Fun House (4 page)

“What can’t we do in ten days?” she smiled. “The fields of love, ploughboy!”

It was pointless talking to her. I headed for the door, and ten minutes later I was at L. and O. Headquarters on the Rue de la Paix. The Commissioner was waiting for me. He had left Washington by Coastal Rocket a few hours after me but arrived two hours sooner. The first thing I asked him about was Gladys Ellsberg.

“My dear Crockett,” he broke in on me. “A man operates best when his emotional needs are satisfied. Here we have provided you with all the comforts of home — ”

“In the atmosphere of a whore house!” I finished for him. “I don’t like it! I’m kept in the dark about this St. Ewagiow convention while this woman knows everything.”

“That’s Their doing, Crockett. You’re not an alien but still you aren’t one of us. The Board is suspicious of you. Please be reasonable! I’ve gone against the Board to bring you into the country. If you fail I’ll be out of my job.”

“We’ll all be out of our jobs. We’ll all be dead.”

“Let’s not put the hearse before the horse. We hope this St. Ewagiow show will attract Barnum Fly.”

“Is that what the Board predicts?”

“It’s what our agents in the St. Ewagiow predict. If our man comes to town the probabilities are 9.74 x: y that he’ll see his daughter. Let me brief you on Cleo Fly. She’s twenty-four years old, born in 1995. And very beautiful. So beautiful she required only minor treatment at the Garden of Eden Salons. She was lengthened by two inches and a tendency to excessive thinness was corrected.” He paused and shook his head as if considering some astonishing facts. Then he said, “There is no record of any men in her life. It’s her job of course. She’s one of the attendants at Atomic Amusement Park.”

“Her job?”

“Most of the employees there are indifferent to sex. It’s occuptional with them.”

“I don’t understand, Elvis.”

“These thrill jobs! How can I make you understand? It’s like being loved by a giant. The public has a nickname for the Atomic attendants. Fission-proof virgins,” he smiled faintly. “And this is where you come in, Crockett. You’re to make her acquaintance. At least it can begin as an acquaintance.”

I stared at him with disgust. His blond, insipid face hardened for a second. “The assignment’s beneath you? I thought you had some ideals? I thought you believed in a future for mankind?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not a future as a studhorse!”

“Crockett, you’ve seen my men! None of them would have the patience, not when the country’s full of women to whom fornication is as natural as a respiration. Neatly put, isn’t it, Crockett? For a situation of this sort we need a man like you.”

“Why don’t you send a member of the Board?”

“An amusing idea, but you and I know the necessities of our profession. We can contact Barnum Fly through his daughter. And one contact leads to another,” he added coarsely.

That last comment was too much for me. I rushed to the door while he called. “You need a rest, Crockett. Have fun.”

I returned to the Hotel Pompadour. Gladys had gone, and since she was one of the natives I could guess what she was up to. I cursed her, the Commissioner and the Board. Then I searched the room for what I wanted — the wall taps that were featured in the hotels of Greater Miami. They were on the wall next to the bathroom door. There was bourbon and rye and five or six drinks I had never heard of. I tried a bourbon but was too excited for it to have any effect. I switched to opgin
¹
. As soon as I swallowed an inch of the stuff I felt as if I’d been kicked in the head. Then seven or eight black spots floated before me, on each spot a seated Turkish beauty. I guessed they were Turkish for they were wearing veils, only veils. I drank a second opgin and instantly the floor rushed up and hit me. In fact when I stood up I was completely sober.

To hell with a drink like that, I thought. I picked up a chair and heaved it at the mirror. The glass tinkled, a pleasant tinkle and my nerves relaxed. That opgin had its points, I thought and poured myself a third shot. There before me on the couch was my wife or maybe it was Gladys smiling and waving. I hurried over when suddenly the floor seemed to break open and a swarm of those Turkish beauties flew up at me like devils, their veils red as fire …

When I recovered consciousness I was lying on the floor. It was solid, everything a floor should be. I tried to stand up but was too dizzy. My head was pounding and through the pounding I heard a voice saying. “How do you feel, darling?”

It was Gladys, but what I saw were two blurs, one black, the other yellow, and both blurs were vibrating in a sickening biological rhythm with my insides. “I’m sick,” I moaned.

“Serves my little sparrow right for drinking while I’ve been working.”

