Collected Stories Read online

  "Just as I thought," said Alonzo, and shook his head. He put the machine in his pocket without letting anyone see it. "We're too late, friends. The man's dead."

  He was right. Indeed, Jubal had split open like an overstuffed soysausage. He had eaten himself to death.

  And that, snookums, is the story of Alonzo Keyes. Please don't let it frighten you. I do hope, though, you can learn something from it: A Good Boy Always Cleans His Plate, but he doesn't make a pig of himself.

  Death? You don't know what Death means? Not now, precious.

  I wish his story ended here, but I'm sorry to say that Alonzo Keyes went on to marry Mrs. Jubal. He put aside his guinea pigs and brain machines and lived happily-but not happily ever after. Within a few years, Alonzo and Mrs. Jubal took to fighting, and with great bitterness and gloom they decided to break up. The entire marriage had been a Mistake.

  It was Mrs. Jubal's idea to bring out the old machine and the #57; she thought that all her sadness could be erased if, somehow, Alonzo could make her forget that she'd ever seen him. Alonzo agreed; it seemed like a fine idea, and after "snuffing" their memories of the marriage, they could go their own ways without regret. So right away he cooked up some #57 on the kitchen stove, took out the little machine and gave it a few adjustments (that means turning the knobs an eentsy-weentsy bit). Then he and his wife sat down on the living room sofa, drank a glass of the drug, and fitted the wires to their heads. After giving his wife one last kiss and one last punch in the mouth, Alonzo pressed the button.

  The machine worked. Both closed their eyes, sagged to the floor, and hiccupped. The wires fell away, and when they awoke they didn't know one another.

  But Alonzo had made A Bad Mistake: he'd forgotten that people tend to repeat their own Bad Mistakes. As soon as he came to his senses and saw the beautiful stranger on the floor beside him, he immediately fell in love with her all over again.

  Can you guess what happened, snookums? That's right: they got married, and then broke up, and then erased their memories of the marriage, and then got married again, and then. Well, it took Alonzo almost twenty years to realize what had happened.

  When he did, he took the #57 and the wonderful machines and put them On the Market; that means he put together a lot and left them in stores for people to buy. Once again it seemed he had done it for A Good Cause: he went on TV and told everyone that, used correctly, his little machines could cure Troubled Thoughts. He saw the day, he said, when every Clinic and Home would have one, and they would be used to make people happy-people who were worried and fearful and full of regrets for things that had happened in the past. (Sometimes, you see, a memory gets "locked away" deep inside us like a Keyes Day Treasure Hunt, and it makes us go a little funny in the head years later. A boy whose Mommy had made fun of him while he was learning to talk might, years later, have a Stutter, a kind of shivering, on certain words. A woman whose Daddy had hit her when she was little might, years later, find it hard to fall in love. Alonzo thought his machines could help people like this by "snuffing out" the unhappy memories.)

  But once again he'd made A Bad Mistake. People went out and bought them, but not to cure their Troubled Thoughts. They bought them, rather, as a toy. Correctly adjusted, with the drug taken at just the right time and in just the right amounts, the machines could be made to snuff the tiniest and most recent memories. It gave many people the chance they had been looking for all their lives: to repeat, as if for the first time, whatever they liked best. A young girl whose happiest moments had been the first time she sat through Gone With the Wind (a popular movie which I'm sure you'll see some day) could sit through it again-for the first time. A man who liked reading could select his favorite book and, after correctly adjusting the machine, could read it again as if it were brand new.

  There had never been anything like this before. Once upon a time, people used to "drink to forget." That meant that they drank glasses of Rum, just like Jubal, and for an hour or two could escape from the past. But suddenly, overnight, everyone was drinking #57-and Rum itself was forgotten. There had even been a Rum-drinkers' club (it was known as the AA) where, night after night, sad people met and talked about their Troubled Thoughts. Now it changed its name to the Nepenthe Society. People came for just one night and went home cured.

