Pohl, Frederik - The Age of the Pussyfoot

The boy looked politely interested. “Yes? What about it?”

“What do you mean by ‘real,’ Charles?” asked the girl.

In the old days, before Forrester died, he had been a science-lover. It had always seemed to him wonderful and exciting that he should be living in an age when electricity came from wall sockets and living pictures from a box on a bench. He had thought sometimes, with irony and pity, of how laughably incompetent some great mind of the past, a Newton or an Archimedes, would have been to follow his own six-year-old’s instructions about tuning a television set or operating his electric trains. So here I am, he thought wryly, the bushman in Times Square. It’s not much fun.

But by careful and single-minded questioning he got some glimpse of what the children were talking about. Their playmates were not “real,” but they were a lot realer than, say, a Betsy-Wetsy doll. They were analogues, simulacra; the children, when pressed, called them “simulogs.” The little girl said proudly that they were very good at developing interpersonal relationships. “Got that much,” said Charles, “or, anyway, I think I do. So what does Taiko have to do with it?”

“Oh, him!”

“He doesn’t like anything that’s fun.”

“He says we’re losing the will to cope with—with what you said, Charles. Reality.”

“And all that sweat,” added the girl. “Say! Would you like to hear him?”

She glanced toward the view-wall, now showing a placid background scene of woody glades and small furry animals. “You mean on the television?” Forrester asked.

“The what, Charles?”

“On that.”

“That’s right, Charles.”

“Well,” said Forrester. . . .

And thought that, after all, he might as well. If worst came to worst, he could take up Taiko’s offer of a job, assuming it was still open; and before he came to that worst he would be better off knowing something about it. “Display away,” he said. “What have I got to lose?”

The viewing wall, obedient to the little girl’s orders, washed out the forest glade and replaced it with a stage. On it a man in a fright wig was bounding about and howling.

With difficulty Forrester recognized the blond, crew-cut visitor he had so unceremoniously got rid of—when? Was it only a couple of days ago? Taiko was doing a sort of ceremonial step dance: a couple of paces in one direction and a stomp, a couple of paces away and another stomp. And what he was shouting seemed like gibberish to Forrester.

“Lud, lords, led nobly!”(Stomp!) “Let Lud lead, lords,”(stomp!) “lest lone, lorn lads lapse loosely”(stomp!) “into limbo!”(Stomp!) He faced forward and threw his arms wide. The camera zoomed in on his impassioned, tortured face. “Jeez, kids! You want to get your goddamn brains scrambled? You want to be a juiceless jellyfish? If you don’t, then—let Lud lead!”’(Stomps!) “Let Lud lead!”(Stomp!) “Let Lud lead—”

The boy cried over the noise from the view-walls, “Now he’s going to ask for comments from the viewers. This is where we usually send in things to make him mad, like ‘Go back in the freezer, you old icy cube’ and ‘Taiko’s a dirty old Utopian!’ Of course, we don’t give our names.”

“Today I was going to send in, ‘If it was up to people like you we’d still be swinging from our tails like apes,’ ” said the girl thoughtfully, “but it probably wouldn’t make him very mad.”

Forrester coughed. “Actually, I’d just as soon not make him mad. I may have to go to work for him.”

The children stared at him, dismayed. The boy extinguished Taiko’s image on the view-wall and cried, “Please, Charles, don’t do that! Mim said you turned him down.”

“I did, but I may have to reconsider; I have to get some kind of a job. Matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”

“Oh, good,” said the girl. “Mim’ll get you a job. Won’t she, Tunt?”

“If she can,” the boy said uncertainly. “Say, what can you do, Charles?”

“That’s one of my problems. But there has to be something; I’m running out of money.”

They did not respond to that, merely looked at him wide-eyed. They not only looked astonished, they looked embarrassed.

At length the little girl sighed and said, “Charles, you’re so sweaty ignorant I could freeze. I never heard of anybody being out of money, ‘cept the Forgotten Men. Don’t you know how to get a job?”

“Not very well.”

“You use the joymaker,” the boy said patiently.

“Sure. I tried that.”

The boy looked excited. “You mean— Look, Charles, you want me to help you? Cause I will. I mean, we had that last year in Phase Five. All you have to do is—”

His expression suddenly became crafty. “Oh, sweat, Charles,” he said carelessly, “let me do it for you. Just, uh, tell it to listen to me.”

Forrester didn’t need the girl’s look of thrilled shock to warn him. “Nope,” he said firmly. “I’ll wait for your mother to come home.”

The boy grinned and surrendered. “All right, Charles. I just wanted to ask it something about Mim’s other— Well, here’s what you do. Tell it you want to be tested for an employability profile and then you want recommendations.”

“I don’t exactly know what that involves,” Forrester said cautiously.

The boy sighed. “You don’t have to understand it, Charles. Just do it. What the sweat do you think the joymaker’s for?”

And, actually, it turned out to be pretty easy, although the employability profile testing involved some rather weird questions. . . .

What is “God”?

Are your stools black and tarry?

If you happened to be a girl, would you wish you were a boy?

Assume there are Plutonians. Assume there are elves. If elves attacked Pluto without warning, whose side would you be on?

Why are you better than anyone else?

Most of the questions were like that. Some were worse—either totally incomprehensible to Forrester or touching on matters that made him blush and glance uneasily at the children. But the children seemed to take it as a matter of course, and indeed grew bored before long and wandered back to their own view-wall, where they watched what seemed to be a news broadcast. Forrester growled out the answers as best he could, having come to the conclusion that the machine knew what it was doing even if he didn’t. The answers, of course, made no more sense than the questions; tardily he realized that the joymaker was undoubtedly monitoring his nervous system and learning more from the impulses that raced through his brain than from his words, anyway. Which was confirmed when, at the end of the questions, the joymaker said, “Man Forrester, we will now observe you until you return to rest state. I will then inform you as to employability.”

Forrester stood up, stretched, and looked around the room. He could not help feeling that he had been through an ordeal. Being reborn was nearly as much trouble as being born in the first place.

The children were discussing the scene on the view-wall, which seemed to show a crashed airliner surrounded by emergency equipment, on what appeared to be a mountain top somewhere. Men and machines were dousing it with chemical sprays and carrying out injured and dead—if they made that distinction!—on litters, to what Forrester recognized by the ruby caduceus as death-reversal vehicles. The mountainside was dotted with what looked like pleasure craft—tiny, bright-colored aircraft that had no visible business there, and that seemed to be occupied by sightseers. No doubt they were, thought Forrester—remembering the crowds that had stood by the night he was burned to death heedless of icy spray, icy winds and irritated police trying to push them back.