“Working!” I cried. “You don’t know what work is!” I felt a little steadier. The yellow blur, I realized, was her hair, the black blur her dress. She was wearing one of the shroud-like dresses of the St. Ewagiow, a miniature silver coffin
¹
pinned to it for ornament. “Where did you get that awful rag?”

“It’s not a rag. It’s the latest style, darling. I know what you need.” She hurried to the wall taps and returned with a glass full of some violet-colored stuff
²
. “This’ll help you, darling.”

I drank it. I felt it slide down my throat into my stomach and then slide up into my head, and as it slid it scraped. As if there were iron combs inside of me. I hollered and shrieked and sweated and in about a minute I was normal.

“My little sparrow feels better?” she smiled.

“Please don’t sparrow me, I’m still weak.”

“Well, darling, I’ll get back to work.”

“Work!” I hooted. “That’s our word, not yours.”

“Is that so? We can work twice as hard as any dozen of you redskins when we’re inoculated — ”

“Inoculated with what? Opgin?”

“Darling,” she smiled. “You’re slowly acquiring a sense of humor. Congratulations. But to answer your question. When we’re inoculated with Bee-Ambo
³
we really do work.”

“I don’t know that one.”

“Bee-Ambo is a derivative made of the hormones of the honey bee.”

“And it makes you work?”

“Like a bee.”

“Why isn’t it injected wholesale?” I said excitedly. “Everybody ought to be injected and told the A-I-D is missing. We could organize the greatest manhunt in history — ”

“There’s no need for a manhunt, darling, or They would have ordered it.”

“They!” I exclaimed. “It’s always They. What we should think of is us. People working for themselves, for their future!”

“Darling, you’ve missed the crux of the matter. In order to work well you have to be able to think well. Bee-Ambo would cause people to think for themselves. Why risk a state of intellectual anarchy when we have such marvelous Thinkers?”

“You’ve surrendered your brains to your Marvelous Thinkers!” I shouted. “It might be all right in ordinary times but not now. Now’s the time for everybody to begin thinking, and I mean everybody. You, me, that man who drove the Shrinkmobile, everybody with a life to lose!”

For a second I thought I had convinced her, particularly since she had been intellectually inoculated as you might say. But then her eyes flashed. “I’m loyal to our form of Government!”

“So am I, Gladys, but don’t you think the Government should call on its people in an emergency like this one?”

“What do you want of me?” she snapped. “You must really think I’m that stupid wife of yours, working from sunrise to sundown in that stupid utopia of yours. No, darling, I may resemble your wife but I’m not! I believe in the American way of life and don’t tell me so do you. You’re playing a childish game out of a past we’ve left behind us. You pitiful work slaves! Atomic power
¹
had freed us from slavery, biology from hunger. We alone have realized man’s dream of happiness on earth — ”

“The ant’s dream of happiness. Every ant picked for his job at the age of six!”

“Our jobs aren’t important to us, you pitiful fool. We live for happiness. What else does man want on this earth?”

“Happiness, yes, but man is more than a bundle of flesh made for fun. Man is also a thinking, feeling brain and your Thinkers have taken away your brains!”

“I won’t listen to your talk. It’s traitorous!”

“It’s democratic!”

She was silent, and again I thought I had convinced her. Then she said. “This is no time for political debate. While you’ve been indulging that bundle of flesh of yours, I’ve searched Cleo Fly’s room. You might be interested to know she’s an addict.”

“I know all about that Atomic thrill job of hers.”

“I’m talking of her habits off her job, dear bundle,” she said sarcastically. “I found a box of Sweet Dreams in her room. But we better go now.”

“Go where?”

“The Commissioner has reserved her for you for ten tonight.”

“Reserved her?”

“Not as a soul-mate, darling. That’s my assignment. We’re going to Atomic Park. You can’t go on the horrid little amusements there without a trained attendant along. That’s the law.”

“Horrid little amusements,” I repeated nervously.

“I almost went out of my mind on the Rollercoaster!” She sighed. “It’s a risk, darling, especially for someone with your quiet background. But you can’t meet her when she’s Sweet Dreaming. You have to meet her when she’s more or less conscious.”

Listening to her I felt an odd sensation, as if she were really my wife giving me advice.