  As you might expect-since the drug's first use had been to commit a Murder, a terrible thing, Willie-Criminals immediately saw the drug as a useful tool. A Criminal would walk into a shop, force the shopkeeper to give him all the Money in his Money-box (which was called a Cash Register), and then make the man forget he'd just been robbed. The poor shopkeeper would go about his day, never thinking to call in the Police, and only that night-after he'd looked inside his Cash Register-would he know that a Criminal had visited him.

  (Finally somebody very very smart went to the Police with A Good Idea: whenever they caught a Criminal, instead of hitting him they would simply snuff the man's whole past away. He would forget all the people and places that had taught him to become a Criminal, and would, in fact, become a little child again-a child who could be trained in Good Habits the way Alonzo had trained his guinea pigs)

  Those were memorable days, those first days of the Forgetfulness Drug.

  I, too, was caught up in the craze, and so was my husband, your dear Great-Grandaddy (God bless him). We were much younger then, and saw no danger. We returned to Paris, a beautiful city in another country, and there we visited a certain garden named Versailles-a garden we had always loved because we'd spent the day after our wedding there. As we walked the broad paths, passing statues buried in greenery and bushes in the shapes of animals, gazing at ourselves in the reflecting pools and dodging the spray from the fountains, we knew somehow that we'd done it all before that much the machine had not erased-yet it was just as wonderful as if it were the first time. Once again we thrilled to the vistas; once again we felt the vague Presence wherever we walked.

  Pardon me, Willie. Great-Granny does go on. It's you I should be thinking of. ..I see I've written of the Presence.

  That's not the same as Presents, Willie, like the kind you get for Keyes Day, the kind I'll give you when you come visit me. I mean that your Great-Grandaddy and I had the feeling we were being watched by Something.

  Well, Something was watching us all, I guess, because less than a month after Alonzo's machines came out in the stores, The Government passed a law calling #57 a Dangerous Drug and stopping sales of the wonderful machines. (If you want to know what The Government is, snookums, I'll tell you when you get here. Don't ask Daddy about it, he doesn't know. He'll only Tell you a Fib.) Policemen went from house to house searching for machines that had already been sold; most of them were taken and melted down like oleo on a slice of soy- toast, and the drug was dumped into the ocean. But your Great-Grandaddy (bless his heart) unscrewed the machine into little pieces and hid them inside our TV set, where they looked like they belonged, and he poured the #57 over an aspidistra plant we had in the bedroom, where it seeped through the soil and collected in a little puddle at the bottom of the dish long after the Policemen had gone.

  We weren't the only ones who found a way to "save our snuffer" (as the machines came to be called). Many others did, too, and some men even made their own machines and drugs in their basements. I guess it wasn't so very hard to do.

  So when The Government saw that its laws weren't working, and that Alonzo's snuffers were themselves hard to snuff, it quickly passed some new laws saying that people were allowed to own snuffers-but only if they bought them from The Government.

  The ones The Government made were much better than Alonzo's; all you had to do was press them against your head, and there was no drug to worry about. The snuffer did it all.

  Soon the new snuffers became as popular as TV and as common as cars. Everybody owned one-everybody, that is, but your Great-Grandaddy (God bless him) and me. Some might say he was too cheap to buy the new model-I'm sure that's what your Mommy and Daddy would tell you- bu
t the truth is, he just plain didn't trust The Government.

  In a way, I think he may have been right. There was something very funny about those snuffers.. .They'd been On the Market for a year or two, and suddenly they all began breaking down. People had to take them to be repaired - you know, the way a man comes to fix the air-conditioner - only the repairs weren't made at offices. No, you had to take your broken snuffer somewhere else.

  To a Clinic.

  And when you came back, you'd be wearing the snuffer.

  The new models, it seems, were made to fit over the head, covering all the hair, like the chromium Helmets your Mommy and Daddy wear. This way, it is easier for people to. have their snuffer with them all the time. And that's just the way people wanted it; they liked to keep their Helmets on all day and all night, when they were handy for snuffing out Nightmares.

  In short, SF had become a way of life.

  (Some people think SF stands for Snuffers. It doesn't. It stands for Selective Forgetfulness, which is what Snuffers are for.)

