The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) Page 5

  tunnels, so that now most of these heavy homes had sunk into it. Park Avenue was mainly a row of rusty fences and weedy lots. Occasionally one might glimpse through the hollyhocks a tower, its conical hat askew.

  Only two of these curios still stood firm. Both were grey, trailing the dirty lace of their porches, swaybacked, pot-bellied and senile. One of them, after its ruined owner had flung himself in front of one of his own trains, had been converted into a warehouse. It now held all the reuttite mantles produced between 1904 and 1929—nearly all the reuttite there was, and representing 25 years of attempts to find some use for it other than gas mantles.

  The other house was still, as it had always been, the Smilax house. Phineas Smilax, the first and only president of the Gardnerville, Fernley and New York Railway (‘Route of Reuttite’), had invested heavily in the mineral. He had hoped that, as he and Altoona grew richer, the line would actually extend as far east as New York City.

  Phineas began building his railroad line in 1885. The work progressed slowly, and this was in part due to certain peculiarities in his hiring policies. Orders existed to fire any man caught beating a horse, drowning a kitten, or tying a can to a dog’s tail. He further refused the coolie labour his competitors relied upon, preferring instead bible students, who sang, at his request, hymns while they worked. His favourite hymn was The Celestial Railroad. Despite his paying them the then-lavish wage of one dollar an hour, the students were so poorly suited to this work that progress was measured at first in feet per month, then in inches. By 1913, his empire stretched from Altoona to Warm Springs, a fifty-eight-mile vista of sagebrush which he inspected daily in his private car.

  This car was the only luxury Phineas permitted himself, for he believed in moderation in all things. The excess of his fortune was always distributed to charities, among which he never scanted the Animal Protection League. Phineas was known to all as a kindly and temperate man—no less to his own children than to strangers. He never chastised his son and daughter by more than a reproving frown, and more was never required.

  Perhaps the only fault his neighbours might have found with him was in his choice of servants. Phineas had taken into his employ in the great house in Altoona people from the Nevada Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

  ‘Criminals, pish !’ he would exclaim. ‘They are merely poor unfortunates, languishing for want of a kind word.’ For over twenty years he had no other servants, and a gentler, more trustworthy set could scarce be found.

  One day in 1913 Phineas sat looking out the window of his private car at the sagebrush, state flower of Nevada. ‘I feel old, today,’ he remarked to his secretary, who afterwards remembered it as the first time he had ever heard his master complain. ‘I feel I’m getting near the end of the line.’

  The secretary handed him a telegram from his butler, back in Altoona. Phineas Smilax read it and fell from his chair, dead.

  The telegram read, ‘DAUGHTER ENCEINTE REPEAT PREGGERS STOP HAVE BEATEN HER WITH HORSEWHIP AND DRIVEN HER FROM THE TOWN ALTHOUGH I AM FATHER OF THE CHILD STOP PLEASE ADVISE DISPOSITION HER CLOTHING PORTRAIT ETCETERA STOP SIGNED CRAGELL’.

  The daughter was never found. Cragell, having admitted to raping Lotte and frightening her into silence for several months, was returned to the Asylum. Phineas Jr. took over his father’s debts and began his own family, sired on a feeble-minded maidservant. By his own daughter he had an indeterminate number of children also, and hanged himself in 1930, when the last of the railroad had gone to pay his bootleggers. Three generations of illiterate Smilaxes still lived in the grey house, gardening in its yard. They never spoke of their banished relative, Lotte.

  Rusty rails now stretched away from Altoona in three directions. Only the Nevada Southern continued to operate one train a week between Altoona and Las Vegas. Mary Junes Beele had circled on her calendar the day on which that train would leave. Tomorrow was the circled day.

  The Beeles had now been here two weeks, and each had made a certain reputation. No one liked Mary. The women did not like the deliberating way she looked over their menfolk. Their menfolk did not like the insolent way she deliberated and rejected them. No one liked the way she treated her husband.

  Barthemo, on the other hand, was sought out to about the same degree that Mary was snubbed. He was, after all, the finest gossip the town had ever seen, having already aired one new scandal and dug up a dozen old ones in his first week on the job. As a result of the very first issue of the Altoona Truth, two families were not speaking, and there was talk of a divorce, a spite fence, a duel. He reported everything, with scrupulous

  objectivity and in delicious detail. It was said that one day Beele would describe his own cuckolding fairly.

