one-room apartment over a porn shop. It was almost a loft, reasonably clean, decently enough furnished with leased possessions that were obviously in their third or fourth setting. But there were a few personal touches: a calendar showing a young ef hugging a kitten, a plastic imitation of an old-fashioned round-faced clock, a crimson sofa pillow stamped “Use Me.”

She answered all my questions readily and with great good humor. She was fourteen then, a CF-E, and she served as a packer at the Qik-Freez Hot-Qizine factory. She traveled to and from work in an electric bus. She was paid 125 new dollars for a four-day week (twenty-two were take-home pay), plus two two-week vacations every year, plus free lunches every working day of the factory’s products which, she assured me, were the best foods ever, sold in all the tootiest restaurants in the world.

She was jolly, companionable, undemanding. I could relax with her. When she came in from the nest (it was outside in the hallway), I stood up as she entered. She blushed, smiled shyly, and murmured, “Thank you.” When she asked if I would like to use her, I said it would be a profit.

Afterwards, I offered her ten new dollars “to buy a gift.” She would not take it. I urged her then to accept a plastigold brooch I had on, the kind of cheap trinket I wore on my excursions into the “lower depths.” She was delighted with it.

That had been two years ago. I saw her every time I came to Detroit to visit my parents. I brought her presents and took her wherever she wanted to go. I think she liked me. But it was hard to tell; she liked
everything.

Apparently something had gone wrong in the chromosomal manipulation of the embryo from which her group had been cloned. She was not quite a variant, but her Grade E genetic rating was warranted. Once I saw her trying to shove a grossly oversized plastic stopper into the narrow neck of a bottle. Her brow was furrowed, her eyes puzzled. Her spatial cognizance was especially deficient, her vocabulary limited, her speech rapid to the point of spluttering. But she was a sweet ef, not incapable of treachery but unaware of it. I liked her. I may have felt a sense of responsibility.

She was standing outside the restaurant-cabaret when I arrived, although I had told her many times to wait inside if I was delayed. Her face lighted up when she saw me. She came running to throw her arms about my neck, and smeared my lip rouge.

The restaurant was crowded, noisy, and smelled of phenol. Too many small tables had been jammed in under a low ceiling; the atmosphere was milky with smoke. But Millie loved it, waving to acquaintances as we threaded our way to our table.

We had an enjoyable dinner: wretched food, but served with great verve by a flatfooted obso waiter who obviously recognized a good thing when he saw one. He would get his pat.

Millie chattered unceasingly, sometimes with a mouthful of food. She told me about her mean supervisor at the factory, about her girlfriend Sarah who had consumed a liter of petrorye “straight off’ ’ on a dare, and had to be taken to a hospital to have her stomach vacuumed, about a kitten she had found abandoned, named Nick, for me, who had stayed two days and then departed for parts unknown.

I listened to all this, smiling and nodding. DIVRAD was far away. I ate my prochick, drank my petrowine, and asked myself no questions.

Millie was wearing a tooty transparent blouse. Her breasts had been painted in red circles, like archery targets. There was what appeared to be a wide aluminum “gut-clutcher” about her waist, fastened in front with a brass tongue, shackle, and iron padlock. The key hung from a wire loop about her neck. She wore a minikilt, her legs bare from calf to buttock. Her boots were synthetic fur. From the zipper tabs hung the “flying penis” ornament that was the current rage, advertised on TV with a remarkable animated film and the endlessly repeated demand: “How tooty can you get? How tooty can you get? How tooty can you get?”

After dinner I asked our solicitous waiter if any natural brandy was available. Regrettably no. But he promised something just as good. It turned out to be a fruit liqueur. I think it was natural. Much too sweet for my taste, but Millie loved it.

The lights dimmed, a siren sounded, the diners screeched in anticipation, and a Master of Ceremonies darted through the curtain onto the minuscule stage. He was wearing an enormous codpiece, the batting popping out through a rip. The audience roared with laughter. He told several jokes (“I’m in mourning tonight. I lost my wife. But she found her way back home”).