  And it's still a way of life today. Thanks to SF, certain books have become amazingly popular; others have been left to crumble into dust. People find the book they like best and spend all their time reading it, over and over, snuffing out each previous reading. The Classics are doing well, and so is something we call Adult Fiction, which means they are written for lonely people. Mysteries are doing best of all; every home and Home, it seems, has a copy of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I know it's a big favorite with your Mommy and Daddy-I remember seeing a copy of the special plastic-coated "Indestructo Edition" at your house and maybe some day it will be a favorite of yours. I hope, though, that you choose to read it only once.

  As your Great-Grandaddy used to say, SF has made it possible for a man to find a well- thumbed book on bis bookshelf, a book almost falling apart from years and years of reading, a book he knows he's read dozens of times, and studied dozens of times, and discussed, and written in the margins, and loved-and still not remember ever having read it.

  A funny feeling, right, snookums?

  Most people, of course, don't have bookshelves any more. After all, they own only one book. That's all they'll ever need.

  In movies the same thing has happened, only worse, since reading's too hard for many people. Young men and women quit their jobs and spend all day in downtown movie theaters, growing pale, living on popcorn and orange drink, watching the same film again and again, reel after reel, until they sicken or starve.

  And there's no longer any question of spending time and money on a film that turns out to be bad; there are no more unhappy surprises. All the uncertainty has been taken out of it, and whenever people go to the movies, they know they're going to see their favorite film. There's no further need for new films, and no interest in them. No one's made a film in years; the Old Greats are good enough.

  TV has been even crazier, maybe because each part of the country has its own choice. In Birmingham, England, episode #114 of Coronation Street was at one time shown every day for more than a year, and no one complained. But the record goes to the citizens of Calhoun County, Arkansas, who voted twenty-six years ago to have a favorite segment of I Love Lucy- "Lucy Buys a Dachshund"-shown every morning, seven days a week, re-run after re-run.

  You guessed it, snookums. It's still on the air.

  Live-action sports were hard-hit, too; men have taken to watching "instant replays" of their favorite football games on TV. There was even a terrible tragedy many years ago (that means something that ends badly) during the National Crew Races of 2024. During a crew race, Willie, eight men sit in a long thin rowboat and row as fast as they can, while a ninth man cheers them on. And in the Races of 2024 the men did row as fast as they could-nine times, after which six men on one crew and four on the other died of heart attacks. It seems the audience was so excited by the Races that they snuffed them, and persuaded the crews to do the same. The men in the boats couldn't understand why, the sixth and seventh and eighth times around, the Race seemed so tiring...

  Of course, Bad Mistakes like that had to be stopped, and they were. People have learned to be more careful. And then, a lot of things, such as music, seem almost unchanged.

  People listen to good music-and bad music-pretty much as they did before SF. The reason, I guess, is that music depends on repetition to be enjoyed; that means hearing it over and over, snookums. I'll bet you didn't like your Nursery Rhymes the very first time you heard them.

  Though, of course, there are certain pieces that call for snuffing. The most popular is something by a man named Haydn; it's called The Surprise Symphony.

  As you can see, everything has slowed down; in fact, we're standing still. People are too busy re-living the favorite days of their pasts to worry about the future. When someone asks, "What's new?" there's only one answer: "Nothing."

  And it's been this way for. For twenty, thirty years now. Oh, snookums, it's been awful! The past was never like this! We're in a kind of Living Death. (It's not necessary that you know what Death means, snookums.)

  The rest of the world smiles at us and shakes their heads, yet The Government doesn't seem to care. I guess they're happy they've been re-elected time and again for the past two decades. (All this may be too com-pli-cat-ed for you, Willie, but I simply mean, everyone seems to like The Government now.)

  I've never voted for them myself; and now, of course, they won't let me, because I'm no. Your Great-Grandaddy (God bless him) never voted for them either. I wonder what he'd say if he were alive today.

  No, we didn't vote. But then, neither of us ever wore the Helmets. Everyone else bought them, but we were.