  Filled with sweet loathing for her husband, Mary entered the press room, where he was reading a proof.

  ‘Your coperation is appreciated,’ he read, then paused to add an ‘o’. He did not greet his wife or acknowledge her existence in any way. ‘… how long will these goings-on continue?’ he read, then amended it to ‘… how long will these goings-on go on?’

  ‘Yaddadda yaddadda go on?’ she mocked.

  He continued reading.

  ‘No one ever comes to this damned town,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing ever happens in this damned town,’ she added.

  ‘The only time we see a fresh face in this damned town,’ she concluded, ‘is when someone strays off the road to Vegas.’

  ‘What about that hitchhiker? He isn’t on the way to Las Vegas, but to the US Navy Ammunition Depot.’

  ‘Oh, the sailor. He doesn’t count. I’m bored with him already,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Can I use the car tonight, by the way?’

  Her husband nodded, not looking up from his proof. ‘Find out if you can,’ he said, ‘why he has those tattoos of Dumbo and Bambi on his arms. There might be a feature story in that—human interest, you know, something for the puzzle page.’

  That night, while Barthemo Beele was inserting into his paper a late news item about the adultery of an editor’s wife, Mary and the sailor were discovering, in the back seat of the Ford, that they were very drunk. The Ford was parked at the edge of town, near the entrance of the Lost Albanian Mine.

  ‘I hear something,’ mumbled the sailor. ‘It ain’t your old man, is it?’

  ‘Him? Don’t worry,’ Mary said, laying a hand on Bambi. ‘Listen, he’s busy right now, putting the paper to bed. He’s some kind of—not freak—neurotic, I guess. All he cares about is putting the damned paper to bed. Altoona Truth. He wants to bring out a Sunday edition called the Altoona Altruist. Faugh !’ She took a drink down savagely, then another.

  ‘Shh. Someone out there, baby. Hey, maybe it’s the Lost Albanian himself, eh? Ha ha.’ He poured himself a paper cup of gin and swallowed it. As long as they were this drunk, there seemed no point in stopping.

  ‘Don’t even say that joking !’ she gasped. ‘They say if you see

  the Lost Albanian, the world is coming to an end. Jesus, that would be a story for Barty, now, wouldn’t it? Let’s change the subject. Are you gonna take me away on the train tomorrow or not?’

  ‘Sure I am.’

  A low, blocky shape appeared, ghostly grey, at the dark entrance to the mine shaft. It scuttled across the moonlit stretch of ground towards them.

  ‘Snakes !’ screamed the sailor. ‘I’ve gone snakey !’

  ‘You can drink all you want,’ murmured Mary sleepily. She had not seen the shape. ‘As long as you take me away from the Altoona Tooth … I mean the …’ She dozed, resting her dirty knot of hair upon Dumbo. The sailor did not notice. He peered fearfully out in the dark, looking for more hallucinations. So this was the DT’s ! Only a few days before, he had finished his tour of duty at Wompler Research, where all hell had broken loose—little grey boxes. It must be that they were stuck in his unconscious somehow, and the DT’s released them, he theorized. Something clanked under the car, but he refused to hear it. He closed his eyes and sipped gin,
until, a certain percentage of his blood becoming alcohol, he slept.

  At 11 : 00 the next morning Barthemo Beele and the town marshal woke them up.

  ‘Hey, where’s the car?’ groaned the sailor.

  ‘We’ve been robbed !’ Mary exclaimed.

  Barthemo busied himself taking pictures of the couple from various angles, while the marshal questioned them about the robbery. The four of them compiled a list of the stolen articles :

  1 bracelet, ankle, lady’s

  1 clasp, metal, purse

  1 zipper, metal, dress

  1 lipstick

  1 compact

  2 silver dollars and an unknown amount of change, several hairpins

  2 cigarette lighters

  1 aluminium comb various keys

  2 silver fillings from Mary’s teeth

  1 gold tooth from sailor

  1 automobile, Ford.

