Complete Stories (37 page)

Time passed. Slowly the mist dissipated. At some point Luanne’s visionary state wore off. She looked down at the drawings she’d been working on and wondered what they meant. It was as if she had been drugged for the last hour or so, drugged full and happy. Some of her drawings were of clothes, but others were of buildings. One of the buildings was particularly striking: a vast conical lattice surrounded by two twining spirals of metal. Mounted inside it were four huge glass structures: a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder and a half-sphere.

But where was Garvey? Hadn’t he been here a little while ago?

Luanne hurried through her silent store. There was the hole, and there, three feet down, were the soles of poor Garvey’s shoes! He was stuck in there upside down! The mist had poisoned him—he had passed out and fallen in!

Luanne seized Garvey’s feet and pulled. Normally she couldn’t have budged him, but something filled her with superstrength. Garvey bumped up out of the hole like a lumpy carrot. Luanne laid him out on his back and began blowing kisses into his slack mouth. He breathed back, twitched, opened his eyes.

“Garvey? Are you all right?”

“
Da
,” said Garvey, his voice strangely gruff. “
Pamiatnik III Internatsionala prokety
Vladimir Tatlin.” His eyes closed and he went slack again.

Luanne picked him up bodily and carried him away from the awful hole. With fumbling fingers she dialed the Rescue Squad.

Garvey woke to the sound of his wife’s voice. They were each in a single bed—hospital beds. She was sitting up and talking on the phone.

”…responsibility. The insurance won’t pay, and we’ve got to sue someone. Isn’t there a World Court? The comet smashed into our store, man. We’re in a decontamination room and they want to bulldoze our store under. What the hell is a lawyer for, Sidney? Stay on it, and call back. Goodbye.”

“Uh, Luanne …”

“Garvey! Baby! These idiots think we glow in the dark, man, we’re supposed to stay locked up for ten days! The store’s screwed and nobody wants to take the blame. I say it’s our government’s fault—I mean they’re the ones who egg the Russians on.”

“The Russians?”

“Those stupid Commies,” Luanne fumed. “It was some kind of space-probe they sent up to intercept that new comet they discovered. Lenin’s Comet? These goddamned spastic Reds wanted to plant a time-capsule of propaganda on the comet and bring part of it back.”

“Part of Lenin’s Comet?”

“That’s what crashed in our store. The probe smashed the comet all to bits. Our store got hit by about six tons of frozen comet. The stuff boiled off into gas and that’s what flipped us out, Garvey, that’s where the visions came from.”

For someone in a hospital bed, Luanne looked surprisingly well. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, and her round eyes were bright with plans.

“They want us on the
Today
show, Gar, but the doctors won’t let us out. There’s got to be big money in this somewhere. It’s just too bizarre. Drugged-out on space-gas!”

“Was I in the hole very long?”

“I was sort of wasted, baby, so I’m not too sure. Half an hour? What was it like?”

“I …”

Garvey was interrupted by a voice from the TV screen. It was a fat doctor, talking to them on closed-circuit. “Hello, Mr. Carrandine, I’m glad to see you’ve snapped out of it.”

“Let us out!” shouted Luanne. “What about our children?”

“Your children will be taken care of by a policewoman, Mrs. Carrandine. Surely you must understand that your quarantine will last until we have finished our batteries of tests. The material you and your husband inhaled is unlike any other substance known to science. My colleagues tell me that is must come from a different galaxy, where the weak-force is …”

“CRAP!” Luanne threw her sheet over the TV screen and camera. “Come on, Garvey, help me figure out how we can get out of here and cash in on this!”

“Did you hear that? They’ll put a policewoman in our house? Jesus. How long have we been here?”

“It’s just noon. The kids are still in school. Do you feel all right now, baby?”

Garvey got out of his bed and stretched. He felt good, very good indeed. It would be nice to get some lunch. A fast-food triple-burger and a milkshake, for instance.

The air in front of his chest grew thick. There was a pale flickering, a slight buzz, and—
plop
, a burger ‘n’ shake dropped out of the air to splatter on the hospital-room floor!

“Oh my God!” Luanne had been watching closely. “Can you do that again, Gar?”

This time he stood next to the dresser. Make it two shakes and burgers. Nothing to it. Buzz, flicker, click—there they were.

