Player Piano

  "They certainly give you enough shirts," said Katharine, counting. "Nine, ten, eleven, twelve."

  "Nothing like enough. For two weeks you drink and sweat, drink and sweat, drink and sweat, until you feel like a sump pump. This is a day's supply at the outside."

  "Uh-huh. Well, sorry, that's all there is in the box except this book." She held up the volume, which looked like a hymnal.

  "Hi ho--The Meadows Songbook," said Paul wearily. He leaned back and closed his eyes. "Pick a song, Katharine, any song, and read it aloud."

  "Here's the song for the Green Team, Doctor Shepherd's team. To the tune of the William Tell Overture."

  "The whole overture?"

  "That's what it says here."

  "Well, go ahead and give it a try."

  She cleared her throat, started to sing softly, thought better of it, and lapsed into plain reading:

  "Green oh Green oh Green's the team!

  Mightiest e'er the world has seen!

  Red, Blue, White will scream,

  When

  They see the great Green Team!"

  "That'll put hair on your chest, Katharine."

  "Oh, gosh but it'll be fun! You know you'll love it when you get up there."

  Paul opened his eyes to see that Katharine was reading another song, and her eyes shone with excitement and she rocked her head from side to side. "What's that you're reading now?"

  "Oh, I wish I were a man! I was just reading your song."

  "My song?"

  "The Blue Team's song."

  "Oh--my song. By all means, let's hear it."

  She whistled a few bars of "Indiana," and then sang, this time heartily:

  "Oh you Blue Team, you tried and true team,

  There are no teams as good as you!

  You will smash Green, also the Red Team,

  And the White Team you'll batter, too.

  They'd better scurry before your fury,

  And in a hurry, without a clue;

  Because the Blue Team's a tried and true team,

  And there's no team as good as you!"

  "Hmmm."

  "And you will win, too. I know you will," said Katharine.

  "You going to be at the Mainland?" The Mainland was a camp for wives and children, and women employees whose development wasn't yet complete, across the water from the Meadows, the island where the men went.

  "That's as close as I can get to the real thing," said Katharine wistfully.

  "That's close enough, believe me. Tell me, is Bud Calhoun going to be there?"

  She colored, and he was instantly sorry he'd asked. "He had an invitation, I know," she said, "but that was before--" She shrugged unhappily. "And you know what the Manual says."

  "The machines can't stand him any more," said Paul heavily. "Why don't they build in a gimmick that will give a man a free drink before he gets the ax? Do you know what he's up to now?"

  "I haven't talked to him or seen him, but I did call up Matheson's office to find out what was going to be done with him. They said he was going to be a project supervisor for the--" her voice caught "--for the Reeks and Wrecks." Emotion was giving her a rough going-over now, and she left Paul's office hurriedly.

  "I'm sure he'll do well," Paul called after her. "I'll bet we won't know our city a year from now, with him thinking up things for the Reeks and Wrecks to do."

  Her phone rang, and she relayed the information to Paul that Doctor Edward Finnerty was at the gate, wanting in.

  "Bind his hands and feet, put a bag over his head, and have four men bring him up. Fixed bayonets, of course. And be sure and get a picture of it for Shepherd."

  Ten minutes later, Finnerty was escorted into Paul's office by an armed guard.

  "For heaven's sake--look at you!" said Paul. Finnerty's hair was cut and combed, his face was pink, shining, and shaved, and his seersucker suit, while worn and a poor fit, was crisp and sanitary-looking.

  Finnerty looked at him blankly, as though he couldn't guess what the fuss was about. "I'd like to borrow your car."

  "Promise to wipe off the fingerprints when you're through?"

  "Oh--you're sore about that pistol business, I suppose. Sorry. I meant to throw it in the river."

  "You know about it, then?"

  "Sure--and about how Shepherd turned in a report on you, too, telling how you let me in the plant without an escort. Tough." Finnerty, after less than a week in Homestead, had taken on rough, swashbuckling mannerisms--glaringly synthetic. He also seemed to be getting a real kick out of being a liability as an associate for anyone respectable.

