The Steam-Driven Boy Read online

  ‘That isn’t the worst,’ he continued. ‘Foreign powers, chiefly the Finns, are now trying to steal my invention. I’ve been invited to play blindfold chess tonight at the party, and I fear it is there that an attempt will be made upon my life. Here –’

  He pressed a scrap of paper into my palm. ‘Here is the only copy of my formula. Take care it does not fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘It’s safe with me, doctor,’ I assured him, as I tucked it into a secret compartment of my billfold.

  In Hong Kong, Oxbow caught tularemia. He was resuscitated by spleen massage, and as soon as he was able, called me on the radio.

  ‘Did you feed Black Phantom, my wonderdog?’

  ‘Yes, master. Bwana, take great care. Watch out for girl from Iowa Writers’ Conference, effendi. Over and out, chief.’ Just before he went off the air, I heard scuffling sounds – and a shot.

  ‘He sounds a little sick,’ said Margo. She and Oxbow are the only ones who know my secret identity. We disembarked at Mattrick’s party, while Eileen, returning from Hong Kong, asked ‘George’ to marry her.

  ‘To whom?’

  A number of people seemed to be at the wrong party. Among these were a boy in a sleeper suit carrying a tyre and a candle, a black-hatted quaker, a fat, jolly-looking Negress with her hair tied up in a red-and-yellow checkered kerchief, and a very tall green man. Their speech was strained, and I detected something familiar about the quaker’s voice. Margo took down everything he said:

  kodel fiberglas doelon polymite acrylan

  curon durastran lastex vinylite fortrel

  nykon polyester corfam fabricon acrylex

  doron bunalenex lucite actinene creslan

  dynel protofoam banlon caprolan formica

  rayon celustran chemex fiberfil actinel

  lurex quiltacel antron koromite spandex

  nylon strantron forlon koratron polynel

  Gene returned from his Civil Defence meeting, unslung his binoculars and asked Eileen what was new.

  ‘Nothing much. Tad dropped in.’

  ‘Why on earth do you call him “Tad”?’ asked Gene.

  A man in farmer costume came from upstairs to borrow some toothpaste. ‘We’re having a “Famous Mac” party,’ he explained. ‘I’m “Old MacDonald”. Can I borrow some toothpaste? You see, we’re all brushing each other’s teeth.’

  I walked over to Mattrick, who was engaged in conversation with a portly man in pince-nez.

  ‘Hello!’ said Mattrick. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here. Have you met Fenster Doybridge, the famous kidnapper?’

  ‘We’ve met,’ snapped the fat man.

  ‘Indeed,’ I said, offering them cigarettes. ‘In fact, I saw a bit of your work this evening, if I’m not mistaken, Doybridge.’

  He chuckled non-committally, and turned away to watch a Xerox engineer doing funny imitations. Suddenly I realized that Margo was nowhere in sight!

  The man from upstairs came back for more toothpaste. ‘It’s taking a little more to finish off “Mary McCarthy”,’ he explained. ‘Afterwards, we’re gonna do some pantomimes. “Cardinal MacIntyre” is gonna harrow Hell for us, so “MacAdam” can build a road across it, on which “MacArthur” can return to the Philippines. Hope you folks don’t mind a little noise.’

  ‘Are you going to read from novel?’ I asked Horace Mattrick. He nodded. ‘I’d better. It’s written,’ he added, laughing, ‘entirely in vowels – you’re supposed to improvise the consonants – so most people have a little trouble with the plot.’

  I watched the quaker make an odd sign to a tall, peculiar-looking man. This person wore only black sleeves and trouser legs over his thin limbs, his only other garments being a black stovepipe hat and a monocle. I remarked to Mattrick that the man looked like nothing so much as a half-naked peanut.

  This peanut-man in turn made a secret signal to another man in a stovepipe hat (were they coming into fashion?). That man sported a wisp of white beard, but otherwise resembled a labourer, for his sleeves, blue with white stars, were rolled high on veinous, knotty arms. His hat was striped red-and-white.

  I kept one eye on the girl from the Iowa Writers’ Conference, who reeled from room to room in some sort of drunken dance. The phonograph was playing code. I noticed Doybridge listening closely to it, along with the men in the stovepipe hats.

  And Doybridge had donned a stovepipe hat!

