The Age of the Pussyfoot Read online

“Do you wish other clothing, Man Forrester?”

  “Don’t confuse me. Just hold on a minute,” he said, rattled and angry. He thought for a minute. “I don’t know who this Hirowatsis is—”

  “Taiko Hironibi, Man Forrester. Male, dendritic Confucian—”

  “Cut that out!” Forrester was breathing hard. Abruptly the joymaker in his hand hissed and sprayed him with something that felt damp for a second, then dissipated.

  Forrester felt himself relaxing. He appreciated the tranquilizing spray, without quite liking the idea of having a machine prescribe and dispense it.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “what do I care who he is? Go ahead. Send him in. And get a move on with my breakfast, will you?”

  “You’ll do!” cried Taiko Hironibi. “The greatest! What a cranial index! You look—cripes, I don’t know what to call it—you look like a brain. But a swinger.”

  Charles Forrester, gravely and cheerfully, indicated a seat with his hand. “Sit down. I don’t know what you want but I’m willing to talk about it. You’re the damnedest looking Japanese I ever saw.”

  “Really?” The man looked disconcerted. He also looked quite non-Japanese: crew-cut golden hair, blue eyes. “They change you around so,” he said apologetically. “Maybe I used to look different. Say! Did I get here first?”

  “You got here before my breakfast, even.”

  “Great! That’s really great. Now, here’s the thing. We’re all messed up here, you have to get that straight right away. The people are sheep. They know they’re being expropriated, but do they do anything about it? Sweat, no, they sit back and enjoy it. That’s what we’re for in the Ned Lud Society. I don’t know your politics, Charley—”

  “I used to be a Democrat, mostly.”

  “—Well, you can forget that. It doesn’t matter. I’m registered Arcadian myself, of course, but a lot of the guys are Trimmers, maybe—” he winked— “maybe even something a little worse, you know? We’re all in this together. Affects everybody. If you raise your kids with machines you’re bound to have machine-lovers growing up, right? Now—”

  “Hey!” said Forrester, looking at his wall. At a point as near as he could remember to be just about where the bed had disappeared, a sphincter was opening again. It disgorged a table set for two, one side bearing his breakfast, the other a complete setting but no food.

  “Ah, breakfast,” said Taiko Hironibi. He opened a pouch in the kiltlike affair he wore and took out a small capped bowl, a plastic box that turned out to contain something like crackers, and a globe, which, when squeezed, poured a hot, watery, greenish tea into the cup at his place. “Care for a pickled plum?” he asked politely, removing the cap from the bowl.

  Forrester shook his head. Chairs had appeared beside the table, and he slid into the one placed before the ham and eggs.

  Next to the steaming plate was a small crystal tray containing a capsule and a scrap of golden paper on which was written:

  I don’t know much about that champagne wine. Take this if you have a hungover.

  Hara

  To the best of Forrester’s knowledge he didn’t have a hangover, but the capsule looked too good to waste. He swallowed it with some of the orange juice and at once felt even more relaxed. If that were possible. He felt positively affectionate toward the blond Japanese, now decorously nibbling at a dark, withered object.

  It crossed Forrester’s mind that the capsule, plus what the joymaker had sprayed him with, might add up to something larger than he was ready for. He felt almost giddy. Better guard against that, he thought, and demanded as unpleasantly as he could, “Who sent you here?”

  “Why—the contact was Adne Bensen.”

  “Don’t know her,” snapped Forrester, trying not to grin.

  “You don’t?” Taiko stopped eating, dismayed. “Sweat, man, she told me you’d be—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” cried Forrester, and prepared for the killing question he had been saving. “Just tell me this. What’s the advantage of my joining your society?”

  The blond man was clearly disgruntled. “Listen, I’m not begging you. We got something good here. You want in, come in. You want out, go—”

  “No, don’t give me an argument. Just answer the question.” Forrester managed to light a cigarette, puffed smoke in Taiko’s face. “For instance,” he said, “would it be money that’s involved?”

