While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction Page 3

  “She’ll live,” he said, “but it’s made an old lady out of her like that.” He snapped his fingers. It was a weak snap. It didn’t make any noise. He looked at the face of Jenny, and it hurt him. “He’s got a shock coming in there,” he said. “Nancy doesn’t look like that anymore.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s good. Maybe he’ll have to look at her as a fellow human being now.”

  He got up. He went to Jenny’s brains and shook a steel rack that carried part of them. The rack didn’t give at all. Hoenikker wound up shaking himself. “Oh, God,” he said, “what a waste, what a waste, what a waste. One of the great technical minds of our time,” he said, “living in a moving van, married to a machine, selling appliances somewhere between Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Flamingo, Florida.”

  “I guess he is pretty bright,” I said.

  “Bright?” Hoenikker said. “He isn’t just George Castrow. He’s Dr. George Castrow. He spoke five languages when he was eight, mastered calculus when he was ten, and got his Ph.D. from M.I.T. when he was eighteen!”

  I whistled.

  “He never had any time for love,” Hoenikker said. “Didn’t believe in it, was sure he could get along without it—whatever it was. There was too much else to do for George to bother with love. When he came down with pneumonia at the age of thirty-three, he had never so much as held the hand of a woman.”

  Hoenikker saw the magic shoes where George had put them, under the cot. He slipped off his bedroom slippers and slipped on the magic shoes. He was pretty familiar with them. “When pneumonia hit George,” he said, “he was suddenly in terror of death and in desperate need of a nurse’s touch many times a day. The nurse was Nancy.”

  Hoenikker turned on Jenny’s master control switch. Her brains hummed. “A man who hasn’t built up a certain immunity to love through constant exposure to it,” he said, “is in danger of being all but killed by love when the first exposure comes.” He shuddered. “Love scrambled poor George’s brains. Suddenly love was all that mattered. Working with him in the laboratory, I was forced to listen eight hours a day to tripe about love. Love made the world go round! It was love and love alone the world was seeking! Love conquered all!”

  Hoenikker tugged at his nose and closed his eyes, trying to remember a skill he’d had a long time ago. “Hello, Baby,” he said to Jenny. His toes wiggled in the magic shoes.

  “Heh-le, Hah-uh-u-duh-suh-um,” Jenny said. There wasn’t any expression in her face. She spoke again, put the sounds together better. “Hello, Handsome,” she said to Hoenikker.

  Hoenikker shook his head. “Nancy’s voice doesn’t sound like that anymore,” he said. “Lower, a little rougher now—not so liquid.”

  “Huh-ear, huh-ut fuh-uh thu-uh suh-a-fuh uf-fuh Guh-od guh-o-yuh-oooo,” Jenny said to him. She smoothed that out, too, “Here, but for the Grace of God, go you,” she said.

  “Say,” I said, “you’re good. I didn’t think anybody but George could make her talk.”

  “Can’t make her seem alive—not the way George can,” Hoenikker said. “Never could—not even after I’d had a thousand hours of practice.”

  “You put that many hours in on her?” I said.

  “Sure,” said Hoenikker. “I was the one who was going to take her out on the road. I was the footloose bachelor who didn’t have much of a future in research anyway. George was the married man who was to stay home with his laboratory and his wife, and go on to bigger things.”

  Life’s surprises made Hoenikker sniffle. “Designing Jenny—” he said, “that was supposed to be a little joke in the middle of George’s career—an electronic joke off the top of his head. Jenny was a little something he was to tinker with while he came drifting back to earth after his honeymoon with Nancy.”

  Hoenikker rambled on about those olden days when Jenny was born. And sometimes he would make Jenny chime in, as though she remembered those days, too. Those were bad days for Hoenikker, because he fell in love with George’s wife. He’d been scared to death he would do something about it.

  “I loved her for what she was,” he said. “Maybe it was all the pap George was spouting about love that made me fall in love with her. George would say something ridiculous about love or about her, and I’d think up real reasons for loving her. I wound up loving her as a human being, as a miraculous, one-of-a-kind, moody muddle of faults and virtues—part child, part woman, part goddess, and no more consistent than a putty slide-rule.”

