As for the French — they leave me speechless, positively beating the air. They will either do you a style pompier, piling the muck up on the top of your head and pressure-greasing it until you leave marks on the ceiling of every lift you enter, or else they treat you to a razor cut of such topiary ferocity that you come out feeling sculpted. They cut into the stuff as if it were cheese. No. No. You can have Paris. Let me keep my modest tonsure and my Short-Back-and-Sides Outlook. The style Fenner (vintage 1904) is my sort of thing.
Why, in Vulgaria, once, things got so bad that Polk-Mowbray was driven, positively driven, to Take Steps — and you know how much he hated the naked thrust of Action. It was during the Civil War when the country was Communist all the week and Royalist at the weekends. Every Saturday morning the Royalist troops came down from the hills and took the Praesidium; every Monday morning they were driven back with heavy losses. Monday was payday for the Communist forces, Saturday that of the Royalist army. This had a strange effect on the hairdressing business, for during the week you only found heavily nationalized barbers at work, while at the weekend you could borrow the live Royal barbers from the other side. The Communists used an unpretentious pudding-basin cut which had been worked out in terms of the dialectic, lightly driving a harrow across the scalp and then weeding with finger and thumb. They were short of instruments because the Five-Year Plan hadn’t started to work due to lack of foreign capital. Anyway, during the week you were in the hands of some horny peasant, while if you waited till Sunday you could get a sort of Viennese pompadour which fanned away into wings at the back like a tail coat and carried sideburns of a corkscrew pattern which once made Polk-Mowbray look so like Elizabeth Barrett Browning that the British Council man, Gool, suggested… but that is another story.
Yes, the Balkan barber, conditioned by the hirsute nature of his client, has developed a truly distressing style of action — suited to the nature of the terrain I don’t doubt, but nonetheless frightful to those who have been decently brought up. They positively plunge into one’s nostrils, hacking and snipping as if they were clearing a path in the jungle; then before one can say “moustache cup” they crawl into one’s ears, remorselessly pruning at what (to judge by the sound) must be something as intractable as a forest of holm oak. I could tell you grim tales of punctured eardrums, of inhaled hair, but I shall spare you. You know.
But I think you had left before Polk-Mowbray entered his Do-It-Yourself phase; the state of Vulgarian barbary must have touched him off. He saw an advertisement for an instrument called, I think, The Gents Super Hair Regulator, which from the brochure appeared to be an ingenious comb and razor blade in one; you trimmed as you combed, so to speak. Nothing simpler, nothing more calculated to please. Polk-Mowbray, deeply moved by the discovery, ordered a dozen, one for each member of the Chancery. He was beside himself with pride and joy. Speaking from a full heart, he said: “From today our troubles are over. I want each one of you from now on to use his little Regulator and so boycott these heathen barbers of Vulgaria.” Well, I don’t know if you know the Regulator? No? Be warned then. It is not a toy for frolicking amateurs. The keenest professional skill is needed to work it. Otherwise, it takes huge lumps out of your hair in the most awkward places, leaving gaunt patches of white scalp glimmering through. By lunchtime on that fatal day, the whole Chancery looked as if it had been mowed down by ringworm or mange. Worse still, de Mandeville contracted a sort of scalp-rot which turned his whole skull green. A sort of deathly verdigris set in. He had to keep his hair in a green baize bag for over a week while Fenner’s Follicle Food did its healing work— lucky I had brought a bottle with me. But, of course, the sight nearly drove Polk-Mowbray berserk, especially as at that time the two were at daggers drawn. De Mandeville had sworn to try and drive his chief mad by a sort of verbal Chinese torture. To every remark made to him, he would only reply “Charmed, I’m sure,” with a kind of snakelike sibilance. It doesn’t sound much, but I assure you that after a few days of endless repetition of this phrase (accompanied by the fearful sight of the green baize bag on his head), Polk-Mowbray was practically beaten to his knees.
But probably the most horrifying instance of mass barbary that I recall was what befell the little party of guileless Finns who submitted themselves to a Vulgarian perm in preparation for the National Lepers’ Day Ball. That could not be bettered as an illustration of the Things One Is Up Against in the Service. Five of them, including the Ambassadress, were partially electrocuted owing to a faulty fuse. How is it, I ask myself, that they did not know that the light and power arrangements of Vulgaria were so capricious? Yet, they did not. Polk-Mowbray, who was wooing the Communists, had given the Minister for Interior an electric razor which, whenever it was plugged in, fused the lights of the capital. Something of this order must have happened to the innocent Finns. With their crowning glories tied into those sort of pressurized domes attached to the ceiling by a live wire, they were suddenly aware that everything was turning red-hot and beginning to smoke fearfully; the atmosphere was rapidly beginning to resemble that of a Turkish bath that has got out of control. But the Finns are normally an unemotional race and not much given to fruitless ratiocination. It was not until sparks an inch long began to sprout from their fingers that they began to wonder dimly if all was well. By then it was too late.
They were far too hot to hold. The barbers who manfully tried to disengage them retired hastily with burns and shock. In fact they might have been there to this day, fried to a crisp, had not the Diplomatic Corps been passing at that moment in full tenue. We were winding our way across the town to lay a rather limp wreath on the Leper Memorial when we saw the smoke and heard the shrill ululations of the feckless barbers. It was more than lucky, too, that Dovebasket should have a pair of rubberized pliers in his uniform pocket. He darted into the smoke-filled cavern and brought his mechanical genius to bear on the situation, snipping the live wires which attached our poor colleagues to the roof. The Finns rolled moaning to the floor in their golden domes, looking like so much science fiction. “Give them air,” we all cried shrilly, and willing hands carried them out and laid them in a row upon the pavements. All this had the superficial air of being a mass burial, and I personally believe that had it been anyone but the Finns, that would indeed have been the case. But the Finns can take anything with equanimity. Water was carefully poured over them from plastic buckets. They smoked, they smelled like chops frying, but at last they came to their senses.
We did not see them again until the ball that night which closed Leper Week. My dear chap, you have never imagined such hair. It was positively psychoanalytic. Golden wigs of such hellish, blinding, metallic brilliance. The demon barbers had certainly done their work… Ah I But I see that Fenner is free at last. More of this anon.
THE QUAKER CANNON
by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
“Social science fiction” is too often thought of as limited either to angry satire or to ponderous Utopian novels. Certainly the Pohl-Kornbluth combination has been noted primarily for a highly specialized kind of satirical novel set in a stiflingly overpopulated, advertising-drenched, cold-war-like future.
This kind of novel, whose objective is to pinpoint some of the more flagrant of our cultural absurdities, must of necessity assume the continuation of some sort of peace on Earth, however uneasy or precarious (just as the last group of stories here have done). The novelette that follows is unusual in several respects: