Introduction to
THE HAPPY BREED
This is the second of two stories I bought from writers whose work I did not know. It came in, one of a pair, from Robert Mills, my own agent. The note accompanying it said simply, “You’ll like the way he thinks.” That, in the trade, is called the undersell. When I was younger, when I worked in a bookstore on Times Square, an area where the hard sell was invented (or at least perfected), I used the undersell—or “mush” as it is called—with only two items. The first was with a book called The Alcoholic Women. It was ostensibly a volume of case histories intended for medical students, dealing with psychiatric aberrations attendant on female alcoholism. But there was one passage, on page 73, if I recall properly, that was extremely steamy. Something about lesbianism, rather graphically reported by the lushed female herself. When we would get in one of the moist-palmed salesmen from Mashed Potato Falls, Wyoming, in search of “lively reading” (because he couldn’t pick up some bimbo in a bar for the evening’s release), we would conduct him to the rear of the shop and hold up the book. It invariably fell open on Page 73. “Here, read anywhere,” we would say, jamming his nose, like a lump of silly putty, right onto that paragraph. His eyes would water. A pair of poached eggs. He would always buy the book. We stiffed them fourteen bucks for the thing. (I think it’s in paperback now, for about half a buck, but them was in the days before Fanny Hill.) Page 73 held the only really “lively” action in the book. The rest was a jungle of electroshock therapy and stomach pumping. But the mush worked marvelously.
The other item was a twelve-inch Italian stiletto in the knife case. When a customer asked for a blade, I would unlock the case and pull out all that steel. I would hold it up, closed, to show it had no switch button on it. Then I would carelessly flip my wrist in a hard, downward movement, and the blade would snap open, quivering. It would usually be about two inches under the customer’s tie knot. Eyes bulge. Poached eggs. Et cetera. Seven-buck sale. Every time.
The only times you can use the mush with any degree of assurance are the times you know for damn dead certain you’ve got a winning item, something that won’t let go of them. Bob Mills was smart to use the mush on me. He knew he had a winner. John T. Sladek’s “The Happy Breed” is a helluva story.
Sladek was born in Iowa on 12/15/37, and attended the University of Minnesota 19 years later as student No. 449731. He studied mechanical engineering, then English literature. He left school to work (Social Security No. 475-38-5320) as a technical writer, bar waiter and for the Great Northern Railway as switchman No. 17728. He thumbed through Europe with passport No. D776097 until he found himself standing in a soup line at Saint-Severin in Paris. He worked as a draftsman in New York, then returned to Europe. He is now living in England, registered as Alien No. E538368. He has been published in New Worlds, Escapade, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and elsewhere. He has just finished his first novel of speculative fiction, The Reproductive System.
The only mushy thing about Sladek or his story is his lousy head for figures. Carry on.
* * * *
THE HAPPY BREED
by John T. Sladek
A.D. 1987
“I don’t know,” said James, lifting himself from the cushions scattered like bright leaves on the floor. “I can’t say that I’m really, you know, happy. Gin or something phony?”
“Aw, man, don’t give me decisions, give me drink,” said Porter. He lay across the black, tufted chaise that he called James’s “shrink couch.”
“Gin it is, then.” James thumbed a button, and a martini glass, frosty and edible-looking, slid into the wall niche and filled. Holding it by the stem, he passed it to Porter, then raised his shaggy brows at Marya.
“Nada,” she said. She was sprawled in a “chair”, really a piece of sculpture, and one of her bare feet had reached out to touch Porter’s leg.
James made himself a martini and looked at it with distaste. If you broke this glass, he thought, it would not leave any sharp edges to, say, cut your wrists on.
“What was I saying? Oh—I can’t say I’m really happy, but then I’m not—uh—”
“Sad?” volunteered Marya, peering from under the brim of her deerstalker.
“Depressed. I’m not depressed. So I must be happy,” he finished, and hid his confusion behind the glass. As he sipped, he looked her over, from her shapely calves to her ugly brown deerstalker. Last year at this time she’d been wearing a baseball cap, blue with gold piping. It was easy to remember it, for this year all the girls in the Village were wearing baseball caps. Marya Katyovna was always ahead of the pack, in her dress as well as in her paintings.
“How do you know you’re happy?” she said. “Last week I thought I was happy too. I’d just finished my best work, and I tried to drown myself. The Machine pulled the drain. Then I was sad.”
“Why did you try to kill yourself?” James asked, trying to keep her in focus.
“I had this idea that after a perfect work the artist should be destroyed. Dürer used to destroy the plates of his engravings after a few impressions.”
“He did it for money,” muttered Porter.
“All right then, like that architect in Arabia. After he created his magnum opus, the Sultan had him blinded, so he couldn’t do any cheap copies. See what I mean? An artist’s life is supposed to lead toward his masterpiece, not away from it.”