  It was of black silk, to complete his costume of cutaway coat, striped trousers and spats. He carried a walking stick, and a bag marked with a dollar sign. As I stared at it, I realized with a shudder that it was exactly the size of a human head.

  Stirring, the garbage under Mrs Onager’s sink took on an unearthly shape.

  ‘If I should marry you, Pater will cut me off with a penny,’ said ‘George’ to Eileen. According to Eileen’s way of thinking, George in French was Georges, while penny was pronounced to rhyme with penis. But Eileen was feverish, feverish and ill.

  I wandered into the garden, where the quaker was behaving oddly with a tree.

  ‘Sunspot!’ I cried. ‘Is it you?’

  ‘Shh! The Finns or someone are tailing me. It might be only a joke, you know – a case of the wag tailing the dog – but don’t let’s take chances. Pretend not to know me, and for your own protection, go back inside.’ With misgivings, I obeyed.

  In one corner of the living-mom, the Xerox engineer was doing a clever imitation of a legal tort. In a second, Doybridge expounded an aesthetic of kidnapping. In a third, Eileen had curled up to read The Renaissance, while in the fourth, Dr Aa was just preparing to play blindfold chess with a short, swarthy man I recognized as Gene. I took it all in at a glance, not liking the look of any of it.

  Fenster D. pontificated: ‘In essence as in theory, in execution as in conception, from the first symbol to the ultimate sensibility, the whole must be, how shall I say…’

  There was an enormous CRACK! and the bedroom ceiling, bearing a man on a Mack steamroller, descended upon the pile of coats and on the girl from the Iowa Writers’ Conference, and on Tad.

  ‘It never happened before,’ said the driver, who wore both a mackintosh and a mackinaw. A deus ex mackinaw? I wondered. It would do to keep a close watch on the ‘Cardinal’.

  Knowing that Dr Aa would open with a knight, his opponent had substituted for it a tiny, live, venomous seahorse. When poor Aa touched it, the creature bit him savagely.

  ‘Aa!’ Screaming his own name, the blindfolded arachnologist rose from the game and fell dead.

  Mrs Onager peered beneath her sink and rubbed her eyes in disbelief.

  As soon as the police left with Aa’s effects, the girl from Iowa began her dance all over again.

  ‘I have an announcement to make,’ she sang. ‘I’m not what I seem. Actually I came here to interest all of you in NAME LABELS. They are gummed for easy affixing to any surface, and they have YOUR NAME, YOUR ADDRESS, ANYTOWN, EVERYWHERE. One hundred cost only one dollar, and they come in this elegant styrene carrying case.’ She exhibited a perfect little styrene box. Then, bending to trail her long, blonde hair, she swept about the room, taking orders for NAME LABELS. Seeing through her ruse, I vowed to deal with her later, after Mattrick’s improvisation.

  Opening his novel, novel, the famous author read:

  ‘I did sit in Rimini, sipping drinks within its limiting light. In hip, with-it Rimini, I, light-tickling, kiss Mimi’s lips. Isis Mimi swings, I swirl, twirl this nitwit girl, fling digits in Rimini’s wind, O Finns!

  ‘O gold moon of Hong Kong! How now, brown orb of loot? Go to! Spook who glows or god who bows to boon, do not tow two old clocks on sloops or spoons on ponds (pools) of bold rococo. Row on row of cold wood brooms! Oxbow, London fog!

  ‘A yak at last, a llama, half-mad after, alas, pasta, asks all that wash aft, madam. Man has castaway what cats ask. Ah, sad, mad, glad, bad tanks! Last act, Aa! Dallas!

  ‘He never left the deck. We never held the end. The red shed never seemed free, we’ve
seen. Bled green, he fed her eggs, beets, beef; he fed her greed. Never kneel! Well-met, Gee Bee!

  ‘Up busts Luck. Run tub, bub. Stuck-up ducks upchuck mud mukluks. Run, nun! Turds pluck up trust, sub fucks up, truck U-turns. Numb trust cuts guts. Ubu’s pus must run, but …’

  I drew my weapon as we applauded.

  ‘Where could all that garbage have gone?’ Mrs Onager mused. ‘It couldn’t have just walked away.’

  Eileen began to feel as though she were coming down with psittacosis, commonly known as ‘parrot fever’, as she explained to Gene.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ he demanded jealously.

  I shot the so-called girl from the fictitious Writers’ Conference twice. I was just turning the body over with my toe when Marge came in from the garden, with Jean-Claude Odeon and Oxbow. We linked arms.

