The Age of the Pussyfoot

Eight

When he reached Adne’s apartment, the children let him in. “Hello, Tunt,” he said. “Hello, Mim.”

They stared at him curiously, then at each other. Blew it again, he thought in resignation; it must be the girl that’s Tunt, the boy that’s Mim. But he had long since decided that if he tried to track down all his little errors he would have time for nothing else, and he was determined not to be derailed. “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

“Out.”

“Do you know where?”

“Uh-huh.”

Forrester said patiently, “Would you like to tell me where?”

The boy and girl looked at each other thoughtfully. Then the boy said, “Well, not particularly, Charles. We’re kind of busy.”

Forrester had always thought of himself as a man who liked children, but, although he smiled at these two, the smile was becoming forced. “I guess I can call her up on the joymaker,” he said.

The boy looked scandalized. “Now? While she’s crawling?”

Forrester sighed. “Look, fellows, I want to talk to your mother about something. How do you recommend I go about it?”

“You could wait here, I guess,” the boy said reluctantly.

“If you have to,” added the girl.

“I get the impression you don’t want me around. What are you kids doing?”

“Well—” The boy overruled his sister with a look and said sheepishly, “We’re having a meeting.”

“But please don’t tell Taiko!” cried the girl.

“He doesn’t like our club,” the boy finished.

“Just the two of you?”

“Sweet sweat, no!” laughed the boy. “Let’s see. There are eleven of us.”

“Twelve!” the girl crowed. “I bet you forgot the robot again.”

“Maybe I did. You and me, Tunt. Four boys. Three girls. A grown-up. A Martian . . . and the robot. Yeah, twelve.”

“You mean a Martian like Heinzlichen what’s-his-name?”

“Oh, no, Charles! Heinzie’s a dope, but he’s people. This is one of the big green ones with four arms.”

Forrester did a double take, then said, “You mean like in Edgar Rice Burroughs? But—but I didn’t think those were real.”

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.

“Old Hap’s never going to make it,” said the boy to the girl, then looked up as he saw Forrester. “Oh, you’re done?”

Forrester nodded. A drone from the view-wall was saying, “. . . Made it again, with a total to this minute of thirty-one and fifty-five out of a possible ninety-eight. Not bad for the Old Master! Yet Hap still trails the rookie Maori from Port Moresby—”

“What are you watching?” he asked.

“Just the semifinals,” said the boy. “How’d you make out on your tests?”

“I don’t have the results yet.” The screen flickered and showed a new picture, a sort of stylized star map with arrows and dots of green and gold. Forrester said, “Is ten million a year too much to ask for?”

“Sweat, Charles! How would we know?” The boy was clearly more interested in the view-wall than in Forrester, but he was polite enough to add, “Tunt’s projected life average is about twelve million a year. Mine’s fifteen. But of course we’ve got, uh, more advantages,” he said delicately.

Forrester sat down and resigned himself to waiting for the results. The arrows and circles were moving about the star map, and a voice was saying, “Probe reports from 61 Cygni, Proxima Centauri, Epsilon Indi, and Cordoba 31353 show no sign of artifactual activity and no change in net systemic energy levels.”

“Dopes!” shrilled the little girl. “They couldn’t find a Martian in a mattress.”

“At Groombridge One, eight, three, oh, however, the unidentified object monitored six days ago shows no sign of emission and has been tentatively identified as a large comet, although its anecliptic orbit marks this large and massive intruder as a potential trouble spot. Needless to say, it is being carefully watched, and SEPF headquarters in Federal City announce that they are phasing two additional monitors out of their passive orbits. . . .”

“What are they talking about?” Forrester asked the boy.

“The war, of course. Shut up, won’t you?”

“. . . Well, there’s a good news tonight from 22H Camelopardis! A late bulletin just received from sortie-control headquarters states that the difficult task of replacing the damaged probe has been completed! The first of the replacements rushed out from BO 7899 has achieved stellar orbit in a near-perfect, almost circular orbit, and all systems are go. Seven backup replacements—”

“Sweat,” said the girl. “What a tedious war! Charles, you used to do things better, didn’t you?”

“In what way?”

The girl looked puzzled. “More killing, of course.”

“If you call that better, maybe we did. World War Two killed twenty million people, I think.”

“Weep. Twenty million,” breathed the girl. “And so far we’ve killed, what is it, Tunt? Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-two million?” asked Forrester.

The boy shook his head disgustedly. “Twenty-two individual Sirians. Isn’t that rotten?”

But before Forrester could answer, his joymaker spoke up.

“Man Forrester! Your tests have been integrated and assayed. May I display the transcript on Bensen children equipment?”

“Go ahead,” the boy said sullenly. “Can’t be any worse than that.”

