Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

“There is only one device, Amelia, and we need to test it now. You are here, you are trusted. Eszterhazy is too independent. You will take the device.” A grinding noise, as of badly lubricated machinery. “Or you will not be in the Game.”

“What are this bastard’s specs? How does it work?”

“You will be told, Amelia. In good time.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s being installed in your autogyro as we speak. A red button on your joystick controls it: Press, it’s on. Release, it’s off.”

“I’m not happy about this, ZF.”

“Go to your autogyro, Amelia. Fly well.” The light dimmed even more and the camera clicked again as the lens irised shut. ZF-43 had turned off the world outside his jar.

Rudy choked down a nickel’s worth of beans and kielbasa and enough java to keep him running for the rest of the day. It was going to be a long one. The scheduled game would bring the people out into the streets, and that was a recruiting opportunity he couldn’t pass up. He knew his targets: not the fat, good-natured guys catching a few hours of fun before hitting the night shift. Not their sharp-eyed wives, juggling the kids and grabbing the paycheck on Friday so it wouldn’t be spent on drink. Oh, no. Rudy’s constituency was hungry-looking young men, just past their teens, out of work, smarter than they needed to be, and not yet on the bottle. One in ten would take a pamphlet from him. Of those, one in twenty would take it home, one in fifty would read it, one in five hundred would take it to heart, and one in a thousand would seek him out and listen to more.

The only way to make it worth his while, the only way to pull together a force, was to get as many pamphlets out there as possible. It was a numbers game, like the lottery, or like selling insurance.

Rudy had sold insurance once, collecting weekly nickels and dimes from the hopeful and the despairing alike. Until the day he was handed a pamphlet. He took it home, he read it, and he realized what a sham his life was, what a shill he had been for the corporate powers, what a fraud he had been perpetrating upon his own people, the very people that he should be helping to escape from the treadmill of their lives.

He finished his coffee and hit the street. Crowds were already building near the CityPlace — that vast open square at the heart of the city, carved out of the old shops, tenements, and speakeasies that had once thrived there — where the aerobattle would take place. He picked out a corner near some ramshackle warehouses on the plaza’s grimy southern rim. That’s where his people would be, his tillage, as he thought of them.

“Tillage” was a word his grandfather used back when Rudy was young. The old man used to speak lovingly of the tillage, the land he had farmed in his youth. The tillage, he said, responded to him as a woman would, bringing forth fruit as a direct result of his care and attention. Not that he, Rudy, had great amounts of time to spend on a woman — but that hadn’t seemed to matter on the streets, where women were freely available, and briefly enjoyable. Sexual intercourse was overrated, in his opinion. Politics was another matter, and he made his friends among men and women who felt the same. They kept their distance from one another, so the Naked Brains couldn’t pick them all off in a single raid. When they coupled, they did so quickly, and they didn’t exchange names.

Moving deftly through the gathering crowd, he held out only one pamphlet at a time, and that only after catching a receptive eye. A willing offering to a willing receptor, that wasn’t illegal. It wasn’t pamphleteering, which was a harvestable offense. Last thing he wanted, to be harvested and, if the rumors were as he suspected true, have his grey matter pureed and fed to the Naked Brains.

But to build his cadre, to make his mark, he needed to hand out a thousand pamphlets a day, and crowds like this — in the CityPlace or on the slidewalks at rush hour — were the only way to do it.

“Take this, brother. Thank you.” He said it over and over. “Salaam, brother, may I offer you this?”

He had to keep moving, couldn’t linger anywhere, kept his eye out for the telltale stare of an Eye of the Brains. When he had first started this business, he had sought out only men who looked like himself. But that approach proved too slow. He’d since learned to size up a crowd with a single glance and mentally mark the receptive. That tall, black-skinned man with the blue kerchief, the skinny little freckled guy in the ragged work clothes, the grubby fellow with the wisp of a beard and red suspenders. All men, and mostly young. He let his female compatriots deal with the women. Didn’t want any misunderstandings.

The guy with the kerchief first. Eye contact, querying glance, non-sexual affect, tentative offer of pamphlet. He takes it! Eye contact, brief nod, on to the little guy. Guy looks away. Abort. Don’t offer pamphlet. On to the third guy —

“What’s this, then?” Flatfoot! An Eye? Surely not a Fist? Best to hoof it.

Rudy feinted to one side of the copper and ran past him on the other, swivel-hipping through the crowd like Jim Thorpe in search of a touchdown. He didn’t look back, but if the cop was an Eye, he’d have backup pronto. Around the big guy with the orange wig, past the scared-looking lady with the clutch of kids — yikes! — almost overturned the baby carriage. What’s that on the ground? No time to think about it! Up and over, down the alleyway, and into the door that’s cracked open a slot. Close it, latch it, jam the lock. SOP.

Rudy turned away from the fire door. It was almost lightless in here. He was in an old, run-down kinescope parlor, surrounded by benches full of kinescope devotees, their eyes glued to the tiny screens wired to the backs of the pews in front of them. On each screen the same blurry movie twitched: Modern Times , with the Marx Brothers.

He took a seat and put a nickel in the slot.

He was just a regular Joe at the movies now. An anonymous unit of the masses, no different from anybody else. Except that he didn’t have his girlfriend with him. Or a girlfriend at all. Or any real interest in having a girlfriend. Or in anything so historically blinkered as going to the kinescope parlor.

Rudy had heard about this particular kinescope in a Know the Foe session. It was supposed to be funny, but its humor originated in a profound class bias. The scene that was playing was one in which Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo were working on an assembly line while their supervisor (Groucho) flirted with the visiting efficiency inspector (Margaret Dumont). Zeppo and Chico worked methodically with wrenches, tightening bolts on the bombs that glided remorselessly into view on the conveyor belt. Harpo, equipped with a little handheld pneumatic drill, worked regularly and efficiently at first, drilling a hole in a bomb fin which Zeppo promptly unbolted and Chico replaced with a new fin. That his work was meaningless appeared to bother him not at all. But then, without noticing it, Groucho leaned against a long lever, increasing the belt’s speed. As the pace increased, Harpo realized that the drill could be made to go faster and faster, just like the assembly line. He became fascinated by the drill and then obsessed with it, filling the bombs’ fins with so many holes that they looked like slices of Swiss cheese.

Chico and Zeppo, meanwhile, kept working faster and faster as the line sped up. For them, this was grim business. To keep from falling behind, they had to employ two wrenches, one per hand. Sweat poured off them. They shed their hats, then their jackets, then their shirts and pants, leaving them clad only in voluminous underwear. Harpo, on the other hand, was feeling no pressure at all. He began drilling holes in his hat, then his jacket, then his shirt and pants.