Porter opened his eyes and said, “Exist! The end of life is life. Exist, man, that’s all you gotta do.”
“That sounds like cheap existentialism,” she snarled, withdrawing her foot. “Porter, you are getting more and more like those damned Mussulmen.”
Porter smiled angrily and closed his eyes.
It was time to change the subject.
“Have you heard the one about the Martian who thought he was an Earthman?” James said, using his pleasant-professional tone. “Well, he went to his psychiatrist—”
As he went on with the joke, he studied the two of them. Marya was no worry, even with her dramatic suicide attempts. But Porter was a mess.
O. Henry Porter was his full adopted name, after some minor earlier writer. Porter was a writer, too, or had been. Up to a few months ago, he’d been considered a genius—one of the few of the twentieth century.
Something had happened. Perhaps it was the general decline in reading. Perhaps there was an element of self-defeat in him. For whatever reason, Porter had become little more than a vegetable. Even when he spoke, it was in the cheapest clichés of the old “hip” of twenty years ago. And he spoke less and less.
Vaguely, James tied it in with the Machines. Porter had been exposed to the Therapeutic Environment Machines longer than most, and perhaps his genius was entangled with whatever they were curing. James had been too long away from his practice to guess how this was, but he recalled similar baby/bathwater cases.
“ ‘So that’s why it glows in the dark,’ “ James finished. As he’d expected, Marya laughed, but Porter only forced a smile, over and above his usual smirk of mystical bliss.
“It’s an old joke,” James apologized.
“You are an old joke,” Porter enunciated. “A head-shrinker without no heads to shrink. What the hell do you do all day?”
“What’s eating you?” said Marya to the ex-writer. “What brought you up from the depths?”
James fetched another drink from the wall niche. Before bringing it to his lips, he said, “I think I need some new friends.”
* * * *
As soon as they were gone, he regretted his boorishness. Yet somehow there seemed to be no reason for acting human any more. He was no longer a psychiatrist, and they were not his patients. Any little trauma he might have wrecked would be quickly repaired by their Machines. Even so, he’d have made an extra effort to side-step the neuroses of his friends if he were not able to dial FRIENDS and get a new set.
Only a few years had passed since the Machines began seeing to the happiness, health and continuation of the human race, but he could barely remember life before Them. In the dusty mirror of his unused memory there remained but a few clear spots. He recalled his work as a psychiatrist on the Therapeutic Environment tests.
He recalled the argument with Brody.
* * * *
“Sure, they work on a few test cases. But so far these gadgets haven’t done anything a qualified psychiatrist couldn’t do,” said James.
“Agreed,” said his superior. “But they haven’t made any mistakes, either. Doctor, these people are cured. Moreover, they’re happy!”
Frank envy was written all over Dr. Brody’s heavy face. James knew his superior was having trouble with his wife again.
“But, Doctor,” James began, “These people are not being taught to deal with their environment. Their environment is learning to deal with them. That isn’t medicine, it’s spoonfeeding!”
“When someone is depressed, he gets a dose of ritalin, bouncy tunes on the Muzik, and some dear friend drops in on him unexpectedly. If he is manic or violent, he gets thorazine, sweet music, melancholy stories on TV, and maybe a cool bath. If he’s bored, he gets excitement; if he’s frustrated, he gets something to break; if—”
Brody interrupted. “All right,” he said. “Let me ask you the sixty-four-dollar question: could you do better?”
* * * *
No one could do better. The vast complex of Therapeutic Environment Machines which grew up advanced medicine a millennium in a year. The government took control, to ensure that anyone of however modest means could have at his disposal the top specialists in the country, with all the latest data and techniques. In effect, these specialists were on duty round the clock in each patient’s home, keeping him alive, healthy and reasonably happy.
Nor were they limited to treat. The Machines had extensions clawing through the jungles of the world, spying on witch doctors and learning new medicines. Drug and dietary research became their domain, as did scientific farming and birth control. By 1985, when it became manifest that Machines could and did run everything better, and that nearly everyone in the country wanted to be a patient, the U.S. Government capitulated. Other nations followed suit.
* * * *
By now, no one worked at all, so far as James knew. They had one and only one duty—to be happy.
And happy they were. One’s happiness was guaranteed, by every relay and transistor from those that ran one’s air conditioner right up to those in the chief complex of computers called MEDCENTRAL in Washington—or was it The Hague now? James had not read a newspaper since people had stopped killing each other, since the news had dwindled to weather and sports. In fact, he’d stopped reading the newspaper when the M.D. Employment Wanted ads began to appear.
