The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories

THE OLD ADAM By Martin Waddell

Adam lived in a bottle on shelf 43Q. He was 23 years old, trilingual and four foot three inches high. They fed him through a straw and spoke to him through a grille in the side of the bottle.

Adam was an original.

There was nothing before Adam and it seemed as though there would be nothing after him, for Adam was sterile. True, he had no Eve, so the point was immaterial. His mother was a rubber tree and his father some unknown donor, Caucasian free and twenty-one, but otherwise a mere card in an index file. Perhaps it was better that way.

Specimen 223367/Qlt/MZ was his formal name, but those who knew him best called him Adam, because it seemed appropriate. 223367/Qlt/MZ did not mind. The plastic brain they had lodged in his rubber skull was possessed of cheerful demeanour. He had an intelligence quotient which, whilst excellent for the son of a rubber tree, was not quite the thing for a Hero of the Soviet Union. For Adam was a Hero ofahe Soviet Union and a Bachelor of the Humanities (Leningrad) to boot. He had well grained neuron skin and the whites of his eyes were manufactured from the intestines of a rroldyheart worm. His bones were a neubron complex specially devised not to warp the leather stitching of his veins where the pig urine flowed freely. A man of many parts, Adam was master of none. He had great difficulty in moving his limbs. In later, more efficient numbers housed on the bright clean shelves of the laboratory, miracles had been performed. Poor Adam was merely a prototype. His shelf was in the public section of the Vitarum building but far from the popular central aisles. Now and then someone would take Adam's card from the Vita register and have him removed from his bottle by a white coated assistant. Placed on the smooth oileroid folds of the limber table Adam would smile his best smile and sometimes attempt conversation. This was not easy. Although in a burst of initial enthusiasm they had taught him three languages… for political purposes. they had restrained his facility to the level which was immediately required of him. Adam was a good clean Russian numbskull. The Sonic in his bottle was tuned constantly to the Ravery. Noise was a vital part of his life, and the louder the merrier.

That was the root of Adam's trouble.

As a boy of two weeks (four foot three high, trilingual, fed through a straw and spoken to through a grille in the side of the bottle) he had become accustomed to the steady hum of the Ravery through his Sonic tubes. It was his constant lullaby. It formed the background at the height of his popularity when there were men in white coats and members of the Central Committee and television cameras around him, all the paraphernalia that might be expected to surround the first appearances of the first synthetic man. Of course he was precocious, for they had designed him with that in mind. But something somewhere in the rubber membranes was not as it should have been. 223367/Qlt/MZ absorbed information readily, but was unable to retain much of it. In it went, through his florelmghyt eardrums, and out another way. Little lodged in the chamber of his brain which had been specially designed for that purpose. The result was that Adam was subjected to a cram course of perpetual Indoctrolum tapes which were fed through his Sonic, totally obliterating the soothing though frenetic beat of the Ravery to which he was patiently tuned. Naturally 223367/Qlt/MZ did not take kindly to this. On a number of occasions he detached the Sonic plugs from the slots in the folds of his florelmghyt eardrums and dropped them on the floor. In one final undignified scene during an international Ultraview hook-up he removed the vetto shied from the microphone before him and broadcast to a startled world a few sharp and pungent phrases in Esperanto which sealed his fate, and ultimately, his bottle.

He should not have done it. The Ultraview unit estimated that a third of the World's potential audience had ultrad in on 223367/Qlt/MZ's outburst and of those forty-seven per cent could be assumed to have an Esperanto A rating and the other fifty-three per cent would at least understand the gestures which had accompanied it. If Adam had known of his little brothers and sisters all grouped together in the synthetic womb he'd left behind him he might have shown some restraint, perhaps in time have come to find the kindly instruction of the Indoctrolum audocrats as pleasing and soothing to the central nervous system as the hourly outpourings of the Ravery units. But Adam did not know of the others. He had been led to believe he was an only child through reading too much of his own publicity put out through the Soviet Department of Humanitarian Affairs. His was the only Supravisual green bottle and he the only Adam in it. So he whipped up the vetto shield at the right moment and said what he said. His message never reached Alaska or other points on the Eastern hook-up where they had time to expunge it, but where it was least desirous that it should be heard it was, loud and strong, and so another bastion of the East went West.