  In the garden, Sunspot gave one strangled scream. Then all was silence, save for the stealthy, rustling, retreating step of the garbage man.

  THE TRANSCENDENTAL SANDWICH

  ‘We can give you knowledge,’ said the salesman-thing.

  Claude Mabry looked all around his room: mildewed wallpaper, broken linoleum, dirty long underwear slung over a chair that had a weak leg, the clock face that had been cracked and repaired so many times with scotch tape that he could hardly see it said 3.20.

  ‘I’m smart enough for me,’ he said. ‘There’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the salesman-thing, ‘and there’s such a thing as being so smart you have to wash dishes down at Stan’s Chili Bowl to earn enough to live – here.’

  Claude could not reply. The whole thing reminded him of the Bible: a snake or whatever it was dressed up like a man, offering ‘knowledge’ – it just didn’t make sense.

  ‘Look, I don’t mean to be unpleasant,’ said the salesman. ‘But we Guzz are a hell of a lot more powerful and a hell of a lot smarter than your species. If we’d wanted to, we could have vaporized your whole planet – but it’s not our way. So when somebody comes offering to make you smart, don’t knock it.’

  Claude wanted to rip off that grinning, false mansuit and see what the Guzz looked like. He half-rose, then sank back again and looked at the floor.

  ‘If you’re so good, why do you want to do anything for me?’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything for you. I voted to turn Earth into a bird refuge. But we have a democratic form of government and the majority wanted to make your kind fit citizens to share the universe with us.’

  ‘All right, how do I know you can make me smart?’

  The salesman opened his briefcase and took out a handful of bright brochures. ‘Don’t take my word for it that we can make you one of the smartest men on Earth,’ he said. ‘Don’t take it from me that being smart is worthwhile. Millions are trying our plan. Thousands have tried it already. Have a look.’

  He handed Claude a folder showing full-colour pictures of quiet scholars, white-coated scientists, dignified judges and beaming businessmen. Their testimonials were capped with red headlines:

  COULD’T READ OWN NAME –

  NOW COMMANDS 20 LANGUAGES!

  FAMOUS ECONOMIST

  ‘HATED ARITHMETIC’

  THE STEAM-DRIVEN BOY

  ‘DUMB OX’

  TO BRILLIANT THEOLOGIAN – IN 7 MONTHS!

  ‘But – what would I study?’

  ‘Everything.’ The salesman produced another slick booklet and began turning the pages, showing Claude pictures of happy housewives and hairy-handed labourers reading heavy volumes, farmers peering through microscopes and grannies using slide rules. ‘We call our system the Interface Way. Every person we accept must study at least two subjects intensively. If the subjects are unrelated, all the better. We mix mathematics with literature, we throw theoretical physics at a medical specialist, we give the mathematician theology.’

  ‘What would I get?’

  ‘If we accepted you, you’d be tested. Then we’d know.’

  ‘What do you mean, if?’ Claude felt he had just been offered a million dollars, but at the word ‘if’ it had shrunk to about a nickel.

  The stranger, sensing his anxiety, spoke soothingly. ‘Don’t worry too much about that. We won’t be testing your I.Q. or previous knowledge. In fact, the less of either, the better. We want people who haven’t had a chance, people who feel useless because the sleeping genius within them has never been awakened. What do you say?’

  ‘I don’t know. What would it cost me?’

  ‘All the money in the world couldn’t buy you a better education, pal. But all it costs is your signature.’

  ‘Well – oh hell, why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ echoed the salesman, handing him a pen. Claude signed a few forms in various colours and the salesman gave him a copy of each.

  ‘Claude,’ he said, ‘you’ve just made your first intelligent decision.’

  The Guzz had pretty well taken over Earth, in every way. Guzz-developed gadgets were in every home. Clergymen thanked the Lord from their pulpits that the Guzz were not warlike or vicious but a truly democratic – ah – people. The government made daily announcements of new Guzz gifts to humanity.

  They quietly disarmed the nuclear powers, they made efficient clean-air and sewage-disposal systems for our cities, they introduced new food sources and birth-control plans in Asia. Hardly a government bureau in the world had not been approached by the Guzz with a suggestion or a gift – and these aliens used no stronger forces than tact and kindly persuasion.

  The only disagreeable thing about them was the way they looked – both at home and in Earth-drag.