There were no jobs, only Happiness Jobs—make-work invented by the Machines. In such a job, one could never find an insoluble or even difficult problem. One finished one’s daily quota without tiring one’s mind or body. Work was no longer work, it was therapy, and as such it was constantly rewarding.
Happiness, normality. James saw the personalities of all people drifting downward, like so many different intricate snowflakes falling at last into the common, shapeless mound.
“I’m drunk, that’s all,” he said aloud. “Alcohol’s a depressant. Need another drink.”
He lurched slightly as he crossed the room to the niche. The floor must have detected it, for instead of a martini his pressing the button drew blood from his thumb. In a second the wall had analyzed his blood and presented him with a glass of liquid. A sign lit: “Drink this down at once. Replace glass on sink.”
He drained the pleasant-tasting liquid and at once felt drowsy and warm. Somehow he found his way to the bedroom, the door moving to accommodate him, and he fell into bed.
As soon as James R. Fairchild, AAAAGTR-RHO1A, was asleep, mechanisms went into action to save his life. That is, he was in no immediate danger, but MED 8 reported his decrease in life expectancy by .0005 years as a result of overindulgence, and MED 19 evaluated his behavior, recorded on magnetic tape, as increasing his suicide index by a dangerous fifteen points. A diagnostic unit detached itself from the bathroom wall and careened into the bedroom, halting silently and precisely by his side. It drew more blood, checked pulse, temp, resp, heart and brain-wave pattern, and X-rayed his abdomen. Not instructed to go on to patellar reflexes, it packed up and zoomed away.
In the living room, a housekeeper buzzed about its work, destroying the orange cushions, the sculpture, the couch and the carpet. The walls took on an almost imperceptibly warmer tone. The new carpet matched them.
The furniture—chosen and delivered without the sleeping man’s knowledge was Queen Anne, enough to crowd the room. Its polyethylene wraps were left on while the room was disinfected.
In the kitchen, PHARMO 9 ordered and received a new supply of anti-depressants.
* * * *
It was always the sound of a tractor that awoke Lloyd Young, and though he knew it was an artificial sound, it cheered him all the same. Almost made his day start right. He lay and listened to it awhile before opening his eyes.
Hell, the real tractors didn’t make no sound at all. They worked in the night, burrowing along and plowing a field in one hour that would take a man twelve. Machines pumped strange new chemicals into the soil, and applied heat, to force two full crops of corn in one short Minnesota summer.
There wasn’t much use being a farmer, but he’d always wanted to have a farm, and the Machines said you could have what you wanted. Lloyd was about the only man in these parts still living in the country by now, just him and twelve cows and a half-blind dog, Joe. There wasn’t much to do, with Them running it all. He could go watch his cows being milked, or walk down with Joe to fetch the mail, or watch TV. But it was quiet and peaceful, the way he liked it.
Except for Them and Their pesky ways. They’d wanted to give Joe a new set of machine eyes, but Lloyd said no, if the good Lord wanted him to see, He’d never have blinded him. That was just the way he’d answered Them about the heart operation, too. Seemed almost like They didn’t have enough to keep ‘em busy or something. They was always worrying about him, him who took real good care of himself all through M.I.T. and twenty years of engineering.
When They’d automated, he’d been done out of a job, but he couldn’t hold that against Them. If Machines was better engineers that him, well, shoot!
He opened his eyes and saw he’d be late for milking if he didn’t look sharp. Without even thinking, he chose the baby-blue overalls with pink piping from his wardrobe, jammed a blue straw hat on his head, and loped out to the kitchen.
His pail was by the door. It was a silver one today—yesterday it had been gold. He decided he liked the silver better, for it made the milk look cool and white.
The kitchen door wouldn’t budge, and Lloyd realized it meant for him to put on his shoes. Dammit, he’d of liked to go barefoot. Dammit, he would of.
He would of liked to do his own milking, too, but They had explained how dangerous it was. Why, you could get kicked in the head before you knew it! Reluctantly, the Machines allowed him to milk, each morning, one cow that had been tranquilized and had all its legs fastened to a steel frame.
He slipped on his comfortable blue brogans and picked up his pail again. This time the kitchen door opened easily, and as it did, a rooster crowed in the distance.
Yes, there had been a lot of doors closed in Lloyd’s face. Enough to have made a bitter man of him, but for Them. He knew They could be trusted, even if They had done him out of his job in nineteen and seventy. For ten years he had just bummed around, trying to get factory work, anything. At the end of his rope, until They saved him.
In the barn, Betsy, his favorite Jersey, had been knocked out and shackled by the time he arrived. The Muzik played a bouncy, lighthearted tune, perfect for milking.
No, it wasn’t Machines that did you dirt, he knew. It was people. People and animals, live things always trying to kick you in the head. As much as he liked Joe and Betsy, which was more than he liked people, he didn’t really trust ‘em.