  Paul was amazed, as he had been amazed at Kroner's, by how much others knew about his affairs. "How do you know so much?"

  "You'd be surprised who knows what, and how they find out. Surprise the pants off you to know what goes on in this world. My eyes are just opening." He leaned forward earnestly. "And, Paul--I'm finding myself. At last I'm finding myself."

  "What do you look like, Ed?"

  "Those dumb bastards across the river--they're my kind of people. They're real, Paul, real!"

  Paul had never doubted that they were real, and so found himself without any sort of comment or emotional response for Finnerty's important announcement. "Well, I'm glad you've found yourself after all these years," he said. Finnerty had been finding himself ever since Paul had known him. And, weeks later, he'd always deserted that self with angry cries of impostor, and discovered another. "That's swell, Ed."

  "Well, anyway, how about the keys to the car?"

  "Is it fair to ask what for?"

  "This is a milk run. I want to pick up my clothes and stuff at your house and run them over to Lasher's."

  "You're living with Lasher?"

  Finnerty nodded. "Surprising how well we hit it off, right from the first." His tone implied the barest trace of contempt for Paul's shallow way of life. "Keys?"

  Paul threw them to him. "How do you plan to use the rest of your life, Ed?"

  "With the people. That's my place."

  "You know the cops are after you for not registering?"

  "Spice of life."

  "You can be jailed, you know."

  "You're afraid to live, Paul. That's what's the matter with you. You know about Thoreau and Emerson?"

  "A little. About as much as you did before Lasher primed you, I'll bet."

  "Anyway, Thoreau was in jail because he wouldn't pay a tax to support the Mexican War. He didn't believe in the war. And Emerson came to jail to see him. 'Henry,' he said, 'why are you here?' And Thoreau said, 'Ralph, why aren't you here?' "

  "I should want to go to jail?" said Paul, trying to get some sort of message for himself out of the anecdote.

  "You shouldn't let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in."

  "Well, it doesn't." Paul reflected that the big trouble, really, was finding something to believe in.

  "All right, so it doesn't." There was weary disbelief in Finnerty's voice. He was apparently getting bored with his convention-ridden former friend from the north side of the river. "Thanks for the car."

  "Any time." Paul was relieved when the door closed behind the new--this week's--Finnerty.

  Katharine opened the door again. "He scares me," she said.

  "You needn't be scared. He wastes all his energy on games with himself. There goes your phone."

  "It's Doctor Kroner," said Katharine. "Yes," she said into the telephone, "Doctor Proteus is in."

  "Would you please put him on," said Kroner's secretary.

  "Doctor Proteus speaking."

  "Doctor Proteus is on," said Katharine.

  "Just a moment. Doctor Kroner wishes to speak with him. Doctor Kroner, Doctor Proteus in Ilium is on the line."

  "Hello, Paul."

  "How do you do, sir."

  "Paul, about this Finnerty and Lasher business--" His playfully conspiratorial tone implied that the proposed prosecution of these two was sort of a practical joke. "Just wanted to tell you that I call
ed Washington about it, to let them in on what we're going to do, and they say we should hold off for a while. They say the whole thing ought to be well planned at the top level. It's apparently bigger stuff than I thought." His voice dropped to a whisper. "It's beginning to look like a problem nationwise, not just Iliumwise."

  Paul was pleased that there was to be a delay, but the reason for it was a surprise. "How could Finnerty get to be a problem nationwise or even Iliumwise? He's only been here a few days."

  "Idle hands do the Devil's work, Paul. He's probably been getting into bad company, and it's the bad company we're really after. Anyway, the top brass wants in on whatever we do, and they want to have a meeting about it at the Meadows. Let's see--sixteen days from now."

  "Fine," said Paul, and added, in his mind, the imaginary seal he affixed to all official business these days--"And to hell with you." He had no intention of turning informer on anyone. He would simply stall until he and Anita were fully prepared to say, "To hell with you, to hell with everything," aloud.

  "We think the world of you over here, Paul."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Kroner was silent for a moment. Suddenly he shouted into the phone, almost rupturing Paul's eardrum.