Then the nude chorus line came kicking on. One had a scar from a recent Caesarian section clearly visible. Another one astounded me; I thought I might have discovered the first case of steatopygia in the Detroit area.

After the dance routine, the next act was introduced by a professional type as being a “serious sex lecture.” It was two marionettes, nude ef and em, cleverly manipulated, demonstrating various copulative positions. Father would have loved it.

This was followed by an em transvestite who sang a song about his continual “hard luck,” with the rhyming lines you might expect.

Then came two nude ef acrobatic dancers who were quite good.

The chorus line came on again for a tired number in which they wore animal masks. The ef with the
gluteus
that was the most
maximus
I had ever seen was the gorilla.

The final act, the “star attraction,” lasted less than five seconds. The room was darkened completely. A single blue spotlight centered on the stage. The curtains parted briefly. There stood a naked em, obviously a genetic variant, with a circumcised
membrum virilis
at least 60 cm long. The audience gasped. The curtains closed. The house lights came on. There was a great snapping of fingers.

“Shall we go?” I asked Millie.

She profited from driving at high speed. I enjoyed it, too, though I rarely had the opportunity. We drove out to an automobile testing track we had discovered in the River Rouge area. For a ten new-dollar pat, the bearded obso night watchman would unlock the gate and allow us onto the track. It was oval-shaped, the end curves so steeply banked that it was impossible to climb them until I had the car up to top speed.

Around and around we went, Millie screaming with delight as we moved higher and higher, lying on our side as we neared the tops of the almost vertical end curves. It was a cloudy, moonless night. Only the fan of white from the headlights, rushing ahead of us, showed me the edge I was shaving.

On the final go-round, I switched off the lights. Then just the faint light from the sky provided dim illumination. Wind-howl, engine roar, and the pleased whimpering of Millie next to me. ... I plunged through the darkness.

“Y’gonna stop yesself one of these nights,” the bearded watchman said when we left.

“That’s right,” I said.

He shook his head. “This world. ...”

I remembered my mother had spoken the same words in the same tone. “This world. . .

Back in Millie’s apartment, I handed over her gift. She tore off the wrappings as a child might, almost frantically, ripping. She was delighted with the musical powder box and set the miniature couple to dancing, around and around, watching them with a pleased smile, head cocked.

Her body was' young, young, the skin nylon, the flesh natural rubber. There was a patch of golden lanugo over the lumbar vertebrae. Her painted breasts stared at me like shocked eyes. I rolled atop her and penetrated. Her lips drew back in a lupine grin.

She had told me, “Ilike using the most,” and that was operative. But she had a habit that amused me at first, then distracted me, then angered me, but that I eventually conditioned myself to ignore. During using she would continue her conversation, telling me of a prank they had played at the factory (they had put the supervisor’s purse on the assembly line, and it had emerged at the other end wrapped tightly in plastic and frozen as hard as a plastibrick). Or of a tooty pair of black plastisilk panties she had seen, imprinted with crimson mouths. Or of her desire to learn to drive, to drive endlessly, at high speed, anywhere.

While she recounted these things, during using, her cardiac rate increased, her breathing became shallow and rapid, her eyes glittered, a sweat covered her plump thighs. She continued chattering, linking her heels behind my knees, grasping my buttocks to pull me deeper, talking, talking, until she summited, interrupting her recital for a small shriek, then gabbling again while her body continued to pump in diminishing rhythm and her fingers probed gently into my rectum.

I arrived back at my parents’ home in Grosse Pointe about 0400 the following morning. I went immediately to bed and slept until almost 1300. Without a Somnorific.

The return to GPA-1, thirty-six hours later, was a series of small accidents that almost added up to disaster.

1. The Bullet Train left the Detroit terminal right on schedule. It moved about ten meters and ground to a halt. A small em had tumbled off the platform, onto the tracks, and broken his right tibia.