  Afraid, I guess. Those Helmets don't work right. They snuff things even when nobody's asked them to, as if Someone Else is holding the switch. And so people these days seem to forget things you'd think they'd want to remember. Like the time The Government promised all that money for the cities, and the cure for cancer, and the solar energy plants in every county. (That meant that your air-conditioner would work whenever the sun shined on your house.)

  The Government seemed to forget those promises-but all the people did, too. All the people with Helmets, that is. They were busy watching TV Greats and The Classics Hour. I'd tell your Mommy and Daddy about the Mayor's promise to leave office six years ago, to "give someone else a chance"-and they'd only smile and vote for him again.

  That's one reason I'm afraid of the Helmets. Oh, please don't think I'm just an old scaredy-cat, Willie; it's you I'm afraid for. I don't want you to make that Little Trip to the Clinic, and I'm so glad it won't happen till you're five. (Someone here at the Home said that, soon, children will be fitted with Helmets when they're born, and I said I didn't see how that could be true, because during the first five years the head grows too fast. But she said it'll be a new kind of Helmet that grows right along with it.)

  That means that, some day, everyone will wear a Helmet. But not me, I don't want one and I don't need one. I still have our old machine, the first one we bought, and what',s left of Alonzo's #57, and sometimes, when the need is great, I take it out. But I only use it for Very Special Things, precious. Harmless Things. Like the time someone (I forget who) died-some- one I must have loved-and I wanted to erase the pain from my memory.

  Sometimes the need is very great.

  But I've never worn one of the Helmets. They frighten me. And I wish they frightened you as well. Listen and I'll tell you another Secret: I know why your Mommy and Daddy never take their Helmets off.

  They can't get them off. The Helmets are part of their heads.

  It's true, I know it's true. A few days before they put me in this Home, I saw a man jump from the roof of his building. He fell toward the sidewalk, ten floors down. He fell on his head. And when it hit the sidewalk, the Helmet cracked open, and there was no head under it, so that everything that was inside ran out, and the wires were exposed.

  So Willie, precious, please come visit Great-Granny before your Trip to the Cli
nic. Please come to the Home and live here with me, I won't let them find you, and I'll let you try out my # 57 and that will be good enough.

  I'm so glad I've written you this letter, teaching you, warning you, scaring you, perhaps, but that's all to the good, because it means you'll come to me. Writing has made me feel so close to you, but it's nothing like having you here with me would be. Having you here safe with your old GreatGranny who loves you so dearly. I'd give you all the cookies and cake you could eat, I'd even let you try the # 57, it will be good enough.

  Sorry, snookums. Great-Granny repeats herself.

  I'll end here, praying for your reply, and I'll be waiting, even if it takes years.

  Your loving Great-Granny

  Fri 18 Sept '39

  Willie, precious,

  How's my little snookums? How's my snookums today? As happy as I am? I hope so, because I'm sure there's never been such a wonderful day! I woke up this morning feeling like a young girl again, and when I looked at your picture above my bed, and the rain beating against my window, there were tears of happiness in my eyes.

  And do you know why, precious? Because today I've decided to sit down and write you a letter. Imagine, Willie, a letter of your very own! Baby's First Letter!

  There's so much I have to tell you, and I'm so excited I can hardly begin. Why, I don't remember the last time I felt so good.

  Petey

  'Let's face it, Doctor, if an inmate's suicidal there ain't a hell of a lot you can do. Sure, you can take away his shoes so he don't strangle himself with his shoelaces, and you take away his clothes for the same reason. I once seen a man hanging from the bars on his window by his T-shirt-and maybe just to be safe you take the cot out of his room, since last year we had a broad who slashed her wrists on the spyings....

  "But you can't do everything. I mean, if they want to kill themselves they're gonna figure out a way to do it. We once had a guy who ran against the wall with his head. A nine-by-seven cell, that's all it was, so he couldn't build up much speed… Still, he gave himself a pretty nice concussion. Put a nice dent in the plaster, too. Now, of course, we keep the place padded And another one we had, I swear to God he just held his breath till he croaked. I mean it, if they've got the will they can do it.