  "Beg your pardon, sir?" The message had been so loud as to be all pain and no sense.

  Kroner chuckled, and lowered his voice a little. "I said, who's going to win, Paul?"

  "Win?"

  "The Meadows, the Meadows! Who's going to win?"

  "Oh--the Meadows," said Paul. It was a nightmarish conversation, with Kroner vehement and happy, and with Paul devoid of the vaguest notion as to what was being discussed.

  "What team?" said Kroner, a shade peevishly.

  "Oh. Oh! The Blue Team is going to win!" He filled his lungs. "Blue!" he shouted.

  "You bet your life we're going to win!" Kroner shouted back. "The Blues are behind you, Cap'n!" Kroner, then, was on the Blue Team, too. He started to sing in his rumbling basso:

  "Oh you Blue Team, you tried and true team,

  There are no teams as good as you!

  You will smash Green, also the Red Team,

  And the White Team you'll batt--"

  The song was interrupted by a cry: "White's going to win! Go, White!" It was Baer, yelling in the background. "So you think Blue's going to win, do you, do you, eh? Win? Think Blue's going to win, eh, eh? The White Team will trim you, trim you--aha, aha--trim the daylights out of the Blue Team."

  There was the sound of laughter and banter and scuffling, and Kroner picked up the Blue Team's song where he'd left off:

  "They'd better scurry before your fury,

  And in a hurry, without a clue;

  Because the--"

  Baer's piercing voice cut through Kroner's bass with the White Team's song, to the tune of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp":

  "White, White, White's the one to watch for.

  Blue, Green, Red will come to grief.

  Before the fury of the White

  They'll get knocked clear out of--"

  The scuffling grew louder, and the songs degenerated into panting laughter. There was a clatter in Paul's receiver, a cry, a click, and then the dial tone.

  Paul restored the receiver to its cradle with a limp hand. There was no quitting before the Meadows, he told himself glumly--no re-educating Anita and quitting in the few days remaining. The Meadows would have to be endured, and, worse luck, he would have to endure it as captain of the Blue Team.

  His glance passed over the hairy tan chest, frank gray eyes, and keg-sized biceps of the man on the book jacket, and his thoughts slid easily, gratefully, into the fantasy of the new, good life ahead of him. Somewhere, outside of society, there was a place for a man--a man and wife--to live heartily and blamelessly, naturally, by hands and wits.

  Paul studied his long, soft hands. Their only callus was on the large finger of his right hand. There, stained a dirty orange by cigarette tars, a tough hump had grown over the years, protecting his finger against the attrition of pen and pencil shafts. Skills--that was what the hands of the heroes in the novels had, skills. To date, Paul's hands had learned to do little save grip a pen, pencil, toothbrush, hair brush, razor, knife, fork, spoon, cup, glass, faucet, doorknob, switch, handkerchief, towel, zipper, button, snap, bar of soap, book, comb, wife, or steering wheel.

  He recalled his college days, and was sure he'd learned some sort of manual skill there. He'd learned to make mechanical drawings. That was when the lump on his finger had begun to grow. What else? He'd learned to bounce a ball off several walls with skill, and to the consternation of most of his squash opponents. He'd been good enough to make the quarter-finals of the Regional Collegiate Squash Tournament two years in a row. He used to be able to do that with his hands.

  What else?

  Again uneasiness crept up on him--the fear that there was far too little of him to get along anywhere outside the system, to get along at all contentedly. He might go into some small business, such as the one he claimed to be in when he didn't want to be recognized--wholesale groceries. But he would still be caught in the mesh of the economy and its concomitant hierarchy. The machines wouldn't let him into that business, anyway, and even if they would, there'd be no less nonsense and posturing. Moreover, despite the fact that Paul was saying to hell with the whole system, he was aware that the relatively unskilled and dull business of buying and selling was beneath him. So to hell with it. The only thing worse would be complete idleness, which Paul could afford, but which, he was sure, was as amoral as what he was quitting.

