‘No, Mr Strikerock.' A pause. ‘Not according to our records.'
Aw hell, Vince thought, and hung up.
What was marriage, anyhow? An arrangement of sharing things, such as right now being able to discuss the meaning of der Alte giving an eight a.m. speech and getting someone else -- his wife -- to fix breakfast while he prepared to go to his job at Karp u. Sohnen Werke's Detroit branch. Yes, it meant an arrangement in which one could get another person to do certain things one didn't like to do, such as cooking meals; he hated having to eat food which he had prepared himself. Single, he would eat at the building's cafeteria; he foresaw that, based on past experience. Mary, Jean, Laura, now Julie; four marriages and the last the shortest.
He was going downhill. Maybe, god forbid, he was a latent queer.
On the TV, der Alte uttered, ‘ ... and paramilitary activity recalls the Days of Barbarism and hence is doubly to be renounced.'
Days of Barbarism -- that was the sweet-talk for the Nazi Period of the middle part of the previous century, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled. So der Alte had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Sons of Job, the latest nut organization of a quasi-religious nature flapping about in the streets, proclaiming a purification of national ethnic life, etc., or whatever it was they proclaimed.
In other words, stiff legislation to bar persons from public life who were odd -- those born specially, due to the years of radiation fall-out from bomb testing, in particular from the vicious People's China blasts.
That would mean Julie, Vince conjectured, since she's sterile. Because she could not bear children she would not be permitted to vote ... a rather neurotic connective, logically possible only in the minds of a Central European people such as the Germans. The tail that wags the dog, he said to himself as he dried his face. We in Nord Amerika are the dog; the Reich is the tail. What a life. Maybe I ought to emigrate to colonial reality, live under a faint, fitful, pale-yellow sun where even things with eight legs and a stinger get to vote ... no Sons of Job, there. Not that all the special people were that special, but a good many of them had seen fit -- and for good reason -- to emigrate. As had quite a number of quite unspecial folk who were simply tired of the overpopulated, bureaucratically-controlled life on Terra these days, whether in the USEA, in the French Empire, or in People's Asia, or Free -- that is, black -- Africa.
In the kitchen he fixed himself bacon and eggs. And, while the bacon cooked, he fed the sole pet allowed him in the apartment building: George III, his small green turtle.
George III ate dried flies (twenty-five per cent protein, more nourishing than human food), hamburger, and ant eggs, a breakfast which caused Vince Strikerock to ponder on the axiom de gustibus non disputandum est there's no accounting for other people's tastes, especially at eight in the morning.
Even as recently as five years ago he could have possessed a pet bird in The Abraham Lincoln, but that was now ruled out. Too noisy, really. Building Rule s205; thou shalt not whistle, sing, tweet or chirp. A turtle was mute -- as was a giraffe, but giraffes were verboten, too, along with the quondam friends of man, the dog and cat, the companions which had vanished back in the days of der Alte Frederich Hempel, whom Vince barely remembered. So it could not have been the quality of muteness, and he was left, as so often before, merely to guess at the reasoning of the Party bureaucracy. He could not genuinely fathom its motives, and in a sense for that he was glad. It proved that he was not spiritually a part of it.
On the TV the withered, elongated, near-senile face had vanished and a moment of music, a purely audible event, had replaced it. Percy Grainger, a tune called ‘Handel in the Strand', as banal as could be ... just the appropriate postscript to what had come before, Vince reflected. He clicked his heels abruptly, came to attention, in a parody of Germanic military stiffness, chin up, arms rigid, as the melody tinkled from the speaker of the TV set; Vince Strikerock at attention to this child's music which the authorities, the so-called Ges, saw fit to play. Heil, Vince said to himself, and raised his arm in the ancient Nazi salute.
The music tinkled on.
Vince turned to another channel.
And there, on the screen, a hounded-looking man fleetingly appeared in the midst of a crowd which seemed to be cheering him; the man, with what were obviously police on both sides of him, disappeared into a parked vehicle. At the same time the newscaster declared, ‘ ... and, just as in hundreds of other cities across the USEA, Dr Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School here in Bonn, is taken into custody as he protests the newly-signed-into-law bill, the McPhearson Act ... ‘
On the screen the vehicle, a marked police car, zipped away.
A hell of a note, Vince thought glumly. Sign of the times; more repressive, scared legislation by the establishment. So who am I going to get help from if Julie's departure causes me to break down mentally? As well it might. I've never consulted an analyst -- I've never needed to in my entire life.
But this ... nothing like this, precisely this bad, has ever happened to me. Julie, he thought, where are you? Now, on the TV screen, the scene changed, and yet it remained the same. Vince Strikerock saw a new crowd, different police, another psychoanalyst being led off; another protesting soul taken into custody.
‘It is interesting,' the TV set murmured, ‘to observe the loyalty of the analyst's patient. And yet, why not? This man has placed his faith in psychoanalysis possibly for years.'
And where did it get him? Vince wondered.
Julie, he said to himself, if you're with someone, some other man right now, there's going to be trouble. Either I'll drop dead -- either it will kill me outright -- or I'm going to give it to you and that individual, whoever he is. Even if, especially if, he's a friend of mine.
I'm going to get you back, he decided. My relationship with you is unique, not like that with Mary, Jean and Laura.
I love you; that's it. My god, he thought, I'm in love! And in this day and age. Incredible. If I told her, if she knew, she'd laugh her head off. That's Julie.
I should go to an analyst, he realized, for being in a state like this, for being totally psychologically dependent on a cold, selfish creature like Julie for existence itself. Hell, its unnatural. And -- it's folly.
Could Dr Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School in Bonn, Germany, cure me? Free me? Or this other man they're showing, this -- he listened to the newscaster, who droned on as the police vehicle drove away -- Egon Superb. He had looked like an intelligent, sympathetic person, gifted with the balm of empathetic understanding. Listen, Egon Superb, Vince thought, I'm in deep trouble; my tiny world collapsed this morning when I woke up. I need a woman whom I'll probably never see again.
A.G. Chemie's drugs can't help me with this ... except, perhaps, a mortal overdose. And that's not the sort of help I'm after.
Maybe I should roust out my brother Chic and both of us join the Sons of Job, he thought abruptly. Chic and I swear fealty to Bertold Goltz. Others have done so, other malcontents, others who have dismally failed, either in their private lives -- as I have -- or in business or in their social ascent from Be to Ge.
Chic and I Sons of Job, Vince Strikerock thought eerily.
In bizarre uniform, parading down the street. Being jeered at. And yet believing -- in what? In ultimate victory? In Goltz, who looks like a movie version of a Rattenfanger, a rat-catcher? He cringed from the notion; it frightened him.
And still the idea remained lodged in his mind.