“Jesus, Garvey. How come I can’t do that?”

“I got more of the gas than you did.” Garvey ate as he talked. “I always knew something like this would happen to me, Luanne. I’m Superman! I can do anything I like. And the I.R.S. can go straight to hell!”

“
Don’t
, Garvey! You’ve got to be careful what you wish! Don’t wear it out on garbage!”

There was a fumbling outside, and the inner door of their room’s air-lock swung open. It was a man in a baggy white decontamination suit. His face was obscured by bulky air-filters.

“yrrnd shhhnnddt chuchufff mnnn krrrrdnnn!” The bulky figure reached for Garvey’s lunch.

“Uh, Luanne, do you think …”

“Yeah, baby. Let’s split.”

The scene around them flickered like two intercut films and resolved itself into the Carrandine’s living-room.

“Oh, Garvey! Make a lot of gold, man, I mean like hundreds of pounds! Quick before the pigs get here!”

A small ingot of gold thudded to the floor. Then another and another and another—the rain of metal lasted a full minute. Garvey paused and regarded his riches with a vaguely dissatisfied air.

“That’s good for a few million bucks, Luanne. Go hide it, and let me concentrate. I’ve got to do something much bigger. There’s not a whole lot of time left—I can feel my powers wearing off.”

Obediently Luanne got her daughter Betsy’s wagon and began lugging ingots into the den. There was a fireplace in there with a trapdoor you could lift up to shove the ashes in. One by one, Luanne stashed the gold-bars in the hidden ash-barrel.

There were sirens in the distance. Garvey lay on the couch with his eyes closed. As Luanne hurried back and forth with the heavy ingots, she saw girders rising up around their house, steel beams shooting up like fountains. Some vast tower was growing overhead, some eternal monument to Garvey’s power!

Luanne hid the last ingot and went to stand by Garvey’s laboring head. “Can you hear me, baby?” A weak nod. “Are you done?” Another nod. “Can I have a chicken sandwich and a glass of red wine?”

“No,” said Garvey, smiling a little. “You’ll have to buy it, Luanne. I’ve used up all my power.”

The room was in shadow, darkened by the immense bulk overhead. Luanne laid her hand on Garvey’s cool forehead. “What did you make out there, baby?”

“A tower. I saw it when I was in the hole. I don’t know what it means, but I had to make it. It’s sort of a giant clock. Let’s go outside and see how it turned out.”

The structure overhead was inconceivably vast. Standing under it was like standing under the Eiffel tower. Garvey and Luanne had to walk a good five minutes till they could get a decent view of the thing. People were milling about like excited ants, but for the moment no one stopped the Carrandines. They reached a good vantage-point and feasted their eyes.

“I
drew
that,” murmured Luanne. Garvey just smiled, happier than he’d ever been.

The tower was a giant cone swept out by two linked spirals. Supported by a great spare lattice of strutwork, the spirals narrowed up to a point hundreds and hundreds of feet overhead. Inside the giant structure were four great glass jewels, four whole buildings suspended one above the other: a cube, a triangular pyramid, a cylinder, and a hemisphere.

“They rotate,” said Garvey. “The cube once a year, the tetrahedron once a month, the cylinder once a week, and the hemisphere once a day. It’s never the same. A monument with moving parts.”

“Can we go in?”

“Yeah. See that?” Garvey pointed to a great slanting shaft that leaned up along one side of the tower. A shaft twice the height of the Empire State Building. “There’s elevators in there. The cube is an exhibition hall, the pyramid is an auditorium, the cylinder is offices, and the hemisphere…the hemisphere is for us.”

“There they are,” someone shouted. “There’s Carrandine and his wife! Get them!”

The fat doctor and some other men came rushing up to Garvey and Luanne. “Did you build this thing?”

“Uh …”

“Sure Garvey built it! You should be down on your knees thanking him, man.”

“Do you know what this tower is, Carrandine?”

“I—I got the idea for it when I was stuck in that hole.”

“No wonder. We found the Russian time-capsule down in the bottom. A Communist artist named Vladimir Tatlin dreamed up the design for this tower in 1919.
Monument to the Third International
. Fortunately the Soviets never had the funds to construct it. But now you …”

“Talk about uptight!” interrupted Luanne. “What’s ‘the Third Inter-national’ supposed to be?”

