And I was bored with it.
It began to become evident to others, eventually. One day during my final semester a friend asked me, “Is there something worrying you, Harry?”
I shook my head quickly—too quickly. “No,” I said. “Why? Do I look worried?”
“You look worse than worried. You look obsessed.”
We laughed about it, and finally we went down to the student center and had a few beers, and before long my tongue had loosened a little.
I said, “There is something worrying me. And you know what it is? I’m afraid I won’t live up to the standards my family set for me.”
Guffaws greeted me. “Come off it, Harry! Phi Beta in your junior year, top class standing, a brilliant career in history ahead of you—what do they want from you, blood?”
I chuckled and gulped my beer and mumbled something innocuous, but inside I was curdling.
Everything I was, I owed to Mother. She made me what I am. But I was played out as a student of history; I was the family failure, the goat, the rotten egg. Raymond still wrestled gleefully with nuclear physics, with Heisenberg and Schrodinger and the others. Mark gloried in his fastball and his slider and his curve. Paul daubed canvas merrily in his Greenwich Village flat near N.Y.U., and even Robert seemed to take delight in keeping books.
Only I had failed. History had become repugnant to me. I was in rebellion against it. I would disappoint my mother, become the butt of my brothers’ scorn, and live in despair, hating the profession of historian and fitted by training for nothing else.
I was graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, a few days after my twenty-first birthday. I wired Mother that I was on my way home, and bought train-tickets.
It was a long and grueling journey to Wisconsin. I spent my time thinking, trying to choose between the unpleasant alternatives that faced me.
I could attempt duplicity, telling my mother I was still studying history, while actually preparing myself for some more attractive profession—the law, perhaps.
I could confess to her at once my failure of purpose, ask her forgiveness for disappointing her and flawing her grand scheme, and try to begin afresh in another field.
Or I could forge ahead with history, compelling myself grimly to take an interest, cramping and paining myself so that my mother’s design would be complete.
None of them seemed desirable paths to take. I brooded over it, and was weary and apprehensive by the time I arrived at our farm.
The first of my brothers I saw was Mark. He sat on the front porch of the big house, reading a book which I recognized at once and with some surprise as Volume I of Churchill. He looked up at me and smiled feebly.
I frowned. “I didn’t expect to find you here, Mark. According to the local sports pages the Braves are playing on the Coast this week. How come you’re not with them?”
His voice was a low murmur. “Because they gave me my release,” he said.
“What?”
He nodded. “I’m washed up at twenty-one. They made me a free agent; that means I can hook up with any team that wants me.”
“And you’re just taking a little rest before offering yourself around?”
He shook his head. “I’m through. Kaput. Harry, I just can’t stand baseball. It’s a silly, stupid game. You know how many times I had to stand out there in baggy knickers and throw a bit of horsehide at some jerk with a club in his paws? A hundred, hundred-fifty times a game, every four days. For what? What the hell does it all mean? Why should I bother?”
There was a strange gleam in his eyes. I said, “Have you told Mother?”
“I don’t dare! She thinks I’m on leave or something. Harry, how can I tell her—”
“I know.” Briefly, I told him of my own disenchantment with history. We were mutually delighted to learn that we were not alone in our affliction. I picked up my suitcases, scrambled up the steps, and went inside.
Dewey was cleaning up the common room as I passed through. He nodded hello glumly. I said, “How’s the tooth trade?”
He whirled and glared at me viciously.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“I’ve been accepted by four dental schools, Harry.”
“Is that any cause for misery?”
He let the broom drop, walked over to me, and whispered, “I’ll murder you if you tell Mother this. But the thought of spending my life poking around in foul-smelling oral cavities sickens me. Sickens.”
“But I thought—”
“Yeah. You thought. You’ve got it soft; you just need to dig books out of the library and rearrange what they say and call it new research. I have to drill and clean and fill and plug and—” He stopped. “Harry, I’ll kill you if you breathe a word of this. I don’t want Mother to know that I didn’t come out the way she wanted.”