You could trust Machines. They took good care of you. The only trouble with Them was—well, They knew so much. They were always so damned smart and busy, They made you feel kind of useless. Almost like you were standing in Their light.
It was altogether an enjoyable ten minutes, and when he stepped into the cool milkhouse to empty the pail into a receptacle that led God knew where, Lloyd had a strange impulse. He wanted to taste the warm milk, something he’d promised not to do. They had warned him about diseases, but he just felt too good to worry this morning. He tilted the silver pail to his lips—
And a bolt of lightning knocked it away, slamming him to the floor. At least it felt like a bolt of lightning. He tried to get up and found he couldn’t move. A green mist began spraying from the ceiling. Now what the hell was that? he wondered, and drifted off to sleep in the puddle of spilled milk.
* * * *
The first MED unit reported no superficial injuries. Lloyd G. Young, AAAAMTL-RHO1AB, was resting well, pulse high, resp normal. MED 8 disinfected the area thoroughly and destroyed all traces of the raw milk. While MED 1 pumped his stomach and swabbed nose, throat, esophagus and trachea, MED 8 cut away and destroyed all his clothing. An emergency heating unit warmed him until fresh clothing could be constructed. Despite the cushioned floor, the patient had broken a toe in falling. It was decided not to move him but to erect bed and traction on the spot. MED 19 recommended therapeutic punishment.
* * * *
When Lloyd awoke, the television came to life, showing an amiable-looking man with white hair.
“You have my sympathy,” the man said. “You have just survived what we call a ‘Number One Killer Accident,’ a bad fall in your home. Our Machines were in part responsible for this, in the course of saving your life from—” The man hesitated, while a sign flashed behind him: “BACTERIAL POISONING.” Then he went on, “-by physically removing you from the danger. Since this was the only course open to us, your injury could not have been avoided.
“Except by you. Only you can save your life, finally.” The man pointed at Lloyd. “Only you can make all of modern science worth while. And only you can help lower our shocking death toll. You will co-operate, won’t you? Thank you.” The screen went dark, and the set dispensed a pamphlet.
It was a complete account of his accident, and a warning about unpasteurized milk. He would be in bed for a week, it said, and urged him to make use of his telephone and FRIENDS.
* * * *
Professor David Wattleigh sat in the tepid water of his swimming pool in Southern California and longed to swim. But it was forbidden. The gadgets had some way of knowing what he was doing, he supposed, for every time he immersed himself deeper than his chest, the motor of the resuscitator clattered a warning from poolside. It sounded like the snarl of a sheepdog. Or perhaps, he reflected, a Hound of Heaven, an anti-Mephistopheles, come to tempt him into virtue.
Wattleigh sat perfectly still for a moment, then reluctantly he heaved his plump pink body out of the water. Ah, it was no better than a bath. As he passed into the house, he cast a glance of contempt and loathing at the squat Machine.
It seemed as if anything he wished to do was forbidden. Since the day he’d been forced to abandon nineteenth-century English literature, the constraints of mechanica had tightened about Wattleigh, closing him off from his old pleasures one by one. Gone were his pipe and port, his lavish luncheons, his morning swim. In place of his library, there now existed a kind of vending machine that each day “vended” him two pages of thoroughly bowdlerized Dickens. Gay, colorful, witty passages they were, too, set in large Schoolbook type. They depressed him thoroughly.
Yet he had not given up entirely. He pronounced anathema upon the Machines in every letter he wrote to Delphinia, an imaginary lady of his acquaintance, and he feuded with the dining room about his luncheons.
If the dining room did not actually withhold food from him, it did its best to take away his appetite. At various times it had painted itself bilious yellow, played loud and raucous music, and flashed portraits of naked fat people upon its walls. Each day it had some new trick to play, and each day Wattleigh outwitted it.
Now he girded on his academic gown and entered the dining room, prepared for battle. Today, he saw, the room was upholstered in green velvet and lit by a gold chandelier. The dining table was heavy, solid oak, unfinished. There was not a particle of food upon it.
Instead there was a blonde, comely woman.
“Hello,” she said, jumping down from the table. “Are you Professor David Wattleigh? I’m Helena Hershee, from New York. I got your name through FRIENDS, and I just had to look you up.”
“I—how do you do?” he stammered. By way of answer, she unzipped her dress.
* * * *
MED 19 approved what followed as tending to weaken that harmful delusion, “Delphinia”. MED 8 projected a year of treatment, and found the resultant weight loss could add as much as .12 year to patient Wattleigh’s life.
* * * *
After Helena had gone to sleep the professor played a few games with the Ideal Chessplayer. Wattleigh had once belonged to a chess club, and he did not want to lose touch with the game entirely. And one did get rusty. He was amazed at how many times the Ideal Chessplayer had to actually cheat to let him win.