  “Well, sure. Everybody needs money, right? But that’s not the only thing—”

  Forrester said, politely but severely, restraining the impulse to giggle, “You know, I had an idea it would be like that.” His two tranquilizers, plus what was still in his system from the previous night, were adding up to something very close to a roaring drunk, he noticed. With some pride. How manly of him, he thought, to keep his wits so clear when he was so smashed.

  “You act like I’m trying to take advantage of you,” Taiko said angrily. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that the machines are depriving us of our natural human birthright? to be miserable if we want to, to make mistakes, to forget things? Don’t you see that we Luddites want to smash the machines and give the world back to people? I mean, not counting the necessary machines, of course.”

  “Sure I see,” agreed Forrester, standing up and swaying slightly. “Well, thanks. You better be going now, Hironibi. I’ll think over what you said, and maybe we can get together some time. But don’t you call me. Let me call you.” And he bowed Taiko to the door and watched it close behind him, keeping his face relaxed until the Japanese was gone.

  Then Forrester bent over and howled with laughter. “Con man!” he shouted. “He thinks I’m an easy mark! Ah, the troubles of the rich—always somebody trying to swindle you out of it!”

  “I do not understand, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker. “Are you addressing me?”

  “Not in this life,” Forrester told the machine, still chuckling. He was filled with a growing pride. He might look like a country cousin, he thought, but there went one sharper who had got no farther than first base.

  He wondered who this Adne Bensen was who had fingered him for the swindler and sent him an electronic kiss. If she kissed in person the way she kissed through sensory stimulation of the tactile net, she might be worth knowing. And no problem, either. If Taiko was the worst this century could turn up, Forrester thought with pleasure and joy, his quarter of a million dollars was safe!

  Twenty minutes later he found his way to the street level of the building, not without arguments from his joymaker. “Man Forrester,” it said, sounding almost aggrieved, “it is better to take a taxi! Do not walk. The guaranties do not apply to provocation and contributory negligence.”

  “Shut up for a minute, will you?” Forrester managed to get the door open and looked out.

  The city of 2527 A.D. was very large, very fast-moving, and very noisy. Forrester was standing in a sort of driveway. A clump of ethereal, thirty-foot-high ferns in front of him partially masked a twelve-lane highway packed to its margins with high-speed traffic moving in both directions. Occasionally a vehicle would cut in to the entrance to his building, pause before him for a moment, and then move on. Taxis? Forrester wondered. If so, he was giving them no encouragement.

  “Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “I have summoned death-reversal equipment, but it will not arrive for several minutes. I must warn you, the costs may be challenged under the bonding regulations.”

  “Oh, shut up.” It seemed to be a warm day, and Forrester was perhaps still slightly befuddled; the temptation to walk was irresistible. All questions could be deferred. Should be deferred, he told himself. Obviously his first task was to get himself oriented. And—he prided himself on this—he had been something of a cosmopolitan, back in those days before his death, equally at home in San Francisco or Rome as in New York or Chicago. And he had always made time to stroll around a city.

  He would stroll through this one now. Joymakers be damned, thought Charles Forrester; he right-faced, hooked t
he joymaker to his belt, and set off along a narrow pedestrian walk.

  There were very few walkers. It didn’t do to make snap judgments, Forrester thought, but these people seemed soft. Perhaps they could afford to be. No doubt someone like himself, he mused soberly, seemed like a hairy troglodyte, crude, savage, flint-axed.

  “Man Forrester!” cried the joymaker from his belt. “I must inform you that Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major has waived protest of the bonding regulations. The death-reversal equipment is on its way.” He slapped it, and it was quiet, or else its continued bleating was drowned out by the sound of the clamoring traffic. Whatever drove these cars, it was not gasoline. There were no fumes. There was only a roar of air and singing tires, multiplied a hundredfold and unending. The trafficway lay between tall bright buildings, one a soft, flowing orange, one the crystalline, blue-gray color of fractured steel. In the court of a building across the trafficway he could see, dimly through the glass and the momentary gaps in the traffic, a riot of plant growth with enormous scarlet fruits. On a balcony above him scented fountains played.