  “And then George began spending more and more time with me,” said Jenny. “He took to going home from the laboratory at the last possible moment, wolfing down his supper, and hurrying back to work on me till well past midnight. He would have the control shoes on all day long and half the night—and we would talk, and talk, and talk.”

  Hoenikker tried to give her face some expression for what she was going to say next. He punched the Mona-Lisa-smile button Sully Harris had punched the day before. “I was excellent company,” she said. “I never once said anything he didn’t want to hear—and I always said what he wanted to hear exactly when he wanted to hear it.”

  “Here,” said Hoenikker, undoing Jenny’s straps so she could step forward, “is the most calculating woman, the greatest student of the naïve male heart that ever walked the face of the earth. Nancy never had a chance.”

  “Ordinarily,” said Hoenikker, “a man’s first wild dreams about his wife peter out after the honeymoon. The man then has to settle down to the difficult but rewarding business of finding out to whom he is really married. But George had an alternative. He could keep his wild dreams of a wife alive in Jenny. His neglect of the imperfect Nancy became a scandal.”

  “George suddenly announced that I was too precious a mechanism to be entrusted in anyone’s care but his own,” said Jenny. “He was going to take his Jenny out on the road, or he would leave the company entirely.”

  “His new hunger for love,” said Hoenikker, “was matched only by his ignorance of the pitfalls of love. He only knew that love made him feel wonderful, no matter where it came from.”

  Hoenikker turned off Jenny, took off the shoes, lay down on the cot again. “George chose the perfect love of a robot,” he said, “leaving me to do what I could to earn the love of an imperfect, deserted girl.”

  “I—I’m certainly glad she’s well enough to say whatever she’s got to say to him,” I said.

  “He would have gotten the message in any event,” said Hoenikker. He handed up a slip of paper. “She dictated this, in case she wasn’t up to saying it to him personally.”

  I didn’t get to read the message right away, because George showed up at the back door of the van. He looked more like a robot than he’d ever made Jenny seem. “Your house again—your wife again,” he said.

  George and I had breakfast in a diner. Then we drove over to the GHA works and parked in front of the Research Laboratory.

  “Sonny Jim,” George said to me, “you can run along now, and start leading a life of your own again. And much obliged.”

  When I got off by myself, I read what Nancy had dictated to her second husband, what she’d said in person to George.

  “Please look at the imperfect human being God gave you to love once,” she’d said to George, “and try to like me a little for what I really was, or, God willing, am. Then please, Darling, become an imperfect human being among imperfect human beings again.”

  I’d been in such a hurry to get off by myself that I hadn’t shaken George’s hand or asked him what he was going to do next. I went back to the van to do both those things.

  The back door of the van was open. Jenny and George were talking inside, very soft and low.

  “I’m going to try to pick up the pieces of my life, Jenny—what’s left of it,” George said. “Maybe they’ll take me back in the Research Laboratory. I’ll ask anyway—hat in hand.”

  “They’ll be thrilled to have you back!” said Jenny. She was thrilled herself. “This is the best news I’ve ever heard—the news I�
�ve been longing to hear for years.” She yawned and her eyelids drooped. “Excuse me,” she said.

  “You need a younger man to squire you around now,” said George. “I’m getting old—and you’ll never get old.”

  “I’ll never know another man as ardent and thoughtful as you, as handsome as you, as brilliant as you,” said Jenny. She meant it. She yawned again. Her eyelids drooped some more. “Excuse me,” she said. “Good luck, Angel,” she mumbled. Her eyes closed all the way. “Good night, Sweetheart,” she said. She was asleep. Her battery was dead.

  “Dream a little dream of me,” whispered George.

  I ducked out of sight as George brushed away a tear and left the van forever.