He was never seen on Ultraview again.

The grille of his green bottle was closed and the Socialiser sealed and he was whisked away through a strict security blackout to the basement of the Vitarum, and shelf 43 Q, in a little cream room.

His tiny brother 223367/Qlt/MZ-2 took his place. MZ-2 had red hair from the tail of a Ukranian squirrel and the Hungarians had contributed a boiler suit in national colours. They called him the Universal Man, and he quickly learned to play chess. Although MZ-2 was more intelligent, he had not Adam's attraction for the scientists.

The little cream room at the end of Cirium Walklin just to the north of the main entrance was frequently visited in those first few months, and now and then Adam's grille slid back for a little conversation. But it was not the good old days. What talk there was was all about his insides, and Adam was soon on the way to becoming a hypochondriac. They fed him little pills of all descriptions at one time almost disintegrating the foam rubber setting of his stomach. Adam came to look on them as an unnecessary interference in his day, and to ignore them accordingly. Mercifully the Indoctrolum Audocrats had ceased to break into the middle of his Ravery Sonics. He sat in his bottle and tapped his finger against the glass in what he fondly imagined to be time to the music. He took less and less notice of the world around him and, gradually, the world around him took less and less notice of Adam.

From the day of the Ultraview fiasco and his sudden eclipse from the public eye to his twenty-third year Adam sat in his bottle on shelf 43 Q in the little cream room. If he ever yearned for the world outside it cannot have been keenly, for he had seen little of it. An early attempt at cultural weaning had taken the form of a progressive course in the translated works of Thomas Hardy, just then enjoying a Soviet re-patriation as unexpected as it was undeserved. Poor Adam knew more of the wicked wiles of Wessex (then situated somewhere south east of the Urals) than he did of the trouble and strife of his own up-to-date day. It is true that from time to time he toyed with the dial of his sonic and came across strange voices and sentiments which confused him, but by his twenty-third year he had ceased to bother about them.

It was the day of his twenty-third birthday. He was sitting in his bottle singing, as was his wont. It was a cheerful song, though unruly. He had developed a bass range and a yoodle of considerable potential. He sang both solo and in harmony and on the day of his birthday he was engaged in perfecting a particularly traumatic effect when his grille slipped back, perhaps for the first time in four or five months. He was so taken with his song that he was not at first aware of the pale blue eyes that gleamed through contact lenses at him.

Una had not come to the Vitarum to see Adam.

She was a friendly girl, but of a retiring disposition. She was a student in the Humanities and some chance fancy had taken her from her macrofotex in viewdor above to stroll through the dim lit corridors of the basement where the old exhibits were housed. What led her to the green door with the legend 223367/Qlt/MZ is something we shall never know. She came through it softly, for she had some faint idea that it was a place where she had no right to be with her low videx rating.

Adam's green bottle sat on shelf 43 Q, all on its own. Inside Adam was harmonising lustily. He wore the green boiler suit in which he had been conceived and his podgy hands clapped happily against his prone legs. Every nerve on his body was visibly straining to keep up with the frantic beat from the Sonic.

Quite naturally, Una thought that something was wrong. She rushed him from the shelf to the oileroid table and quickly released the catch on his grille, although she lacked the requisite authority to do so. The noise from Adam's Sonic was almost too much for her, accustomed as she was to the silence of the viewdor above. Completely oblivious of what was happening Adam continued with his song.

Una unplugged his Sonic.

It was many years since Adam's bottle had known silence. His voice trailed away. He attempted to adjust the dial, played with the valve, tentatively removed the Sonic plug from his ear-drum and held it before his face, solemnly inspecting it with his grave worm-intestine eyes.