  Farming--now there was a magic word. Like so many words with little magic from the past still clinging to them, the word "farming" was a reminder of what rugged stock the present generation had come from, of how tough a thing a human being could be if he had to. The word had little meaning in the present. There were no longer farmers, but only agricultural engineers. In the rich Iroquois Valley in Ilium County, thousands of settlers had once made their living from the soil. Now Doctor Ormand van Curler managed the farming of the whole county with a hundred men and several million dollars' worth of machinery.

  Farming. Paul's pulse quickened, and he daydreamed of living a century before--living in one of the many farmhouses now crumbling into their foundations over the valley. He chose one farmhouse in particular for his fantasy, one close to the edge of town that he'd often admired. He suddenly realized that the farm, the little patch of the past, wasn't a part of van Curler's farm system. He was almost sure it wasn't.

  "Katharine," he called excitedly, "get me the Ilium Real Estate Manager on the phone."

  "Ilium Real Estate Office. Doctor Pond speaking." Pond's speech was effeminate, lisping.

  "Doctor Pond, this is Doctor Proteus at the Works."

  "Well! What can I do for you, Doctor Proteus?"

  "You know that farmhouse out on King Street, just outside the city limits?"

  "Mmmm. Just a moment." Paul heard a machine shuffling through cards, and then a bell announced that the card had been found. "Yes, the Gottwald place. I have the card right here."

  "What's being done with it?"

  "A good question! What can be done with it? I wish I knew. It was a hobby with Gottwald, you know, keeping it just like an old-fashioned farm. When he died, the heirs wanted to get van Curler to take it over, but he said it wasn't worth bothering with. Two hundred acres is all, and he'd have to cut down the windbreaks to connect it with other fields so he could farm it efficiently. Then the heirs found out that they couldn't have sold it to the Farm System anyway. It's in the deed that the place has to be kept old-fashioned." He laughed bitterly. "So all old Gottwald left his heirs was a nice headache, a white elephant."

  "How much?"

  "Are you serious? The thing's a museum exhibit, Doctor. I mean, almost nothing mechanical on the place. Even if you could beat the restrictions in the deed, it'd cost you thousands to get it in shape."

  "How much?" The farm was looking better and better.


  "Eighteen thousand, it says on the card." Before Paul could close the deal that instant, Pond added, "but you can get it for fifteen, I'm sure. How would twelve suit you?"

  "Would five hundred hold it until I can look it over?"

  "It's been holding itself for almost fourteen years. Go on out and have a look, if you really feel you have to. After you've thrown up, there are some really nice things I'd like to show you." The machine riffled through its cards again. "For instance, there's a nice Georgian house on Griffin Boulevard. Electronic door openers, thermostatically controlled windows, radar range, electrostatic dust precipitators, ultrasonic clothes washer built in, forty-inch television screens in the master bedroom, guest room, living room, kitchen, and rumpus rooms, and twenty-inch screens in the maids' rooms and the kiddies' rooms, and--"

  "Where can I get the key to the farm?"

  "Oh, that thing. Well, to give you an idea of what you're getting into, there is no lock. There's a latchstring."

  "Latchstring?"

  "Yes, latchstring. I had to go out myself to find out what the darn thing is. There's a latch on the inside of the door, with a string tied to it. When you want to let somebody just walk in, you stick the little string through a hole in the door, so the string dangles outside. If you don't want people walking in, you pull the string in through the hole. Ghastly?"

  "I'll survive somehow. Is the latchstring out?"

  "There's a caretaker there, detailed from the Reeks and Wrecks. I'll call him and tell him to put it out. Confidentially, I'm sure they'll take eight."

  15

  THE LATCHSTRING AT the Gottwald house was out for Doctor Paul Proteus.

  He tugged at it, listened with satisfaction as the latch disengaged itself inside, and walked in. The living room was dimly lit through tiny-paned, dusty windows, and what light did get in died without reflection on dull, dark antique surfaces. The floor rose and fell like a springboard beneath Paul's feet.

  "The house breathes with you, like good underwear," said a lisping voice from the shadows. Paul looked in the direction from which it had come. The man sucked on his cigarette, lighting his moon face with a pink glow. "Doctor Proteus?"