  ‘I’ll go phone this into the highway patrol, just as soon as the lines are working again,’ said the marshal. ‘You know it’s a funny thing. Just about every car in town has been stolen. Bicycles, too, and I don’t know what-all. And wouldn’t you know it, my highway patrol radio transmitter got misplaced too.’ He wandered off, in the direction of the Town Talk Bar.

  ‘Very interesting,’ the editor mused. He, too, had been hearing strange rumours and complaints all morning. Now, as he sat down in the grass beside Mary and the sailor, his mind began spinning out headlines for an extra edition :

  NO WHEELS? ANTI-CLIMAX

  ‘The telephone lines are down,’ he murmured. ‘So are the power lines. Odd.’

  ‘I’m leaving you, Barty,’ Mary said.

  ‘And at least a dozen cars stolen—old cars, too.’

  ‘I’m going on the noon train with Lovey,’ she said firmly. The sailor looked abashed.

  ‘You might think that someone wanted to cut Altoona off from the outside world,’ Beele said.

  ‘To Las Vegas. I’m not coming back.’

  ‘I can assume either that they don’t want us to know what is going on outside, or—and what is more likely—they want to keep those outside from knowing what is going on here. Very odd.’

  ‘Monster ! Monster !’ she screamed, inches from his vacant eyes.

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ he said abstractedly. ‘Monsters from outer space have kidnapped us, and we don’t know it yet.’

  He wondered if the Air Force’s nearby radar shack knew of the strange phenomenon … or if they had been affected by it. Whole new panoramas of headlines opened before his inner vision, miles of exclusive copy.

  NO RADAR ON?

  —

  AF WIRELESS

  —

  We will toast neither our bread nor our power company this

  a.m. The lines are down. The lines that supply us with power, heat, light, communication, our umbilical cords to the outside world all down. Moreover we are without transportation. There is not a vehicle left in town : not a car, not a bicycle, not so much as a roller skate. Yet even more frightening is the prospect of impairment of our national defence network. How soon are our complacent authorities going to come too, and realize …

  Mary and the sailor did not further disturb his reverie. Rising, they dusted themselves off and strolled away in the direction of the station. Barthemo wondered if a sarcastic public notice would be more appropriate.

  Due to circumstances beyond, it seems, the control of the city fathers, there will be a slight interruption termination in a few of our public utilities …

  It registered on him then that Mary was gone. To the station. But if whoever was cutting off Altoona from the outside world were as thorough as they seemed, it was a sure bet they would not miss the train. He would take his camera. He would take pictures of them actually stealing a train, 60-second pictures, with his new camera.

  By one minute to twelve he was hidden under the station platform, his camera beside him. When he had stopped at the office to pick it up, a dozen people had tried to waylay and buttonhole him. There were conflicting stories about the water and gas being cut off, about walking tool boxes—and one intriguing item about poltergeists at the old Ruyteck house, the warehouse for gas mantles.

  WHO HAUNTS WAREHOUSE?

  —

  Neighbours rattled by ghostly knocks

  He could not get over the feeling that he was not alone in the darkness.

  The train from Las Vegas, no special, came puffing hi a leisurely ten minutes late, took on mail, took on water, took on two passengers, a woman and a sailor, and puffed off again in the direction it had come. Aside from the goggled engineer’s waving at the woman passenger as she boarded, nothing seemed odd.

  Suddenly there was a crunching sound close at hand. The editor turned to see a large blocky shape beside him, digesting his camera. It seemed to do so with difficulty, as though it were full already, yet it remained in place, while its crab-claw hands picked up every crumb. So this was it !

  ‘Eureka !’ he cried, and, as was his habit, unnecessarily translated, ‘I have found it !’ Leaping up joyfully, he brought his head into painful and concussive contact with the bottom of the platform. What else do metal boxes eat? he wondered as consciousness fled. What would I eat, if I were a metal box? Surely not an editor …?

  He awoke some time that afternoon to find the thing no longer beside him. His tongue noted fillings missing, and his belt no longer functioned. No buckle. These were reassurances that he had not been dreaming. Zap! Even the metal spring from his notepad was gone; even the lead from his pencil. He could see the banner now :

  GNAWING GNOME PUTS BITE ON TEETH, BELTS BUCKLE

  —

  Foxy box has goat-like appetite

  With maybe a cut of the thing munching a tin can. Barthemo felt he had it made.

