Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“Here’s nice bottla red ones.”

There was a nice bottle of red ones. I fumbled the top off the bottle and spilled the bright red pills bouncing across the white tile bathroom floor. We dropped to our knees after them, after the red pills, the red dots, the red, fiery moons, spinning suddenly, whirling, twirling, racing across the white floor. And then it got dark. Dark, and darker and even the red, red moons faded away.

Some eons later, light began to come back and the red moons, dim now and pallid, whirled languidly across a white ceiling.

Someone said, “He’s coming out of it, I think.”

“Oh,” I said. “Ugh!”

I didn’t feel good. I’d almost forgotten what it was like, but I was sick. Awful. I didn’t particularly want to look around but I did, eyes moving rustily in their sockets. There was a nurse and a doctor. They were standing by my bed in what was certainly a hospital.

“Don’t ask,” said the doctor. I wasn’t going to. I didn’t even care where I was, but he told me anyway, “You are in the South Side Hospital, Mr. Barth. You will be all right—which is a wonder, considering. Remarkable stamina! Please tell me, Mr. Barth, what kind of lunatic suicide pact was that?”

“Suicide pact?”

“Yes, Mr. Barth. Why couldn’t you have settled for just one simple poison, hm-m? The lab has been swearing at you all day.”

“Uh?”

“Yes. At what we pumped from your stomach. And found in the girl’s. Liquor, lots of that—but then, why aspirin? Barbiturates we expect. Roach pellets are not unusual. But aureomycin? Tranquilizers? Bufferin? Vitamin B complex, vitamin C—and, finally, half a dozen highly questionable contraceptive pills? Good Lord, man!”

“It was an accident. The girl—Julia—?”

“You are lucky. She wasn’t.”

“Dead?”

“Yes, Mr. Barth. She is dead.”

“Doctor, listen to me! It was an accident, I swear. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were, well, celebrating.”

“In the medicine cabinet, Mr. Barth? Queer place to be celebrating! Well, Mr. Barth, you must rest now. You have been through a lot. It was a near thing. The police will be in to see you later.”

With this kindly word the doctor and his silently disapproving nurse filed out of the room.

The police? Julia, poor Julia—dead.

Now what? What should I do? I turned, as always, inward for advice and instructions. “Folks! Why didn’t you stop me? Why did you let me do it? And now—what shall I do? Answer me, I say. Answer!”

There was only an emptiness. It was a hollow, aching sensation. It seemed to me I could hear my questions echoing inside me with a lonely sound.

I was alone. For the first time in nearly ten years, I was truly alone, with no one to turn to.

They were gone! At last, after all these years, they were gone. I was free again, truly free. It was glorious to be free—wasn’t it?

The sheer joy of the thing brought a tightness to my throat, and I sniffled. I sniffled again. My nose was stuffy. The tightness in my throat grew tighter and became a pain.

I sneezed.

Was this joy—or a cold coming on? I shifted uneasily on the hospital bed and scratched at an itch on my left hip. Ouch! It was a pimple. My head ached. My throat hurt. I itched. Julia was dead. The police were coming. I was alone. What should I do?

“Nurse!” I shouted at the top of my voice. “Nurse, come here. I want to send a wire. Rush. Urgent. To my aunt, Mrs. Helga Barth, the address is in my wallet. Say, ‘Helga. Am desperately ill, repeat, ill. Please come at once. I must have help—from you.’”

She’ll come. I know she will. They’ve got to let her. It was an accident, I swear, and I’m not too old. I’m still in wonderful shape, beautifully kept up.

But I feel awful.

Well—how do you suppose New England would feel today, if suddenly all of its inhabitants died?

Wendell Hart had drifted, rather than plunged, into the underground movement. Later, discussing it with other members of the Savers’ Conspiracy, he found they had experienced the same slow, almost casual awakening. His own, though, had come at a more appropriate time, just a few weeks before the Great Ritual Sacrifice.

The Sacrifice took place only once a decade, on High Holy Day at dawn of the spring equinox. For days prior to it joyous throngs of workers helped assemble old vehicles, machine tools and computers in the public squares, crowning each pile with used, disconnected robots. In the evening of the Day they proudly made their private heaps on the neat green lawns of their homes. These traditionally consisted of household utensils, electric heaters, air conditioners and the family servant.

The wealthiest—considered particularly blessed—even had two or three automatic servants beyond the public contribution, which they destroyed in private. Their more average neighbors crowded into their gardens for the awesome festivities. The next morning everyone could return to work, renewed by the knowledge that the Festival of Acute Shortages would be with them for months.

Like everyone else, Wendell had felt his sluggish pulse gaining new life as the time drew nearer.

A cybernetics engineer and machine tender, he was down to ten hours a week of work. Many others in the luxury-gorged economy had even smaller shares of the purposeful activities that remained. At night he dreamed of the slagger moving from house to house as it burned, melted and then evaporated each group of junked labor-blocking devices. He even had glorious daydreams about it. Walking down the park side of his home block, he was liable to lose all contact with the outside world and peer through the mind’s eye alone at the climactic destruction.

Why, he sometimes wondered, are all these things so necessary to our resurrection?

Marie had the right answer for him, the one she had learned by rote in early childhood: “All life moves in cycles. Creation and progress must be preceded by destruction. In ancient times that meant we had to destroy each other; but for the past century our inherent need for negative moments has been sublimated—that’s the word the news broadcasts use—into proper destruction.” His wife smiled. “I’m only giving the moral reason, of course. The practical one’s obvious.”

Obvious it was, he had to concede. Men needed to work, not out of economic necessity any more but for the sake of work itself. Still a man had to wonder….

He had begun to visit the Public Library Archives, poring over musty references that always led to maddeningly frustrating dead ends. For the past century nothing really informative seemed to have been written on the subject.

“You must have government authorization,” the librarian explained when he asked for older references. Which, naturally, made him add a little suspicion to his already large dose of wonder.

“You’re tampering with something dangerous,” Marie warned. “It would make more sense for you to take long-sleep pills until the work cycle picks up.”

“I will get to see those early references,” he said through clenched teeth.

He did.

All he had needed to say at the library was that his work in sociology required investigation of some twentieth century files. The librarian, a tall, gaunt man, had given him a speculative glance. “Of course, you don’t have government clearance…. But we get so few inquiries in sociology that I’m willing to offer a little encouragement.” He sighed. “Don’t get many inquiries altogether. Most people just can’t stand reading. You might be interested to know this—one of the best headings to research in sociology is Conspicuous consumption.”