I repeated what I had said to Mark—and told him about Mark, for good measure. Then I made my way upstairs to my old room. I felt a burden lifting from me; I was not alone. At least two of my brothers felt the same way. I wondered how many more were at last rebelling against the disciplines of a lifetime.
Poor Mother, I thought! Poor Mother!
Our first family council of the summer was held that night. Stephen and Saul were the last to arrive, Stephen resplendent in his Annapolis garb, Saul crisp looking and stiff-backed from West Point. Mother had worked hard to wangle appointments for those two.
We sat around the big table and chatted. The first phase of our lives, Mother told us, had ended. Now, our preliminary educations were complete, and we would undertake the final step towards our professions, those of us who had not already entered them.
Mother looked radiant that evening, tall, energetic, her white hair cropped mannishly short, as she sat about the table with her thirty-one strapping sons. I envied and pitied her: envied her for the sweet serenity of her life, which had proceeded so inexorably and without swerving towards the goal of her experiment, and pitied her for the disillusioning that awaited her.
For Mark and Dewey and I were not the only failures in the crop.
I had made discreet inquiries during the day. I learned that Anthony found literary criticism to be a fraud and a sham, that Paul knew clearly he had no talent as a painter (and, also, that very few of his contemporaries did either), that Robert bitterly resented a career of bookkeeping, that piano playing hurt George’s fingers, that Claude had had difficulty with his composing because he was tone-deaf, that the journalistic grind was too strenuous for Jonas, that John longed to quit the seminarial life because he had no calling, that Albert hated the uncertain bohemianism of an actor’s life—
We circulated, all of us raising for the first time the question that had sprouted in our minds during the past several years. I made the astonishing discovery that not one of Donna Mitchell’s sons cared for the career that had been chosen for him.
The experiment had been a resounding flop.
Late that evening, after Mother had gone to bed, we remained together, discussing our predicament. How could we tell her? How could we destroy her life’s work? And yet, how could we compel ourselves to lives of unending drudgery?
Robert wanted to study engineering; Barry, to write. I realized I cared much more for law than for history, while Leonard longed to exchange law for the physical sciences. James, our banker-manqué, much preferred politics. And so it went, with Richard (who claimed five robberies, a rape, and innumerable picked pockets) pouring out his desire to settle down and live within the law as an honest farmer.
It was pathetic.
Summing up the problem in his neat forensic way, Leonard said, “Here’s our dilemma: do we all keep quiet about this and ruin our lives, or do we speak up and ruin Mother’s experiment?”
“I think we ought to continue as is, for the time being,” Saul said. “Perhaps Mother will die in the next year or two. We can start over then.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t die?” Edward wanted to know. “She’s tough as nails. She may l
ast another twenty or thirty or even forty years.”
“And we’re past twenty-one already,” remarked Raymond. “If we hang on too long at what we’re doing, it’ll be too late to change. You can’t start studying for a new profession when you’re thirty-five.”
“Maybe we’ll get to like what we’re doing by then,” suggested David hopefully. “Diplomatic service isn’t as bad as all that, and I’d say—”
“What about me?” Paul yelped. “I can’t paint and I know I can’t paint. I’ve got nothing but starvation ahead of me unless I wise up and get into business in a hurry. You want me to keep messing up good white canvas the rest of my life?”
“It won’t work,” said Barry in a doleful voice. “We’ll have to tell her.”
Douglas shook his head. “We can’t do that. You know just what she’ll do. She’ll bring down the umpteen volumes of notes she’s made on this experiment, and ask us if we’re going to let it all come to naught.”
“He’s right,” Albert said. “I can picture the scene now. The big organ-pipe voice blasting us for our lack of faith, the accusations of ingratitude—”
“Ingratitude?” William shouted. “She twisted us and pushed us and molded us without asking our permission. Hell, she created us with her laboratory tricks. But that didn’t give her the right to make zombies out of us.”