But win he did, game after game, and the Ideal Chessplayer each time would wag its plastic head from side to side and chuckle, “Well, you really got me that time, Wattleigh. Care for another?”
“No,” said Wattleigh, finally disgusted. Obediently the Machine folded its board into its chest and rolled off somewhere.
Wattleigh sat at his desk and started a letter to Delphinia.
“My Darling Delphinia,” scratched his old steel pen on the fine, laid paper. “Today a thought occurred to me while I was (swimming) bathing at Brighton. I have often told you, and as often complained of the behavior of my servant, M-. It, for I cannot bring myself to call it “he” or “she”, has been most distressing about my writing to you, even to the point of blunting my pens and hiding my paper. I have not discharged it for this disgraceful show, for I am bound to it—yes, bound to it by a strange (and terrible secret) fate that makes me doubt at times which is master and which man. It reminds one of several old comedies in which, man and master having changed roles, and maid and mistress likewise, they meet, I mean, of course, in the works of.”
Here the letter proper ended, for the professor could think of no name to fit. After writing, and lining out, “Dickens, Dryden, Dostoyevsky, Racine, Rousseau, Camus,” and a dozen more, his inkwell ran dry. He knew it would be no use to inquire after more ink, for the Machine was dead set against this letter—
Looking out the window, he saw a bright pink- and yellow-striped ambulance. So, the doctor next door was going off to a zombie-land, was he? Or, correctly, to the Hospital for the Asocial. In the East, they called them “Mussulmen”; here, “zombies,” but it all came to the same thing: the living dead who needed no elaborate houses, games, ink. They needed only intravenous nourishment, and little of that. The drapes drew themselves, so Wattleigh knew the doctor was being carried out then. He finished his interrupted thought.
—and in any case he was wholly dissatisfied with this letter. He had not mentioned Helena, luncheon, his resuscitator which growled at him, and so much more. Volumes more, if only he had the ink to write, if only his memory would not fail him when he sat down to write, if only-
* * * *
James stood with his elbow on the marble mantelpiece of Marya’s apartment, surveying the other guests and sizing them up. There was a farmer from Minnesota, incredibly dull, who claimed to have once been an engineer, but who hardly knew what a slide rule was. There was Marya in the company of some muscular young man James disliked at sight, an ex-mathematician named Dewes or Clewes. Marya was about to play chess with a slightly plump Californian, while his girl, a pretty little blonde thing called Helena Hershee, stood by to kibitz.
“I’m practically a champion,” explained Wattleigh, setting up the pieces. “So perhaps I ought to give you a rook or two.”
“If you like,” said Marya. “I haven’t played in years. About all I remember is the Fool’s Mate.”
James drifted over to Helena’s side and watched the game.
“I’m James Fairchild,” he said, and added almost defiantly, “M.D.”
Helena’s lips, too bright with lipstick, parted. “I’ve heard of you,” she murmured. “You’re the aggressive Dr. Fairchild who runs through friends so fast, aren’t you?”
Marya’s eyes came up from the game. Seemingly her eyes had no pupils, and James guessed she was full of ritalin. “James is not in the least aggressive,” she said. “But he gets mad when you won’t let him psychoanalyze you.”
“Don’t disturb the game,” said Wattleigh. He put both elbows on the table in an attitude of concentration.
Helena had not heard Marya’s remark. She had turned to watch the muscular mathematician lecture Lloyd.
“Hell yes. The Machines got to do all the bearing and raising of children. Otherwise, we’d have a population explosion, you get me? I mean we’d run out of food—”
“You really pick ‘em, Marya,” said James. He gestured at the young man. “Whatever became of that ‘writer’? Porter, was it? Christ, I can still hear him saying, ‘Exit, man!’ “ James snorted.
Marya’s head came up once more, and tears stood in her pupil-less eyes. “Porter went to the hospital. He’s a Mussulman now,” she said brightly. “I wish I could feel something for him, but They won’t let me.”
“—it’s like Malthus’ law, or somebody’s law. Animals grow faster than vegetables,” the mathematician went on, speaking to the farmer.
“Checkmate,” said Marya, and bounced to her feet, “James, have you a Sugarsmoke? Chocolate?”
He produced a bright orange cigar. “Only bitter orange, I’m afraid. Ask the Machine.”
“I’m afraid to ask it for anything, today,” she said. “It keeps drugging me—James, Porter was put away a month ago, and I haven’t been able to paint since. Do you think I’m crazy? The Machine thinks so.”
“The Machine,” he said, tearing off the end of the cigar with his teeth, “is always right.”
Seeing Helena had wandered away to sit on Marya’s Chinese sofa, he excused himself with a nod and followed.