  On their own planet (or so it was said, for no one had yet visited them) the Guzz were disagreeably vermiform. Here, so as not to spook the natives, they wore human forms of plastic. Their movements in these were natural enough, but they all looked alike. As far as most people, including Claude, were concerned, the Guzz were just so many talking store-window dummies.

  The first box that arrived was a table-top computer equipped with keyboard, microphone, speaker and visual display screen. That night when he returned from Stan’s Chili Bowl, Claude lay awake looking at all that gleaming, complicated junk and wondering if he might have made a mistake in even hoping …

  Next day three packages arrived. The first contained books and a sheaf of documents: a certification that Claude Mabry was eligible for this correspondence course, more copies of the various forms he’d signed – and a booklet entitled: Welcome, Future Genius!

  ‘The government of Guzz and your own government wish to take this opportunity to welcome you … conditions and by-laws … You may not always see the reasons for instructions given you in this course, but they are necessary to ensure efficient use of your time.

  ‘The enclosed books are for Lesson One. The books required for each lesson will be provided with the lesson. At various points in the program you will be asked to study them thoroughly.’

  Claude glanced at the titles of the books: The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud; Verbal Behavior, B. F. Skinner; Towards Information Retrieval, Fairthorne; were only a few.

  The dream book looked interesting but inside, like all the others, it was full of long-winded sentences that didn’t mean anything.

  The second package contained a tape cassette titled: Program for Lesson One and simple instructions for loading it into the teaching computer.

  As soon as Claude could do so, he switched on the machine. He might have expected it to give him a problem, to register the fact that it was turned on, or at least to ask his name, but it did none of these things.

  Instead, it politely requested him to eat a sandwich.

  Claude scratched his head. The Gun had to be joking. He could imagine them watching him right now, laughing at his stupidity. So this was the big learning course! So this …

  He remembered the third package and tore it open. Inside was a cellophane-wrapped sandwich. Though Claude turned it over and ov
er, he could see only one difference between this and any other cellophane-wrapped sandwich: Inside the wrapper was a plain printed name slip. But instead of ‘ham and cheese’ or ‘peanut butter and grape jelly’ it simply read: Eat me.

  The bread was a little stale but he enjoyed the salami or para-salami inside.

  An hour later he correctly answered a request to explain how and why dreams were subject to syntactical rules. The answer was obvious.

  Two hours later he had read Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge, read it at skimming speed because it was already perfectly familiar to him.

  A lesson or two later Claude had gone through about fifty difficult books without any trouble. He progressed rapidly through the programs, though it did not seem like progress at all: he simply knew what he was doing. Using Fourier analysis to solve problems in electronics seemed something he had always known, just as he had always realized the gross truth of Newtonian mechanics and the finer truth of quantum mechanics, the position of Hubert Van Eyck in Flemish painting, the syllogistic properties of an Andrew Marvell poem, the flaws in the historical theories of Spengler and Toynbee – or for that matter, how to prepare sauce ozéne with seven ingredients. Scraps of learning, areas of learning, even whole complex structures of learning were suddenly his.

  Having learned, he worked. By the fourth lesson Claude had gone through Gödel’s proof of the necessary incompleteness of mathematical theorems and picked holes in Lucas’s application of this to mechanical devices. He had also put forth an aesthetic theory understandable by perhaps ten men, refutable by no more than one. He had nearly destroyed mathematical economics, and devised a tentative translating machine. He was hardly aware that these things had not been done before, nor was he really aware of the transition from his job at the Chili Bowl to a research fellowship at a prominent university.

  The transition came about from his publication of various monographs in journals, the names of which he knew only from footnotes in the books he was skimming. Some of the monographs came back. He had sent them to wrong addresses, or to journals long out of print.

  Others, like his ‘Queueing Theory Applied to Neural Activity’ and ‘On Poetic Diction’, became classics. Men with tweedy manners but sharp suits and clean attaché cases came to see him. They sat in the steamy, oily kitchen of Stan’s Chili Bowl and talked with him about quasar explanations, new codes of international law and logic mechanisms. True, many prodigies were springing up now that the Guzz offered their massive home study program. But for the time being, genius was still something universities fought over. And so, almost without knowing it (he was thinking of other things), Claude Mabry gave Stan his notice, packed his T-shirts and blue jeans and entrained for Attica University.