  (illustration credit 4)

  THE EPIZOOTIC

  While new young widows in extraordinary numbers paraded their weeds for all to see, no official had yet acknowledged that the land was plagued. The general population and the press, long inured to a world gone mad, had not yet noticed that affairs had recently become even worse. The news was full of death. The news had always been full of death. It was the life insurance companies that noticed first what was going on, and well they might have. They had insured millions of lives at rates based on a life expectancy of sixty-eight years. Now, in a six-month period, the average age at death for married American males with more than twenty thousand dollars in life insurance had dropped to an appalling forty-seven years.

  “Dropped to forty-seven years—and still dropping,” said the president of the American Reliable and Equitable Life and Casualty Company of Connecticut. The president himself was only forty-six, very young to be heading the eighth-largest insurance company in the country. He was a humorless, emaciated, ambitious young man who had been described by the previous president as “gruesomely capable.” His name was Millikan.

  The previous president, who had been kicked upstairs to chairmanship of the board of directors, was with Millikan now in the company’s boardroom in Hartford. He was an amiable old gentleman, a lifelong bachelor named Breed.

  The third person present was Dr. Everett, a young epidemiologist from the United States Department of Health and Welfare. It was Dr. Everett who gave the plague a name that stuck. He called it “the epizootic.” “When you say forty-seven years—” he said to Millikan, “is that an exact figure?”

  “We happen to be somewhat short of exact figures just now,” said Millikan wryly. “Our chief actuary killed himself two days ago—threw himself out his office window.”

  “Family man?” said Dr. Everett.

  “Naturally,” said the chairman of the board. “And his family is very nicely taken care of now, thanks to life insurance. His debts can all be paid off, his wife is assured an adequate income for life, and his children can go to college without having to work their ways through.” The old man said all this with sad, plonking irony. “Insurance is a wonderful thing,” he said, “especially after it’s been in effect for more than two years.” He meant by that that most life insurance contracts paid off on suicide after they had been in effect for more than two years. “No family man,” he said, “should be without it.”

  “Did he leave a note?” said Dr. Everett.

  “He left two,” said the chairman. “One was to us, suggesting that we replace him with a Gypsy fortune-teller. The other was to his wife and children, and it said simply, “I love you more than anything. I have done this so you can have all the things you deserve.” He winked ruefully at Dr. Everett, the country’s outstanding authority on the epizootic. “I daresay such sentiments are quite familiar to you by now.”

  Dr. Everett nodded. “As familiar as chicken pox to a pediatrician,” he said tiredly.

  Millikan brought his fist down on the table hard. “What I want to know is what is the Government going to do about this?” he said. “At the current death rate, this company will be out of business in eight months! I presume the same is true of every life insurance company. What is the Government going to do?”

  “What do you suggest the Government do?” said Dr. Everett. “We’re quite open to suggestion—almost pathetically so.”

  “All right!” said Millikan. “Government action number one!”

  “Number one!” echoed Dr. Everett, preparing to write.

  “Get this disease out in the open, where we can fight it! No more secrecy!” said Millikan.

  “Marvellous!” said Dr. Everett. “Call the reporters at once. We’ll hold a press conference right here, give out all the facts and figures—and within minutes the whole world will know.” He turned to the old chairman of the board. “Modern communications are wonderful, aren’t they?” he said. “Almost as wonderful as life insurance.” He reached for the telephone on the long table, took it from its cradle. “What’s the name of the afternoon paper?” he said.

  Millikan took the telephone away from him, hung up.

  Everett smiled at him in mock surprise. “I thought that was step number one. I was just going to take it, so we could get right on to step two.”

  Millikan closed his eyes, massaged the bridge of his nose. The young president of American Reliable and Equitable had plenty to contemplate within the violet privacy of his eyelids. After step one, which would inevitably publicize the bad condition of the insurance companies, there would be the worst financial collapse in the country’s history. As for curing the epizootic: publicity could only make the disease kill more quickly, would make it cram into a few weeks of panic deaths that would ordinarily be spread over a few queasy years. As for the grander issues, as for America’s becoming weak and contemptible, as for money’s being valued more highly than life itself, Millikan hardly cared. What mattered to him most was immediate and personal. All other implications of the epizootic paled beside the garish, blaring fact that the company was about to go under, taking Millikan’s brilliant career with it.