Wattleigh still sat brooding over the Fool’s Mate. “I don’t understand. I just can’t understand,” he said.
“—it’s like the hare and the tortoise,” boomed the mathematician. Lloyd nodded solemnly. “The slow one can’t ever catch up, see?”
Lloyd spoke. “Well, you got a point. You got a point. Only I thought the slow one was the winner.”
“Oh.” Dewes (or Clewes) lapsed into thoughtful silence.
Marya wandered about the room, touching faces as if she were a blind person looking for someone she knew.
“But I don’t understand!” said Wattleigh.
“I do,” James mumbled about the cigar. The bitter-sweet smoke was thick as liquid in his mouth. He understood, all right. He looked at them, one by one: an ex-mathematician now having trouble with the difference between arithmetic and geometry; an ex-engineer, ditto; a painter not allowed to paint, not even to feel; a former chess “champion” who could not play. And that left Helena Hershee, mistress to poor, dumb Wattleigh.
“Before the Machines—?” he began.
“—I was a judge,” she said, running her fingertips over the back of his neck provocatively. “And you? What kind of doctor were you?”
* * * *
A.D. 1988
“It was during the Second World War,” Jim Fairchild said. He lay on his back on the long, tiger-striped sofa, with a copy of Hot Rod Komiks over his eyes.
“I thought it only started in the sixties,” said Marya.
“Yeah, but the name ‘Mussulman’—that started in the Nazi death camps. There were some people in them who couldn’t—you know—get with it. They stopped eating and seeing and hearing. Everybody called them ‘Mussulmen’, because they seemed like Moslems, mystics ...”
His voice trailed off, for he was thinking of the Second World War. The good old days, when a man made his own rules. No Machines to tell you what to do.
He had been living with Marya for several months now. She was his girl, just as the other Marya, in Hot Rod Komiks, was the girl of the other Him, Jim (Hell-on-Wheels) White. It was a funny thing about Komiks. They were real life, and at the same time they were better than life.
Marya—his Marya—was no intellectual. She didn’t like to read and think, like Jim, but that was okay, because men were supposed to do all the reading and thinking and fighting and killing. Marya sat in a lavender bucket seat in the corner, drawing with her crayons. Easing his lanky, lean body up off the sofa, Jim walked around behind her and looked at the sketch.
“Her nose is crooked,” he said.
“That doesn’t matter, silly. This is a fashion design. It’s only the dress that counts.”
“Well, how come she’s got yellow hair? People don’t have yellow hair.”
“Helena Hershee has.”
“No, she hasn’t!”
“She has so!”
“No, it ain’t yellow, it’s—it ain’t yellow.”
Then they both paused, because Muzik was playing their favorite song. Each had a favorite of his own—Jim’s was “Blap”, and Marya’s was “Yes, I Know I Rilly Care for You”—but they had one favorite together. Called “Kustomized Tragedy”, it was one of the songs in which the Muzik imitated their voices, singing close harmony:
Jim Gunn had a neat little kustom job,
And Marya was his girl.
They loved each other with a love so true,
The truest in the worl’.
But Jim weren’t allowed to drive his kar,
And Marya could not see;
Kust’mized Traju-dee-ee-ee.
The song went on to articulate how Jim Gunn wanted more than anything in the worl’ to buy an eye operation for his girl, who wished to admire his kustom kar. So he drove to a store and held it up, but someone recognized his kar. The police shot him, but:
He kissed his Marya one last time;
The policeman shot her too.
But she said, “I can see your kustom, Jim!
It’s pretty gold and bloo!”
He smiled and died embracing her,
Happy that she could see.
Kust’mized Traju-dee.
Of course, in real life, Marya could see very well, Jim had no kar, and there were no policemen. But it was true for them, nevertheless. In some sense they could not express, they felt their love was a tragedy.
Knowing Jim felt lonesome and bloo, Marya walked over and kissed his ear. She lay down beside him, and at once they were asleep.
* * * *
MEDCENTRAL’s audit showed a population of 250,000,000 in NORTHAMER, stabilized. Other than a few incubator failures, and one vat of accidentally infected embryos, progress was as predicted, with birth and death rates equal. The norm had shifted once more toward the asocial, and UTERINE CONTROL showed 90.2 per cent adult admissions at both major hospitals.
Trenchant abnormals were being regressed through adolescence, there being no other completely satisfactory method of normalizing them without shock therapy, and its attendant contraindications.
* * * *
Lloyd pulled his pocket watch from the bib of his plaid overalls. The hands of Chicken Licken pointed straight up, meaning there was just time to fetch the mail before Farm Kartoons on TV. On Impulse, Lloyd popped the watch into his mouth and chewed. It was delicious, but it gave him little pleasure. Everything was too easy, too soft. He wanted exciting things to happen to him, like the time on Farm Kartoons when Black Angus tried to kill the hero, Lloyd White, by breaking up his Machine, and Lloyd White had stabbed him with a pitchfork syringe and sent him off to the hospital.