'Are you alright?' a voice said from the grille overhead. It was not an unpleasant voice, but Adam was not used to conversation and resented the break in his concentration, so he did not reply. #

The voice repeated its enquiry, more urgently.

Adam looked up. Through the sides of the bottle he could see Una's pale face and her trim figure encased in a sky blue working overall. Her hair was short and neat, extremely functional. She looked as if she was harmless. Her enquiry was well meant and Adam bore no grudge.

All he did was to repeat, in Esperanto, that which had previously removed difficulties from his path. He said it pithily. It may not have been strictly called for, but it was apt.

Una had not lived a particularly secluded life. Her father had been a scientist and she knew that not all Sythons thought before they spoke. At this time she was not aware of Adam's case history and so the repetition of his words for posterity did not spark off the recognition they might have warranted. (They had, let it not be forgotten, coloured East West relations for more than half a decade.) Una thought him merely neglected, and possibly illbred. But she was kind, and most concerned about the fit which had preceded her unplugging his Sonic, and she was not to be deterred.

'Are you alright?' she demanded again, as though nothing had been said. She managed it with a simple dignity which would have played on the heart strings of another man but on Adam it was wasted, for the one or two which were relevant had already snapped. These things happen to prototypes. The delicate nuance of her speech passed him by. Nothing had fitted him for the idea of tone as an implication of meaning. What did filter through to him, as he got used to the idea, was that somebody had come to talk to him who did not require a detailed account of his insides.

He told her all, rapidly, and in some considerable detail. Although his own life had been somewhat restricted he knew enough from the world of song as transmitted by the Ravery Units to realise that other people were colourful, gay and romantic. The digested plots of many thousands of half remembered sentiments slipped from him as his own experiences. which indeed they were. In the sum of his years enough passion had brewed in the environs of his green bottle to serve many a mortal in a full-sized world.

Una, who had come to ponder her troubles amidst the relics of yesteryear, found herself seated on the oileroid table top listening enthralled to the words of specimen 223367/Qlt/MZ as they spilled from him. She did not even own a Sonic, for they were out of date. Thus the brittie metres and the shrill cadence of Adam's conversation was a revelation to her. What he said was not only sincere, it also rythmed.

Una went home, tossed and turned on her pensive couch, and returned the next day with a recodex.

Adam had resigned himself to another twenty-three years of silence. He was sitting hunched over, drinking fluid from the auto filler through a plastic straw when Una came strolling through the door.

She switched off his Sonic, switched on her recodex, opened the grille, said 'Are you alright?', and Adam started to talk.

He did not observe the humming recodex on the oileroid table beside his patient listener, nor notice the shudders of glee that chased across her intellectual brow as his sparkling sentences flowed through the grille.

Two and three quarter hours later Una departed and Adam, nursing a sore throat and quite exhausted, plugged himself back into the Sonic and went to sleep.

It was the first of many happy interludes. Una and her recodex became a familiar sight in the building, slipping through the viewdor to fade from sight in the draughty walk-lins of the basement. No one knew quite where she went or what she was doing. As she was a nonentity, no one bothered to find out.

Fourteen months later Una's great work was viewdorated. It proved an immediate success. She captured the common spleen, they said. She spoke with the poetry of the people. Sentiment came back with a rush. Una's frank and open-hearted declarations expressed the bloom of youth and purity, the sadness of rejected passion, the mellowness of a lonely faun at sunset and other like and allied things with a brittle brilliant clarity. 'Are You Alright?' became the motif of a generation within a month of viewdoration.

Una was in demand. It followed that her visits to Adam and his green bottle were less frequent. Down in the depths of the little cream room there was no one to admire her, and besides she was becoming bored with his one-sided conversational style.

So Una stayed away.

Adam, who was totally surprised when she first appeared, took it philosophically. He soon grew accustomed to his renewed loneliness. He replugged his Sonic in his ear and sat back to sing away the years.

It is not fair to say that Una forgot her old chum completely.