  The telephone on the table rang. Breed answered, received information without comment, hung up. “Two more planes just crashed,” he said. “One in Georgia—fifty-three aboard. One in Indiana—twenty-nine aboard.”

  “Survivors?” said Dr. Everett.

  “None,” said Breed. “That’s eleven crashes this month—so far.”

  “All right! All right! All right!” said Millikan, rising to his feet. “Government action number one—ground all airplanes! No more air travel at all!”

  “Good!” said Dr. Everett. “We should also put bars on all windows above the first floor, remove all bodies of water from centers of population, outlaw the sales of firearms, rope, poisons, razors, knives, automobiles and boats—”

  Millikan subsided into his chair, hope gone. He took a photograph of his family from his billfold, studied it listlessly. In the background of the photograph was his hundred-thousand-dollar waterfront home, and, beyond that, his forty-eight-foot cabin cruiser lying at anchor.

  “Tell me,” Breed said to young Dr. Everett, “are you married?”

  “No,” said Dr. Everett. “The Government has a rule now against letting married men work on epizootic research.”

  “Oh?” said Breed.

  “They found out that married men working on the epizootic generally died of it before they could even submit a report,” said Dr. Everett. He shook his head. “I just don’t understand, just don’t understand. Or sometimes I do—and then I don’t again.”

  “Does the deceased have to be married in order for you to credit his death to the epizootic?” said Breed.

  “A wife and children,” said Dr. Everett. “That’s the classic pattern. A wife alone doesn’t mean much. Curiously, a wife and just one child doesn’t mean much, either.” He shrugged. “Oh, I suppose a few cases where a man has been unusually devoted to his mother or some other relative, or maybe even to his college, should be classified technically as the epizootic—but cases like that aren’t statistically important. To the epidemiologist who deals only in staggering figures, the epizootic is overwhelmingly a disease of successful, ambitious married men
with more than one child.”

  Millikan took no interest in their conversation. With monumental irrelevance, he now placed the photograph of his family in front of the two bachelors. It showed a quite ordinary mother with three quite ordinary children, one an infant. “Look those wonderful people in the eye!” he said hoarsely.

  Breed and Dr. Everett glanced at each other strickenly, then did as Millikan told them. They looked at the photograph bleakly, having just confirmed for each other the fact that Millikan was mortally ill with the epizootic.

  “Look those wonderful people in the eye,” said Millikan, as tragically resonant as the Ancient Mariner now. “That’s something I’ve always been able to do—until now,” he said.

  Breed and Dr. Everett continued to look into the uninteresting eyes, preferring the sight of them to the sight of a man who was going to die very soon.

  “Look at Robert!” Millikan commanded, speaking of his eldest son. “Imagine having to tell that fine boy that he can’t go to Andover anymore, that he’s got to go to public school from now on! Look at Nancy!” he commanded, speaking of his only daughter. “No more horse, no more sailboat, no more country club for her. And look at little Marvin in his dear mother’s arms,” he said. “Imagine bringing a baby into this world and then realizing that you won’t be able to give it any advantages at all!” His voice became jagged with self-torment and shame. “That poor little kid is going to have to fight every inch of the way!” he said. “They all are. When American Reliable and Equitable goes smash, there isn’t a thing their father will be able to do for them! Tooth and nail all the way for them!” he cried.

  Now Millikan’s voice became soft with horror. He invited the two bachelors to look at his wife—a bland, lazy, plump dumpling, incidentally. “Imagine having a wonderful woman like that, a real pal who’s stuck with you through thick and thin, who’s borne your children and made a decent home for them,” he said. “Imagine,” he said after a long silence, “imagine being a hero to her, imagine giving her all the things she’s longed for all her life. And then imagine telling her,” he whispered, “that you’ve lost it all.”