No one seemed to know. And once Garvey had promised to manage the monument’s rental and upkeep, no one really cared. The great tower stands in Killeville to this day—go see it next time you’re down South!

============

Written in 1983.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, December, 1984.

Our Lynchburg friends Henry and Diana Vaughan did indeed own a dress-shop. I saw a model of Tatlin’s proposed
Monument to the Third International
in the
Moscow-Paris
exhibition at the Pompidou Center, and then I saw the model again in a TV documentary.

Denny Blevins was a dreamer who didn’t like to think. Drugs and no job put his head in just the right place for this. If at all possible, he liked to get wired and spend the day lying on his rooming house mattress and looking out the window at the sky. On clear days he could watch his eyes’ phosphenes against the bright blue; and on cloudy days he’d dig the clouds’ drifty motions and boiling edges. One day he realized his window-dirt was like a constant noise-hum in the system, so he knocked out the pane that he usually looked through. The sky was even better then, and when it rained he could watch the drops coming in. At night he might watch the stars, or he might get up and roam the city streets for deals.

His Dad, whom he hadn’t seen in several years, died that April. Denny flew out to the funeral. His big brother Allen was there, with Dad’s insurance money. Turned out they got $15K apiece.

“Don’t squander it, Denny,” said Allen, who was an English teacher. “Time’s winged chariot for no man waits! You’re getting older and it’s time you found a career. Go to school and learn something. Or buy into a trade. Do something to make Dad’s soul proud.”

“I will,” said Denny, feeling defensive. Instead of talking in clear he used the new cyberslang. “I’ll get so cashy and so starry so zip you won’t believe it, Allen. I’ll get a tunebot, start a motion, and cut a choicey vid. Denny in the Clouds with Clouds. Untense, bro, I’ve got plex ideas.”

When Denny got back to his room he got a new sound system and a self-playing electric guitar. And scored a lot of dope and food-packs. The days went by; the money dwindled to $9K. Early in June the phone rang.

“Hello, Denny Blevins?” The voice was false and crackly.

“Yes!” Denny was glad to get a call from someone besides Allen. It seemed like lately Allen was constantly calling him up to nag.

“Welcome to the future. I am Phil, a phonebot cybersystem designed to contact consumer prospects. I would like to tell about the on-line possibilities open to you. Shall I continue?”

“Yes,” said Denny.

It turned out the “Phil the phonebot” was a kind of computerized phone salesman. The phonebot was selling phonebots which you, the consumer prospect, could use to sell phonebots to others. It was—though Denny didn’t realize this—a classic Ponzi pyramid scheme, like a chain letter, or like those companies which sell people franchises to sell franchises to sell franchises to sell …

The phonebot had a certain amount of interactivity. It asked a few yes/no questions; and whenever Denny burst in with some comment, it would pause, say, “That’s right, Denny! But listen to the rest!” and continue. Denny was pleased to hear his name so often. Alone in his room, week after week, he’d been feeling his reality fade. Writing original songs for the guitar was harder than he’d expected. It would be nice to have a robot friend. At the end, when Phil asked for his verdict, Denny said, “Okay, Phil, I want you. Come to my rooming-house tomorrow and I’ll have the money.”

The phonebot was not the arm-waving clanker that Denny, in his ignorance, had imagined. It was, rather, a flat metal box that plugged right into the wall phone-socket. The box had a slot for an electronic directory, and a speaker for talking to its owner. It told Denny he could call it Phil; all the phonebots were named Phil. The basic phonebot sales spiel was stored in the Phil’s memory, though you could change the patter if you wanted. You could, indeed, use the phonebot to sell things other than phonebots.

The standard salespitch lasted five minutes, and one minute was allotted to the consumer’s responses. If everyone answered, listened, and responded, the phonebot could process ten prospects per hour, and one hundred twenty in a 9 A. M. – 9 P. M. day! The whole system cost nine thousand dollars, though as soon as you bought one and joined the pyramid, you could get more of them for six. Three thousand dollars profit for each phonebot your phonebot could sell! If you sold, say, one a day, you’d make better than $100K a year!

The electronic directory held all the names and numbers in the city; and each morning it would ask Denny who he wanted to try today. He could select the numbers on the day’s calling list on the basis of neighborhood, last name, family size, type of business and so on.