Once, in a mild heat-wave whilst passing through Pasadena on a Soviet American Goodwill Goalongtur, she did pause to wonder how he fared in his green bottle and despatched a request to the Vitarum (of which she was now a full vice president) that specimen 223367/Qlt/MZ should be rehoused in a sumptuous case in the main hall, where she hoped his life might be a brighter, fuller one. It is not nice to assume that she thought in terms of possible future material from his new vistas. For she did not. At that time she had many spools of recodex to prune as a result of her months of patience in the cream room.

Although mystified, the Directorate of the Vitarum responded to the request of their brightest jewel with alacrity. Although she had not explained her motive (indeed she could not) they had specimen 223367/Qlt/MZ installed in a brand new case on the top landing, between the bust of Nero and the rotund Moon thing. Adam had soft lighting and people to look at, although there was no grille to speak through. But Adam was unhappy. They had installed an Ultraviewer in his glass case and he watched it fitfully and without interest. His old-fashioned Sonic equipment they left on shelf 43Q downstairs, along with his green bottle, which was pitifully outmoded.

Adam sat in the corner of his spacious case and sulked. People had a distressing habit of pressing their faces against his glass and mouthing at him. The Directorate had omitted to lable him properly and it is possible that the public took him for someone else. Perhaps it was that the ten per cent of the population which now had rubber trees in the family didn't like to talk about it, and wanted Adam suppressed. The new people had fine frames and remarkable durability and it cannot be said that Adam was the sort they would have chosen for a forefather. Adam was not handsome, and so they disowned him. Perhaps not disowned. they simply did not cause his identity to become known (although they must have sensed it from his rubbery look) and therefore debarred him from his rightful place in the sympathies of humankind. Beside Adam the bust of Nero looked reasonably like everybody else and the Moon thing was expected to be a thing and had no common root with his audience, and so was excused. Adam alone was a travesty, for Adam reflected themselves.

Although things were pretty bad, there was a compensation.

Over the weeks Adam did try to strike up acquaintances as best he could. The absence of the grille and the mouthing faces put him off humans, and the bust of Nero was not talkative, but the pink and purple moon thing Jhad a way of gesturing with its mandibles which was at once touching and affectionate.

Side by side in their glass cases they sat, periodically winking and gesticulating in the silence of their sound-proofed existences. They came to have a common bond, a sympathy that was divorced from the others outside and from which the bust of Nero was excluded by a common decision. Adam had never heard of Nero and the Moon thing had no reason to regard him with other than suspicion, considering what he'd had to put up with.

Ten years passed on the landing. Ten years of leisurely glass tapping between the two cases, of Sonic-less life. Ten years that saw annual viewdoration of Una's work, annual acclaim of her style which remained identical and therefore pleasing right from 'Are You Alright?' to her tenth work, 'Bottle-green'. Ten years which also produced a gradual clutter of exhibits on the floors of the Vitarum.

There came a day when Adam, unlabelled, his past forgotten, was caught up in a silent revolution. White-coated men came and removed him from his glass case in a Plutrone bag and wheeled him away to the old-fashioned walklins of the basement. A last despairing glance over his shoulder left him with a vision of the faithful Moon thing tapping the glass with all three hundred and forty-eight mandibles, rubbing its pink and purple body against the side of its case, opening and shutting its large eye in a gesture of farewell.

Even when they brought him to shelf 43Q in the little cream room and reinterred him in his bottle Adam's faith was not restored. The parting with the pink and purple Moon thing was too much, even for a Sython. The once beloved Sonic plug hung idly by his side, for he now had no use for it. Now and then he did feed fitfully from his tube, even listlessly cleaned down the inside of the glass bottle, but it was no fun. They had put great calf volumes on either side of shelf 43 Q, and they refused to communicate.

He was thirty-four and alone in the world.