  Rumours came to meet him as he passed along Park Avenue, and more than rumours. Flying saucers, thousands of fire-breathing monsters were solemnly attested to by sober citizens. Great, he thought. Next it’ll be a telepath as big as a house. He gnashed his unfilled teeth on their silly rumours. Barthemo Beele considered himself a lover of truth, stranger to fiction.

  Why, it’s as though it read my mind! he thought, staring at the Ruyteck house. The poltergeist no longer haunted the building—it had become the building. Seemingly the crumbling grey castle had come to life; it tipped and swayed in a clumsy sort of dance. His mind refused to function—except to curse the loss of his camera. Here was a million-dollar picture, and it could only happen in the West, where monsters were monsters.

  The worn edifice shivered and rattled obscenely—he thought of the rotting corpse of a dowager doing the twist—and stretched itself upwards, rising, as it were, on tiptoe. Its towers stopped slumping and actually towered, as nails screamed from boards,

  mould-softened timbers flaked apart, and a century of dust boiled from every crack.

  The old house gave a final shudder, shaking off ornaments and pieces of window as if they were drops of water, swayed, tipped up crazily on one corner and—

  Disappeared. Came to pieces so suddenly and completely that it was like a vanishing trick. Turned in an instant from a solid building to a pile of flat lumber. A bouncing cluster of bright metal boxes exploded from the remains and skipped about aimlessly, as though getting their bearings. They broke apart and bounced off in different directions, then, but all with seeming purpose. The editor noted one peculiarity about this set of monsters—their surfaces seemed to be made of gas mantles, stuck together in some way.

  MARTIAN MONSTERS THE MCCOY

  —

  Plunder house, don gas mantles

  He followed one of the trundling boxes up Park Avenue to the corner of Broadway, where it paused at a fire hydrant.

  DOGS WILL BE ALIENS

  But the box was surrounding the hydrant. It split apart, then closed over it. A moment later there came a small geyser from the assembly. He saw a sort of crude water-wheel, fashioned like a child’s pinwheel, spinning in
the middle of the jet. A small box detached itself from the assembly and dashed away. Part of its surface, he noted, was of red-painted cast iron.

  INVADER WEDS FIREPLUG

  —

  Can this marriage last?

  In the distance the water tower, a giant golf ball on a tee, began to wilt. He watched it dent and collapse, as grey shapes swarmed over it.

  AU REVOIR, OUR RESERVOIR

  He thought of simply filling up the headline with question marks, but there were not enough in the type case to do so. There were not even enough to take care of all the questions he wanted to put to his readership.

  He turned and headed for the office. It was only by chance that he peered in the door of Smilax’s Hardware—after all, like all the other buildings on the block, its windows were smashed—but what he saw made him halt.

  What he did not see, rather. The store was utterly empty, looted clean. He found the owner, Milo Smilax, lying on the floor at the back, weeping. The metal frames from the bottom halves of his glasses were missing, naturally. He babbled of washing machines. Never a coherent man at best, Milo was now gubbling :

  ‘I’m a dead man, they ruint me ! The washing goddamned machines boxes washing machines ruint me eating guns. Help me mama don’t tell boxes tell fare thee Wellington remington Washington ne’er-do-well. They eat the coal scuttling like grabs up anything handy saws gone screws gone knives gone fishing rods the …’

  Dr. Trivian would have said the shelves were unfulfilled. In fact, about all that remained were the seed catalogues, the price tags, and a worn, scuffed cardboard sign. Milo stared at the sign as he babbled on. It said, ‘LOOKING FOR TOOLS?’ The pupils of LOOK’S eyes were looking at the blank eyes of TOOLS. ‘SEE OUR SAWS’.

  ‘It’s the end ! Ruint ! Nails, saws, chains, everything gone with the w—’

  ‘The end? It is, is it? Is that any way to talk, Milo? I’ll admit it looks bad right now, but we haven’t got the big picture, have we? I mean, we have to fight this thing—or these things—not just lay around crying. We have got to—’