“Still,” Martin said, “we can’t just go to her and tell her that it’s all over. The shock would kill her.”
“Well?” Richard asked in the silence that followed. “What’s wrong with that?”
For a moment, no one spoke. The house was quiet; we heard footsteps descending the stairs. We froze.
Mother appeared, an imperial figure even in her old housecoat. “You boys are kicking up too much of a racket down here,” she boomed. “I know you’re glad to see each other again after a year, but I need my sleep.”
She turned and strode upstairs again. We heard her bedroom door slam shut. For an instant we were all ten-year-olds again, diligently studying our books for fear of Mother’s displeasure.
I moistened my lips. “Well?” I asked. “I call for a vote on Richard’s suggestion.”
Martin, as a chemist, prepared the drink, using Donald’s medical advice as his guide. Saul, Stephen, and Raymond dug a grave, in the woods at the back of our property. Douglas and Mark built the coffin.
Richard, ending his criminal career with a murder to which we were all accessories before the fact, carried the fatal beverage upstairs to Mother the next morning, and persuaded her to sip it. One sip was all that was necessary; Martin had done his work well.
Leonard offered us a legal opinion: It was justifiable homicide. We placed the body in its coffin and carried it out across the fields. Richard, Peter, Jonas and Charles were her pallbearers; the others of us followed in their path.
We lowered the body into the ground and John said a few words over her. Then, slowly, we closed over the grave and replaced the sod, and began the walk back to the house.
“She died happy,” Anthony said. “She never suspected the size of her failure.” It was her epitaph.
As our banker, James supervised the division of her assets, which were considerable, into thirty-one equal parts. Noel composed a short fragment of prose which we agreed summed up our sentiments.
We left the farm that night, scattering in every direction, anxious to begin life. All that went before was a dream from which we now awakened. We agreed to meet at the farm each year, on the anniversary of her death, in memory of the woman who had so painstakingly divided a zygote into thirty-two viable cells, and who had spent a score of years conducting an experiment based on a theory that had proved to be utterly false.
We felt no regret, no qualm. We had done what needed to be done, and on that last day some of us had finally functioned in the professions for which Mother had intended us.
I, too. My first and last work of history will be this, an account of Mother and her experiment, which records the beginning and the end of her work. And now it is complete.
THE IRON CHANCELLOR
Nothing very serious or lofty here, just a slick, well-made story somewhat in the Henry Kuttner vein. (He was one of my early idols, a clever, prolific, technically proficient writer who died in 1958 at the age of 44. I never knew him personally but I followed his stories eagerly in the magazines when I was in my teens—they appeared under a host of pseudonyms, but we ferreted them all out—and later studied them with ferocious concentration to pry loose their secrets). It dates from December, 1957; Horace Gold, who had a weakness himself for the Kuttner sort of light comedy with a grim twist, quickly bought it without giving me a particularly hard time and printed it in the May, 1958 issue of Galaxy.
It has had a healthy post-publication life in anthologies—most conspicuously in a bizarre volume edited by a couple of good friends of mine, Martin H. Greenberg and George R. R. Martin, called The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book. It’s been optioned a couple of times for television, too, but so far has never been produced.
——————
The Carmichaels were a pretty plump family, to begin with. Not one of the four of them couldn’t stand to shed quite a few pounds. And there happened to be a super-special on roboservitors at one of the Miracle Mile roboshops—40% off on the 2061 model, with adjustable caloric-intake monitors.
Sam Carmichael liked the idea of having his food prepared and served by a robot who would keep one beady solenoid eye on the collective family waistline. He squinted speculatively at the glossy display model, absent-mindedly slipped his thumbs beneath his elastobelt to knead his paunch, and said, “How much?”
The salesman flashed a brilliant and probably synthetic grin. “Only two thousand nine hundred ninety-five, sir. That includes free service contract for the first five years. Only two hundred credits down and up to forty months to pay.”
