Oscar pulled him away from the machine.
“It threw me!” Ferd yelled. “It tried to kill me! Look-blood!”
His partner said it was a bump that threw him—it was his own fear. The blood? A broken spoke. Grazed his cheek. And he insisted Ferd get on the bicycle again, to conquer his fear.
But Ferd had grown hysterical. He shouted that no man was safe— that mankind had to be warned. It took Oscar a long time to pacify him and to get him to go home and into bed.
He didn’t tell all this to Mr. Whatney, of course. He merely said that his partner had gotten fed up with the bicycle business.
“It don’t pay to worry and try to change the world,” he pointed out. “I always say take things the way they are. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”
Mr. Whatney said that was his philosophy, exactly. He asked how things were, since.
“Well… not too bad. I’m engaged, you know. Name’s Norma. Crazy about bicycles. Everything considered, things aren’t bad at all. More work, yes, but I can do things all my own way, so…”
Mr. Whatney nodded. He glanced around the shop. “I see they’re still making drop-frame bikes,” he said, “though, with so many women wearing slacks, I wonder they bother.”
Oscar said, “Well, I dunno. I kinda like it that way. Ever stop to think that bicycles are like people? I mean, of all the machines in the world, only bikes come male and female.”
Mr. Whatney gave a little giggle, said that was right, he had never thought of it like that before. Then Oscar asked if Mr. Whatney had anything in particular in mind—not that he wasn’t always welcome.
“Well, I wanted to look over what you’ve got. My boy’s birthday is coming up—”
Oscar nodded sagely. “Now here’s a job,” he said, “which you can’t get it in any other place but here. Specialty of the house. Combines the best features of the French racer and the American standard, but it’s made right here, and it comes in three models—Junior, Intermediate and Regular. Beautiful, ain’t it?”
Mr. Whatney observed that, say, that might be just the ticket. “By the way,” he asked, “what’s become of the French racer, the red one, used to be here?”
Oscar’s face twitched. Then it grew bland and innocent and he leaned over and nudged his customer. “Oh, that one. Old Frenchy? Why, I put him out to stud!”
And they laughed and they laughed, and after they told a few more stories they concluded the sale, and they had a few beers and they laughed some more. And then they said what a shame it was about poor Ferd, poor old Ferd, who had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.
TEN-STORY JIGSAW
by Brian W. Aldiss
The wider range and subtler definition of subject matter in modern s-f makes, I think, for better reading—but much more complex anthologizing.
Time was when the editor of a collection such as this could sit down and sort out the stories into tidy piles under such subheadings as Space Travel, Time Travel, Planetary Adventure, Marvelous Invention, Alien Visitors, Mutation, Atom Doom, and the like.
Presumably this could still be done. The space ships, inventions, and mutations are still there—but that’s not what the stories are about. The end result would be only to multiply confusion. If I used subheadings here, the two main ones would have to be: Whither Civilization? and Inside Man.
One of the old labels would still fit, though—Atom Doom —and the next three stories could be grouped under it. The first of them is the work of a young British author who has only recently begun to appear in print in this country.
The time: After World War III.
The place: Sydney, Australia.
The hero: A junkman.
My name is Badger Gowland. It’s an ordinary sort of name for an ordinary sort of bloke. For the past twenty years I’ve worked as scrap merchant in this big, war-torn city. The city happens to be Sydney, but I suppose that, with minor variations, what I’m going to tell you might have happened in any war-torn city: Singapore, New York, Hamburg, Moscow, London. In that twenty years, I’ve come across many strange stories, but the strangest is that of Tosher Ten-Toes. Tosher was my cobbler. Here’s his story, and you’ll have to take it as it is, without frills.
This particular morning, the last morning of Tosher’s life, there was something vague about him. He was preoccupied. I spotted it even in the way he came toward me when he came to work, but thought nothing of it at the time. His amnesia made him like that at times, and all the lads were used to it and thought nothing of it.
“Come on, Tosher!” I shouted. “The other scrap gangs have already left. Time we were moving.”
I was seated in the helicart, waiting to go. He scrambled up beside me apologetically. I let in the clutch, the vanes began to spin above us and up we went. Helicarts are absolutely silent in action; we might have been birds, the way we took the air.
It was a fine, warm spring day with air as still as syrup, just the sort of day for our job. The enemy raid over the city the night before had been chicken feed—a paltry couple of satellite-to-Earth squadrons of Depressors dropping a few “suitcases.” “Suitcases” are what we call the light type of H-bombs that Depressors generally carry: small stuff equivalent to not more than eighty thousand tons T.N.T. The best thing about them from our point of view is that they’re clean—no R.A. fall-out—and so we don’t have the bother of cluttering ourselves with anti-suits while we are salvaging.
Directly the raid was over, I had phoned through to Civil Maintenance and bought a couple of freshly damaged ten-story buildings cheap. They stood fairly close together on George’s Heights, looking out across Obelisk Bay and the sea. I slid the co-ordinates into the cyberpilot now and we were away. Tosher pulled his wind-cheater off and stowed it in the locker, just to show he was all set for action.
In the sunshine, the city looked good from the air. Neat. Even the beggars starving in the gutters look tidy when you’re a couple of hundred yards up. A bright, early-flowering weed lent a touch of gaiety to the craters among the buildings. The waters of the port shone like brass.
“What have we got today, Badger?” Tosher asked.
“A tenner with courtesy and a jigsaw tenner,” I said. Those are just the cant terms we use in the trade. A building “with courtesy” means some sort of Government office block—if you get courtesy from them, you get precious little else. A “jigsaw” is private flats or homes; we call them that because when they are busted open they look like a pattern of interlocking pieces—like a smashed dolly house.
In no time we were circling over our new property. Good slices of both of them were still standing. Far below, the demolition squads were busy roping off the area. They always move in and blow up the unsafe buildings after we have paid our brief salvage visits. “The vultures” is what they call us; I won’t tell you what we call them. They grudge us an honest living. Yet what we scrap lads pay the civic authorities pays those chaps’ wages. Besides, with all raw materials in short supply owing to the war, we are valuable members of the community—all that sort of bunk!
“My turn for out,” Tosher said, casting round for his gear.
I had leveled out close to the ten-story jigsaw, holding the helicart steady against the ruined top floor. We always work from the top down. And we always do the jigsaws first because they are more exciting; you never know what you’re going to find. In a courtesy job, it’s all cut and dried: so many desks, so many wash basins, so many lavatory bowls. After a time, a good scrap man—like me or Tosher —can fillet a courtesy with our eyes shut.