  The joymaker was addressing him again, but he could catch only part of it. “. . . On station now, Man Forrester.” A shadow passed over him, and he looked up.

  Overhead a white aircraft of some sort—it had no wings—was sliding diagonally down toward him. It bore a glittering ruby insigne like the serpent staff of Aesculapius on its side. The nearer end of it was all glass and exposed, and inside a young woman in crisply tailored blue was drowsily watching something on a screen invisible to Forrester. She looked up, gazed at him, spoke into a microphone, then glanced at him again, and went back to watching her screen. The vehicle took position over his head and waited, following with him as he walked.

  “That’s funny,” said Forrester aloud.

  “It’s a funny world,” said somebody quite near him.

  He turned around. Four men were standing there, looking at him with pleasant, open expressions. One of them was very tall and very heavy. In fact, he was gross. He leaned on a cane, studying Forrester, his expression alert and interested.

  Forrester realized that he was the one who had spoken and, in the same moment, realized that he knew him. “Oh, sure,” he said, “The Martian in orange tights.”

  “Very good,” said the Martian, nodding. He was not in orange tights now; he wore a loose white tunic and slate-gray shorts. He wasn’t really a Martian, Forrester remembered; at least, his ancestors had come from Earth.

  One of the other men took Forrester’s hand and shook it. “You’re the one with the quarter of a million dollars,” he said. “Look me up when this is all over. I’d like to know what a fellow like you thinks of our world.”

  He brought his knee up and kicked Forrester in the groin. Hard.

  Forrester felt the world explode, starting inside him. He saw that the man was stepping back, looking at him with interest and pleasure; but it was hard to watch him because the city was moving. It tilted up at an angle, and the sidewalk struck him on the forehead. He rolled, clutching at his testicles, and found himself looking upward.

  The man from Mars said conversationally, “Don’t hurry. Plenty of time for everybody.” He lifted his cane and limped forward. Moving was quite an effort for him in Earth’s gravity, after Mars, Forrester saw. The cane came down on his shoulder and upper arm, was lifted and came down again, regularly, slowly, and strongly. It must have been weighted. It felt like a baseball bat.

  The pain in Forrester’s gut was like death. His arm was numb.

  All in all, though, he realized quite clearly—unable to move, watching as they passed the cane from hand to hand and the white aircraft hovered overhead, the woman’s face peering patiently down—all in all, it was hurting rather less than he might have expected. Perhaps it was Hara’s hungover medicine. Perhaps it was just shock.

  “You were warned, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker sadly from where it lay beside his head.

  He tried to speak, but his lungs were not working.

  He could not quite lose consciousness, either, though he wanted to very much. Perhaps that was another result of Hara’s euphoric pill. Then he felt that he was succeeding. The pain in his belly grew alarmingly and began to recede again, and then he felt nothing at all, or nothing physical.

  But there was something painful in his mind, something that whimpered, Why? Why me?

  Three

  Howls of laughter rolled over Forrester. A girl was screaming, “He’s spinning it! He’s spinning it! Gee, I think I saw the cartridge!”

  Forrester opened his eyes. He was in something that lurched and hummed. A girl in a tailored blue suit, her back to him, was staring at what seemed to be a television screen showing a sort of arena, where the screaming girl, face flushed and happy, stamping with excitement, was standing over a blind-folded man who held a gun.

  Forrester’s aches and bruises reminded him at once of what had happened. He was surprised that he was still alive. He croaked, “Hey!”

  The girl in tailored blue looked over her shoulder at him. “You’re all right,” she said. “Just take it easy. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Where?”

  Impatiently she moved her hand. The arena with the man and girl disappeared—just as the man seemed to be raising the gun—and Forrester found himself looking at blue sky and clouds. “Lift up a little,” the girl in blue said. “You’ll see it. There.”