Adam cast about in his mind for something to do and the Sonic emotions which had become his reasoning told him to pine. So pine he did, but there was nobody there to notice. The chubby 223367/Qlt/MZ of yesteryear gradually faded. The memory of sweetly groping mandibles filled his thoughts, the poetry of their vapid weaving, the sweet insinuations. In the Moon thing and the Moon thing alone Adam had found faithfulness. The members of the Central Committee had betrayed him, the scientists and the Ultra viewers; Nero had not even taken any notice. Una, who had seemed to hold the key to his personality, had faded away from his world. The Moon thing alone had been true.

Or so it seemed.

Sad and sorry he sat in his bottle on his thirty-fifth birthday. Wistfully he practised gestures against the glass. He did not hear the grille scrape back, nor see the pale blue eyes that gazed at him earnestly through contact lenses.

The cream recodex spools had at last run out.

Una, disguised as her old self, had slipped through the walklins of the Vitarum basement, battered recodex at the ready.

'Are you alright?' she asked, hopefully.

Adam looked up. Through the side of the bottle he could see Una's pale face and her trim figure encased in a sky blue working overall. Her hair was short and neat, extremely functional. She looked as if she was harmless, and Adam could not remember bearing any grudge.

But from somewhere deep inside him swelled a reply in Esperanto, which he thought he had long forgotten.

'Are you alright?' she said again, with an eye on her royalties and her finger on the tab of the recodex, but also a simple dignity.

He told her all, rapidly. But he told her all by his new method, gesticulation. Although his expressions were rich and varied in his fashion, they were not for viewdoration. Adam wanted his Moon thing by him. Perhaps itwas base humanity coming out in him at last or perhaps it was merely Una's imagination, but it seemed to her that Adam was striking a bargain. When she hopefully switched his Sonic on and off he included it in his gestures, but without putting it to its proper use. What he was after she did not know; but without it she was not going to get him replugged to the Sonic, and no Sonic meant no inspiration, and nothing for the recodex spool.

Distraught, Una roamed the Vitarum. She went from the land plane to the Vista Platform and mooched through the Vulcan globe, but no solution suggested itself. At last she came to the landing where she looked at Nero for inspiration, and found none. But close by, though separated from Nero by the Chromocreature, was the sad puff ball of the Moon thing, pink and purple and out of sorts, all three hundred and forty-eight mandibles wagging dispiritedly.

Una wasn't of Russian peasant stock for nothing. There was something in the wag of the despairing mandibles that told all she needed to know.

She disappeared into the Dorval arcade, discarded her overall, fluffed her hair, powdered her nose and departed for the offices of the Directorate. It was a strange request, but they were not likely to disagree with Una, who was now all-powerful.

The Moon thing was stuck in a Plutrone bag and carried down through the echoing walklins to the cream room and shelf 43 Q.

The Moon thing had, as Moon things do, curled its mandibles into its tummy and swallowed its eye. When they plopped it into Adam's bottle it di4 not stir.

It was not a big bottle, but it was big enough. Una was a woman of discretion. She placed a curtain over shelf 43Q and they went away and closed up the cream room.

Adam, frantic with delight, tapped the glass.

Mandible by mandible the Moon thing responded. Bits of pink and purple emerged slowly as it uncurled and swelled, tinged a faint green for it was chameleonic by nature. To

Adam's delight it grew and grew till at last the large cold eye in the middle of its throat opened, and it winked at him.

It rolled toward him. It shot out forty-nine mandibles and wrapped them round his throat, spat another twenty-two around each limb, attached the slitting edges to his tender neuron skin and made a meal of his pig urine blood. It opened its middle and dropped him into its digestive cavity where it stung him with septic suckers, bent and snapped his rubber bones, munched him tenderly with smooth pink flesh edges.

It had waited a long time for a square meal, and it was hungry.

In the morning Una came on tip toe to the shelf. She pulled back the curtain and cleared the grille of Adam's bottle.

Some tattered rubber adhered to the mandibles. A pool of digestive fluid in the bottom of the bottle contained a discarded piece of Adam's eye, but Una did her best to contain herself.

After all, the Moon thing was listening to the Sonic.

'Are you,' she said, hopefully, 'alright?'