Mechanical Joe, knowing it was time to fetch the mail, came running out of the house. He wagged his tail and whined impatiently. It didn’t make any difference that he wasn’t a real dog, Lloyd thought as they strolled toward the mailbox. Joe still liked it when you scratched his ears. You could tell, just by the look in his eyes. He was livelier and a lot more fun than the first Joe.
Lloyd paused a moment, remembering how sad he’d been when Joe died. It was a pleasantly melancholy thought, but now mechanical Joe was dancing around him and barking anxiously. They continued.
The mailbox was chock-full of mail. There was a new komik, called Lloyd Farmer and Joe, and a whole big box of new toys.
Yet later, when Lloyd had read the komik and watched Farm Kartoon and played awhile with his building set, he still felt somehow heavy, depressed. It was no good being alone all the time, he decided. Maybe he should go to New York and see Jim and Marya. Maybe the Machines there were different, not so bossy.
For the first time another, stranger thought came to him. Maybe he should go live in New York.
DEAR DELPHINIA, (Dave printed). THIS IS GOING TO BE MY LAST LETTER TO YOU, AS IDONT LOVE YOU ANY MORE. I KNOW NOW WHAT HAS BEEN MAKING ME FEEL BAD, AND IT IS YOU. YOU ARE REALLY MY MASHINE, AREN’T YOU HA HA I’LL BET YOU DIDN’T THINK I NEW.
NOW I LOVE HELENA MORE THAN YOU AND WE ARE GOING AWAY TO NEW YORK AND SEE LOTS OF FRIENDS AND GO TO LOTS OF PARTYS AND HAVE LOTS OF FUN AND I DONT CARE IF I DONT SEE YOU NO MORE.
LOVE, AND BEST OF LUCK TO A SWELL KID,
DAVE W.
* * * *
After an earthquake destroyed seventeen million occupants of the Western hospital, MEDCENTRAL ordered the rest moved at once to the East. All abnormals not living near the East hospital were also persuaded to evacuate to New York. Persuasion was as follows:
Gradually, humidity and pressure were increased to .9 discomfort while, subliminally, pictures of New York were flashed on all surfaces around each patient.
* * * *
Dave and Helena had come by subway from LA, and they were tired and cross. The subway trip itself took only two or three hours, but they had spent an additional hour in the taxi to Jim’s and Marya’s.
“It’s an electric taxi,” Dave explained, “and it only goes about a mile an hour. I’ll sure never make that trip again.”
“I’m glad you came,” said Marya. “We’ve been feeling terrible lonesome and bloo.”
“Yes,” Jim added, “and I got an idea. We can form a club, see, against the Machines. I got it all figured out. We—”
“Babay, tell them about the zombies—I mean, the Mussulmen,’ said Helena.
Dave spoke with an excited, wild look about him. “Jeez, yeah, they had about a million cars of them on the train, all packed in glass bottles. I wasn’t sure what the hell they were at first, see, so I went up and looked at one. It was a skinny, hairless man, all folded up in a bottle inside another bottle. Weird-looking.”
In honor of their arrival, the Muzik played the favorite songs of all four: “Zonk,” “Yes, I Know I Rilly Care for You,” “Blap,” and “That’s My Babay,” while the walls went transparent for a moment, showing a breath-taking view of the gold towers of New York. Lloyd, who spoke to no one, sat in the corner keeping time to the music. He had no favorite song.
“I want to call this the Jim Fairchild Club,” said Jim. “The purpose of this here club is to get rid of the Machines. Kick ‘em out!”
Marya and Dave sat down to a game of chess.
“I know how we can do it, too,” Jim went on. “Here’s my plan: Who put the Machines in, in the first place? The U.S. Government. Well, there ain’t any U.S. Government any more. So the Machines are illegal. Right?”
“Right,” said Helena. Lloyd continued to tap his foot, though no Muzik was playing.
“They’re outlaws,” said Jim. “We oughta kill them!”
“But how?” asked Helena.
“I ain’t got all the details worked out yet. Give me time. Because, you know, the Machines done us wrong.”
“How’s that?” asked Lloyd, as if from far away.
“We all had good jobs, and we were smart. A long time ago. Now we’re all getting dumb. You know?”
“That’s right,” Helena agreed. She opened a tiny bottle and began painting her toenails.
“I think,” said Jim, glaring about him, “the Machines are trying to make us all into Mussulmen. Any of you want to get stuffed into a bottle? Huh?”
“A bottle inside a bottle,” Dave corrected, without looking up from his game.