The star map disappeared from the wall and was replaced by shimmering sine waves, punctuated with numbers that were quite meaningless to Forrester. “You may apply for reevaluation on any element of the profile, if you wish. Do you wish to do this, Man Forrester?”

“Hell, no.” The numbers and graphs were not only meaningless but disturbing. Forrester had a flash of memory, which he identified as dating from the last time a government agency had concerned itself with finding him a job—after his discharge from his post-Korean peacetime army service, when he joined the long lines of unemployables telling their lies to a bored State Employment Service clerk. He could almost see the squares of linoleum on the floor, the queues of those who, like himself, wanted only to collect unemployment insurance for a while, in the hope that during that time the world would clarify itself for them.

But the joymaker was talking.

“Your profile, Man Forrester, indicates relatively high employability in personal-service and advocative categories. I have selected ninety-three possible openings. Shall I give you the list?”

“My God, no. Just give me the one you like best.”

“Your optimum choice, Man Forrester, is as follows: Salary, seventeen thousand five hundred. This is rather less than your stated requirements, but an expense—”

“Hold on a minute! I’ll say it’s less! I was asking for ten million!”

“Yes, Man Forrester. You stated ten million per year. This is seventeen thousand five hundred per day. At four-day-week norm, allowing for projected overtime as against health losses, three million eight hundred thousand dollars per year. Expenses are also included, however, optimized at five million plus in addition to salary.”

“Wait a minute.” The numbers were so large as to be dizzying. He turned to the children. “That’s almost nine million a year. Can I live on that?”

“Sweat, Charles, sure, if you want to.”

Forrester took a deep breath.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

The joymaker did not seem particularly concerned. “Very well, Man Forrester. Your duties are as follows: Conversation. Briefing. Discussion. The orientation is timeless, so your status as a recent disfreezee will not be a handicap. You will be expected to answer questions and be available for discussions, usually remote due to habitat considerations. Some travel is indicated.”

“Sweat.” The Bensen children were showing signs of interest; the boy sat up, and his sister stared wide-eyed at Forrester.

“Supplementary information, Man Forrester: This employer has rejected automated services for heuristic reasons. His desideratum is subjectivity rather than accuracy of data. The employer is relatively unfamiliar with human history, culture, and customs—”

“It is!” cried the girl.

“—And will supplement your services with TIC data as needed.”

Forrester cut in, “Never mind that. Where do I go for my interview?”

“Man Forrester, you have had it.”

“You mean I’ve got the job? but—but what do I do next?”

“Man Forrester, I was outlining the procedure. Please note the following signal.” There was a mellow, booming chime. “This will indicate a message from your employer. Under the terms of your employment contract, you may not decline to accept these messages during the hours of ten hundred to fourteen hundred on working days. You are further required to receive such messages with no more than twelve hours’ delay even on nonworking days. Thank you, Man Forrester.”

And that, thought Forrester, was that.

Except for trying to find out what was bugging the kids. He said, “All right. What’s eating you?”

They were whispering together, their eyes on him. The boy stopped long enough to ask, “Eating us, Charles?”

“Why are you acting like that?” Forrester amended.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Nothing important,” corrected the girl.

“Come on!”

The little girl said, “It’s just that we never knew anybody who’d work for them before.”

“Work for who?”

“The joymaker told you, Charles! Don’t you listen?” said the boy, and the girl chimed in, “Sweat, Charles! Don’t you know who you’re working for?”

Forrester took a deep breath and glared at them. He told himself that they were only children and that in fact he was rather fond of them; but they seemed on this particular morning to be determined to drive him mad. He sat down and picked up his joymaker. Carefully he scanned the cluster of buttons until he found the crystal-clear, rounded one he was looking for, turned the joymaker until its spray nozzle was pointing at the exposed flesh of his arm, and pressed the button.

Happily it was the right button. What the fine mist that danced into his wrist might be he did not know, but it achieved the expected effect. It was like a supertranquilizer; it cleared his mind, quieted his pulse, and enabled him to say, quite calmly, “Machine! Just who the hell have you got me working for?”

“Do you wish me to display a picture of your employer, Man Forrester?”

“You damn bet I wish!”

“Please observe the view-wall, Man Forrester.”

And observe it Forrester did; and he swallowed hard, stunned.

In all justice to the joymaker, Forrester was forced to admit that he had placed no restrictions on its choice of an employer for him. He had been willing to accept almost anything, but all the same he was surprised.

He hadn’t expected his employer to have bright green fur, or a diadem of tiny eyes peering out of a ruff around a pointed head, or tentacles. He had not, in fact, expected it to be one of the enemy, the race whose presence in space had scared mankind into a vast series of raid drills, weapons programs, and space probes . . . in short, a Sirian.