  Forrester tried to raise himself on an elbow, caught a glimpse of trees and rambling pastel buildings, and fell back. “I can’t lift myself up! Damn it, I’ve been half killed.” He became aware that he was on a sort of a stretcher and that there was another one beside him. The other one was also occupied, by someone with a sheet over him. “Who’s that?” he cried.

  “How would I know? I just bring them in, I don’t write their life stories. Now relax, or I’ll have to put you to sleep.”

  “You silly bitch,” said Forrester precisely. “I’m not going to stand for this. I demand that you— Wait a minute! What are you doing?”

  The girl had turned around, and she was holding something very like his own joymaker, pointed at him. “Are you going to shut up and lie still?”

  “I warn you! Don’t you dare—”

  She sighed, and something cool touched his face.

  Forrester gathered all his strength to tell her what he thought of her, her probable sex life, and this world of hers, in which arbitrary and unpleasant things were done to well-to-do men like himself. He couldn’t. All that came out was, “Arr, a-r-r-r.” He was not unconscious, but he was very weak.

  The girl said, “You sweat me, greenie. You are a greenhorn, aren’t you? I can always tell. You people wake up in the dormer and you think you’re God’s own sweat. Mother! Sure you’re alive. Sure you’ve had the biggest break you can imagine. But do you think we care?”

  All this time the aircraft was slipping and turning, coming in for a landing. The girl, who one would have thought to be the pilot, paid no attention. She was very cross. She said, “Now, I know my job, and my job is to keep you alive—or keep you safely dead till they can take care of you. I don’t have to talk to you. I especially don’t have to listen to you.”

  Forrester said, “A-r-r-r.”

  “I don’t even like you,” she said with vexation, “and you’ve made me miss my favorite program. Oh, go to sleep.”

  And, just as Forrester felt the aircraft touch ground, she raised the joymaker again, and he did.

  At the temperature of liquid helium, chemistry stops.

  On this fact, and on one reasonable hope, the largest industry of the late twentieth century had been built.

  The reasonable hope was that the progress of medicine in past years would be matched by similar progress in the future—so that, no matter what a person might die of, at some future time a way would be found to cure it, to repair it, or at least to make it irrelevant to continuing life and activity (including a method of repairing the damage
done by freezing a body to that temperature).

  The fact was that freezing stopped time.

  And the industry was Immortality, Inc.

  In the city of Shoggo in which Forrester had awakened, a city that was nearly eight hundred years old and enormous, a thousand acres of park along a lake front had humped themselves into a hill. All around was flat. The hill itself was an artifact. It was, as a matter of fact, the freezing center for that part of the world.

  A hundred and fifty million cubic yards of earth had been eaten out of the ground to make a cold-storage locker for people. After the locker was built, most of the dirt was heaped back on top of it for insulation.

  The differential in temperature between ground level and the heart of the frozen hill was nearly five hundred degrees, Fahrenheit, or three hundred and more in the Kelvin scale on which the dormer operated.

  When Forrester realized where the white aircraft had taken him, he was instantly submerged in a terror he could not express. Beginning to awaken, he was still terribly weak, as though one of those sprays from the girl’s joymaker had shorted out ninety percent of his volitional muscle control. (As in fact it had.) When he saw the bright featureless ceiling overhead and heard the moan and click of the thousand frightening instruments that brought people back to life, he fugued into a terrifying certainty that they were going to freeze him again. He lay there, groaning inarticulately, while things were done to him.

  But they were not freezing him.

  They were just patching him up. The blood was washed away. The bruises were scrubbed with something metallic, then touched with a transparent stiff jelly from a long silvery tube that looked something like a large lipstick. His left thigh was pressed for a moment between two glowing screens, which he knew to be a sort of X-ray device, and a fine wash of something that glistened wet and dark was painted over his heart.

  This last treatment made him feel better, whatever it was. He found that he was able to speak.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The young-looking, red-faced man who was working over him at that moment nodded casually and touched Forrester’s navel with the end of a silvery probe. He glanced at it and said, “All right, I guess we’re through with you. Get up, and let’s see if you can walk to Hara’s office.”