Jim continued, “I think the Machines are drugging us into Mussulmen. Or else they got some kind of ray, maybe, that makes us stupider. An X ray, maybe.”
“We gotta do something,” said Helena, admiring her foot.
Marya and Dave began to quarrel about how the pawn moves.
Lloyd continued to tap his foot, marking time.
* * * *
A.D. 1989
Jimmy had a good idea, but nobody wanted to listen. He remembered, once when he was an itsy boy, a Egg Machine that tooked the eggs out of their shells and putted them into plastic—things. It was funny, the way the Machine did that. Jimmy didn’t know why it was so funny, but he laughed and laughed, just thinking about it. Silly, silly, silly eggs.
Mary had a idea, a real good one. Only she didn’t know how to say it so she got a crayon and drew a great Big! picture of the Machines: Mommy Machine and Daddy Machine and all the little Tiny Tot Machines.
Loy-Loy was talking. He was building a block house. “Now I’m putting the door,” he said. “Now I’m putting the little window. Now the—why is the window littler than the house? I don’t know. This is the chimney and this is the steeple and open the door and where’s all the people? I don’t know.”
Helena had a wooden hammer, and she was driving all the pegs. Bang! Bang! Bang! “One, two, three!” she said. “Banga-banga-bang!”
Davie had the chessmen out, lined up in rows, two by two. He wanted to line them all up three by three, only somehow he couldn’t. It made him mad and he began to cry.
Then one of the Machines came and stuck something in his mouth, and everybody else wanted one and somebody was screaming and more Machines came and ...
* * * *
The coded message came to MEDCENTRAL. The last five abnormals had been cured, and all physical and mental functions reduced to the norm. All pertinent data on them were switched over to UTERINE SUPPLY, which clocked them in at 400 hrs GMT, day 1, yr 1989. MEDCENTRAL agreed on the time check, then switched itself off.
* * * *
Afterword:
“The Happy Breed” demonstrates one version of what I like to think of as the Horrible Utopia. Ionesco’s play, The Bald Soprano, had already shown a world without evil. In a sense, this was my model; I tried to show a world without pain. In both instances, the same phenomena obtain: without evil or pain, preference and choice are meaningless; personality blurs; figures merge with their backgrounds, and thinking becomes superfluous and disappears. I believe these are the inevitable results of achieving Utopia, if we make the mistake of assuming that Utopia equals perfect happiness. There is, after all, a pleasure center in everyone’s head. Plant an electrode there, and presumably we could be constantly, perfectly happy on a dime’s worth of electricity a day.
If not of happiness, then, of what material do we construct our Utopia? The avoidance of pain, perhaps? Perfect security from disease, accident, natural disaster? We gain these only at the cost of contact with our environment—ultimately at the cost of our humanity. We become “etherized”, in both of Eliot’s senses of the word: numb and unreal.
To some, this story might seem itself unreal and hypothetical. I can only point out that dozens of electronic firms are now inventing and developing new diagnostic equipment; in a short time physicians will depend almost entirely upon machines for accurate diagnoses. There is no reason why it must stop there, or at any point short of mechanical doctors.
If we elect to build machines to heal us, we must be certain we know what power we are giving them and what it is we ask in return. In “The Happy Breed” the agency through which the anesthetic world comes to be is a kind of genie, the Slave of the Pushbutton. It is a peculiarly literal-minded genie, and it will give us exactly what we ask, no more and no less. Norbert Wiener noticed the similarity between the behavior of literal-minded machines and that of magical agents in fairy tales, myths, ghost stories and even modern jokes.
Semele thought she wanted Jove to make love to her exactly as he would to a goddess—but it turned out to be v.ith lightning. The sorcerer’s apprentice thought he’d give up his work to a magical helper. Wells wrote of a rather dull-witted clerk who stopped the rotation of the earth suddenly. At one end of the spectrum are horror stories like “The Dancing Partner” or “The Monkey’s Paw”, and at the other is Lennie Brace’s joke about the druggist who left a genie to mind his store. Said the genie’s first customer, “Make me a chocolate malted.”
If we decide we really want health, security, freedom from pain, we must be willing to exchange our individuality for it. The use of any tool implies a loss of freedom, as Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents. When man started using a hand ax he lost the freedom to climb or walk on four limbs, but more important, he lost the freedom not to use the hand ax. We have now lost the freedom to do without computers, and it is no longer a question of giving them power over us, but of how much power, of what kind, and of how fast we turn it over to them.
A professor at the University of Minnesota once told me of a term when he was late in making up grades. The department secretary kept calling him, asking if he were ready to turn in his grades yet. Finally a clerk from administration called him. On learning the grades were still not ready, the clerk said exasperatedly, “But, Professor, the machines are waiting!”
They are indeed.
* * * *