It was almost an hour before he was attended to and taken away.

2.    East of Canton, Ohio, streaking for Pittsburgh, we hit the last section of a four-unit articulated truck-train, driverless, on the new AUS-1 automated highway. No one was injured or stopped, but it took almost three hours to clear away the wreckage and the hundreds of plastilap bags of probeans scattered all over the right-of-way.

3.    In New York, getting close to conference time, it took me twenty minutes to get an electric cab. At Fourteenth Street we ran into a traffic jam and sat without moving for another twenty minutes. I was beginning to sweat under my zipsuit.

I signed in at the compound with ten minutes to spare. I swung aboard one of the open-sided, slow-moving cart trains that made continual circuits of the compound, driverless, following a wire laid under the pavement. I was in my office in five minutes. Paul Bumford was waiting with his big green accordion file.

“You like to live dangerously, don’t you?” he said.

“Thank God for accidents,” I said, “or we’d start thinking we can predict
everything.
What’s hot?”

“Lewisohn’s condition has stabilized. Everything else can wait.”

“Good. I have the Supersense file. Let’s go.”

We waited for the executive elevator to take us up to the conference room.

“Were you faithful?” he whispered.

I looked about casually. No one in sight. I patted his cheek softly.

“Not to worry,” I said.

We were the last division heads to arrive, but it was another minute before Angela Teresa Berri made her entrance. We all stood up.

The Satisfaction Section of the Department of Bliss was rigidly organized into four divisions:

—Division of Research & Development (DIVRAD). I was Assistant Deputy Director in charge (AssDepDirRad).

—Division of Security & Intelligence (DIVSEC). Burton P. Klein was AssDepDirSec.

—Division of Data & Statistics (DIVDAT). The AssDepDirDat was Phoebe Huntzinger.

—Division of Law & Enforcement (DIVLAW). The two Assistant Deputy Directors were identical (and, according to rumor, incestuous) twins, Frank and Frances von Liszt. Both, naturally, were called “Franz,” to their delight.

In addition, Angela Berri, Deputy Director of Satisfaction (DEPDIRSAT) had her own headquarters staff. She ran a tight ship, especially on matters that affected policy rather than mere planning and operations.

“Nick, you lead off,” she commanded.

“Project Supersense,” I said, glanced at the digiclock on the wall, and began. . . .

Without consulting my notes, I delivered a concise recitation of the history and current status of the project, costs to date, estimated costs to completion, estimated potential income. I ended in a little more than five minutes by stating, “I recommend Project Supersense be stopped.”

“Comments?” Angela asked, looking at the others.

Burton Klein was the first to respond. He felt Project Supersense should be continued. I knew he would; he had plastitanium electrodes implanted in his brain. He was a Mind-Jerker. He said he did not feel a potential market of two million was negligible. It could be exploited for a lot of love.

I replied with a condensed form of my father’s lecture on Convenience and Consumption, pointing out that if synchronized movie films were made available, nothing would be consumed; it would be a one-time sale.

“Not necessarily,” he said. He claimed that Mind-Jerkers would purchase large libraries of the high-stimulant movie films. And, he pointed out, the same technique could also be used on film reels of books for reading machines. “Even on tapes of music,” he added.

It was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me, and I was silent.

“Anyone else?” Angela Berri inquired.

Brother and sister Liszt passed. Phoebe Huntzinger agreed with Klein.

Angela asked me if we had anything in present status that could be leased.

“No,” I said, “nothing patentable. At this stage, it’s just a concept.”

She nodded. “Stop it,” she said crisply. “Too limited. Phoebe, you’re next.”

One of the responsibilities of Data & Statistics that we were all interested in, that the entire government was interested in, was the

Satisfaction Rate (Satrat). Data was gathered daily; Satrat Reports were issued weekly.

Briefly, the Satrat measured the quality of life in America, what percentage of Americans were satisfied with their lives and the way things were going and, conversely, what percentage were dissatisfied.