We went downstairs for a Shrinkmobile. There were none in sight. We crossed the Seine. It was almost evening. The moon shone in the water, while up in the sky the towers and domes of the moon’s cities gleamed with man-made lights. So far away, this outpost of humanity, I thought, and yet so close by Lunar Rocket.

We passed a sidewalk café. At the tables many of the women wore St. Ewagiow outfits, their roenfoam brassieres glowing dimly in the twilight. “This daughter of Barnum Fly must have been a wild one,” I said, “To be picked for a job like hers at the age of six!”

“Her job didn’t exist when she was six. Atomic Park is new. Her father had her transferred to it. He had special privileges as a holder of the Supreme Court Medal of Distinguished Pleasure. Don’t forget he created Atomic Park.”

“He
wanted
her to work in a place like that! Where she wouldn’t want to marry and have children?”

“You’re so wholesome, darling.”

Before I could answer there was a terrific explosion. The A-I-D! I thought in panic and ran for shelter. Flinging myself under a sidewalk table I waited for the end. And heard laughter. It got louder, closer. In the blinding white light that had followed the explosion, I looked at the legs of a crowd surrounding my table. Somebody pulled at my ankle. I was coaxed out by an L. and O. officer in the uniform of a French gendarme
¹
. He led me away from the crowd and pointed up at the sky, his pointing finger a bright red, for the light had changed. “There will be five fission-fusion blasts tonight, monsieur,” he explained. “It is the convention. Five fission-fusion blasts but harmless as the breath of a mother.
Honi soit qui mal il pense
²
” he said, and in French fashion kissed me on both cheeks before walking off.

“I see a cab,” Gladys called. “Wait here, darling.”

I felt like the biggest fool in the world. The street was flickering with red light. I started walking. I passed a little square where I had a clear view of the huge mushroom I had first seen in the morning. It had been lit up for the evening. But lit-up doesn’t describe that hideous balloon. It was cooking with colors, smoking and boiling, and only its white skull-shaped center remained constant.

I shook my fist at the nightmare in the sky and at all the St. Ewagiows of this world. No, I vowed to myself, they weren’t going to get this country of mine. “Damn you!” I yelled in my emotion.

Again, the tourists began to flock around me, their faces turning orange and black and red in the changing lights. “What’s the matter with him?” I heard somebody asking. “Too much gay Paree,” somebody else said, and the crowd laughed. Just then Gladys came up in a Shrinkmobile and shouted. “Darling, here I am.”

I got into the cab and she said. “That was a perfect introduction to Atomic Park! Fission-Fusion or do you just feel confusion?”

I was still inside the Funhouse, I thought. But I was no longer bitter. I knew that if I was going to save my way of life, I just had to save their way. It was one world.

Atomic Amusement Park was situated on the western edge of the city, and the first sight of it was depressing. In the middle of a great lawn was a walled city bathed in a strange white light that somehow reminded me of heavy white water. The Shrinkmobiles ahead of it seemed to be traveling along the bottom of a sea. As for Gladys, she had become silent, not a joke in her. “Maybe you won’t pass the test,” she whispered.

“What test?”

“The medical. I’m not going in with you, darling, I can’t, I simply can’t! Driver, stop!”

She kissed me and wished me luck. More depressed than ever I drove in alone through a segment of the wall that seemed to have vanished. Another invention of the magicientist Barnum Fly, I thought. Behind the wall, the procession of Shrinkmobiles pulled up in front of a windowless building that was some fifty feet high and approximately a mile long
¹
. Above its roof, the name of the Park flickered like lightning:
ATOMIC AMUSEMENT PARK.

“You ever go?”
I
asked my driver.

“When I was younger,” he said. “That Atomic Rollercoaster, there’s a thrill!”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s great, great, but I guess I’m too old.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It was two months before I stopped shaking.”

“Some fun,” I muttered.

“It’s great fun. I just can’t take it any more.”

I got out of the cab and followed the crowd into a big waiting room whose walls and ceiling were covered with soft white gauze. It puzzled me a second until I realized it was nothing but bandage. There were no furnishings, no framed medical diplomas on the walls, no chairs. The crowd stood in small groups, whispering excitedly as they waited. Suddenly a Voice
²
sounded from somewhere. “Welcome to Atomic Amusement Park. Your entertainment is Our pleasure.” It was a deep booming friendly Voice that reminded me of the doctor we had back home.