Carmichael frowned, thinking of his bank balance. Then he thought of his wife’s figure, and of his daughter’s endless yammering about her need to diet. Besides, Jemima, their old robocook, was shabby and gear-stripped, and made a miserable showing when other company executives visited them for dinner.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
“Care to trade in your old robocook, sir? Liberal trade-in allowances—”
“I have a ’43 Madison.” Carmichael wondered if he should mention its bad arm-libration and serious fuel-feed overflow, but decided that would be carrying candidness too far.
“Well—ah—I guess we could allow you fifty credits on a ’43, sir. Seventy-five, maybe, if the recipe bank is still in good condition.”
“Excellent condition.” That part was honest—the family had never let even one recipe wear out. “You could send a man down to look her over.”
“Oh, no need to do that, sir. We’ll take your word. Seventy-five, then? And delivery of the new model by this evening?”
“Done,” Carmichael said. He was glad to get the pathetic old ’43 out of the house at any cost.
He signed the purchase order cheerfully, pocketed the facsim and handed over ten crisp twenty-credit vouchers. He could almost feel the roll of fat melting from him now, as he eyed the magnificent ’61 roboservitor that would shortly be his.
The time was only 1810 hours when he left the shop, got into his car and punched out the coordinates for home. The whole transaction had taken less than ten minutes. Carmichael, a second-level executive at Normandy Trust, prided himself both on his good business sense and his ability to come quickly to a firm decision.
Fifteen minutes later, his car deposited him at the front entrance of their totally detached self-powered suburban home in the fashionable Westley subdivision. The car obediently took itself around back to the garage, while Carmichael stood in the scanner-field until the door opened. Clyde, the robutler, came scuttling hastily up, took his hat and cloak, and handed him a Martini.
Carmichael beamed appreciatively. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”
/>
He took a healthy sip and headed towards the living room to greet his wife, son and daughter. Pleasant gin-induced warmth filtered through him. The robutler was ancient and due for replacement as soon as the budget could stand the charge, but Carmichael realized he would miss the clanking old heap.
“You’re late, dear,” Ethel Carmichael said as he appeared. “Dinner’s been ready for ten minutes. Jemima’s so annoyed, her cathodes are clicking.”
“Jemima’s cathodes fail to interest me,” Carmichael said evenly. “Good evening, dear. Myra. Joey. I’m late because I stopped off at Marhew’s on my way home.”
His son blinked. “The robot place, Dad?”
“Precisely. I bought a ’61 roboservitor to replace old Jemima and her sputtering cathodes. The new model has,” Carmichael added, eyeing his son’s adolescent bulkiness and the rather-more-than-ample figures of his wife and daughter, “some very special attachments.”
They dined well that night, on Jemima’s favorite Tuesday dinner menu—shrimp cocktail, fumet of gumbo chervil, breast of chicken with creamed potatoes and asparagus, delicious plum tarts for dessert, and coffee. Carmichael felt pleasantly bloated when he had finished, and gestured to Clyde for a snifter of his favorite after-dinner digestive aid, VSOP Cognac. He leaned back, warm, replete, able easily to ignore the blustery November winds outside.
A pleasing electroluminescence suffused the dining room with pink—this year, the experts thought pink improved digestion—and the heating filaments embedded in the wall glowed cozily as they delivered the BTUs. This was the hour for relaxation in the Carmichael household.
“Dad,” Joey began hesitantly, “about that canoe trip next weekend—”
Carmichael folded his hands across his stomach and nodded. “You can go, I suppose. Only be careful. If I find out you didn’t use the equilibriator this time—”
The door chime sounded. Carmichael lifted an eyebrow and swiveled in his chair.
“Who is it, Clyde?”
“He gives his name as Robinson, sir. Of Robinson Robotics, he said. He has a bulky package to deliver.”